of the discard pile. Soon enough you got an idea of which cards a player needed and which they hoarded. Sometimes a person was forced to make an impossible choice. His father scavenged the low-point cards, arranging meld after meld on the table. Claude preferred to hold his cards, fanning them, rearranging them, walking them with his fingers until, without warning, he would complete two or three canastas and go out. They harassed one another as they played.
“Your turn, Claude,” Edgar’s father said.
“Hold on, I’m plotting a revolution.”
“Hey, no table talk.”
“That’s not table talk. I’m trying to get my partner off my back.”
“Well, Edgar and I don’t like it. There’s no telling what sort of signals you two have cooked up.”
“All right, here’s a discard. Take it.”
“Ugh. Does your trash never end? Here’s one for my dear husband.”
His father looked at the discard and peered around his tract of melds.
“Jesus, Gar. You play like a farmer.”
“What’s wrong with that? You should thank me. It’s your crop, too.”
“What’s the score again?”
“Thirty-two thirty to twenty-eight sixty. You’re behind.”
“That’s only one natural’s difference.”
“Now that was table talk for sure.”
“I’m just saying what’s true. Every time Edgar scratches his ear he’s probably telling you all the cards in his hand. Look at that devious expression. What’s it mean when he yawns? ‘I’ve got jacks and I’m going out next round’?”
“You wish. I think we’re stuck in this one to the bitter end.”
“You’re the one who froze the pile. Come on, Edgar, what’s it gonna be?”
Wait, he signed, one-handed.
“See there. Now, what’s that mean?”
“It means he can’t decide what to discard.”
Edgar pondered. He slapped his thigh and Almondine sauntered over and he held out his two cards, facedown. Could be either one of these, he signed. She scented one, then the other. She nosed the first. He placed a ten of hearts on the discard pile.
“Okay, nice. You’ve got the dog scouting cards. Remind me to lower my cards when she’s behind me. Pass the popcorn. I need to think.”
Claude chewed a kernel and looked across the table at Edgar’s father. On the wall, the telephone buzzed quietly, the sound like a june bug at a window screen.
“What was that?” Claude said.
“Oh, I don’t even hear that anymore. When they converted us off the party line it half-rings like that once in a while, but when you pick it up, it’s just dial tone. We call, they say it’s fixed, then it buzzes again.”
“Hmmm. You ever going to put a phone in the barn?”
“No. Quit stalling.”
Claude counted his cards.
“Oh lord, here we go,” his mother said.
“Next game I want to switch partners. My brother’s run out of luck. All he knows how to do is start melds. Besides, with Edgar on my team, I get two for one.”
“You can’t have him. Edgar and I are always partners. Another black three? How many of those do you have?”
“That’s what you’re going to find out. All good things come to those who wait, and I intend to make you wait. Edgar, listen to your poor old uncle Claude. You can get anything you want in this world if you’re willing to go slow enough. Remember that. Words of wisdom.”
“Did you just call yourself slow?”
“A smart kind of slow.”
His father discarded a queen of clubs and looked at Edgar over his glasses. “If you’re the good son I raised you to be, you won’t pick that up.”
Edgar held two cards, neither of them queens. He smiled and pulled a queen off the deck and flipped the new card back onto the discard pile. Claude drew off the deck and tapped the new card on the table and then it disappeared into the mass of cards feathered out in his hand. He looked at Edgar’s father.
“If I’m so slow, then how could I know that’s the sixth queen in that pile? Which is why I can drop this lovely lady and break Trudy’s heart.”
He snapped another queen onto the discards and grinned.
Edgar’s mother pulled out a pair of queens and laid them on the table.
“I’ll be god-damned,” Claude said.
“We don’t use that kind of language around here,” she said, mock-primly, while raking the discard pile over.
“It was for cause. I guess I might as well stretch my legs.”
She parceled out the bounty, folding up two of her melds and tossing a set of cards over to Edgar.
“Partner, may I go out?” she said.
“Look at that. Your own wife did that.”
“It did seem unnecessary, didn’t it?” his father said, but he was grinning.
His mother looked back and forth between them. “All’s fair in love and canasta,” she said.
Claude counted his cards.
“You were holding two hundred twenty points?” his father said.
“Yep.”
“Doesn’t seem like it paid off, does it?”
“You just play your old farmer way and I’ll be in charge of showing some style.”
“A fine proposition if you weren’t my partner.”
“I’ll make it up to you, brother. Haven’t I always?”
To this his father said nothing. He counted out cards from his melds to offset Claude’s loss, then picked up the pad of paper and noted the results. The phone buzzed again. Claude shook his head and shoveled the cards together and began to shuffle.
EDGAR TOOK ALMONDINE with him to the kennel. At four months old, his pups were clumsy, happy beasts with overlong legs and narrow chests. Their ears flopped over except when they looked intently at something. It had taken Edgar almost two weeks to select names from the dictionary, sampling and rejecting possibilities, sleeping with them held in his mind, and still, the morning after deciding, he’d woken filled with regrets. Now it was as though the pups had been born with names already cast and all he’d done was thrash about until they were revealed.
baboo, babu, n. A Hindu title of respect paid to gentlemen, equivalent to master, sir.—babu. Babu-English. The broken English of Bengal.
essay, v.t. [Fr. Essayer. ASSAY.] To exert one’s power or facilities on; to make an effort to perform; to try; to attempt; to endeavor to do; to make experiment of. —n. An effort made for the performance of anything; a trial, attempt, or endeavor; a test or experiment; a literary composition intended to prove some particular point or illustrate a particular subject, not having the importance of a regular treatise; a short disquisition on a subject of taste, philosophy, or common life.
finch, n. [A. Sax. finc = G. Dan. And Sw. fink, finke, Gr. spiza.] A large family (Fringillidae) of small song-birds, including the bunting, sparrow, and goldfinch, having a small conical beak adapted to cracking seeds.
pout, v.i. [From W. pwtiaw, to push, or from dial Fr. pout, potte, Pr. pot, the lip.] To thrust out the lips, as in sullenness, contempt, or displeasure; hence, to look