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He sat at the last of the chairs. “Deal the cards and I’ll play, too.”
Vivian raised an eyebrow at him. One of his mom’s friends tittered. Karl stood—well, sat—his ground.
His wife pushed some chips over to him. “Do you want to learn the counting system I’ve been teaching your mom?”
“No. If I’m going to make such a big deal about counting cards being akin to cheating, I might as well play in ignorance and get my ass kicked.” His wry tone was rewarded by a small lift at the corner of Vivian’s mouth before she shuffled the cards.
“Okay. We’ll play some hands with everyone but Karl counting cards and no direction from me. Then we’ll see how everyone fared and people can ask questions. Ready?” At nods from around the table, including Karl, Vivian dealt a hand.
After five hands, Karl hadn’t lost much more than two of his mother’s friends, though his mom’s constant murmuring was getting on his nerves. He blamed any stupid bet he made on the distraction of constant droning in his ear, not on a lack of ability to count cards.
When her two decks were nearly dealt out, Vivian stopped play. “The first rule of counting cards is to not say your count out loud when I deal.”
“It’s just practice,” his mom said defensively.
“Practice or not, if you get into the habit of advertising that you’re cheating—”
“You said it wasn’t cheating,” Karl interrupted.
“Using your brain,” Vivian corrected herself. “If you ever do go to a casino, you’ll chatter there, too. Even though counting cards like this in blackjack is little different from counting cards in a bridge hand, casinos do frown on it.” Vivian said the bit about bridge with a prim look at him, her eyebrows raised and her lovely pink lips pursed.
If they weren’t at his mother’s, surrounded by his mother’s friends, and if she wasn’t the near felonious wife he married while he was drunk, he would kiss her. Just a peck on those lips, enough to mess with her starchy defense of counting cards as though it was something old ladies did on Sundays while drinking tea and eating cookies.
Of course, his mom and her friends were drinking tea and eating cookies while learning to count cards, so—point of fact—it was something old ladies did. Which was further evidence that Vivian was turning his world upside down and inside out.
That he was sitting here eating cookies and drinking tea while gambling—even if there wasn’t any real money on the table—was a sign that he liked the new Vivian-addled world. As hard as that may be for him to admit. And more than the lectures from his mom, more than Greta’s mothering, his sitting at this table while Vivian discussed the hands that had been dealt and played was a sign that he had to give this relationship a try.
The child she carried was important, but still abstract. However, the joy he felt while in Vivian’s presence was real and palpable. He’d be a fool to let those feelings slip out of his life because of some misbegotten sense of justice for a crime she’d never committed in a state he didn’t live in.
He wasn’t committing himself to anything. Exploration of a relationship wasn’t the same thing as a marriage proposal—or a divorce retraction, since they were already married. This was just him getting to know the real Vivian, with faults to match the kissable knobs of her long neck. He could learn to see her as a person. Not just as the person he’d married, or the mother of his child, or the near criminal or the woman he thought about before he fell asleep every night, but a person—complete and flawed and perfect.
Karl loved his father—missed his father—even though his father hadn’t been a paragon of humanity. Occasionally his father had imbibed too much vodka, had fallen asleep during Mass and had clearly looked at his daughters and wished they were boys whenever they talked about dolls and princesses or asked for a pony. If Karl could reflect honestly on his father’s memory and still love the man, then Vivian deserved the same openness while she was alive and carrying his child.
Though, he still didn’t let Vivian explain to him how to count cards as they played the next several hands. He could be open-minded about his wife without actually cheating. Because no matter what she called it, he still felt as if it was cheating.
