What You Have Left (14 page)

The hat came back full of bills, mostly tens and twenties. Beatty dumped the money into a paper sack. “Give this to Lyle when you see him, sugar,” he said, adding forty dollars from his own pocket as if it were an afterthought. He was wearing his diamond ring again. He'd managed to turn his luck.

Holly waited for Lyle outside the fence along Gervais Street. It had been almost fifteen minutes since they'd taken him into the trailer, and still there were no police, no reporters, no mob. Backhoes and bulldozers had resumed their work. Up on the dome, three men were already taking down the torn flag and putting up a new one. Holly couldn't hold out any longer. She opened the bag and peeked at the money. There must have been at least five hundred dollars. Two thousand quarters.

“I don't even want to know how much is in there,” Lyle said. “I'm giving it all back.” He was standing right beside her. She clinched the bag shut.

“Are you okay? What did they do to you?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Fired me.” He was smiling as if there were razors in his mouth and he was trying not to cut himself.

“You got yourself fired?” It hadn't occurred to Holly that he'd automatically lose his job. So that's why they'd passed the hat. She'd had some vague idea they were contributing to Lyle's legal fund.

“Don't worry, we'll be fine. What are you doing here, anyway?”

Holly considered telling him the truth, throwing it in his face. Maybe he wouldn't be standing there like such a dope if he knew about their savings. Maybe he'd wish he'd thought twice about losing his job. “Jesus Christ, Lyle. You could be in jail. You could have gotten killed.”

“Yeah, well, I didn't,” he said. “Don't make a big deal. You know how I feel about that flag.”

“Lots of people don't like the flag.”

“What was I supposed to do? Call and ask your permission?”

“Why didn't you say something this morning?”

“I didn't know this morning.”

“Liar.” Holly leaned in and sniffed. “Have you been drinking?”

“No,” he said, “I've been working. Somebody's got to pay the bills.”

Lyle caught Holly's wrist the first time she tried to slap him, but the second time, he shut his eyes and took it. For a moment they stood there as if some delicate artifact had dropped and shattered on the sidewalk between them. Lyle touched a finger to his cheek.

“What would you think,” he said, “about me going back to work for my dad?”

Holly had read enough of Lyle's master's thesis to get the gist of it. He argued that compromise and mismanagement during the construction of the South Carolina statehouse had given rise to a building that did lasting damage to the state's self-esteem. When the original architect, John R. Niernsee, had drawn up plans in the 1850s, he had big things in mind. The capitol would be a fireproof repository for state records,
built using only marble, iron, and granite; it would be crowned with a glorious 180-foot tower modeled on the Tennessee statehouse. But along came the war and Sherman, followed by a depression that nearly halted construction. After Niernsee died, the new architect ended up installing wooden floors and walls and substituting the less expensive dome for Niernsee's tower. It was, by all accounts, a half-assed job. A Washington architect hired to inspect the finished product declared it “a parody upon the science of architecture, an insult to the fame of John R. Niernsee, and a disgrace to the state of South Carolina.”

Now Holly was sitting at a window in the Capitol Café, gazing across the street at the statehouse and listening to Lyle tell her that if he ever took another crack at his thesis, he'd do it differently. Compromise wasn't always a weakness, he said; sometimes it was a strength. “They got the thing built, didn't they?”

It was ninety-one degrees outside, and they'd come to the café under the pretense of cooling off, having a glass of iced tea, but really they just needed a quiet place where they could apologize to each other. Once they'd taken back the things they wished they hadn't said, Lyle told Holly he'd been thinking about quitting the statehouse all spring. As he began rambling about his thesis and the virtues of compromise, something clicked, and Holly finally understood his crusade against the video poker business: you fight the thing that pulls you hardest.

Lyle's father had been asking him to come back ever since he quit, and though Holly knew he was sick of being in debt, she still couldn't believe his change of heart. Was he doing it for her, because he thought it was what she wanted?
Was
it what she wanted? Yes, sure, there had definitely been times
when she'd resented Lyle for quitting Gandy, when she'd wanted to ask him where he got off being so holier than thou. Plenty of people had day jobs they weren't proud of. So what? You did what you had to do. But now that she'd gone behind his back and lost their savings, it wasn't so easy to wish him into doing what made her life easier. The thought of him coming home miserable from Gandy every night wrung her insides.

“There's a difference between compromising and selling out,” Holly said. “I don't want you working for your father.”

“Since when do you have something against video poker?”

Behind him, three Pots-O-Gold stood along the back wall. “I don't,” she said, “but we're talking about you, not me.”

“He'll pay me three times what I was making at the statehouse,” Lyle said. “I thought you'd be happy.”

“You know what made me happy? Watching you burn that flag.” It was half true, now that she considered it, but it was also true she had no political qualms about her father-in-law's line of work, because if people were dumb enough to put all their money into a poker machine—herself included—well, that was natural selection; that was how the world maintained its quota of poor people. And somebody had to get rich off it, right?

Lyle couldn't help smiling. “I figured as long as I was quitting, why not?” He ordered another iced tea and then, cocking his head toward the video-poker machines, stood up and motioned for Holly to bring the bag of money and join him.

“So how do you play?” Lyle said.

The question caught Holly flat-footed, but Lyle didn't
notice. He was reading the rules, slipping five quarters into the slot. It was a multi-game Pot-O-Gold. He could take his pick from keno, bingo, blackjack, Shamrock Sevens, or Pieces of Eight Criss Cross, but he didn't hesitate in choosing five-card draw, Holly's bread and butter. That's when it hit her: he already knew all about her gambling. He was giving her a chance to come clean.

He dealt himself a hand. “These things are rigged, you know. The state doesn't regulate them.”

Holly braced herself and began wending her way toward a confession. “That's why you have to find a loose one,” she said. “Usually a new machine is best, especially if it's in some place that doesn't already have poker. They'll set the game so it's easy to win, to attract players, then later they'll switch it back.”

Lyle paused in mid-draw. “Where'd you learn all that?”

And now Holly could tell from the look on his face that she'd been wrong. The possibility that she played poker had never crossed his mind. And further, she understood that she might not have to tell him at all: If he did go work for his father, they'd be rich; they'd never miss the money.

“You know that video parlor on Bluff Road?” she said. “Every once in a while, I like to stop in for a few hands.”

“No kidding.” Lyle studied her for a moment, and then he began to laugh, as if she'd just played some astounding trick on him and he couldn't help being impressed.

The next day—Holly's first as a reformed gambler and Lyle's first without a job—she flipped from one news broadcast to the next during breakfast, trying not to think about Fortunes and the jackpots everybody else was winning, trying
instead to find a report about the flag so she could show Lyle he'd done something that mattered. After a while, she gave up and turned off the TV. Her heart wasn't in it. “Are you going to call your father?”

“In a while,” he said, sliding the newspaper across the table. “Look at this.” Sure enough,
The State
had come through—sort of. There was a story about Lyle on the front page of section B, but they didn't mention his name, and they didn't even speculate about why he'd burned the flag. The construction bosses were treating the whole episode as run-of-the-mill vandalism. The unidentified worker wasn't fired for desecrating the flag; he was fired for being in an area where he wasn't allowed, destroying property, and burning material on site. “It wouldn't have mattered to us if he had burned a two-by-four,” the project manager was quoted as saying.

Holly said, “Shouldn't you go find a reporter or something? Tell your side of the story?”

“I wasn't trying to get on TV. Anyhow, they said they wouldn't file charges if I kept my mouth shut.”

“For God's sake, Lyle, it's not like you robbed a bank.”

Lyle took both of Holly's hands in his, just like he'd done the day he asked her to marry him, the day of her grandfather's funeral. Some people might have called it bad timing, but Lyle called it his way of balancing things out. That's what love was, he'd said—two people finding ways to balance each other against all the grief life slings your way.

“I know you're trying to make me feel better,” he said, “but stop.” He went out onto the porch in his bathrobe, carrying the two antique liquor bottles he'd brought home Wednesday. He'd already rinsed them, and now, settling on the steps, he went to work running a brush inside each one,
loosening the last bits of dirt. Holly stood watching him at the window. The rest of his collection sat on a shelf in the den. They'd cleaned each piece—a section of the original copper cladding from the dome's cupola, a small pickax, two antique keys, a chunk of Tennessee marble, six roofing nails, one musket ball. She'd had her eye on an old oak display cabinet at the antique mall, thinking it would make a nice birthday gift for Lyle, but even before she'd figured a way to pay for it, he'd suggested they skip birthday presents this year to save money.

Holly arrived at the statehouse a little after one o'clock. She'd told Lyle she was going to the antique mall. She hadn't told him she intended to ask Beatty to rehire him. Lyle would have called it loyalty, maybe even love, but Holly knew, deep down, that she was only trying to make herself feel better. It occurred to her after breakfast, as she'd turned from the window and surveyed their living room—the three-thousand-dollar Italian leather sofa, the matching two-thousand-dollar chair, the space in between still waiting for a coffee table. Her not confessing to Lyle wasn't just about wanting to avoid his hurt and her shame. If she told him she'd lost their savings, it would confirm his worst fears about video poker.
His own wife.
And what if it scared him so badly that he changed his mind about working for his father? Holly wanted Lyle to be happy, and she certainly didn't want him to take the job on her account, but if he really was prepared to do it, she wasn't prepared to stop him.

So now she stood in front of the statehouse looking around for Beatty, all the while knowing full well it was pointless. They'd never take Lyle back. But she needed to be
able to tell herself that she'd tried, that she'd done
something,
even if it was a lying-to-herself something that was really nothing.

She found a couple of workers from Beatty's crew eating lunch beneath a palmetto tree at the edge of the statehouse grounds. They told her Beatty had called in sick.
Sick of losing
was more like it. She drove back to Fortunes, refusing to think about the two fifties Lyle had given her for groceries, telling herself she wouldn't look at the jackpots, would not so much as sit at a machine. When she walked in, Billy Pecan was reheating a pot of coffee at the front counter. “Holly,” he said, surprised. “I had to let somebody have your machine. It was getting late—”

“That's okay, Billy.” She went down the hallway, checking each narrow room. Most of the regulars were there, including Timothy Covey, who was too busy dribbling Skoal into a Dixie cup to notice her. A few players did glance up, but, as usual, nobody said hello. They all pretended not to see each other, the way you'd act if you bumped into your pastor at a topless joint out in Cayce.

In the corner room, two pigtailed Girl Scouts were up on tiptoes playing Shamrock Sevens, coaxing a tinny Irish jig from the machine. Beatty was sitting beside them at Holly's Pot-O-Gold. Judging from his ashtray, he'd been there awhile.

“Oh, hey there, Holly, you want in here?” He'd just slid a twenty into the machine and dealt himself another hand of blackjack.

“Beatty, I need to talk to you.”

“Not about Lyle, I hope.”

“I think you should give him another chance.”

“Shoot!” Beatty was busted with a twenty-two.

“Are you listening?”

“Now, sugar, I know, I know, I know. But I can't do it. Not my decision.”

“He was only standing up for what he believes in.”

“Please, Holly,” Beatty said. “Look who you're talking to.” He held up his hands, like maybe she'd never noticed the color of his skin. “You think I like that flag? But you don't see me burning it.”

“Beatty,” she said, “does your wife know you spend all day in here?”

Beatty drummed his fingers on his knee. His ring was missing again. “Look here,” he said, “if that job was so important to Lyle, he wouldn't have done what he did. Simple as that. Nobody was twisting his arm. Anyway, he made out pretty good. Must have been, what, four hundred bucks in the kitty?”

“In the
kitty
?”

“You know—his take.”

“You mean he was taking
bets
on burning the flag?”