The Woman Across the Table

The fifth. The last. My wife the morning I died. If there's a loose wire in this whole box, the odds say it's her, and I've dreaded putting the meter on her, because a man does not want to find that the part that failed was the one he'd been sleeping beside.

So let me work her like a job. It's the only way I'll get through it. A dead machine up on the bench, the cover off, and I follow the wires one at a time and I do not flinch. Diagnostics. I was always good at diagnostics.

Better than good. Let me say the true thing about myself before I take her apart, because it's the thing that makes this whole business such a joke, and a man ought to be able to laugh at himself even from where I'm sitting now.

I could read people. Not a little. Cold, and fast, and right.

Wendover was where I proved it to myself, weekend after weekend, thirty years of Fridays. You'd drive out across that white flat nothing with the salt going pink at the edges near sundown, and the Rainbow or the Nugget would come up out of the desert lit like a fever, and I'd walk in off that quiet into all that noise and I'd feel myself get sharp. Sit down at a table of seven strangers and inside two hands I'd have every one of them.

The kid on my left, twenty-two, too much cologne, kept squaring his chips into a little fort. Scared money. He'd fold anything that looked at him wrong, and you could run him off a pot with a stare and a raise, and I did, twice, and he never once thought to wonder how I knew.

The big fella across from me in the good shirt, he had the opposite tell. He got still. Real still. Most men get busy when they're bluffing, they touch their face, they talk. This one went quiet as a held breath, and that stillness was the loudest thing at the table if you knew to listen for it. When he had the goods he'd chatter and count and reach for his drink. When he had nothing he turned to stone. I let him bluff into me all night and I paid for his kids' Christmas.

And there was a man at the end, older, leather jacket, and I watched him flinch when the dealer moved too quick reaching for his hole cards, a little duck of the shoulder, gone in half a second. Somebody hit that man when he was a boy. Hit him enough that his body still remembered it at sixty. I didn't need his story. It was written on him plain as a service tag. I laid off him. You don't take a beaten man's last forty dollars just because you can. I had rules, out there. I was decent, out there.

That was the gift. Faces were open books to me. A twitch, a swallow, the way a woman's thumb worried the side of her card, and I'd know what she was holding and half of what she'd lived. I never bragged on it because bragging shuts the book. I just sat quiet and read, and I won more than I lost, and I drove home across the salt at two in the morning feeling like a man who understood the world.

Here's the joke. Here's the whole rotten joke of my life.

I read every stranger in that desert for thirty years, and I never once read the woman across my own kitchen table.

Not once. She sat there in the morning with her coffee and her paperwork and her reading glasses down on her nose, and I looked right at her, and I got nothing. Or worse than nothing. I got what she wanted me to get, and I took it for the truth, and I thanked her for it. The gift that never missed on a drunk in a leather jacket four hundred miles from home went stone blind at the distance of my own arm.

Maybe that's how it always is. Maybe the gift only works at a table where you've got no skin in it, where you can afford to see clear because losing only costs you money. Bring it home, put your heart on the table instead of your chips, and the reading gets soft, because now you don't want the true answer. You want the answer that lets you keep sitting there. So you shade every tell in her favor. The stillness that would've screamed bluff in Wendover, at home you call it calm. The fast moving of things from one hand to another, at home you call it competence, and you're grateful for it, blind fool that you are.

I saw everybody but the one I married.

So I don't get to trust my gift for this. That's what I have to write down before I start, so I don't cheat. The reading man is compromised. He loved her, and there's no prettying it up. He called her his little hummingbird, this cold grasping woman, and he meant it, back before he knew what she was. Hold that word; it comes back at my grave, and it breaks what little's left of me when it does. He loved her, or loved being loved, or loved not being alone, which at the end wants the same things and folds the same way. His judgment is no good on this one hand. Set it aside.

Which means I can't feel my way through her the way I felt my way through a card table. I have to do the other thing. The bench thing. The slow thing. Take the cover off, and forget what I want to find, and just follow the wires. Cold. One connection at a time, meter on each one, does the current run true or does it not. A machine doesn't care whether you loved it. A machine only tells you where it failed.

She won't tell me either. But the wiring will, if I go slow and I don't lie to myself about what the needle's reading.

So that's the resolution. I'm setting down the gift that made me proud, because on her it made me a fool, and I'm picking up the meter instead. I'm going to run diagnostics on my own murder with the same hands that fixed ten thousand cold ovens and warm freezers, and I am not going to flinch when I find the short, even if the short turns out to be the woman I woke up next to on the last good morning I had.

Let's just see if I'm good enough to run them on my own death.

One wire at a time. Turn the page.