• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

"Ira Moran! You're not playing cards in a house of worship!" He reached into his right pocket and brought out another deck.

"What if someone comes?" Maggie asked.

"Don't worry; I have lightning reflexes," he told her.

He removed the rubber bands and shuffled the two decks together. They rattled like machine-gun fire.

"Well," Maggie said, "I'm just going to pretend that I don't know you." She gathered the straps of her purse and slid out the other end of the pew.

Ira laid down cards where she'd been sitting.

She walked over to a stained-glass window. IN MEMORY OF VIVIAN DEWEY, BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER, a plaque .beneath it read. A husband named Vivian! She stifled a laugh. She was reminded of a thought she'd often had back in the sixties when the young men wore their hair so long: Wouldn't it feel creepy to run your fingers through your lover's soft, trailing tresses?

Churches always put the most unseemly notions in her head.

She continued toward the front, her heels clicking sharply as if she knew where she was going. She stood on tiptoe beside the pulpit to smell a waxy white flower she couldn't identify. It didn't have any scent at all, and it gave off a definite chill. In fact, she was feeling a little chilly herself. She turned and walked back down the center aisle toward Ira.

Ira had his cards spread across half the length of the pew. He was shifting them around and whistling between his teeth. "The Gambler," that was the name of the song. Disappointingly obvious. You 've got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them . . . The form of solitaire he played was so involved it could last for hours, but it started simply and he was rearranging the cards almost without hesitation. "This is the part that's dull," he told Maggie. "I ought to have an amateur work this part, the way the old masters had their students fill in the backgrounds of their paintings." She shot him a glance; she hadn't known they'd done that. It sounded to her like cheating. "Can't you put that five on the six?" she asked.

"Butt out, Maggie." She wandered on down the aisle, swinging her purse loosely from her fingers.

What kind of church was this? The sign outside hadn't said. Maggie and Serena had grown up Methodist, but Max was some other denomination and after they married, Serena had switched over. She was married Methodist, though. Maggie had sung at her wedding; she'd sung a duet with Ira. (They were just starting to date then.) The wedding had been one of Serena's wilder inventions, a mishmash of popular songs and Kahlil Gibran in an era when everyone else was still clinging to "O Promise Me." Well, Serena had always been ahead of her time. No telling what kind of funeral she would put on.

Maggie pivoted at the door and walked back toward Ira. He had left his pew and was leaning over it from the pew behind so he could study the full array of cards. He must have reached the interesting stage by now. Even his whistling was slower. You never count your money when you 're sitting at the table . . . From here he looked like a scarecrow: coat-hanger shoulders, spriggy black cowlick, his arms set at wiry angles.

"Maggie! You came!" Serena called from the doorway.

Maggie turned, but all she saw was a silhouette against a blur of yellow light. She said, "Serena?" Serena rushed toward her, arms outstretched. She wore a black shawl that completely enveloped her, with long satiny fringes swinging at the hem, and her hair was black too, untouched by gray. When Maggie hugged her she got tangled in the tail of hair that hung down straight between Serena's shoulder blades. She had to shake her fingers loose, laughing slightly, as she stepped back. Se-rena could have been a Spanish senora, Maggie always thought, with her center part and her full, oval face and vivid coloring.

"And Ira!" Serena was saying. "How are you, Ira?" Ira stood up (having somehow spirited his cards out of sight), and she kissed his cheek, while he endured it. "Mighty sad to hear about Max," he told her.

"Well, thank you," Serena said. "I'm