The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [59]
He slid the door aside. Empty except for two shoe boxes. Wayne lifted one of the lids. Stacks of chips she’d never cashed in. Some from the Colossus—these were the source of his phone’s vibrations—some from casinos she was no longer allowed to walk inside. Thousands of dollars’ worth. He wondered if this meant she was coming back or if it meant she didn’t care.
Wayne sat on the bed and remembered the last conversation he and Nada had had between his sheets, her toned, curved flesh pressed lightly against his muscle and fat. They were talking about her name, and she wanted to know what people had called him besides Wayne. He told her he had been a pretty decent offensive lineman, a good-enough pass protector that the quarterback had given him the nickname “Fort Wayne,” which never really caught on. He played some tackle but usually offensive guard, and on the depth charts he was listed by position and name: G. Wayne Jennings. His teammates started calling him “G.W.” or “Gee-Wayne,” and when they were giving him a hard time, the way good teammates do, they sometimes called him “Guh-Wayne,” and when he made a rare mistake, when he missed a block or flinched before the snap, it sometimes became “Duh-Wayne.” He often thought it funny—and he remembered telling Nada this—that his football career was long over and yet he was still a guard. He was still G.W. He was still Gee-Wayne.
“I like Gawain,” Nada said with a satisfied smile, her hand raking across his big chest. “Like the knight.”
Wayne couldn’t admit he had no idea what she was talking about, so he went to the library the next day and discovered a book about the Round Table. Since then he’d read everything he could about Arthurian legend. He’d found T. H. White’s The Once and Future King tough going at first, but he loved it now, absorbing it in his car at lunch hour. The musical Camelot became his secret guilty pleasure. He never told her any of this. That a word from her could change him so much.
Her phone.
Beside the bed was a red phone, a corded model his own mother had in her bedroom. It rang a second time. A third. For some reason, he thought of a line from the King Arthur novel: “Yet, with her prescience, she was aware of dooms and sorrows outside her lover’s purview.”
A fourth ring. A fifth.
That was Canada Gold all right.
A sixth. A seventh.
Aware of all kinds of dooms and sorrows.
Eight. Nine.
He’d had to look up purview.
Ten. “Hello.”
There was no acknowledgment from the other end, but there wasn’t silence, either. Breathing. A background cough. A television.
“Hello? Nada?”
Five seconds of nothing and then a soft click.
Wayne sat on the bed for another hour, but the phone didn’t ring again.
19
MONDAY, JULY 26
ONE FRIDAY a year ago, after seventeen hours counting cards for David Amoyo at the tightly packed blackjack tables of New York New York, Nada pushed through the glass doors out onto the Strip and, surprised to find herself in daylight, drove to a dealership in Henderson, where she traded her Subaru and nineteen thousand dollars in cash for a loaded yellow Miata convertible off the lot. Twelve months and twenty thousand miles later, she found it a perfect fit for the rare remaindered parking spaces of Chicago. Despite an adult life lived mostly in the wide-open West,