Chapter 1 - Twenty Dollars to Lose
My father bet twenty dollars by text message that I would walk through his front door alone for his seventy-ninth birthday.
The stranger sitting beside me in seat fourteen-B on the plane read the message over my shoulder, looked down at the gold wedding ring I still wore on the wrong hand, and told me quietly that I did not have to let the old man win.
I turned my head toward him in surprise.
He was somewhere in his mid-fifties, broad-shouldered beneath a charcoal wool coat without looking like he spent his life in a gym, with silver threading his dark temples and the tired blue eyes of a man who had spent far too many nights in airport terminals.
He had barely spoken three words during the entire flight from Chicago to Richmond, yet now he apparently had opinions about my family dynamics.
"Excuse me?" I asked, tilting my phone screen away from his view.
He nodded once toward the glowing text message in my hand and remarked that my father seemed awfully certain I would arrive by myself.
I let out a dry breath and replied that my father believed twenty-dollar wagers qualified as tender emotional communication, and that he unfortunately won almost every single time.
The stranger glanced down at the stainless-steel chronograph on his wrist and noted that if I needed to be at my father's house before nine o'clock, I had exactly fifty-seven minutes to ruin his evening.
When I stared at him in disbelief, he offered a quiet, crooked smile—not the slick grin of a man trying to pick up a woman in first class, which would have been easy to dismiss, but the conspiratorial smile of a man suggesting we cheat the house at cards.
He introduced himself as Luke, and after I told him my name was Claire, he asked if I wanted to cost my father twenty dollars tonight.
Three years earlier, I would have politely declined and turned back to my book, because three years earlier I would never have been flying into Virginia alone while twisting my old wedding band around my right ring finger like a loose screw.
Three years earlier, my husband Mark would have been sitting in the seat beside me, complaining about the legroom, forgetting to sign the birthday card, and looking forward to eating two slices of my father's warm apple pie.
Then, on a freezing Tuesday in February after twenty-six years of marriage, Mark had stood in the center of our Chicago kitchen and told me there was someone else.
Her name was Denise, she worked at an insurance agency four blocks from Mark's accounting firm, and he had been in love with her for eleven months before finding the nerve to say it out loud.
When I asked Mark that night if he wanted to try to save our marriage, he had stared at the stainless-steel door of the refrigerator instead of looking into my eyes, and that silence had been all the answer I needed.
Since that afternoon, I had become fiercely, stubbornly self-reliant—installing my own garbage disposal, driving myself to the emergency room with a hundred-and-three-degree fever, and refusing to let my older brother Michael stay with me after my gallbladder surgery.
My father knew my independence was a suit of armor I refused to take off, which was why he constantly baited me with twenty-dollar bets that I wouldn't stay for dessert or wouldn't ask anyone for help.
When the plane touched down in the rain and Luke asked again if I was ready to call my father's bluff for thirty seconds at the front door, I warned him that my dad was a retired circuit judge who would interrogate him mercilessly.
Luke replied calmly that he was a structural engineer who technically lived in Denver and could handle thirty seconds of cross-examination, though when I mentioned my father would ask if he was married, a shadow crossed Luke's face before he said his wife had died eleven years ago while they were separated.
At baggage claim, while we waited twenty-three minutes for my battered suitcase, I noticed Luke was carrying a narrow dark walnut box with brass hinges and one corner scorched completely black beneath his arm, which he claimed held something that should have been returned a long time ago.
When I yanked my heavy bag off the carousel, my late mother Helen's worn silver half-dollar coin—the coin she used to flip to referee my father's bets before she died six years ago—slipped from my coat pocket onto the tile, and Luke handed it back to me without prying into the grief behind it.
By the time we stood at the rental car counter, I had laid down strict ground rules: Luke would walk through the front door with me, watch my father hand over the twenty dollars, stay for five minutes without pretending to be my boyfriend or inventing a fake trip to Paris, and leave.
Luke agreed to every single condition with deadpan solemnity right up until I gave him my father's street address on Hawthorne Road, which made his hand freeze on the handle of his suitcase for a fraction of a second before he admitted he used to live near Richmond.
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Forty minutes later, as autumn rain lashed the windshield and we drove past the familiar landmarks of my childhood neighborhood, the dashboard navigation screen instructed Luke to turn left two blocks before Hawthorne Road, yet Luke smoothly turned the steering wheel to the right without hesitating.
"The navigation system says to turn left, so how do you know it's wrong?" I asked, turning cold in the passenger seat as Luke pulled into my father's driveway and I saw the front porch light flare on—where my seventy-nine-year-old father stepped out holding a crisp twenty-dollar bill, only to freeze in terror as his eyes locked onto Luke and the scorched walnut box, whispering in a shattered voice that Luke had promised my mother he would never bring that box back until my father was dead in the ground.
