The Story of Why

Maybe it’s all about what happened in the end and not what actually happened before that . If you try to tell a story as it had really happened, the ins and outs, the guts of the story, the part that makes it good, then you include a little character development, don’t you? Or do you? Do you tell about the Black-Jack dealer who looked like an East German boarder guard with a powdered face and fake eyelashes and do you tell how she never ever smiled and kept popping Tums and burping? And winning and winning and never not winning as we, me, sat there and watched her defy all odds. Do you tell about that?

Or maybe the beginning and the middle don’t count. The first time I told this story I was telling it to my now ex-wife. She waited for me to get to the end-part when I wasn’t even half way through telling her the beginning.

“How much did you loose?” my now ex-wife kept asking.

“Well, hold on,” I said.

She was looking at me with cold blue eyes. She sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for me to get to it.

“How much did you loose? She asked again.

My daughter Tess now stares at me with the same eyes her mother had. It’s forty years later.

My ex-wife didn’t get it then. She didn’t see the beauty, or realize the magnitude of events. She couldn’t see the changes of luck. She wouldn’t appreciate the dance Lady Luck and I were having.

“So I got more money.”

Tess looks at me like she can’t believe her eyes much less her ears.

“I know how stupid that was because you’re mother and I couldn’t afford to loose three hundred dollars back then, much less five hundred…”

Tess’s blue eyes wait for me to get to it.

“But that’s why I did it!” I say. “That’s why I had to go to the bank and get more money!”

“Dad, I don’t—It’s late!”

“So I could win my money back! I wave my hands out to the tables behind us and beside us.

“And you lost all the money?” she asks.

“You’re just like your mother!” I say and wish I hadn’t.

Tess begins to gather her purse, and then her glasses case and proceeds to look around for the sunglasses that are on her head.

“I didn’t want your mother to divorce me, and I knew she would!” I say loudly. The bartender looks over at me.

“So what happened?” my daughter asks in a hissing whisper. Her eyes are unblinking.

“I won,” I whisper back. “I won it all back!”

The unblinking blue eyes bounce back and forth across my face. Her mouth has two lines making thin creases in her cheeks. Her hair is still blond as it was when she was a child, but I wonder if it isn’t really gray now.

I continue my story. I tell her that I won it back, all of it. I turned five hundred and ten dollars in chips in for cold hard cash.

Tess had heard part of this story from her mother, but she never heard the whole story. She hadn’t heard this part.

“I walked with five hundred and ten dollars in my pocket that way,” I say, and I swing Tess around on the bar stool to point to the doors I referred to. “And I reached those doors and I went outside and realized that I had walked completely the wrong way!”

I point in the other direction and swing her again in her chair. “I went that way, trying for those doors where the parking lot is, way over there! But as I was walking all the way over there—I passed that woman—“ I point straight ahead and again swing Tess around to the center of the huge casino. “That woman right there! The dealer. She looks like a prison guard… you see her?”

“With the fake eyelashes?’ Tess asks.

“Yes, yes, yes!” I say. “That was the woman I first lost all my money to! Don’t you see? That woman was the one. I had to give it another shot. Nobody can be as lucky as that woman that night! I had to try! Don’t you see?”

“I see,” Tess says. “You stopped to make one last bet and—“

“Yes!” I scream and the bartender looks over at me again. “One last bet,” I whisper.

“And you lost it all again?”

“That woman is the devil,” I say.

“So you’re saying,” Tess begins, “the reason you and mom got divorced, is because of that woman over there?”

“No!” I say. “It’s because of that door over there. It wasn’t the right one!” I say, and laugh at my joke too loudly.

“You’re going to have to keep it down, Sir,” the bartender is now leaning into my face.

“I’m going back to the room, Dad,” my daughter says and up she rises, leaving me alone at the bar.

I get up too. It is time. I approach the Black-Jack table.

“Remember me?” I ask the witch-lady with the fake eyelashes.

She glares at me. I sit down.

“Yeah,” she says. “You were here last year.”

“And the year before that, and the year before that, and for many years before that,” I say.

“Yeah, I do remember you! You always lose,” she says, and she actually smiles at me.

I know right then Lady Luck is on my side this time.

“Sometimes your luck can change.”

“Oh, yeah? When’s that going to happen?”

I tell her the truth. ”When the lady smiles. ”

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