The Bet

Tony Kincaid had won four hands in a row, and he should have known better than to push for a fifth.

The poker game happened every other Thursday in his kitchen at 1016A West Main Street, above Fred's Barber Shop, and it had happened every other Thursday for six years, since Daryl Whitecloud moved into his apartment on Donovan and started complaining that nobody in North Haven played cards for real money. Tony played for real money. Tony played for anything anyone would put on the table.

"Last hand," Daryl said. He shuffled the deck twice and set it down. "Then I'm going home. I've got a shift at six."

"You said that an hour ago."

"I meant it an hour ago too."

The kitchen smelled like burned coffee and the pretzels Tony kept in a bowl on the counter for poker nights. The window unit in the corner clanked and blew warm air. Down on Main, a car alarm went off and cut out.

"You ever notice," Daryl said, dealing the next hand, "that you only push for one more hand after you've already won a bunch?"

"That's when a man's supposed to push. When he's ahead."

"That's when a man's supposed to quit. While he's ahead."

"Different philosophies," Tony said. "Mine's better."

"Your philosophy's gotten you into three fistfights and one lawsuit."

"The lawsuit got dropped."

"Because the guy moved to Wisconsin."

"I still count it as a win."

Gideon Albrecht sat across from Tony with his sleeves rolled up and a stack of chips that had grown smaller with each round. He was a doctor, and doctors were supposed to be good with numbers, but Gideon played poker like a man reading an eye chart from across the room. He squinted at his cards and then squinted at Tony, like the answer might be written on Tony's forehead.

"I'm out after this too," Gideon said. "Mary thinks I'm at the hospital."

"You told her you were at the hospital?"

"I told her I might get called in. That's different."

Tony dealt the cards. He had a good feeling about the hand, the kind of feeling he usually ignored because it usually turned out wrong, but tonight he let it sit there and grow. He looked at his cards and didn't change his face, or thought he didn't.

"You've got something," Daryl said.

"I've got cards. Everybody's got cards."

"You've got something, and your face is doing the thing it does."

"My face doesn't do a thing."

"Your face has been doing the thing since May."

They raised twice each. Gideon folded early, which was the smart move, and said something about getting home before Mary noticed the truck was gone. Tony and Daryl kept going. By the time they showed their hands, there was forty dollars in the pot and a stack of poker chips that didn't mean anything except pride, which mattered more than the money most nights.

Daryl had two pair.

Tony had nothing. A queen high and a handful of cards that didn't talk to each other.

"Well," Daryl said. He didn't gloat about it, which somehow made it worse. He just reached over and pulled the pot toward himself, calm as anything, like he'd known the whole time.

"Double or nothing," Tony said.

"I told you. I've got a shift."

"One more hand."

"Tony."

"Come on. One more hand, and if I lose, you pick the stakes. Whatever you want."

Daryl looked at him for a second. Something moved behind his eyes, and Tony should have caught it, should have recognized the look of a man doing math on the spot, but Tony was still chasing the feeling from two hands ago, the one that told him tonight was his night.

"Whatever I want," Daryl said.

"Whatever you want."

"You're going to regret saying that."

"I regret a lot of things. What's one more?"

They dealt the last hand. Gideon stayed to watch, since he'd already told Mary the wrong thing anyway and figured he might as well see how it ended. Tony got a decent hand, a pair of nines that turned into three of a kind by the river, and for about ninety seconds he believed in something like destiny.

Then Daryl laid down a straight.

The kitchen went quiet.

"There's no going back now," Daryl said, and he wasn't talking about the hand.

"What does that mean?"

"It means you agreed to whatever I want, and I already know what I want."

Tony felt something drop in his stomach. He hadn't felt it since he was nineteen and had said yes to something he shouldn't have, though he couldn't remember what it was anymore, only the feeling of it.

"What do you want?" Tony said.

Daryl smiled the way he smiled when he had a winning hand and knew it. "A tattoo. Northern Ink, tomorrow, whatever I pick."

"No."

"You said whatever I want."

"I know what I said."

"You're a man of your word, or you're not," Daryl said. "Which is it?"

Gideon, who had been quiet through all of this, laughed for the first time all night, an actual laugh, the kind that comes out before a man can stop it. "I'd pay to see this," he said.

"You're not invited," Tony said.

"I'm a doctor. I go where the injuries are."

Tony didn't sleep well that night. He told himself it was the coffee he'd had too late. It wasn't the coffee. It was the tattoo, and it was also something underneath the tattoo he didn't want to look at directly.

Tomorrow is the seventeenth of July. Six years ago, on the seventeenth of July, his wife Carol had taken the six o'clock ferry off the island with two suitcases and told him she'd call when she landed somewhere. She never called. He found out through her sister, three months later, that she'd landed in Traverse City and stayed there.

He worked on that ferry every day, keeping its engine running. He kept the same channel crossing it had crossed a thousand times before Carol ever stepped on it and never stepped off on this side again. Nobody in town connected the dates. Nobody but Tony.

He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, and thought about how a man could spend six years fixing the same boat and never once ask himself why.

Northern Ink sat at 1025 E. Main, between Baxter's Bakery and the North Haven post office. Ray Doskins ran it, a heavyset man with forearms covered in his own work, most of it done back when he was young and reckless and hadn't learned yet that a tattoo was a decision, not an accident.

Daryl showed up at nine with Gideon trailing behind him, and Linda Asher trailing behind Gideon, because word had gotten around the dispatch office by eight-thirty, and Linda wasn't about to miss it.

"You brought an audience," Tony said.

"I brought witnesses," Daryl said. "In case you try to weasel out."

"I don't weasel."

"You weaseled out of jury duty for two years."

"That's different. That's civic."

Ray looked between them with the patience of a man who had seen every kind of bet walk through his door. "So what am I doing?" he said.

Daryl produced a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket, and Tony felt his stomach drop again. Daryl had clearly thought about this. A planned joke from Daryl Whitecloud was worse than an impulsive one.

On the paper was a drawing. Not fancy, just a sketch, the kind a person does on the back of a napkin at two in the morning. It was the ferry. The Josephine. Tony's boat, the one he'd worked on every day for eleven years, drawn small enough to fit on a forearm.

"That's not what I expected," Tony said.

"What did you expect?"

"Something humiliating."

"This is humiliating. You have to explain to everyone who asks why you've got a boat on your arm."

"That's not humiliating. That's just true."

Linda leaned over to look at the drawing. "It's actually kind of nice," she said.

"Don't encourage him," Daryl said.

Ray traced the outline with a pencil and held it up to Tony's forearm to check the size. "You want it just like this, or you want changes?"

Tony looked at the drawing for a long time. Everyone in the shop waited, and the wait went on longer than it should have, long enough that Gideon shifted his weight and Linda glanced at Daryl.

"Change the name on the hull," Tony said. "Right now it just says Josephine. Put my name under it. Small. Like it's stamped there."

Nobody said anything for a second.

"Why," Daryl said. He wasn't joking.

Tony didn't answer right away. He looked at his own hands, at the grease he could never fully scrub out of the creases in his knuckles, at the calluses he'd built keeping that engine running for eleven years straight.

"Carol named her," Tony said. "The ferry. Before we got married. She used to say a boat should have a woman's name, and I thought that was the most romantic thing I'd ever heard. I was twenty-six. What did I know."

Linda's face changed. Gideon's did too.

"She left on that boat," Tony said. "Six years ago today. I've kept her running every day since and never once asked myself why. I just told myself it was the job."

"Tony," Daryl said.

"I'm not finished. I want my name on it. Under hers. Small, like it's stamped there. That's the tattoo."

The bell over Ray's door jingled, and Smitty walked in still wearing his badge on his belt, off duty but never quite off duty.

"Heard there was a commotion down here," Smitty said. "Linda called it in on the dispatch line like it was an actual emergency."

"It's not an emergency," Linda said. "I just thought you'd want to see this."

"See what?"

"Tony's getting a tattoo."

Smitty looked at Tony, then at the sketch on the counter, then back at Tony. "You hate tattoos. You told me once you'd rather get audited than get inked."

"Things change," Tony said.

"In the last hour?"

"Sometimes an hour's all it takes."

Smitty didn't push it. He leaned against the wall by the door instead and watched. Smitty had known Tony for close to fifteen years. He'd ridden that ferry more times than he could count.

Ray had stopped tracing. He looked at Tony with the expression of a man who understood, suddenly, that the joke had turned into something else, and that he was about to be the one holding the needle when it happened.

"You sure?" Ray asked.

"I'm sure."

"Because once I start, that's it. This isn't a chalkboard."

"I know how tattoos work, Ray."

"I'm saying it because I mean it."

Tony rolled up his sleeve and set his arm on the padded rest. His hand didn't shake.

"Then let's go," he said.

The needle buzzed, and Tony watched the ferry take shape on his own skin, line by line, the same hull he'd patched and repainted more times than he could count. Ray worked quietly. The shop filled with the sound of the machine.

Daryl sat in the chair across from him. "I didn't know," Daryl said finally. "About the date. I wouldn't have pushed if I'd known."

"You didn't push me into anything," Tony said. "I lost fair and square. You just picked the tattoo."

"I picked it because I thought it'd be funny. A grown man with a ferryboat on his arm."

"It is funny."

"Ask me again in an hour."

Linda had pulled up a chair too, and Gideon stood behind her with his arms crossed.

"You could've told her to come back," Linda said. "Any time in six years."

"I could've."

"Why didn't you?"

Tony thought about that question until everyone believed he wasn’t going to answer. "Some part of me figured if she wanted to leave badly enough to get on a boat with two suitcases and not say when she'd be back, chasing her down wasn't going to fix whatever she was running from. I didn't know what that was. I still don't. So I did the only other thing I knew how to do. I kept the boat running."

"Did it help?" Gideon asked.

"I don't know yet," Tony said. "Ask me again in six more years."

Ray wiped the ink away and leaned back to check his line-work. The ferry sat on Tony's forearm now, small and simple. Under the hull, in letters no bigger than a fingernail, his own name.

"Not bad," Ray said. "For a bet."

"It stopped being a bet about twenty minutes ago," Daryl said.

Tony looked at his arm for a long time, turning it under the light. It stung, the way a new tattoo always stings.

"You know what the worst part is," Tony said.

"What," Daryl said.

"I still have to go into work tomorrow and explain this to the ferry inspector."

"That's the worst part? Not the six years of grief you just admitted to in a tattoo parlor?"

"One thing at a time."

Gideon laughed again, and this time Linda joined him, and Ray taped a bandage over the fresh ink.

"For what it's worth," Linda said, "I think it's a good tattoo."

"It wasn't a decision," Tony said. "It was a bet I lost."

Tony walked home along Main Street with his sleeve rolled up so the bandage could breathe, past the marina, past the diner where the lunch crowd was starting to file in, past the dock where the Josephine sat tied up and waiting for the two o'clock run.

He stopped at the rail and looked at the boat for a while. It didn't look any different than it had the day before. Same paint, same hull.

He thought about Carol, not the leaving part, but the part before, the part where she stood on this same dock with a paint can and told him a boat needed a name that meant something. He wondered if she still thought about that, wherever she was, or if it was just a boat to her now.

He didn't know. Might never find out.

His name was on the hull now too, stamped small under hers.

He rolled his sleeve down over the bandage and headed for the boat shop to start his shift.