One
Poker Face

Ben Stone turned briefly as the ferry glided out of the port, watching Manhattan Island fade in the distance, and leaned on the handrail of the boat to keep steady. All those years ago, that whole place for just twenty-four dollars, he thought. Of course, that was a myth, a lie for the less romantic; anyone who knew their history knew full well it was the Puritans who got shafted because the natives who sold the land never conceived of selling it in the first place. No one owned the land; the natives were just selling the right to be there. There was, in those days, Ben mused, the concept that some things could not be bought. A thing was owned only by itself. These days, anything was for sale, everything could be owned. Twenty-four dollars could get you laid, high, or fed in New York City. Priorities change, he thought again, feeling the warm, late-summer breeze ruffle his hair and billow his shirt, and for a moment he closed his eyes. Everything changes, he thought in a gentle, relaxed way. He was unhurried and calm, allowing himself to be carried along, swaying with the chop of the boat as the ferry cut through the dark, poisonous waters.
After a time, he opened his eyes and squinted into the sunset, the sky all rosy pinks and oranges, the sign another warm day was on the way for tomorrow. Ben had loved sunsets for many years, loved watching the dimming light and the stars begin to poke through, but they had not given him comfort recently. He hadn't been sure exactly when they had begun feeling like check marks on a chalkboard, annotating and keeping track, but they had, and now he felt no serenity at the close of another full day, now he only saw a red welt across the sky. These days, he closed the blinds in his office early, preferring to forget that the sun would go away yet again in only a few hours. When he would emerge into the night later on to head home, it would be already gone, and he never had to face the transition. Here, exposed on the ferry, there was no such choice available.
They were approaching Staten Island now, and he cupped a hand over his brow to better see the dock ahead. If he wanted, he could still avoid disembarking, ride the ferry back to Manhattan, hop in his parked car, and speed home. It was still possible to get away. As land neared, his calmness began to melt away, leaving him slightly perspired; the warm breeze had stopped and the air was still thick and humid. There was still time.
But because he was the sort of person who relied on perpetual motion to get himself through things -- once started, the game had to be played through, the book finished, the verdict announced -- Ben never really considered turning tail. When the boat came to a complete stop he slung his coat over his shoulder and lifted his small duffel bag, standing in queue with the other passengers to disembark, and scanned the dock parking lot for his ride.
After a moment's searching, he connected with a familiar face, one that he hadn't seen in several years but one which was never entirely vanished from his mind, and he strode over to where the man leaned up against his car, arms folded, squinting at the boat passengers. He hadn't changed much over the past six years; he was still tall, solidly built, with a thick head of wavy, dark hair, only now beginning to show signs of gray around the ears. Ben wondered if the other man had begun to see sunsets differently these days, and tried to remember when he himself had been on the outer rim of fifty, then decided against it. Mike Logan had changed, but not that much. Ben doubted Mike contemplated sunsets at all. As he neared the car, Mike stood up straight and offered his hands out to Ben, a wide, cheerful smile splitting his face.
"Ben Stone," he said, shaking Ben's hand, effusive enough to take Ben off guard. "Great, great. Right on time. Hell of a day, isn't it?" He turned and opened the passenger car door.
"Yeah," Ben told him, sliding in and pausing to look up at Logan. "Hell of a day, Mike."

---

The ride to the suburbs was largely silent. Mike had attempted a few forays into superficial friendliness, asking about a recent case Ben's offices had cleaned up on, wondering aloud if Ben would now have the DA re-election sewn up for later this year thanks to it. Ben had replied back that he never assumed to have anything guaranteed or in his pocket until the votes were counted, particularly since EADA Jack McCoy was planning on running against him this year.
"Fire him," Mike had said with a grin. "You can do that, you know, you've been able to for what now, eight years?"
Ben shook his head and didn't reply. As if he could be expected, out of the blue, to sack a man who'd been on the job as long as he had, who had an 89% conviction rate, who managed always to get good press, even if he was a complete asshole.
Mike began to feel the distance between them reestablishing itself, sharp and consistent, and wondered exactly how, over ten years, he could have expected it would narrow. Maybe I thought when we got older, he mused, then decided it probably was better this way. There was no reason he should be friends with Ben Stone, no reason at all. But it might have made things easier. Eventually, he stopped trying to make chitchat and just drove, letting the warm twilight air sift through the open car windows.
Ben had a thousand questions for Logan, as it turned out, but couldn't bring himself to ask any of them. He wanted to understand the urgency in getting him out here, and why he had been invited at all. The Logans were not part of his social sphere, and he had only seen them one other time over the past eight years, since they had moved upstate from Manhattan. Then, three months ago, Claire Kincaid, another EADA in his offices, a woman who had been Ben's assistant for over ten years before he was elected District Attorney, announced her engagement and threw a party at '21' for friends and relatives. At the party, Ben had been somewhat surprised to see Mike, but he had long suspected Kincaid of keeping up with the Logans and their doings. She always had her own agenda in that department; Ben was aware she had done it for his own benefit, but they had never discussed it.
So while Mike's presence at the party was not much of a surprise, Ben had not been prepared to see Logan's wife Alexa again. He and would not have come if he had known they both would be there. And Kincaid had known that all along, Ben was sure of that. After catching a glimpse of Alexa through the crowd, Ben had resolved himself to an early departure after some extremely superficial chatting and a round of gin and tonics to help blot out any unnecessary memories that could emerge from her presence, but Claire slipped a drink into his hand and had entreated him to stay. So Ben had kept his distance from the Logans, once catching a searching, hurt glance from Alexa, and turned away, letting the drink soothe his nerves until he felt daring enough to socialize and enjoy himself. Not speaking with the Logans, or allowing himself to remember they existed, he even began to have a decent time. After the meal, someone started playing tunes on the grand piano in the back of the restaurant, and like children drawn to a flame the party guests grouped around and patted one another on the shoulders.
Grinning and decidedly tipsy, Mike had cornered Ben, leaning over the side of the grand. "Long time, Counselor," he'd said loudly, over the other voices, who were singing a Billy Joel tune.
Ben had nodded, drunk himself but not far enough gone to avoid feeling grossly uncomfortable with the former detective standing next to him. "Isn't it a long drive from Rochester to Manhattan just for this?" he asked back.
"Not in Rochester any more," Mike had grinned again, his eyes as lit as he was. "Down on Staten Island now."
Ben had closed his eyes and felt a distinct chill in his back. He didn't want to know this. He didn't want them so close. "When?"
"'Bout six months ago, man," Mike had said, draining his glass. "I got me a transfer. They could use a good Captain, they told me, so we moved. Great place, Staten." He had paused, his face darkening. The change was so sudden, Ben had taken a step back. "Fucking great place."
"Is everything all right, Mike?"
At Ben's concern Mike had seemed to snap out of it and became his old, grinning, drunken self again. "Howzzat poem go, Stone? 'Things change, the shit shifts, byways and sideways, step in the same do twice'? You betcha. Things change. And Stone, that shit has shifted. Man, has it shifted." He'd stood straighter and wandered off, leaving Ben bemused and hoping he was just being incoherent.
Ben had stayed the evening, taking his turn on the piano, leading the dwindling guests in a few songs, until he took a break after one tune and looked up at the remaining guests -- Logan, Alexa, Claire, Jack, Logan's old partner Lennie Briscoe, and one or two others, including Kincaid's fiancé, Caleb Duffy, and he had been struck by how it felt as if a door was being opened again, one which had been closed and bolted, one which could only be opened again by the combination of these people in one room together. It had not happened in eight years or so; what fates were they tempting by daring to relive the past?
The party had broken down not too long after that, and Ben had been taking one last trip to the toilets before leaving when Mike cornered him again. Under the harsh fluorescent lights of the bathroom the former detective had looked drawn, older, his hair limp, and his smile strained. But he had still been smiling. Mike had emptied himself in the urinal and zipped up, watching Ben in the mirror as they washed their hands. "Hey, Stone," he had said, lucidly, without trace of the alcohol. "You should come see the place."
Ben had tried not to act surprised. It was not an invitation he would have ever expected, and certainly not from Logan. He could not be certain what Alexa may or may not have told her husband over the years, or what Mike had divined for himself, if anything. But Ben had never been friends with Mike Logan, and in all the years he and Alexa had lived in Rochester Ben had never set foot in the town. "Why, Mike?" Ben had asked, drying his hands.
Mike had shrugged. "We have a piano," he had grinned, but when Ben didn't return the smile he dropped it. "Truth is," Mike said, more seriously, "we're having this party for Alexa's thirty-fifth, and it'd mean a lot to her if you came by, you know, see the kids, see the place, get out of town for a day or two. It'd mean a lot to me, too."
The speech had left Ben bewildered -- and leery. Why in the world would it mean anything to Logan? And why now? He couldn't wrap his mind around the idea of visiting, dangerously appealing though it might be. "Well, I'll see," he said, wishing he could think of a way to beg off. "When is it?"
"Eighth of September," Mike had said quickly. "Don't worry about it right now," he continued, backing towards the bathroom door. "I'll call you when it gets closer. Glad you'll be coming," he had finished, and broke into another large grin, then slid out of the room, leaving Ben in a stupor not half caused by the gin and tonics.
And here they were, three months later, the beginning of September, and Mike Logan was driving Ben to his home, where in almost no time at all Ben was going to have to face Alexa. He had hated the idea, and hated Logan for asking him to come, because he knew he really had no choice. Even after all this time, if the opportunity came to see her again, to see her children again, Ben could not refuse. The option did not exist. He would have to come. And Ben had no idea how, over the next forty-eight hours, he was going to get through it all.

---

After nearly twenty minutes of driving, Mike pulled up into a wide driveway that led to a substantial front porch attached to a well-restored, Victorian-era home, decorated with jutting windows and round parapets, the kind of gingerbread house Ben had only driven by on the streets before, wondering just what the upkeep on such a place would be. He slid out of the car and openly stared; the place was not enormous, or a mansion, but it was broad and sweeping, a reminder of years past. And as he stared, Ben noted the large white swing in the porch, swaying in the early evening breeze. Out of nowhere his eyes began to sting and he knew he would not be able to prevent everything from being repressed -- at the sight of a swing like the one he had at his own, much smaller, home he could only recall reading the Sunday paper with Alexa by his side, sharing coffee, reading the stories with her. Harshly he bit down on his memories and turned back to the car. Mike hadn't gotten out or cut the motor.
"Pretty nice, isn't she?" Mike craned his head over the dashboard. "Yeah, it's good to have your dream house firm in reality."
"I had no idea," Ben said. "She did this well?"
Mike shrugged. "Records sell," he said. "We cops just go with the flow." He shrugged. "But it cost, Ben, you bet it cost."
Ben stared at him.
"So," Mike said, turning to the passenger window of the car. "Just go ahead in; she's expecting you."
"You're not coming in?"
"Got to go get the kids," Mike smiled slightly. "I'm carpool dad today. Caitlin's at a friend's house, and Benjy's over with the Scout meeting. Shouldn't be too long. Just go ahead in."
Ben stepped back from the car, watching Mike reverse and speed off down the road, then turned back to the house. It all felt so surreal, he had to take a breath. He knew Alexa had made some records; fairly regularly a CD would arrive at his house and he would take it out, look at it, and file it away. He could not bear to listen to her sing, though the reviews of her shows and records called her music ethereal, haunting, and dreamily melodic. He supposed they were accurate; that sounded like the kind of music Alexa would make. He knew they had used some of her songs in some movies, and the royalties paid extremely well, and that one or two of them had sold a lot. But he hadn't received a CD in nearly four years, and had begun to think Alexa had given it up. Or, perhaps, she put her singing on hold. Either way, there was no way a cop -- even a Captain -- could have purchased this place. This was Alexa's. And it spoke as if she herself stood before him.
After a moment or two recovering, he stepped on to the porch and walked right in the house, not calling out to announce himself, rather absorbing the hallway and the adjoining kitchen as he came to them, seeking her with his eyes, dropping his briefcase and jacket on the kitchen table.
He had not known how he would act on seeing her again. They had been in each others' presence only twice over the past ten years, and always there had been people with them. In all that time Ben had not been alone with her ever, not even in a hallway or on a street corner, and as the time they had been together grew shorter and shorter in the span of the rest of their lives, he thought he had forgotten much of what had made him want her so much, letting the emotional tap run dry and rust.
He knew their timing had never been right, not even when she was living with him had their timing made any sense. He had always been one step behind her, and she one step behind him, a circle in which neither had been able to catch up, until finally, they had to break the chain. As he ventured into their living room, catching her standing outside on the deck, leaning on their balcony rail and watching the backyard Ben found himself stopped in his tracks, unsure of how to continue. Had Mike been with him he could have maintained the distant reserve he had expressed with her on public occasions, made small talk, then slid away back to the others from his office. But Mike was gone, for at least the next twenty minutes he was gone, and for the first time in ten years Ben was truly alone with Alexa.
She turned halfway then, the strange warm breeze laced with an autumn chill Ben had felt on the ferry blowing her hair in wispy tufts, and caught him there like a Peeping Tom, his hands in his pockets, pathetically immobile, but she didn't smile or wave, or even smirk teasingly. Instead she slid open the screen door and came straight to him, wrapping her arms around his waist. Ben fitted his arms around her shoulders in a long, tight bear hug, realizing that though this was the first full body contact he had had with her in ages, his arms felt as if they were in a natural position, holding her. She was lighter than he remembered, or perhaps he simply did not remember her as frail. She had always seemed so sturdy, even in her frequent moments of indecisiveness and melancholy all those years ago he had always seen her as strong, in the way a willow tree is strong.
Suddenly, irrationally, the fierce jealousy came back to him again and the rusty tap began to free itself. In a flash all he wanted to ask her to do was to come and be with him again, to come and live with him, but that was even more ridiculous now than it had been ten years ago. She was in her mid-thirties now; he was in his early sixties. It had always been impossible between them, now it felt even more so. What could he possibly offer her? Come and live with me, Ben thought, come and live with me and be my love and watch me dying. Bit by bit, year by year I am in my decline and you can watch it all happen, so when you are forty I will be seventy and when you are fifty and cannot even collect social security I will be eighty. If I last that long. With the weight of those thoughts clear in his mind Ben knew it was over, it could never be again, and he felt a nameless anger that even if he did throw all morals to the wind, if he didn't care about her two kids and didn't to some extent fear Mike, if all of that was rendered invalid he could not erase the fact of his age, or the fact of hers. He could never have this. And he felt a sharp, burning pain in his head and chest at the same time. So he just held her, trying to let the scent of her air out the cobwebs in his system.

---

After a time, she led him to the balcony and gestured widely with her arm towards the large, fenced-in backyard, lined with trees at the far end. "Here it is," she told him, and leaned over to a table, pouring some lemonade from a pitcher. "And here you are." She handed him a glass.
It started sweating against his hand instantly. He took a sip, unable to say anything, and just stared at her. She looked older, of course; not so much in the way women think they look older, from lines and gravity, but in her eyes she was older, in the turn of her mouth she was older. The way she held herself against the balcony, she was older, though none of it seemed to detract from her looks. With Alexa, age seemed natural rather than a robbing of time and beauty; it was simply another guise in which she could appear. Perhaps in the right light, with makeup, she could be suspected of being a mature woman in her late twenties, but in the light of the vanishing sun, the long shadows of her loose blonde hair cutting swathes across her face, she was Alexa, as she had always been, merely a more grown-up version of herself. She was her age. But there was more to it; she had a quietude about her he did not recall, and she touched everything lightly, from the glass to the balcony, as if they were insubstantial and nonexistent. And she touched nothing in the way she had held him just a moment or two ago.
Alexa stared back at him for a moment, then looked away. Ben knew his silences bothered her, but he also knew they were familiar. Strangeness made him watchful, and he tended to hold his words inside until he understood how to express them. "Would you like a tour of the house?" she asked lamely, seeming to be at a loss for how to begin.
"No," he said, not wanting to leave the deck and the oncoming night, and heard how curt it sounded. "I mean, not now," he tempered. "Later."
She nodded and lowered herself into one of the deck chairs gingerly, leaning back and tapped the chair next to her. "Have a seat, Ben."
He sat next to her, leaning back, trying to clear his mind. He would get through this weekend; somehow he would manage to get through it. As he stared at the sky, her fingers brushed his and he reached for her hand, holding it, joined with her between the two chairs. "It's beautiful," he said finally, feeling inadequate. "You've really made a beautiful home, Lexa."
"I didn't know if you would come to see it."
"I didn't think I should," he told her back. "But your invitation caught me...unawares."
"I suppose I should have invited you before now," she ventured.
He shook his head, knowing she wasn't looking at him as he was not looking at her. They were speaking but not looking at one another; somehow putting the two together seemed too much just yet. "I wouldn't have come."
"So what changed your mind, Ben?"
"I don't know," he said quietly. "Maybe it was that Mike asked. Or that it had been this many years. I don't know. So much has happened since you popped into my office, so many things have moved on, or changed. I suppose perhaps I wanted to see if I'd changed at all."
"You haven't, Ben."
He laughed to himself. "More than you know, Lexa."
"And the same for me, Ben. More than you know."
It had been amusing coming from his mouth; from hers it sounded like a declaration, but he didn't have the energy yet to probe why. "So tell me about Staten Island," he said, backing away from her challenge.
"If you like."
"I do." He turned his head slightly and caught her profile, staring a moment, noting how the light caught the fine hairs along her face and lit them like a halo. It had been a long time. Perhaps too long. Perhaps they no longer had the ability to communicate. Small talk was the best way to begin...later if there was time they might try talking about real things.
"The best thing about Staten Island," she began after a pause, "is that it's not Rochester." Alexa settled back into the pillow of her deck chair, and began to go on about the quality of the schools, how this neighborhood was so safe and quiet, how ugly Rochester had turned after nearly eight years there, and moved slowly into the doings of Caitlin and Benjy, how they had made the transition surprisingly well, of their achievements and prizes, how Caitlin had become quite the little dancer, with her weekly tap and ballet lessons and Benjy had skipped fourth grade, he was so smart he'd begun to program his own computer games. She never said more about one child than the other, never listed any of their defeats, never said one word about her life that might have been construed as negative, or harsh, other than the occasional reference to Rochester. To hear Alexa tell it, they were as well off and happy as any family might expect. And just when Ben was gearing up to call her on this prattling good humor, Mike's face coming to him saying "the shit has shifted, Ben," she seemed to sense his unease and changed gears. "So tell me about this upcoming election," she grinned at him. "Think you can win it?"
Ben frowned at her. She was asking the same inane questions Mike had.
Alexa narrowed her gaze and a familiarly challenging glint came into her eyes. "Can you slay the dragon again, Ben?"
His mouth opened slightly. It was an obscure reference, one he had nearly managed to lose touch with, but her tugging on that one memory -- their last meal together at the Rainbow Room with his good friend Barney, who had engineered turning Jack McCoy away at the door -- seemed to loose something inside him and he felt the sting behind his eyes that the front porch swing had brought on. "I didn't bring any wine," he said quietly. "We can't get drunk before we talk, this time, Alexa. Spit it out."
She sat up on the side of the deck chair, leaning forward on her knees, staring at the floorboards. "Well," she said slowly, "in six years lots of things can happen."
He mirrored her actions, sitting up across from her, but didn't speak. Before this moment he had only seen her twice in the past nearly eleven years, and the time prior to Claire's party flashed through his mind, the time when she had first brought her children to meet him, the two year old girl, the five year old boy, who had spun around and around in Ben's desk chair, making himself dizzy. Ben felt slightly lightheaded himself.
She glanced up at him and smiled, but there was no humor in it. "Dear Ben," she said fondly. "None of this is fair, none of this is what I wanted to happen, but it is amazing that no matter how well we organize our dreams the fact is that reality does what the hell it wants. I am sorry, really, really sorry."
Ben shook his head, befuddled. "What's past," he said, "is nothing to be sorry about."
"Ah," she said, tilting her head, "but it is, when it intrudes on the present."
"Tell me, Alexa," he ordered in his courtroom voice, slightly rusty -- since becoming a DA his trials could be counted on one hand.
She nodded. "I'm sick, Ben, I have leukemia."
Ben stopped breathing.
She stared over the balcony into the darkening sky and wiped her eyes, smiling. Then the words tumbled out. "Or at least I had it. The doctors found it when I got tired all the time and started looking like....like Mike did when they pulled him from the basement. Happened almost two years ago. I lost myself for a year, and all of us had to go through over a year of hell with it. I lived in Beth Israel while they tried to chemical burn it out of me, I only got to see the kids on the weekends, Mike came nearly every night, and we practically lost everything trying to pay for it. Insurance is a leech, Ben, it sucks and it doesn't give back. All the while, Ben, this pain like I've never known. Childbirth was a bruise compared to it. When they tell you your blood's poison, then, how can you not feel pain? It was everywhere, every time I heard my heart beat all I could think of how it was circulating poison." She paused, and swallowed. "And then, a year and two months after they diagnosed me, it went away. Poof. They don't say 'cured,' you know, they say 'remission,' but there it was, all gone. So we sold some of my music to those crummy movies to make some money back, and ran away from Rochester. Mike let me pick our new house, this house." She averted her gaze from the setting sun. "Funny. Since it happened, he doesn't ask me why any more, not on anything; if I wanted to paint this place plaid he'd ask what colors. Things were better, once, before this, but they're not too bad now, I suppose. So here I am, my first birthday since remission. Of course you had to come, Ben."
Ben's heart had moved somewhere in the region of his throat and he could not speak. Somehow, some way, this was his fault. It had to be. Something like this could not have happened in a vacuum, someone had to be to blame. The world could not exist in which things like this could happen in a random fashion. Which was, of course, complete nonsense; Ben had tried cases for years in which people had done horrible things for what seemed like no earthly reason. But this was different. This was his Alexa.
"You didn't tell me," he said finally, in a hurt, pleading tone.
"I didn't send out 'I'm sick' cards, no, Ben, I didn't," she said. "Most people just...heard."
"Claire knew," he said flatly, realizing.
Alexa swiveled her head to the side noncommittally. "Probably she did."
"Damn it," he said. "I'm not a child. I didn't need to be protected from this."
"Don't be too hard on her," Alexa told him. "I wouldn't have wanted you to know, not then." She took his hands gently in hers. "Aren't we both children when it comes to each other, anyway?"
He pulled his hands back and rubbed his eyes. "I wish I'd known."
"I'm sorry you know now," she told him. "I didn't really want you to have to hear it."
Inside the house they could hear a door slam and faint voices grow louder. Alexa's face lit up and she half-turned to the house.
"Then why tell me?" Ben asked her quickly. They would never have this much time again together, and she was drifting from him. Selfishly, he thought, Damn kids.
She turned quickly back to him, her face open and exposed, her mouth surprised. And he knew. "It's back," he said quietly. "You've got it again."
Just then, the porch light flashed on yellowly and Alexa's children spilled through the open sliding glass door and piled on their mother, pulling her to a standing position and dragging her into the house, chattering in jagged stereo. They never even saw Ben, and he didn't make a sound. Instead, after they had vacated the deck, he stood and leaned on the balcony, resting his face on his palms. He was not going to make it through this evening, much less the weekend. That much was certain.
Cancer. Alexa had cancer. Ben tried to wrap his mind around the word; like some foreign term he could not quite pull up its meaning in his mind. It was not a word he had thought of much in recent years; no one he knew had contracted it recently, and these days it seemed to pale in significance to greater, newer disease. As though an illness could be supplanted by an even more gruesome way to die, cancer had taken a back seat to trendier, more of-the-moment diseases. To Ben the word almost sounded quaint, like polio or whooping cough. It could be underestimated, it could be forgotten, because today there was Ebola. There was AIDS. To die of AIDS in this last part of the century was almost noble, it was significant, it held within a sense of terrible injustice. AIDS was not like a normal disease, it was something inside you that started turning off the light switches until a tiny, normal bug like the 'flu could quash out the final bulb. Cancer, on the other hand, felt vulgar and simplistic, with the notion that something was inside, eating and growing, feeding, parasitic. Surely, since science had now been able to identify something as subtly horrific as HIV, cancer had gone the way of the mumps, or the whooping cough, hadn't it?
But it didn't matter how Ben perceived the word; the more important part of the concept was that Alexa had it. Somehow, somewhere, this tiny evil had found its way into her and was killing her. She had fought it, and it had come back. And that concept Ben had no problem with grasping. There was nothing quaint or simple about a thirty-five year old woman dying. His Alexa. Cancer. Dying.

---

After a time, the sun went away and the stars poked through the darkness, like pinpricks in a box, like they always did, whether Ben liked it or not. He stared up at the rich, velvet night, trying to think of nothing, to empty his mind like the Zen masters did, and after a time he thought no thoughts at all, just felt a void, his insides scraped clean. The minutes passed, but no one bothered him; in the house he could hear noise and chatter and warmth, and he could not bring himself to go back in, not just yet.
After a long while alone he felt as if he were being watched, and slowly Ben turned his head to the side. Alexa's eldest, Benjy, was standing a foot or two from him, one hand on the balcony, his head slightly cocked to the side, smoky blue eyes wide. "Mom says I should come out to keep you company," the boy said. "'Til the party gets started."
Inside, Ben felt fragile, as if his organs had turned to crepe paper. Oh, my, he thought disjointedly, unable to fully grasp all of the implications at once. Certainly, the ten year old in front of him had signs of his mother in him; he had her delicate frame and the slant of her nose, but the fact was that the boy's appearance was uncannily similar to his father. Ben looked at Benjy and saw himself. The boy spoke to Ben with Ben's mouth, watched him with Ben's eyes, and as Benjy's hair blew in the night breeze Ben imagined when his own had been that thick and vibrantly strawberry blond. Surely, above anything else, faced with this boy every day, surely Mike had to know everything. He just had to. Ben tried to pick back over six years and remember the first time Benjy had strolled into his office; Ben had realized the truth then, too, but only had a few moments with the boy and eventually gave the resemblance over to coincidence, deciding that the five year old was not the adult, but now, coincidence could no longer be blamed. And as Ben stared at his son, he felt a warmth flush his cheeks and found it impossible, despite everything, to be wholly melancholy. "You'd better be good at keeping company," Ben told him sternly, the tone with which he greeted all newcomers. "Are you?"
Benjy raised an eyebrow, uncowed. "If I have to be."
"Show me," Ben said.
The boy, Ben could tell, was doing his best to avoid intimidation, and set his jaw to the challenge. Benjy pushed his glasses higher on his face, leaned over the railing, dangling his arms down, made a coughing sound and spat at the pavement below, watching it splat against the ground. "Cool," he whispered. "Negative points if you hit the grass, plus points if you hit the concrete."
Ben peered over the side for a second, amused beyond belief that the first sign of intelligent discourse from Benjy had come in the form of sputum. Reaching in his lemonade glass, Ben dropped an ice cube over the side of the deck instead of resorting to phlegm. The ice fell to earth and cracked on the edge of the pavement, half in the grass, half on the concrete. "What kind of points are those?"
Benjy craned his head around. "No points. Cancel each other out." Ben having apparently passed the spit test, Benjy now affected boredom, and crashed out on one of the deck chairs. "Bet you don't know stars."
Ben folded his arms and sat the other chair, smiling slightly. "You win, I don't. I know the dippers, and that's it."
"I got a badge in astronomy," the boy said without emotion.
"In Boy Scouts?" Ben leaned forward.
"No big deal," Benjy said, and pointed out into space. "There's Cassiopeia," he said, and began finding the shapes in the stars with practiced ease. Ben leaned back in his chair and listened to the memorized names, watching the small hand point, feeling his heart carefully lower itself back into his chest and pound away restlessly within.

---

Benjy just couldn't be quite sure. They'd now played six rounds of gin rummy, and having won all six, he was growing suspicious. Either the old guy was a complete loser at cards or he was letting him win, and that would have pissed Benjy off if he knew it for certain. But when he looked at his opponent he couldn't tell anything -- the man didn't act like any of the other adults he'd played with, who went easy on him early on , then fought like tigers and still lost, until they realized they suddenly had to be somewhere else, he didn't play like Benjy's mom did, which was at least fairer, but Benjy had always rightly suspected she was very careful about when she won and how she won against him. He could tell those things, adults, they were mostly easy as kids his own age to figure out. And kids his own age....Benjy'd gotten long used to there being no kids his own age. Sure, they said they were ten going on eleven, but to him they acted like his baby sister, and they always, always sucked at cards. They'd play a game or two just to prove to the egghead that they could win, and when they couldn't, they'd kick the cards or kick him and say cards were boring, they were going off home to play Nintendo. Benjy would always marvel how the kids he knew completely missed the complex subtleties of card-playing, the nuances of the combinations, and the tricks you could learn to impress people. Benjy always had a deck in his pocket, a regular old Bicycle deck, which he replaced with a fresh one once a year. And the best thing about cards was if you found a good sucker, you could take them for a couple bucks. Nobody he knew would bet with him any more, though, and over the past few years profits had dwindled, because Benjy won every time. So he'd taken out the cards to size up this stranger again, and they had played by porch light, the lemony burn of the citronella candles filling the air. Inside, the party had begun, his relatives and his parents' friends arrived, and he couldn't figure out why the old guy didn't tell him it was time to get inside and go to bed, but he wasn't going to tempt fate. The thing was, there wasn't anything about this guy he could figure out, and that made Benjy nervous. He didn't know what the man wanted from him, and he didn't know why he wasn't at the party. And his face revealed nothing.
"You ever played this game before, mister?" Benjy asked him after the sixth round.
Ben shrugged. "Not in a while. Guess I'm a little rusty."
"You're not, like, letting me win cause I'm a kid, are you?"
Ben grinned secretively. "What do you think?"
Benjy shuffled the deck expertly, the cards making a satisfying burring sound as they clicked together. "I dunno, mister. Sometimes people do."
"That must really get you annoyed."
Benjy raised his eyebrow again. It was a great trick this kid Andy had taught him back in third grade, in exchange for not having to pay Benjy for losing three games of rummy. It was something he had practiced for a long time, and was very proud of. "I guess."
"Well, it would me. You're not letting me lose, are you? 'Cause I'm a grownup, and all."
Benjy tilted his head a little, like he did when he was perplexed and had to think, as if his brain worked better when it slanted to the side of his skull. "You're weird, for a grownup."
Ben smiled and laughed softly. "You're pretty weird, for a kid."
The short hairs on Benjy's neck rose and he gripped the cards tight. And then he laughed, too. "Thanks, mister."
The boy went on to take Ben for three more games, and, feeling confident that he could make money from the transaction, began to wager. Soon Ben was down by five dollars. A loud burst of laughter came from inside the house, and Benjy froze in mid-shuffle, suddenly realizing just how late he was out, and how he'd managed to miss his favorite show, X-Files, for this. "I probably better get going," he said, hesitantly. He knew he wasn't supposed to be doing this, and while it was fun for a while, he was beginning to feel guilty for taking advantage.
Ben smiled. "Then let's do one more game," he said. "Double or nothing."
Both of Benjy's eyebrows went up at that prospect -- with ten dollars he was practically a millionaire, and all of the X-Files trading cards he could hold would be his. There was one particular one of Scully this kid he knew had shown him, which he'd wanted ever since. She was truly the coolest woman on the face of the earth, because she had eaten a bug once on the show, crunched it all up and swallowed it. That had been awesome. "Yeah," he said, his eyes glinting. "Double or nothing, mister."
He couldn't have been more shocked or disappointed when Ben suddenly transformed into an expert gin rummy opponent. The game was finished in less than ten minutes, and as Ben laid down his hand on the wooden table, proclaiming "gin," Benjy saw his hopes of Scully vanish. "You cheated," he said, miserably, staring desultory at the winning hand. He himself hadn't even been close.
Ben shrugged. "You win some, you lose some."
"I don't," Benjy said, his head shooting up. "I always win. When it counts, I always win."
"You shouldn't," Ben said. "It shouldn't be so important."
The boy scooped up his cards angrily. "I can do this, mister, I can do this real well. You did let me win."
"Maybe," said Ben. "Ever play poker?"
Benjy shook his head. "Uh-huh. Dad says that's a game for adults only."
"Well," said Ben, "it doesn't have to be. It does teach you strategy, though. And right now, you've got none."
"Strategy?"
"Knowing what moves to make. When to make them. How to play the game and which rules to use."
He thought about that. "So I'm supposed to lose sometimes?"
Slowly, Ben nodded. "Sometimes."
"Will you teach me poker?"
"I'll think about it," Ben told him. "Not tonight, though." He offered his hand to the boy. "Good game. You do play well."
Benjy stared at the offered hand and slid his into it. "Thanks, mister."
"Call me Ben," he told his son. And he raised his eyebrow.