Read Online A Handbook to Luck by Cristina Garcia - Free Book Online Page B

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    Enrique poured himself a bowl of cornflakes with milk. He wasn’t sure when the idea of impersonating the famous nineteenth-century magician had occurred to his father, but he suspected that it had something to do with all the kung fu movies they’d been watching since their eviction from the Flamingo Hotel. Younger magicians with fancy laser shows and foreigners with exotic acts (most notably a pair of Germans with Bengal tigers) were replacing the traditional performers like his father. At forty-eight years old, Papi was washed up.
    At the height of his success, he’d earned ten thousand dollars a month—far from top billing but a decent living nonetheless, especially with the free penthouse thrown in. Now he was lucky to earn that in a year, working odd jobs and substituting for sick magicians on the Strip. Papi was aging badly, too, and suffered from a garish array of health problems: phlebitis, gastritis (no more fried pork rinds for him), prostatitis, gingivitis, and a desperate thirst he feared might be the onset of diabetes; not to mention his high blood pressure and irritable colon. His flesh, Papi complained melodramatically, was becoming a burden to his bones.
    The two of them lived in a small apartment on the scruffy end of Paradise Road. Their building, flamboyantly named The Mermaid, had a nautical motif and dried starfish glued to the walls of the grungy vestibule. Their second-story rooms looked out on an abandoned gas station and a baby-furniture store that to Enrique’s knowledge, was never open for business. After school, Enrique worked part-time at a meat-processing plant to help pay the bills. He ran probability theories in his head to stay sane. Only his and Papi’s first year in the States had been more dismal.
    A few of the high-rolling Texans still called Enrique, trying to coax him to play some more poker. Opportunity knocks but it doesn’t nag, Johnny Langston scolded him. But Enrique didn’t trust his playing the way he used to, not even with his mother’s silver bracelet in his pocket. He didn’t like living just to beat the odds anymore. He didn’t want to believe, like their gambler friends, that anything legitimate was strictly for losers. Poker, at least the way it was played down at the Diamond Pin, was a ruthless business. After Enrique had won that big pot on his thirteenth birthday, the same men who’d lost the money had surrounded him in subsequent games like a pod of alligators and devoured his winnings.
    Papi pulled a jar of maraschino cherries from the kitchen cabinet. There were a dozen identical jars behind it, lined up like a battery of soldiers. He twisted off the cap, plunged a finger into the crimson juice, and extracted a fat, dripping cherry.
    â€œHave one,” he said, offering it to Enrique. “It’s good for you.”
    â€œI had a banana already.”
    Papi dangled the cherry over his mouth. “Did you know that Chinese women call their period ‘the old ghost’?”
    â€œUh, no.”
    â€œI dreamt it. I’m telling you,
hijo,
that dictionary is working. How else would I know this?” Papi ate four more cherries in quick succession, then attacked the other half of the grapefruit. “Everything tends toward circumference. Things circle back, the good with the bad. The cycle is shifting for the better, I can feel it. Grapefruit?”
    â€œNo, thanks.”
    Enrique didn’t particularly mind his father’s rubber wig, or the pajamas that had replaced the tuxedos in their closet, or even his phony Chinese accent. (He was tempted to hang a warning sign around his father’s neck: NEW PERSONALITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION .) This was show business, after all. What he couldn’t stand was his father’s obsessive dieting. The original Court Conjurer had been tall and thin and famous enough from old photographs that Papi had no choice but to conform to his image. He