Read Online Femme Fatale and other stories by Laura Lippman - Free Book Online

two and claim it was accidental. She tolerated this feeble groping most of the time, punching the occasional boy who pressed too hard too long, which put the others on notice for a while. Then they forgot, and it happened again—they touched, she punched. It was a price she was more than willing to pay for the exhilaration she felt when she passed the yew berry bushes that marked the end zone, a gaggle of boys breathless in her wake.
    But for all the afternoons she spent at the vacant lot, she never made peace with the tricky plays—the faked handoffs, the double pumps, the gimmicky laterals. It seemed cowardly to her, a way for less gifted players to punish those with natural talent. It was one thing to spin and feint down the field, eluding grasping hands with a swivel of her nonhips. But to pretend the ball was somewhere it wasn’t struck her as cheating, and no one could ever persuade her otherwise.
    She figured it was the same with her father and cards. He knew the game was steeped in bluffing and lying, but he could never resign himself to the fact. He depended on good cards and good luck to get him through, and even Sofia understood that was no way to win at poker. But the only person her father could lie to with any success was himself.
    “That your dad?” Joe, one of the regular quarterbacks, asked one Friday afternoon as they sprawled in the grass, game over, their side victorious again.
    Sofia looked up to see her father slipping through the back door of the tavern, which people called Gordon’s, despite the fact that the owner’s name was Peter Papadakis. Perhaps someone named Gordon had owned it long ago, but it had been Mr. Papadakis’s place as far back as Sofia could remember.
    “Yeah.”
    “What’s he doing, going through the back door?” That was a scrawny boy, Bob, one of the grabby ones.
    Sofia shredded grass in her fingers, ignoring him. Joe said, “Poker.”
    “Poker? Poker? I hardly knew her.” Bob was so pleased with his wit that he rolled back and forth, clutching his stomach, and some of the other boys laughed as if they had never heard this old joke before. Sofia didn’t laugh. She hated watching her father disappear in the back room of the tavern, from which he would not emerge until early Saturday. But it was better than running into him on the sidewalk between here and home. He always pretended surprise at seeing her, proclaiming it the darnedest coincidence, Sofia on Brighton Avenue, same as him. On those occasions, he would stop and make polite inquiries into her life, but he would be restless all the while, shifting his weight from one foot to another, anxious as a little kid on the way to his own birthday party.
    “How’s it going, Fee?” That was her family nickname, and she was just beginning to hate it.
    “S’all right, I guess.”
    “School okay?”
    “Not bad. I hate algebra.”
    “It’ll come in handy one day.”
    “How?”
    “If you get through high school, maybe go on to community college, you won’t be stuck here in Dundalk, breathing air you can see.”
    “I like it here.” She did. The water was nearby and although it wasn’t the kind you could swim in—if you fell in, you were supposed to tell your mom so she could take you for a tetanus shot, but no one ever told—the view from the water’s edge made the world feel big, yet comprehensible. Dundalk wasn’t Baltimore, although the map said it was. Dundalk was a country unto itself, the Republic of Bethlehem Steel. And in 1975, Beth Steel was like the Soviet Union. You couldn’t imagine either one not being there. So the families of Dundalk breathed the reddish air, collected their regular paychecks, and comforted one another when a man was hurt or killed, accepting those accidents as the inevitable price for a secure job. It was only later, when the slow poison of asbestosis began moving from household to household, that the Beth Steel families began to question the deal they had made. Later