Read Online Ghosted by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall - Free Book Online

coming up.
    “A soft spot for this one,” said Tenner, as he lifted him up. Somehow, through all the red wine and vomit, Mason heard him, and he loved him like a hero.
    After school, Tenner taught Mason how to play poker with the big boys. Chaz sat there grinning as Mason lost his allowance, then his textbooks and gym clothes. He learned how to laugh when he lost, how to walk home without his shirt, a fire in his guts.
    When Mason was seventeen, Tenner threw a poker party. All Chaz’s gang from high school was there, as was Tenner’s crew—roughnecks from the old days. Mason showed up drunk and high on mushrooms. Chaz was busy with some girl in the living room.Tenner said Mason could play, and he took a seat between Sam the Chinaman and Straight Ron, smoke circling up through yellow light, chips clicking together like coins.
    He lost, lost again, and kept on losing. The mushrooms amplified everything—the sting of the loss, the smirk. He wanted more than anything to impress Tenner and instead he was almost out of money.
    When it came to his deal, Mason gathered up the cards. Tenner was holding court—telling a trademark story. Mason, meanwhile, had found the aces, slipping one in every sixth card as he shuffled. And now he was dealing them, snapping them down on the felt. As he dealt the second round, Tenner reached his arm across the table. He laid his hand on the deck.
    “Let me deal it out,” he said, interrupting his own story.
    It was supposed to be down, but Tenner turned the next one up.
    “That’s a deuce for me.” Flip. “A cowboy for Sammy.” Flip. “Crabs for Lou …
    He lifted the next card slowly then slammed it down in front of Mason.
    “BOOM!”
    The ace was face up. Tenner reached over and grabbed Mason’s down card.
    “BOOM!”
he said, turning another ace.
    Sam the Chinaman pushed back his seat. Mason’s mushroom high was now a sweating, heartbeating hell. The faces around him were morphing from good ol’ boys to demons who’d finally got a hold of him. He was only seventeen, but that’s how it felt:
final
. And
done for
.
    Tenner stood up and put his large hand on Sam’s chest. With his other hand he pointed his finger like a pistol at Mason. “And
boom,”
he said.
    The air went out of the room.
    “If you’re going to cheat, you should at least learn how to do it.”
    Mason tried to talk, made no sense. Then he was up, pushing through the party, out the door, escaping into the night air.
    He never cheated again. It wasn’t the humiliation, the fear of being gutted or a sudden injection of ethics that did it. It was Tenner’s disappointment.
    Tenner deserved a kick-ass, blaze-of-glory kind of death. Instead, the doctors kept cutting off pieces of his liver until finally he died. Chaz was too broken up to talk, so Mason delivered the eulogy, and he told that story. In a church full of goons, poker players, fishermen, Vietnam vets, hunters and good ol’ boys, he confessed that Tenner’s sharp eye had turned his son’s stupid friend into an honest man.
    When Chaz left town after the wake he ended up here, with the Toronto Berlins. He’d heard plenty about them over the years, but didn’t know how much to believe. There’d been a split in the family before he was born. It turned out that the Toronto contingent didn’t have Tenner’s dilettante spirit. They were gangsters through and through.
    Still, Chaz figured it would have made his dad happy—the reunification of the Berlins. So he set to work. And now he was pretty much running things.
    Mason tried to carry Tenner’s legacy in a different way. The plum incident was a good example. Just last week, Chaz had invited him to a house party an actor friend was throwing. There was plenty of booze and pretty people, and on a counter in the kitchen an arrangement of very small plums. Mason began to hold court in the kitchen, Tenner-style, eventually turning his attention to the bowl of fruit. “I’ll bet I could put eight of