My sister and I supported her eccentric vocation. She played on weekdays and weekends, logging enough hours most weeks to count it as a full-time job. She began chasing games wherever she could find them: inside basements with underground tables in our area, in regulated card rooms in New Hampshire, at high-stakes tournaments in Connecticut casinos.
She reunited with cards like long-lost best friends-passionately, longingly, both nostalgic and hopeful. She ran the numbers: She could make more money at the card table than at the minimum-wage jobs that were the alternative. My mother realized that the best way she could pay the bills on time was to start playing poker again. He and my mother had worked for so long to save up for that house, had managed to secure a mortgage they weren’t quite qualified for even while he was alive. Then, eight months later, my father suddenly died-a stroke on the small yellow couch in the living room. That year, he and my mother finished building a wide-set, two-story colonial with a sunny kitchen and a deck that overlooked the broad backyard: their American dream home. Courtesy of Ian Frischīy 2000, when I turned thirteen, my father’s tile business was flourishing.
The author’s bespoke Christmas card to his mother.
