I Fell in Love with Hope - Lancali

He simply hauled me along, feasting on any excuse to feel the wind
on his face and run a race down the street. We came back with a
fresh deck of cards from the corner store. When Sam tried to give
Henry the change, he waved him off, said Sam ought to use it for
something useful, like gambling.
Although Henry, like Sam, never really left the hospital.
Bodies strengthen with age, then, they wither, return to their state of
weakness when they were little as butter sticks. Henry disagrees
with this view of existence. He is all mind and all memory. Beneath
the pipe and the gray, he’s as young as they come, a boy still in his
prime ready to dance, party, and gamble with the best of them.
“Sweet child,” he says, waving me over. “Come shuffle for us, my
arthritis is acting up.”
“No, no, don’t come over here,” Sam says. “I don’t want you to see
me getting humiliated.”
But I do anyway. Sam eyes me over his mask as I shuffle the cards.
Yellow shines in the flares like amber. The only language that light
knows is mischief.
He winks at me, sliding a hand beneath the table and running it up
and down the back of my thigh.
“I’ve barely put a dent in you, boy,” Henry says. “You should’ve seen
me during the war. We played blackjack for whiskey flasks. Even my
sergeant couldn’t beat the likes of me.”
“Yeah?” Sam teases. “How’d a great player like you end up in a
place like this?”
“Oh, time is a rotten old friend and crafty card player. Only gambler
that could ever best me, that one.”
I give Henry back the cards. A few spill through my fingers.