“That’s wonderful, honey. Did Mia show that to you?”

The little boy frowned mysteriously. “It was dead,” he confirmed.

Up all night gambling, yet here she was, being a mother. For a while she helped Noah chase minnows in the shallows with his net, then moved a chair next to Mia’s, under the shade of a wide umbrella.

“How is the cards?”

Kay lay back in her chair. Just a few minutes with the boys had drained her; she knew right away that she would be asleep within moments. “We were doing pretty well when I left. I think we’re on a hot streak.” She sighed and turned to look at Mia. “You don’t mind? I know it wasn’t what we planned.”

Mia shrugged. From the wicker bag on the sand beside her chair she removed a hairbrush and, squinting into the light, stroked the underside of her long ponytail. “The boys are being good. Have the fun.”

“Well, their mother isn’t. Their mother is fried.”

Mia paused. “Fried?”

“Tired,” Kay explained, and closed her eyes.

She dreamed of being a girl, playing poker with her father in the kitchen, a dream that was also a memory: she had actually done this, years ago. One pair, two pair, three of a kind, straight: at the kitchen table, her matchsticks piled neatly before her, she calculated her bets according to a sheet of paper that listed the order of hands. It was notebook paper, folded and folded again, worn to the softness of chamois cloth from years of travel in her mother’s purse. Her parents played with friends; her mother was lucky, her father explained, but claimed to forget which hand was which. The light of the kitchen was winter light, cool and angular; Kay was eleven years old. Her father taught her to bluff, how to build the pot slowly when the cards were good, when to fold and be gone. Don’t fall in love with a hand, he warned her; even a good hand could lose. Wear a lucky color, but don’t count on it. Music played on the tinny speaker of the kitchen radio; she was wearing a nightgown, but was not cold, and her father was alive. He shuffled the cards to deal. Five-card draw, he said. Suicide kings and one-eyed jacks were wild. He showed her the cards, the jack with his averted gaze, the king with a sword in his head. Daddy? she said. Daddy, I married Jack. That’s good, he said. I know you did. I was there, remember? I’ve always liked Jack.

The light grew brighter and brighter and brighter still, the music louder and louder, and then she awoke to sunshine and heat, and remembered where she was. She had slept two hours; the boys and Mia were nowhere to be seen. Just a few hundred yards off the beach a cruise ship had sailed into view-deck after deck piled high above the water, an impossible vision, like a floating wedding cake. The grinding of the anchor, lowered on its chain, had awakened her, and something else: somewhere, a ragtime band was playing.

She found the boys at the snack bar, eating grilled cheese sandwiches and French fries off paper plates. Mia sat across from them, holding her book up with one hand, like an old painting of a woman reading in a park. Jane Eyre, a copy from the library, its plain covers wrapped in crinkling cellophane; she read voraciously but without discrimination, everything from pulp romances to The New Yorker to Sam’s books on baseball.

Kay sat down between the boys and helped herself to one of Sam’s fries. “Has Jack come out yet?”

“The professor said to tell you he is still winning.” Mia tucked a long marker in the pages of her book and closed the covers. “He did not want to disturb you.”

The fries were greasy and covered with salt: delicious. “How’s the book?”

Mia frowned. “Very sad. But I think it is helping with my English.”

“I haven’t read that since college. I haven’t really read anything since the boys.”

Mia shrugged and gave a neutral smile. “The professor thought I would like it.”

Kay ordered a club sandwich and iced tea, but the boys were too fidgety to wait, and she ate alone while Mia took them back to the condo to watch a movie on cable. Noah was not too old to take a nap, but she knew that Sam would keep him up. In any event, it was enough just to get them out of the sun for a while. It was their first vacation since she’d been sick, their first real vacation ever, not counting trips to friends’ houses or Jack’s parents’ in St. Louis -why not let them do as they liked?

She paid for lunch with the number of their condo, and returned to the casino. Jack was sitting at the bar, eating a hamburger. He told her he was up fifteen.

It took her a moment. “Fifteen thousand?”

“There are people in here who’d think that was nothing.” He bit into a pickle and wiped his hands. Sixteen hours at the table; he didn’t look tired at all. “See that room back there? Poker, the real stuff. I saw a guy lose twenty big ones on a single hand.”

Big ones-he’d never talked this way. “They don’t live on a college teacher’s salary. Jesus, Jack. Fifteen thousand dollars.” So much money, out of nowhere. She couldn’t believe it. “We can pay off all the cards, and the van too.”

“Don’t forget Uncle Sam.”

“Okay, just the van, then.” She laughed at herself. “Just the van. What am I saying?”

She stayed with him while he finished lunch, telling stories about the hands he had played and won, and then walked with him back to the blackjack table.

“Is this such a good idea? Playing more?”

He thought for a moment and nodded. “I think I’m all right,” he said. The dealer had changed; this time it was a young woman with cornrows, just a year or two older than Mia. She broke the seal on a fresh deck.

“Actually, I haven’t had this much fun in a long time. I feel like I could play all day. What are the boys up to?”

“They want to go sailing. Mia made a promise, I’m afraid.”

He rubbed a hand over his face. She knew how much he wanted to play, to ride this lucky streak. “You want to sit in a few hands? I can take them.”

“No, play if you want. Just be sensible. When you’re too tired, quit.” She kissed him one more time and squeezed his hand. The van was two years old; they’d bought it just before she’d gotten sick, after the old Volvo his parents had given them had finally died. How many payments left? All gone in a stroke, the slate wiped clean. “Fifteen thousand dollars, Jack. I can’t believe it. We can really use this luck.”

His hand found her waist, and he pulled her toward him. “This puts me sort of in the mood,” he said into her ear.

She accepted the embrace but then pried herself loose, suddenly embarrassed. She wrinkled her nose. “You need a shower,” she laughed.

The cruise ship was still anchored off the beach. A gate had been lowered at the bow, and a fleet of inflatable dinghies ferried passengers back and forth from the beach across the blue, blue waters of the bay. The sun was so hot it made her shiver.

She signed the rental agreement perfunctorily, barely bothering to read what it said. She hadn’t sailed for years, not since she was a girl at camp, but thought she would remember how. In any event, there was almost no wind. A young man wearing tennis whites and a huge wristwatch helped her rig, while Mia put Noah into a life jacket. Windward, leeward, tack, gibe: the words were all still there, unused for decades, like old bicycles hanging from the rafters of a cold garage.

“You know how to do it?” Stitched on his shirt pocket was his name, Thomas. His accent was southern; he had just graduated from college, she supposed, and was taking a year off to fool around in the sunshine.

“I think so.” She looked the boat over and nodded uneasily. “Well, the truth is it’s been a while.”

He smiled encouragingly at her. Besides taking care of the boats, he was also the diving instructor, he’d explained. “It’ll come back to you.” He directed her gaze across the water at an outcropping of dark stones, marked with a steel tower. “Just don’t go past those rocks. Nothing dangerous, it’s just open sea after that.”