An Unexpected Debt – Chapter 17

Ice cream, funnily enough, reminds me of Bridge.

I was fourteen years old, and it was the last year my father was a regular member of the Mikasa crew. By this time, he was weary of always being on the go, and he was spending more and more weeks on Ossun. Mom was working around the clock, and only Miguel saw her regularly because he handled the business. My older brothers, Oliver and Raphael, were still on the ship occasionally, but they were attending secondary school on Ossun and Rio. And, of course, I was holding down the fort for everyone else.

As per usual.

I was in bed studying when my door chimed.

“Come in,” I said, raising my voice. My father appeared in the doorway.

“Hey, Bug.”

I didn’t lift my head from the book I was reading on my datapad. Studying was all I ever did outside of the caretaking, cleaning, and everything else.

“Are you busy?” he asked.

“Kinda.” I touched my finger to the screen to mark my place and looked up. That was around the time I was studying inorganic chemistry, balancing equations, and understanding the difference between molarity and molality. “What do you need?”

I asked this question at least a hundred times per day. Whatever they needed, I was expected to get it, find it, make it, conjure it out of thin air.

“Well…” Dad fidgeted. He wrung his hands until they were white. It was his way of showing me he felt terrible for asking anything of me when he knew I was knee-deep in everyone else’s shit. “I have a slight problem. Miguel just bowed out of our Bridge match tonight, and I’m on the line for six hundred credits.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Six hundred credits? How did it get this bad?”

The dads played Bridge for money because Mom was notoriously stingy with the discretionary funds. If the dads wanted toys, good booze, or tickets to the New Angeles Fires or Concord City FC football matches, then they had to find other ways to get the credits. Mostly, they took it out of each other’s wallets. Now, there’s nothing wrong with some healthy competition and good-natured card games. I played a lot of cards at that age and still do. But, once again, Dominic had taken the games too far, and if Dad was going to get anything back, he would have to play to win.

Dad shrugged. “I kept making poor decisions in the last game. I lost our contracts several times. Terrible bidding strategies.”

This shouldn’t make any sense to most fourteen-year-olds. What fourteen-year-old learns Bridge? But I had learned quite a lot sitting in the same room with them all my life. Watching games when I was supposed to be studying or taking care of my brothers and sisters.

“You always bid too aggressively,” I said, and he blinked a few times.

“I didn’t think you knew how to play,” he replied, a hand on his hip.

“I know enough.” I turned my head back to my datapad, but Dad cleared his throat. I sighed and shut it off. “What?”

“I need you to play with me tonight as my partner. Maybe we’ll lose, but I can’t let the game go to forfeit.”

“Why can’t you just wait until Miguel can play?” I asked, annoyed that I had to bail someone out again.

“Because it’s Dom, and he insists on sticking to the rules we set years ago. Come on,” he pleaded. “Please?”

I sighed in that dramatic fourteen-year-old way. “Fine. But you owe me.”

“Thanks, Skylar,” he said, smiling. “Eight o’clock tonight. After dinner.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I shooed him from my room and fell back on the bed once the door was closed.

Another night wasted on something stupid when I could be reading or relaxing. And now I really had to learn to play Bridge, not just guess at it like I had been doing for the last few years. I called up a Bridge tutorial on the duonet and sighed as I flipped through it. There were twelve lessons with practice hands for each. It was already one in the afternoon, and I would still need to finish studying and make dinner for everyone. Could I learn Bridge in less than seven hours with everything else left to do?

Turns out I could, and I still had time to spare to make dinner. Bridge was easy enough, I supposed. Take as many tricks as possible, make the contracts, and work with my partner to keep the other team from taking tricks. I memorized the basic strategies and a few of the more advanced tips, then I played every practice hand at least twice until I got them all correct. I also knew Dominic and Juan well enough to know when they were lying. That would come in handy.

Everything was going well until dinner.

Ana was at the end of a rough day. She was studying for entrance exams at a specialty secondary school back when she thought she would be a teacher someday, and she couldn’t get the course material right in her head. She was hard on herself and hadn’t eaten for two days. I saw the warning signs, but I told myself she would snap out of it. People had fasted longer for religious reasons. No big deal.

I was a stupid teenager. So damned stupid.

Throughout dinner, Juan had tried to get Ana to eat, and I kept shooting him glares that could kill, hoping he would stop and take the spotlight off of her. If he had left her alone, she would’ve been fine, but his needling made things worse because then Dominic joined in. This was a year before Nolan was born, and I still didn’t believe that I was taking care of everyone to the extent that parents did. I was in denial. But not for much longer.

“Come on. Just have a bite. One noodle,” Dominic said, picking up a pan-fried noodle with his chopsticks and slurping it up.

“Leave her alone. She’ll eat if she wants to,” I said. Jukia tapped my foot under the table. She hated it when I fought with her father.

“You stay out of this,” he said, poking his finger at me across the table. He turned to Ana and screamed, “Eat!”

We all jumped. Ana closed her eyes like she’d been slapped. Juan knocked over his glass of water, and Dominic jumped up from the table.

“Now look what’s happened.” He backed away from the table as water spilled over and onto the floor where he was just sitting. He pointed at Ana. “Clean it up.”

I set my chopsticks down and stood up. “I’ll clean it. Ana, why don’t you go to your room for a bit?”

“No,” Dominic said. “She’s going to sit and eat until her bowl is empty.”

Ana sat utterly still, so stiff that I wondered if she was having a seizure. She became non-verbal during arguments, unable to do anything but nod or shake her head. She was scared shitless of Dominic at all times. Of course, he only ever acted like this when Mom wasn’t around. I used to wish I was good enough with computers to hack our security system and send Mom the videos on the sly. But then, I wasn’t sure who she would side with.

“Go,” I said to Ana as I lifted her from her chair and ushered her to the door.

I grabbed a towel from the kitchen and returned to a quiet dining room. Dominic glowered over Juan and Miguel. My father stood back from the table, watching the hallway Ana had disappeared down. My father was good with Ana, and he often calmed her when she was on the verge of a panic attack. But tonight, he didn’t want to anger Dom any further.

Dom hovered over the puddle of water on the floor. I eyed him. “Excuse me,” I said, my tone of voice annoyed. He hated that.

He stepped aside a few centimeters, and I had to squat down under his glare to clean up the floor. When I stood up to handle the table, too, Dom grabbed my arm, his grip firm and painful.

“Listen here,” he started.

I saw red. I dropped the towel, twisted, and slipped my arm from his grip, swiping down with my right hand and hitting his wrist with a swift chop.

He cried out and stepped back, and I fell into a ready position, my fists up. I had learned self defense in far-school and kicked the butts of everyone else in the class.

“Don’t touch me,” I said, raising my voice. I wish I could have screamed loud enough for my mother to hear me from a ship away. “If you ever, ever, lay your hands on me again, I will kill you.”

I was deathly serious, and Dominic knew it. His eyes widened, and he stepped back one pace. He raised his hands, palms out, and stepped back again. He wasn’t afraid, so much as unable to try again with everyone watching. He turned on his heel and stalked off.

“I’ll see you for Bridge in twenty minutes!” he called over his shoulder.

I swore and picked the towel up, determined to mop up the mess. Jukia, though, took the towel from my hand gently and finished up for me. “You should finish your dinner,” she said. “I’m sure you want to eat before cards.”

I glared at my father. “Why don’t you ever stick up for Ana?”

He looked chastened but shrugged his shoulders. “Sometimes Dominic’s temper is too hot. I don’t want to cross him.”

“Me neither,” Juan said.

We all knew Dom had had a rough childhood. His own father beat him, and his mother was powerless to stop it.

The sins of the father…

I wouldn’t let my own father’s lack of action become my downfall.

No. I was going to win. Win at life.

Win at Bridge.

I sat down at that table and won every trick I set out to win. I played every single hand to win, even when the cards were against me. I didn’t smile while I demolished them. I didn’t gloat. I didn’t laugh. I barely blinked. After a while, Dad let me take the lead, and we destroyed Dominic and Juan.

Dom was quiet, his chest rising and falling in measured breaths, as Dad collected his winnings.

Dom stood up from the table and left to cross the hall to the kitchen. I thought he was going to get a drink, but instead, he grabbed one of our grocery bags and snapped it open. He jerked the fridge door open and took out all the little treats I had purchased the last time we were in port. Fresh cherries, tubs of yogurt, chocolate bars — they all went into the bag. He slammed the door shut, and I thought he was done, but no. He was far from done. He then emptied the cupboards of the only things Ana ate — crackers, cheese snacks, dehydrated fruits. He was ruthless. He searched and found everything, pushing aside boring snacks for the good ones we hid in the back. The bag began to bulge and overflow.

“What the hell?” Juan said under his breath.

I closed my eyes and hoped he was done.

Then he opened the freezer and took out my favorite ice cream, double chocolate fudge brownie from the artisanal place in Sakata City I loved. I lunged forward to stop him, but Dad caught my arm.

We watched Dom load up the bags, take them down the hall to the airlock, open the airlock, drop them in the hold, close the door, and send everything we loved to eat into outer space. He nodded at the door, dusted off his hands, and left to go to his room without saying a word to anyone.

That was the last time I purchased ice cream for myself while I lived on the Mikasa. I continued to purchase snacks for my sisters, and then for my younger brothers when they came into the world. But I kept them locked away in my room, where I knew Dom would never go.

But at least I won at Bridge.