in-spades-adara-dobson

solitaire

My great grandmother taught me solitaire in a log cabin surrounded by yellow
pines, far beneath Kentucky summer stars. She had an old deck of cards from a relative
I never met–long dead–and she was really just looking for ways to pass the time with
me while I spent the night at her house. When my mom wanted to spend the night being
a woman in her late twenties and my grandma was working a twelve hour shift at the
hospital three towns away, I’d get dropped on that screened porch. She had a scratchy
VCR that she would hook up for me some nights to watch Matilda, but other nights she
would teach me card games. Nothing too complicated or involved on her part, so she
could get back to gardening in the mornings or knitting away the nights. My favorite of
her selection ended up being solitaire. She taught me with a deck that was essentially
crumbling away into nothing, with cards missing, or torn in half, or used so much that
the suit printed onto them had been rubbed into near-indistinguishability. The cards
would stick together and slip from the thick of the humidity, and I would spend hours at
her whittled kitchen table placing and replacing cards by lamplight while she pieced
quilts in the only bedroom of the cabin. My great grandmother taught me solitaire, and I
learned how to be comfortable with being alone.

blackjack

My older brother got a twenty-dollar poker set from Walmart when he was a
teenager. Sleeves of plastic chips shared thin foam strips with plastic cards, sandwiched
between the fake-metal planes of the case. He decided that the best way to break it in
was to teach his ten-year-old sister how to play cards. Ten-year-old sisters though, no
matter how eager or zealous they are, aren’t enough company to make up a poker
table. We played blackjack on the brown corduroy couch in the living room instead. He
took on the role of the house, and I was the excitable gambler that probably would’ve
started putting up my mortgage if we were playing with stakes and I had a mortgage to
begin with. My brother kept trying to teach me the logic of the game after every one of
my countless losses, ‘Kid, you’re sitting on eighteen, you should really stand with this
one.’ What he didn’t understand was that I knew the rules, I knew the game. I’d known
that the odds weren’t looking good for me, and that the most likely outcome would be
that I’d bust. I was just never able to find it within myself to care. The miniscule chance
that I could have a perfect 21 run and impress the older brother I looked up to was
enough for me to risk the loss. I told him to hit me.

tarot

I became self-taught in the art of tarot when I was no more than sixteen. I found
an aged pocket tarot deck when I was rifling through boxes of my mom’s old things
looking for a t-shirt of a band she’d seen in the nineties. It was in near pristine condition,
only the corners of the box a little worn from sitting in a plastic bin for however many years. The deck was gorgeous–illustrations of gloomy, desaturated color framed by
thick black line art, encapsulated by a quality semi-gloss finish. I brought it to my mom
to ask her about it, and she got that special glint in her eyes that showed me I’d
misstepped somewhere. She told me one of her friends had given it to her decades ago
as a teenager, the one that died in a motorcycle accident. My mother has always had a
unique talent in this department, having trauma and sad stories tied to every object
she’s ever owned that make me cry from the guilt of asking innocent questions. She
tossed the deck over in her hands a few times with a faraway look before handing it
back to me. ‘If you want it, it’s yours. Fate never liked me much and I don’t know what
I’d do with it now,’ she told me. I scurried back to my room with the deck in a careful
clutch before I could fall over any more trip wires, and I spent the next two weeks
teaching myself the intricacies of tarot. I read for myself at least three times a day, and
eventually started bringing it to school to give readings to my classmates. I became a
self-proclaimed student of fortune, fixated with my future and my oracular abilities for
others. Ambitious to further my craft, I even learned how to read from a regular suited
deck. Face cards either lost their use or transitioned into court cards, hearts became
cups and spades became swords. I lost myself in cartomancy, the idea that I had the
knowledge of my life and future in my hands for the first time. I spent every waking
moment searching for the same divinatory splendor again and again. I hunted for a
message embedded within the spreads that decisions I’d made were the right ones, that
my bounties would be worth my life’s bruises. It was a new kind of odds I’d taught
myself to deal in–the kind that I tried to convince myself wasn’t dealing in odds at all.

poker

Before all of this, though, I learned poker. Sat at a table lit only by our basement’s
stolen dim blacklights between my older brother, my mother, and her father, I was taught
the pinnacular game of odds. I could almost make out their purple painted faces behind
the veil of smoke I spent years learning how not to choke on. I was never any good at
poker, despite my relentlessly childlike enthusiasm. I reveled in the feeling of the plastic
chips between my ruddy palms each time because I knew that they wouldn’t be there
for long. My mom would deal, and my brother and grandfather would take turns winning.
Still, with every single blind, every ante without fail, I always went all in with whatever
they decided to give me. I’d shove the scraps of chips I’d been given to the center of the
table like I’d seen in movies. The three of them would share a raucous laugh with every
one of my losses, founded in something that I hadn’t been old enough then to
understand. Pity, I later learned, a specific shame held for something smaller and
obviously more stupid than them. I know now that this is where the three of them had
been wrong. I knew that I wasn’t likely to win, that they were better at a game I hadn’t
fully understood, but that wasn’t the point. The glittering possibility existed, no matter
how small, that I could pull through and beat them. I had something to risk, so that
meant that it was worth risking.

My family taught me how to lose, what loss felt like when surrounded by people
that just kept winning. I like to tell myself that they did this so that one day I might be
able to teach myself how to win. But my brother still beats me in poker, and honestly I think he always will. After all of this time, I’ve still never figured out how not to go all in.
Day in and day out I keep coming up with twos of diamonds and sixes of clubs, but
eventually a hand has to be aces. I never learned how to count cards, I don’t think I’m
smart enough for it, but you’d think that eventually I’d be dealt something with
substance. A flush, a full house, I’d settle for a straight. I stay at the table because the
odds have to be getting higher, mathematically if nothing else. After so many years and
hands of high cards, the occasional offsuit that led me to nothing but the loss of
everything I had. My brother told me that the first rule of poker is that the house always
wins, and I know that, but statistically I have to hit something. Everyone I’ve ever known
tells me to fold; that in theory I could have a draw but that the pot isn’t worth it, or that I
could hit a two pair or a full house but either way it’ll be a dead man’s hand. I hear what
they’re saying and I understand the sentiment, I just don’t care. The railbirds that
murmur protests coated in counterfeit concern aren’t worth anything to me. I’ll keep
betting on the worst hands possible because there’s always the chance of other players
folding. I’ll bluff until the house falls down if I have to, no matter how long it takes. I
gather the chips to hear them clink on themselves in my hands, and I go all in.