The Supper Tray

The last time I saw my father awake, I was looking at my watch. I was thirty-one, standing in a hospital hallway in Akron, and a game started across town at eight.

He had worked forty years in a rail yard, and the hands on that blanket looked like tools left out in the rain. He asked me to sit. I sat for eleven minutes. I know, because I counted them against the clock over the nurses' station.

"Stay for the supper tray, Sal," he said. "It's terrible. We can complain together."

I told him I would be back in the morning. I told myself one night wouldn't matter. I had a feeling about that game, the kind I always had, the kind that felt exactly like knowing.

I lost, of course. Not everything, just enough to need another night to fix it. The morning turned into a second game, and then a third. My father died on a Thursday while I was two counties away, trying to win back a number I could not have told you the following week.

For years I told it as a story about bad luck. It wasn't. It was the same small move I made a thousand times. Something pulled at me, and I went toward it before I asked what it would cost. That night the price was the last clear hour of my father's life.

Gambling doesn't only charge you in money. It takes the hours, the phone calls, the suppers, and it takes them in pieces so small you don't notice until the book is closed. You can borrow money. You can't borrow a Tuesday back.

If a game keeps winning the argument against the people who love you, say so out loud to somebody. The National Problem Gambling Helpline is 1-800-MY-RESET.

Eat the terrible supper. Stay for it.

Sal