Page 59 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

“What’s it worth?” I say.

“Three hundred. Same terms.”

“And after that?”

“There’ll be another one in May.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’ve done this for nine years.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know that.” He says it flatly. “A woman who’s found something that works doesn’t stop doing it. Every three weeks, at three hundred thousand, for as long as your save percentage holds and the market doesn’t move.”

I take the card out of my jacket pocket.

I do it without thinking about why. It’s the only clean piece of paper on me, because a receipt with three numbers on it has been gone since the beginning of March. I take a pen off his table, turn her card over, and write on the back.

1,048,000.

Minus three hundred on the third of April is seven forty-eight.

Four forty-eight after the second.

One forty-eight after the third. The fourth clears it and leaves change.

Four.

Four more first periods, including the third of April, and that number will be zero. I’ll be twenty-eight years old, a hundred and thirty games left on a contract, nobody in the world holding anything over anybody I love.

Twelve weeks, if she keeps to the pattern. Three months. I would be done before the second round.

I write the four in the corner and circle it.

He’s come away from the window. He’s looking at the card in my hand, at the number on it, at the name printed on the other side.

“What’s that you’re writing on?”

I turn it over and hold it up so he can read the front.

He looks at it for about four seconds.

Then he puts his hand out and I give it to him. He reads both sides, the name and the number.

“Four,” he says.

“Four.”

“That’s twelve weeks of a league investigator being handed the same six first periods over and over. Every one of them with your name on it.” He isn’t arguing. He’s explaining it the way he reads a schedule. “Do you want to know what four looks like from where I sit, or do you want me to say nothing?”

“Say nothing.”

He says nothing.

He puts the card in my coat pocket himself and pats it flat, twice.

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