Or his watch, a bulky gold thing that weighed his wrist down. Yvonne glanced at her own wrist, encircled with a bright green and purple bracelet her daughter had braided out of embroidery thread. She didn’t bother wearing a watch—Joe kept big, industrial clocks mounted on both the north and south walls. Some days they made Yvonne feel like she was still in grade school, watching that red second hand tick around.

  “I’ll be right back with your check,” she said, deftly clearing the man’s plate and silverware. A stray macaroni noodle curled on the linoleum table like a bitten-off question mark.

  It was near impossible to go into the kitchen without glancing up at the clock. Nine minutes. Her feet ached a little less at the thought. As usual, Joe had his favorite classic rock station blasting away in there. Made it hard to think when adding up the bill, but Yvonne was meticulous. She always double-checked the total. It came out to seven dollars and eighty-two cents.

  When she put the check on the table of Booth 5, tucked in its brown plastic tray, the customer set his hand on her arm. She gave him a quick, quelling glance. Years of waitressing had given her more experience than she’d like when customers tried to get fresh.

  “I have a proposition for you,” he said. His fingers were cool and dry against her skin.

  “Not interested.” She pulled away. “You paying with cash or card?”

  Maybe she better call Joe over from where he was restocking the ketchups. He outweighed the customer by at least a hundred pounds, and it wouldn’t be the first time he’d thrown trouble out on its ass.

  The customer smiled then, and it transformed his face. There was something impish in his eyes, a flash of mischief she’d expect from a kid about to make an outrageous dare. Yvonne blinked and dropped her gaze to the empty coffee mug.

  “How about a wager,” the man said. “A coin toss. I win, you buy my lunch. You win, I pay—and leave you this tip.”

  He opened his shiny black wallet and pulled out a crisp hundred. Still smiling, he tucked the corner under the edge of the mug.

  The green bill glowed against the red tabletop. Yvonne’s fingers curled into her palms. A Benjamin wasn’t huge money, but it would make enough of a difference that she could pay for another inhaler of her daughter’s asthma medication. With some left over for ice cream. She wished she could treat the kids more often.

  “What’s the catch?” She looked right into the man’s eyes.

  They were blue, and she didn’t get a con vibe off him. Just that edge of recklessness—like a guy who’d be willing to chance a hundred bucks on the fall of a coin. There were crazier people out there. Heck, there were crazier people in here she served coffee to every day.

  “No catch,” he said.

  If she lost, so what? Her tips for the day would cover the eight bucks his lunch cost. Barely.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Great.” The man held up a coin—a bright silver quarter.

  He rotated it, so that she could see it was a regular coin, though it had one of those new backs featuring an American territory. Guam or someplace.

  “Your call.” He flipped the coin.

  It spun up, turning end over end, the silver flashing under the fluorescent light. Outside, cars streamed by on the highway, but inside Joe’s Café, time seemed to slow to the distant thump of a heartbeat.

  “Heads,” she said.

  The quarter reached the top of its arc and started down, pulled by gravity, pulled by fate. Yvonne held her breath.

  The coin twisted toward the table…

  And was snatched up in a meaty red fist.

  “Hey!” Yvonne said. Dizziness washed over her, and she grabbed the chrome edge of the table for balance. The traffic outside blurred, a smear of color and motion.

  “No gambling in my place,” Joe said. “Pulltabs up at the truck stop, if that’s your game.”

  The customer nodded, though a pained expression crossed his face for a moment. Then he was just a normal guy, tucking the hundred back into his wallet and pulling out a ten-spot instead.

  “Keep the change,” he said, sliding out of the booth.

  Apparently he meant the quarter, too. Joe slipped it into his pocket with a shrug.

  Yvonne rubbed her forehead. Caffeine jitters raced through her, which was weird because she’d only had two cups of the watered-down stuff they served.

  Or had it been three?

  “Not like you to bet,” Joe said.

  “You know Elaine won over two hundred bucks on pulltabs last week,” she said. “I thought my luck would change.”

  “Too bad. You really paying for that guy’s lunch?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “And I lost, fair and square.”

  Hadn’t she?

  She wiped the now-empty table, the bar towel smearing over the top. Maybe it was the bleach fumes wafting up from the cloth, but she felt woozy.

  Something crinkled under the towel. Yvonne lifted it, then froze. The hundred dollar bill lay on the table, bent up on one side.

  Had her customer slipped it out with some sleight of hand, after she’d seen him put it in his wallet?

  But why would he do that? The bet had been real, on both sides. She squinted, trying to remember which way the quarter had landed.

  Joe went past, patting her shoulder. “Glad to see you get some luck, girl. Don’t spend that hundred all in one place.”

  “I won?”

  Surely she hadn’t. She swayed on her feet, cold prickles racing just under her skin. The last few minutes were all mashed up, scrambled together in her mind. Something was wrong—terribly wrong.

  Through the window, she glimpsed her customer rounding a late-model tan Buick parked at the curb. His keys shone in his hand. Behind him, Route 12 hummed with traffic.

  Yvonne whirled and hurried to the door. The metal handle was cool to her touch as she pushed it open and rushed out to the sidewalk.

  “Wait!” she called, waving at him, the hundred gripped firmly between her thumb and fist.

  He looked up at her and smiled, blue eyes crinkling. Paused with his door half open, about to get into the car.

  “You forgot your money.” She held out her hand.

  It was empty, her fist curled tight around nothing. The back of her neck tightened in a hard shiver. Oh God, what was happening?

  “Take care,” he said. “And thanks for lunch. I’ll stop by again, next time I’m passing through.”

  He finished pulling the door open. Motion, too fast, too close. The screech of brakes. He turned, eyes and mouth opening wide as a blue truck veered wildly out of its lane and careened toward him.

  “No!” Yvonne screamed.

  She was too far to grab him out of danger, too far to do anything except watch, heart squeezing in horror, as he was pinned between the front of the truck and his car door.

  Metal wailed and crunched, and the stench of burning rubber filled the air. The shatter of glass. A human cry, cut off.

  “I’m calling 911!” a lady yelled from Yvonne’s left.

  Her thoughts spun, clattering with panic.

  Wait.

  The quarter never landed. It never landed.

  Her blood pulsed through her, her mind replaying the crash. The bill. The change. The wager. Joe grabbing the quarter.

  “Joe!” Yvonne slammed back through the diner door, past the empty booths and tables, into the kitchen.

  Joe didn’t hear her over the Rolling Stones blaring from the radio. She grabbed his arm, and the burger he was flipping landed in the flames. The stink of charred meat smoked up from the grill.

  “Yvonne, what the—”

  “Come on! Hurry, hurry.”

  She towed him through the kitchen doors. A small crowd gathered on the sidewalk outside the diner, staring at the accident.

  “What’s going on?” Joe asked.

  She pulled him to Booth 5. There was still time. There had to be. I won—I lost—he won—he lost. That coin is still turning.

  Urgency beat through her.

  “The quarter!” she said, releasing Joe’s arm. “Get it out of your pocket.”

  Joe wiped his hands on his greasy white apron. The red linoleum of the table looked like blood. Outside, she saw the truck driver shaking his head, his eyes full of ashes. Sirens faded in and out, and in again, getting closer. Her spit was sour inside her mouth.

  “What happened?” Joe asked, glancing out the window.

  “A guy was hit. Get the coin. Please.”

  He gave her a funny look, but dug in his pocket and held up the quarter, shiny as ever.

  “Here, okay?” He tried to hand it to her, but she backed up, shaking her head.

  “Put it on the table.”

  Her breath bounced up and down in her chest, and her side hurt, like she’d been running flat out. The coin had to be revealed, one way or another—the tear in the universe mended back together. She didn’t know how it had happened, or why. But it had to be fixed.

  Frowning, Joe set the quarter down. His big thumb obscured the face. Ambulance lights strobed outside. Red. Blue. Red.

  She was going to be sick. She swallowed, and leaned forward. Heads. Be heads. Not death. If her customer won the bet, she bought him lunch; and he was smashed by a truck right outside Joe’s Cafe. But if she won…

  Joe lifted his hand, and the face of George Washington shone up at her.

  Heads I win, tails you lose. She touched the quarter with a trembling finger, then looked out the window.

  No morbidly fascinated crowd stood there, no twisted metal wreckage, no wailing ambulance. The dizziness cleared from her head, and she pulled in a long, shaky breath. Her eyes were hot with tears.

  She’d won. And her customer had won, too. He just didn’t know it.

  The tan Buick pulled away from the curb. She watched it merge into the endless stream of traffic on Route 12 and disappear down the highway.

  “Your shift’s over,” Joe said, scooping the quarter back into his pocket. “See you tomorrow, bright and early.”

  Yvonne blinked away the red and blue shadows behind her eyelids, then looked at the hundred dollars crumpled in her fist. She smoothed the bill against her thigh, damp from the sweat of her palm.

  Outside, the sky was still that lazy fall blue. Rock music blasted from the kitchen, along with the smell of grilled burger. Yvonne untied her apron and hung it up behind the counter. Trying not to think too hard about what had happened, how fragile things really were, she folded the hundred and slipped it in her front pocket.

  She’d stop by the pharmacy on the way home—get the asthma medication and grab a box of those chocolate covered ice-cream bars the kids liked.

  It was only a hundred dollars. But it could change everything.

  Introduction to “Winning the Ocean Pearl”

  T. D. Edge understands risk: He ran away from home to become a street theater performer, props maker for the Welsh Opera, sign writer, and professional palm reader at Pink Floyd gigs. Finally, he adopted the riskiest profession of all—professional writer. His short fiction has appeared in many places, including Realms of Fantasy, Flash Fiction Online, and Penumbra.

  He says that the following story takes place in London’s East End, where T. D.’s grandfather’s family once lived.

  “Granddad worked in a high-class bookies in the City until he was eighty,” T. D. writes. “He had a nose for winners, but used to drive my dad nuts because he wouldn’t give any tips. No one ever beats the bookies in the long run, he said. He made up bedtime stories for me when I was young, about a trio of adventurers called Jack, Sam, and Pete. In 2013, I published Bloodjacker, a novel about a bunch of Cockney superheroes, including Jack, Sam, and Pete.”

  Jack, Sam, and Pete don’t appear in this story, but echoes of T. D.’s grandfather inform every single word of “Winning The Ocean Pearl.”

  Winning the Ocean Pearl

  T. D. Edge

  Nick has that look in his eye, the one that tries to kid me he’s just dropping in The Dog and Duck for a quick pint and to share a bit of chat, then back to work. But I’ve been his older brother too long to not know what he’s really after.

  So we play the game where he leans on the bar and says, “How’s things, Steve?” while I pull him a pint of Greene King and say, “Considering the sorry state of the nation’s economy, I can’t grumble because it’s just another reason for people to get pissed,” or some such nonsense.

  He swallows half the pint in one go, then wipes off the froth around his lips with the sleeve of his oily overalls, and grins his grin, the one what would even bring a smile to the Queen’s face, if she ever drops in for a snifter in the Dog when her mighty duty of conning the nation out of its precious love and charity gets too much to bear.

  Before he can ask the favour I know is coming, I throw a spanner in his engine by saying, “How’s Julie doing?”

  While he’s dismantling his smile on account of I’ve just shown him that I know exactly what he wants, I move down the counter to serve Old Bill who’s been sat at the same corner since England won the World Cup. No one’s had the heart to tell him that after 1966 it’s been downhill all the way for our boys, and where footy’s concerned the Germans rule again. I know Bill’s alive because his glass is empty. One day, I’ll go over and it’ll still be full of beer, all the bubbles burst.

  Post lunch in the Dog is one of my favourite times of day. The loud, boorish but conveniently loaded office guys have gone back to their PCs and open plan soap operas, and the place is empty except for a few locals who don’t want to go home; oh, and the odd late-lunching mechanic who’s looking for a sure-fire tip on the gee-gees.

  I go back to Nick to find he’s now wearing his ‘Okay, you rumbled me but listen, this is really important’ look.

  “All right,” he says, “Julie don’t want me gambling no more, but—”

  “And why don’t she want you gambling, Nick?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, I lost a bit of the money Dad left me.”

  “Two hundred grand, if anyone’s counting, which I am.”

  He finishes his pint and I pour him another. It’s Friday which means his boss at Action Autos will be on his way to the Royal Epping Forest Golf Club, so there won’t be too many nuts getting tightened this afternoon. Just mine.

  “Thing is,” he says, “she wants to go to university and we want to buy a flat, and...”

  “Your three hundred grand and her hundred ain’t enough?”

  “Come on, Steve, you know what property costs in Whitechapel and I don’t get paid much.”

  I could argue that they do actually have enough to buy a small flat, and that Julie would be happy, and that his income will do until she qualifies. I’ve seen the angles of concern on her face when they argue about it here in the Dog, when they don’t think I’m listening; and I’m not listening as such, just employing the heightened sensitivity that any good pub landlord needs if he’s to anticipate fights, affairs and hooky credit cards.

  But you know what? Nick really does love this girl and he needs her if he’s ever going to be something other than a betting pillock in sweaty overalls. So, instead of telling him what I really think, I say, “What’s your master plan, Nick?”

  Back comes the smile, the one that Mum and Dad could never resist; that was the last thing she saw on her death bed and what persuaded him to leave me his business and Nick the spare money.

  Thing is, the Dog weren’t his business.

  “One last bet,” he says.

  “Is that the same as George Best’s one last drink?”

  “I mean it,” he says. “I really love Jools and I’m going to chuck in the gambling. But I want to give her a proper chance to do well at uni, and things are really tight. There’s rumours that Action Autos are going to close down the Whitechapel branch, which means I’ll be out of work and she might not be able to make it as a lawyer.”

  “What do you want from me?” As if I don’t know.

  Dad had been a bookie. A very successful one. Which means he made a lot of money and the punters didn’t. Then again, the punters never do. Dad didn’t gamble himself because he knew the odds are always in the bookies’ favour. And maybe because he never indulged, he had an unruffled instinct for winners. That, and a mass of contacts in the horse-racing business. All of which I inherited. So I ran the shop just like he did and I might have continued to do so if it wasn’t for Nick.

  He hadn’t learnt from Dad that in the long run, which is the only one that counts, money always flows from the punters to the bookies. He’d pestered me constantly for tips, which I refused to give him, so he blamed me when he lost so much of his inheritance. After he blew the first hundred grand, I sold the business and bought the Dog, figuring I’d be safe from his all-consuming need to win more and easy.

  A year ago he’d met Julie and for a while I thought love might bring him to his senses. She has that magical combination of intelligence and heart-full support, which for my money is one of the great and largely unheralded strengths of East End women. Forget your Dames and Ladies, your plummy-voiced actresses who play the parts of London working class women but who have as much chance of understanding them as I do Stephen Hawking’s theories of time and the universe.

  She is my little brother’s one great chance to be someone and when he is, when he gets solid with family and plain hard work, well, maybe then I’ll think about settling down too, my job done.

  So, once again he implores me for a certainty, not that there’s any such thing, of course. But this time, much to his surprise, I agree.

  “Okay, okay,” I say. “It just so happens there’s a new horse running at Cheltenham this Saturday. Inside word is she’s going to be something special. She’s got Lance Harris riding her and the boys at the stables say they’ve never seen a better combination. She’s four-to-one right now.”

  “Thanks, bruv,” he says, reaching for his pint and planning no doubt to shoot straight to the bookies next door. “What’s her name?”

  “Ah, well, you need to do something for me before I give you that.”

 

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