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Loren dealt and one card flipped over on its way across the table, the eight of hearts. Gregg said that was a misdeal. Loren said it was one card. They looked at the eight of hearts for a while. Then Gregg turned it back over and put it in with the rest of his while Loren finished dealing.

They had been playing at Hallberg’s on Central most Tuesdays since the Pines closed. The Pines had been in Fridley, across from the Menards, and the owner’s son sold it in 2017 to a man from Maple Grove who put in a wood-fired pizza oven and wrote the beers on a chalkboard in colored chalk, and then he closed too, about fourteen months later, and now the place did eyelash extensions. The board came from the Pines. Gregg took it off the shelf by the dartboard on the last night it was open. The holes on the third street had gone wide from however many years of pegs, and one of the blue pegs had been a wooden match with the head snapped off since 2019. Loren always took blue. Gregg said he couldn’t concentrate with the match.

Winner bought. Gregg had won the first game and come back from the bar with a Summit for himself and a Grain Belt for Loren. He’d gotten a basket of cheese curds too, and he hadn’t touched them since.

“So Deb’s got a spreadsheet now,” Gregg said.

“Deb’s the lawyer?”

“Deb’s a paralegal. She works for a guy in Baxter who does mostly DWIs. But she’s the personal representative, because Dad left everything to Sharon, and when Sharon went in March it all went to Deb to sort out, Sharon’s things and Dad’s things, which by then are the same things. Six ways. Me and Julie and Tim, and then Sharon’s three. Which, fine. Somebody has to do it. I didn’t want to do it.” He threw two cards into Loren’s crib and squared up the four he had left. Gregg cut and Loren turned the seven of clubs.

Gregg led a queen. “She went through the house over Memorial Day with a clipboard, her and Brian’s wife, and they wrote down everything. There’s a line on there for a rake. There’s a line for the salt and pepper shakers, the two loons, and then a line for each loon in case somebody only wants the one. And then she color-coded it and mailed everybody sticky notes. In an envelope, with a stamp on it. I’m yellow. Julie’s green. Tim got orange, except Tim never opened his envelope, so Tim isn’t anything.”

“Twenty,” Loren said, on a king.

“Twenty-nine. Brian’s pink.” Loren didn’t have anything, so Gregg put his deuce on it for thirty-one. “He’s not happy about pink. So the second weekend in June we all go up to Dad’s and walk around with our sticky notes. Five grown adults and Kim on FaceTime from Mesa, Deb carrying her around the kitchen so she can point at things. I brought Owen. I thought he should see the house one more time and he sat on the dock the whole afternoon with his phone, which, he’s twelve, that was probably the right call. And it was fine for maybe forty minutes. Julie wanted Dad’s watch, the one he got for thirty years at Northwest, and nobody else put a note on it. I put mine on the tackle box and the recliner. I don’t know why I want the recliner. It still smells like him, Old Spice and those Werther’s. Heidi’s going to make me put it in the basement.”

“Heidi’s right.”

“Heidi’s right. And then Brian comes in from the garage and he’s got a pink note on the snowblower. Except the snowblower isn’t there. He put the note on the wall where it used to be.”

Loren played out his last card. “Your count.”

Gregg laid his hand down. The ace of clubs, the two of hearts, the nine of diamonds, the queen of spades. He looked at the seven of clubs for a while.

“Nineteen,” he said.

He left his peg where it was. Loren laid out the seven of hearts and the eight of diamonds and the eight of clubs and the king of diamonds. “Fifteen two, four, six, eight, and two pair is twelve.” He pegged it with the match. His crib was four and he pegged that too, and Gregg already had the cards and was shuffling.

“He took it in April,” Gregg said. “The week after Sharon’s funeral. Backed his trailer up to the garage and took the snowblower and the good extension ladder, and both gas cans, and the pontoon’s got its own trailer so that was a separate trip but the same week. His thing is somebody had to winterize it. It was April.” He dealt.

Loren threw two into Gregg’s crib, and Gregg turned the four of spades.

“And then there’s the lake,” Gregg said.

The lake place was on Horseshoe up by Merrifield. Gregg’s dad, Arlo, bought that and a sixteen-foot Alumacraft in 1981 for eleven thousand dollars, from a man who ran a bait shop on 371 back before the four-lane. It had been two rooms then, with a porch that sloped toward the water enough that you could set a marble down by the door and it would go off the end. Gregg’s dad used to do that with the kids. There was a picture of it someplace, the three of them on their stomachs on the porch boards with Julie in the middle, watching a marble go, and Gregg had been looking for that picture since June. Arlo put the addition on in 1990, after he married Sharon. The floor in the addition came out a half inch higher than the floor in the old part, and you caught your toe on it every time even if you knew. Gregg had caught his toe on it in June, walking around with his yellow sticky notes.

“Deb wants to sell,” Gregg said, after the count. “Which I get. Brian wants to keep it. He wrote up terms to buy the rest of us out on the back of a paper placemat from the Timberline in Crosslake. Two hundred a month to each of us for, I did the math, about forty years.”

“Huh.”

“Owen asked me in the car on the way home if we’re still going up for the Fourth next year. I said probably. What he wants to know is if the tube’s still in the boathouse. That’s all he cares about, the tube, and I didn’t tell him I don’t know whose color the tube is.” Gregg picked up his cards one at a time as Loren dealt them, which Loren had asked him not to do in maybe 2005 and then stopped asking. The cards stuck. “And then she found the ledger.”

“What ledger?”

“Dad kept a ledger. Green one, with the columns. Every dollar he lent any of us, back to 1985. Tim, transmission, 1999, four thousand. Me, apartment deposit, six hundred, and then a line that just says Tempo, which is when he co-signed on my Tempo. Julie’s got a couple little ones. And Deb says if it’s in the dead person’s handwriting it’s an advancement and it comes off your share. Deb says it’s the law. So now there’s a tab on the spreadsheet with Tim down for the four thousand and me for the Tempo.”

“You paid him back for the Tempo.”

“I paid most of it. And then the summer after, me and Tim did the roof at the lake. Tore it down to the boards. Three weekends. That was supposed to be the rest.” He looked at the card that had just come to him and put it with the others. “He didn’t write down the roof.”

Loren dealt the last one.

“She’s also got Brian down for twenty-two thousand,” Gregg said. “For the gutter business, in 2004. Brian’s got a lawyer now. A real one, in Nisswa. Kim has not called me one time since I was nineteen and she calls me from Arizona to ask do I think the ledger will hold up. I don’t know.”

“Throw,” Loren said.

Gregg put two cards down on his own side of the table, where his crib went when it was his crib, and looked at them before he pushed them over to Loren’s side.

“Yours,” he said.

“Yeah.”

Loren turned the six of hearts and they pegged it out without talking. Then Gregg laid down the three of hearts and the three of spades and the four of clubs and the five of diamonds, and with the six it was fifteen two, fifteen four, and a double run of four for fourteen, and he counted it fast and moved his peg and got up to get napkins and sat back down without any.

“And then there’s the albums,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“No. I don’t want to do the albums.”

The bass fishing show was on over the pull-tab booth with the sound off. It had been the same show every Tuesday for about a year and Loren knew by now the man in the boat was named Dave and that he said the same short thing to the camera whenever he netted one. Denise came by for the empties and asked if they wanted another. Gregg said whoever wins, and Denise said she knew how it worked. Gregg dealt a hand that nobody got much out of.

“How’s Marcy,” Gregg said.

“Fine.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Loren shuffled. He shuffled for a while. “Her feet are bad. They’ve been bad a long time. She’d say two years. I’d say longer than that. She used to call it her plantar fasciitis, and she bought the gel inserts at Fleet Farm and then the real ones at that place in Roseville where they make you stand on the machine. Then she quit saying plantar fasciitis. It’s numb and it burns, both. I didn’t know that was a thing you could have. She’ll take her socks off at the table and look inside them. There’s never anything in there.” He dealt. “It got bad around Labor Day. Bad bad. It’s up past her ankles now.”

“Can she walk?”

“She walks. She walks fine if you’re not watching close. She goes along the counter and then the backs of the chairs, the kitchen’s got a route now. She does the basement stairs one at a time, both feet on each step before the next one. She does the stairs when they’re at school. Ellie’s got soccer at Northdale three nights a week and Marcy sits in the car till warmups start, so she can get up into the bleachers while everybody’s looking at the field, and she sits on the bottom row, and she tells Ellie she likes the bottom row.” He threw two into his own crib. “Sam came in the kitchen last week when she had both hands on the counter and she started wiping it. She wiped that counter a long time. He wanted a Gatorade. She got him one.”

“Jeez.”

Gregg cut. Loren turned the three of hearts.

Gregg led a four. Loren played a four on it and said eight for two. Gregg put down another four and said twelve for six. Loren said, you had two fours, and Gregg said, I had two fours. Loren played a three and said fifteen for two, and he picked up Gregg’s red peg and moved it two holes. They both looked at it. Loren put it back and moved the match.

Gregg put a card down. “What did the neurologist say.”

“Idiopathic.” Loren put a card down. “That means they don’t know.

“She had the space heater under the desk in the den, the little one. In March she had her feet by it all afternoon and she got a blister on the side of her foot the size of. It was big. She didn’t feel it. So the heater’s in the garage and I do the bathwater now. I test it with my elbow. And she’s on the gabapentin, which makes her tired. She fell asleep at supper Sunday in the middle of telling me something. About the lunch committee at church, somebody brought bars with coconut in them and Doris Pflum can’t have coconut. And she just stopped. Her head went down. Then she woke up and finished about Doris and Ellie looked at me and I said Mom’s tired.” He played out his last card. “She’s up at three most nights. She sits on the edge of the tub and runs the water so I won’t hear.”

Gregg counted his hand. It was six. Loren laid his down, the ace and the three and the four and the five, and said a pair and two runs was eight as he reached for his peg.

“Fifteen,” Gregg said.

Loren looked at the cards.

“Five, four, three, and the three,” Gregg said. “That’s ten.”

“Ten,” Loren said, and pegged ten. Then he sat there. “She made me promise I wouldn’t say anything to the kids. So I haven’t said anything.”

Loren didn’t turn over his crib. After a while Gregg reached across and turned it over for him and it was two, and Gregg moved the match two holes.

They played two hands and didn’t talk. A man came in wearing a Coon Rapids Cardinals sweatshirt and bought forty dollars of pull-tabs and opened all of them standing right there at the booth and put every one in the barrel and left. Denise watched him go and then said something to the woman at the end of the bar that made the woman laugh. On the second hand Loren had a flush in his crib with a heart turned up and moved past Gregg on the third street, into the holes where the pegs leaned.

“Sharon had forty-one Hummels,” Gregg said. He played a card. “Twenty-one. Brian’s wife looked them up on eBay. Twelve dollars. Fifteen. Most of them don’t sell. So when I went up in August to get the recliner there’s a green sticky note on the Merry Wanderer and a pink one on the Goose Girl. Julie says she didn’t do it.”

“Julie’s green,” Loren said.

“Yup.”

Loren laughed through his nose, a short one, and put a ten on Gregg’s twenty-one. “Thirty-one for two.”

Gregg was at a hundred and five by the last deal and Loren was at a hundred and ten, with the match in a hole on the fourth street where the wood had split a little. It was Loren’s crib. Before the deal Gregg set his wallet on the table by the board and said it was digging into him. While Loren squared up the played cards Gregg counted the holes from his red peg to the end, touching each one with his finger, and then he counted them again.

Gregg counted first. He laid down the seven of spades, the eight of spades, the eight of diamonds and the jack of hearts. The nine of clubs was the cut.

“Fifteen two, fifteen four, six, eight, a pair is ten, and two runs is sixteen,” Gregg said. “That’s out.” He reached for his peg.

Loren looked at the cards.

“That’s twelve,” he said.

“It’s sixteen.”

“Fifteen two, fifteen four. Where’s six and eight.”

“The jack.”

“The jack with what.”

Gregg looked at the cards a long time. He looked at the jack and the seven and the eights and the nine.

“Pair’s six,” Loren said. “Two runs of three is twelve.”

“Twelve,” Gregg said.

He moved his peg twelve to a hundred and seventeen and sat back. Loren laid out the six of hearts and the six of spades, the nine of diamonds, the three of clubs. He didn’t look at Gregg.

“Fifteen two, four, six, eight, ten,” Loren said, “and two pair is fourteen.”

He moved the match up the fourth street and into the last hole. He didn’t need the crib. He turned it over anyway after a second to look. The king of diamonds, the four of hearts, a queen, the seven of diamonds. Nineteen. He pushed it back in with the deck.

Gregg put the pegs away in the little drawer at the end of the board, which stuck, and which he had to pull on twice.

Loren went up to the bar with his wallet out. Denise already had the Summit open and was getting a Grain Belt out of the cooler. She said, you, huh, and he said, me. He gave her a twenty and told her to keep it.

He brought them back. Gregg’s wallet was still on the table next to the board, and Loren set the Summit down on top of it.