"Where is she?"

"Still up in Vermont now, but she's coming back down. Her friend drives her this weekend."

"Are you sure she's all right?"

"Of course, of course. I think she's getting tired of there anyway. I think it's time for her to come home."

While my aunt was out of the house at her library job, Uncle Richard and I played gin rummy, a penny a point. The cards were special ones, with giant print, for people with bad vision. My uncle leaned back on the sofa, his eyes sly over his half glasses. On the table in front of him was a pair of silver globes, the kind you see for sale in Chinatown in satin boxes, that he picked up and clacked together when he was thinking. It drove me crazy.

"You're just like Captain Queeg."

"Hah hah. Humphrey Bogart." My uncle had four cards left. His eyes narrowed and he threw down the queen of hearts into the discard pile. I reached for it, hesitated, and then pulled my hand back. He laughed. "That's right, Niece. You have to weigh things, think them out. You think it looks like a treasure, it might be a poison."

"I need a cigarette."

Without taking his eyes off his cards, Uncle Richard reached behind him into the crack between the cushion and the back of the sofa and pulled out a battered pack of Camel nonfilters. He shook them expertly so that one slid out toward me. "Be my guest." With his slippered toe he poked under the sofa fringe and nudged out an old tuna can full of butts.

"Looks like you've got it all set up."

"That's right." He took a gold lighter out of his shirt pocket and lit my cigarette, then his, and set the can on the coffee table.

"Doesn't she smell it?"

"Nah. She too busy worry about other things." He frowned down at his hand.

"Uncle Richard, what did you think of my father?"

"What's this, you studying your roots?"

"No, I'm just curious."

"Pau-yu was a very intelligent man. And he has charisma, like movie star. Not like your old uncle."

"Do you think he loved my mother?"

"Why you ask all these questions, Niece? He cherish your ma-ma. She is very able woman. Your turn."

I picked up the king of spades, one of my favorite cards, but I couldn't use it, since all I was holding was low clubs, so I laid it down. I remembered, sinkingly, that I hadn't seen a lot of high spades in this game. "Ah," my uncle said. His hand hovered over the facedown pile, teasing me, then swooped down for the king I'd just discarded. "Gin. Forty-five points." Jack, queen, king, ace. Royal flush.

"Luck," I said.

"I tell you, Niece, that's what it is. Luck. Everything is luck."

"Someone else's good luck is your bad."

"In cards, maybe. Not in other things. You know feng shui?" He pronounced it the Cantonese way, "shwee."

"Wind water."

"Very good. I have friend in Queens, expert in this. He came down, look at our house, make recommendations. You gotta bad angle on your door, he says, no money can come in, you put a mirror here to fix. Energy trapped behind this window, you put something glass to catch it. Then what happened? We get a six-thousand-dollar refund from IRS. What do you think?"

"I think you had something to do with that refund."

"See these bells and chime hanging here? That's for chi to play. You give it toy, good luck wants to come in. Hah, I can see you don't believe. I tell you what. We go see some real luck in action. The puppies. You ever see greyhound race?"

"Once. A documentary on TV."

Uncle Richard laughed raucously. "Forget TV." He counted his cards quickly, swept them together. "One hundred thirty points. You owe me seven dollars."

"What's the matter, Niece? This old car is too much for you? Japanese-made, very good, we got it secondhand."

"No, no, everything's fine." It was a good thing my uncle was nearly blind, he wouldn't be able to pick up details like the fact that my palms were sweating all over the steering wheel. It was the first time I'd been in the driver's seat since I'd gotten sideswiped in Ma's Honda. I put on my sunglasses and adjusted the rearview mirror, casual, like I did it all the time, like I was born driving.

"So what we say to your aunt?" Uncle Richard tested me.

"We saw Cousin Cousine." Aunty Mabel had come home with one of her migraines and had gone to lie down after lunch. I'd scrawled the note we left on the kitchen table: Going tothe movies. Be back for dinner.

"Good. You tell me the story."

I glanced behind me and in front of me and when I was surer than sure it was absolutely safe pulled out of the driveway. I was usually bad at recalling the plots of movies, but this one I remembered, because it was the one Carey and I had seen on our first date and we'd argued about it afterward. He'd thought it was immoral.

"They're these two couples, the man in one couple is the cousin of the woman in the other couple. Anyway, the man cousin is a real jerk, always having affairs, and the wife is good, the actress's name is Marie-Christine Something."

"Make a left at this light. What does this Marie look like?"

"Oh, I don't know, long blond hair, not pretty pretty but very attractive. And in the other couple, it's the wife cousin who's the jerk. She's extremely beautiful, dark hair, neurotic as hell, always threatening to commit suicide. For attention. You know she's never going to do it. You following this, Uncle Richard?"

"Ummhmm."

"Her husband's totally easygoing, totally sweet. A doll. So guess what happens."

"Either the good and the good or the bad and the bad get together."

"But the bad and the bad are related by blood."

"When I was growing up cousin could marry cousin. You make a right at this intersection. Watch out for trucks. Right, Niece."

"Sorry." It seemed as if my uncle's eyesight was improving geometrically the farther away we got from the house. We'd been following the Gulf shore a ways, and now we were heading toward downtown St. Pete. We passed a low-slung stucco hospital with a row of those tall gangly palms, the kind where the trunks were skinny at the bottom and widened toward the top. "Bends in hurricane," Aunty Mabel had explained to me when I'd pointed this out.

"You ever miss New York?" I asked my uncle.

"Of course. Chinese food. You think you can get decent here? Seafood is okay, but has American taste."

"How about your friends?"

"All retiring now, and they come down here, you know, or to Miami. Miami, Miami. Big deal. Sometimes your aunt and me, we think Hawaii."

"Hawaii! That would be great."

"Yeah. Honolulu. You come visit us there, eh?"

"Of course."

Now we were in a particularly seedy section, auto repair shops and bars and very few people on the street. I found the automatic door lock button and pressed it. Per capita, there was much more crime here than in New York. I remembered what Lillith had told me about the town of Starke, near Gainesville. "You want to hold your breath when you pass that," she'd warned.

"Why?"

*"Cause that's where all the worst serial murderers are penned up. And that's where they keep Ole Sparky."

"What?"

"The electric chair."

"I thought they didn't use that anymore."

"They do in Florida."

How did she even know things like that?

"So how much money you bring, Niece?" My uncle's jovial tone brought me back into the present.

"Not much. I'm living on a shoestring, Uncle Richard. I haven't worked since January."

"Your luck will change. Don't worry." On the worry my uncle started to cough, until he was hacking away like he did mornings in the bathroom. He whipped out a handkerchief, hawked, and spat. It turned my stomach and I tried not to let him see.

"Are you okay?"

"Fine, fine. Okay, make a left here on Gandy Boulevard and go two blocks and you see a parking lot."

You couldn't miss it, it was so enormous, with DERBY LANE in ten-foot-tall letters over the main entrance. Fortunately the lot wasn't very full, so I didn't have to pull any fancy parking stunts. As we got out of the car I could hear a band playing and a loudspeaker announcing something over it. The other people going in looked fairly normal, plump blond tourists in shorts and T-shirts. My uncle was by far the most nattily dressed, in a yellow linen suit and white bucks.

As we walked toward the entrance he nudged me. "You like this tie?" he asked, holding it out for my inspection. It was unfashionably wide and had tiny brightly colored parrot heads on a black background.

"That's Daddy's." Now I knew why it had bothered me. Ma and I had picked it out for his birthday and I remembered the last time I'd seen him wear it, at the eighth grade Christmas play where my sister had been the Madonna.

"I wear it for you, Niece. Plus, it happens to be my lucky tie."

I wondered what Daddy would have thought about this, whether anything of his could ever bring luck to anyone. I wondered what he would have thought of Uncle Richard and me going to the greyhound track. I myself was afraid I'd hate the track, I didn't know why I was there, except I was bored and humoring Uncle Richard. I was afraid the dogs would make me sad.

My uncle paid for the dollar apiece tokens to get us through the turnstiles, bought a program, and then led me through the infield over to a building he called the benching area, where the dogs were penned, ready to go, or cooling down. I wasn't prepared for what it would sound like, that greyhounds were after all hounds, all that howling and yelping. They weren't show dogs and didn't have to be beautiful, although some of them were. Bred strictly for speed, their spare lines were not unlike horses' and they weren't just gray. White, some of them, one even pure black, blue-black, a whole range of tans, pintos, dappled. Uncle Richard was friends with a handler, who flipped back the ear of one of the dogs and showed me the tattoo. The hound stood lean and quiet beneath his hands. Her name was Shady Lady and she was scrawny, light gray with little black spots. Her face markings resembled a raccoon mask.

The dogs were barking, the announcer was barking, my uncle and I left the benching area and went back through the infield to the betting windows. As we walked he was scribbling notes in his program. Opposite the windows hung a row of television sets before which stood a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. I thought it must be closed circuit and then I saw that one screen was showing a horse race while the one beside it was displaying jai alai.

Uncle Richard placed several bets, talking and flinging down bills so fast that I had no idea what he was doing. "Tenth race, quiniela box," I heard him say. Then he turned to me. "Okay. You pick a race, pick a number. We make it simple, your first time. You pick which one to win, place, or show. You know what that means?"

"Yes."

I made my choice by name: Khartoum (named for a famous horse, I knew), Hotsplit, Greyghost the Fourth, and Shady Lady, a long shot in the seventh race, ridiculously long, twenty-five to one. Those were my kind of odds. I bet all my dogs to win and handed over thirty dollars in all. My uncle bought a plastic glass of beer and we went to lean against the fence. Across from us the odds flickered on the big board and a brass band played "The Girl from Ipanema." In the center of the track was a carefully styled oasis, complete with pond and playing fountain. The whole scene wavered in the blazing, unforgiving savannah heat. I put my sunglasses on again.

Uncle Richard sipped his beer and pulled out his cigarettes and we smoked and waited.

I studied the program. "SHADY LADY, number 7 Green and White. Night Shadea"Lady Godiva. Rl Erly-Crwdd 1st Tn. Weaknd in Stretch. Sought Rl 1sta"Bmpd. Led Brieflya"Weaknd." My uncle was watching the odds flip with the calm concentration of someone who could do intricate calculations in his head. A snowy egret wafted onto the oasis and stood, as if posing in the brilliant green by the fountain, then took off as the band began playing a march. The dogs were being led out.

Saddled by their colors, muzzled, they paraded before us from right to left to the starting gates, in order of number. They each had distinctive strides, held their heads differently. I saw right away that Number 6, tan and husky but with an extremely narrow pelvis, straining at the leash, was going to win. I told my uncle.

"You wanna change your bet, Niece?"

"No, I'm just telling you, I'm positive he's going to win."

At some signal the dogs were crammed one by one into the starting gates and the handlers, dressed identically in white polo shirts, khaki shorts, and running shoes, sprinted down the track to the grass by the first turn. And then, for the first time I heard the dogs, whining, barking, all their various impatient voices. "Here's Rusty," someone said, and somewhere a clattering bell, like an old fire alarm, shrilled. The sun caught a gleam off the little device on wheels that ran along the inside railing and suspended the bouncing white stuffed rabbit over the packed dirt. When the rabbit had just cleared the corner by the starting gates it tripped some wire and the gates lifted and the dogs were off, silently shooting out from their little gates like the professionals they were, eating up ground in giant gallops, those lean legs that were entirely muscle, the trim-hipped torsos, the tiny aerodynamic heads that contained just enough brain matter for survival and the knowledge to run. The human beings were the unruly ones, leaning forward with their tickets grasped in their fists, screaming numbers as if they were the names of drowning lovers. I followed the dog I'd bet on, Khartoum, Number 5, for about ten seconds, and then I lost him. "Shit!" my uncle yelled. "Watch that turn, just edge over, that's right, beautiful." As far as I could tell, his vision at that moment was about twenty-twenty. They ran around one and a half times and it was over.

Number 6, the robust tan I'd picked at the last moment but not bet on, won.

"Huh," Uncle Richard said. He'd thrown his ticket to the ground in disgust the instant the dogs came in. "Well," he said to me. "You were right. You should have changed your bet."

My dog for the next race, Hotsplit, was scratched. "You could get your money back right now," my uncle urged, poking me, but I didn't want to bother. Again we watched the dogs parade by. "This time it's Number One," I said. Number 1 was jet black and although far from the largest had a confident step I liked.

"Okay, okay, you go put money on," said Uncle Richard.

"Nope. I just want to watch."

Number 1 came in an easy first. "Bad race," my uncle muttered.

"Why was it bad?"

"Dirty. You see that first turn, that one big white dog, you see how he goes sideways like that, cheats all the others, not fair."

"But dogs don't know to cheat."

"You think they can't be trained?"

"Maybe."

"I'm surprised the judge didn't call. No, it was a cheat. But I tell you, Niece, you're something. Two for two."

Once Carey and I had gone to Saratoga Springs and I had won two hundred dollars on a long shot who looked good in the paddock. I don't know how I did it. It's like falling in love, your eye automatically picks out one in a crowd, you can't explain why.

In the next race my uncle won seventy-two dollars. To celebrate he bought another beer and a Coke and a sun hat with a visor for me. After that he began to lose steadily. I didn't even bother to check my tickets. I hadn't bet on a single winner, although I managed to call them all, four more in a row. I admit, it was some kind of a thrill.

"Jeez Louise, Niece," Uncle Richard said. "Next time we place our bets right before post time. But you gotta pick second and third too. You practice, we can do superfectas." My uncle's face was distinctly gray in the sunlight and noticing this gave me a shock.

"Uncle Richard, maybe we better go home now."

"One more race, Niece. You like this one, it's that dog you met."

So we watched, although I was distracted and didn't even bother to pick a winner this time. I tried to focus on Shady Lady instead. She didn't cut a very promising figure, slightly splay-legged, her head bowed down in a deferential manner. Beside her the competition looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger dogs. By the time the starting bell sounded the odds against her had climbed to twenty-seven to one. I was afraid to look, but when I did, she was right in the middle of the pack. At the first curve she slid into third place. I imagined I could see her ribs heaving under her colors, and I wondered what the hell was driving her on, didn't she know how outclassed she was? As the leaders bounded toward us, it looked like the second-place dog was losing ground. Shady Lady had taken his place when they whipped past. The crowd was on its feet. Someone was screaming louder than anyone else, right in my ear, and I realized, later, that it was me.

She stayed a close second right to the finish. It cut me to the quick, I don't know why. It wasn't like I had a lot riding on it. My uncle put his hand on my shoulder. I had completely forgotten that he was there.