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from grinning when I picked up the three replacements that Phil dealt me. One of them was a king. I added it to the two kings I already had in my hand. I was picturing Phil cleaning out the garage when there was a knock on the back door. The door opened and Jack appeared in the kitchen. “Hey,” he said when he saw us, “I thought the game was tonight.”
    â€œIt is,” I said. “We’re just playing a couple of hands to see who has to clean out the garage.”
    â€œTalk about high-stakes poker,” Jack said with a laugh. He went to the fridge and pulled out a beer. He was watching us the whole time.
    Phil discarded four cards—I definitely had him. I didn’t bother trying to keep a poker face now. He drew four from the deck.
    â€œRead’em and weep,” I said, throwing down my cards. There were my three kings staring up at Phil.
    Phil turned over his cards. Four aces. I couldn’t believe it.
    â€œLooks like someone has his weekend cut out for him,” Phil said, grinning as he collected the cards from the table. “You ready to go to the car show, Jack?”
    I slapped the table with one hand. Damn! I glanced at Jack. He shook his head.
    â€œIs that why you did it?” Detective Antonelli said. “Because you lost and you were mad at your stepfather? Because you had to spend the weekend cleaning up
his
garage?”
    I told him, “You don’t understand. I didn’t do it.”

Chapter Eight
    â€œYou said I could tell it my way,” I said to Detective Antonelli.
    â€œYou can, David,” he said. “But I’d like you to stick to the point, okay?”
    â€œI am,” I said.
    So I told him what happened next.
    Phil was still grinning after he gathered the cards and got up from the table. He said to Jack, “I have to go upstairs and changemy shirt and grab my wallet. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
    Jack told him to take his time. He leaned on the counter, working on the beer he’d taken from the fridge.
    â€œDo you guys do that a lot?” he said.
    â€œDo what?” I said. “Play cards?”
    â€œPlay for stuff,” Jack said.
    I nodded. Jack took another pull of beer.
    â€œWhat do you play for?” he said.
    â€œChores, mostly. Stupid stuff, like cleaning out the garbage cans or taking the empties back to the beer store. And big stuff too. Like shoveling the driveway after a major storm. Or, one time, painting the downstairs bathroom with Mom.”
    â€œAnd today?”
    â€œToday it was cleaning out the garage. It’s going to take me all weekend.”
    Jack looked thoughtful as he sipped more beer.
    â€œIs the split pretty much even?” Jack said.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œI mean, does Phil win maybe half the time and you win the other half?”
    I thought about it. “He wins way more often than I do,” I said. I thought about it some more. “When it’s really big stuff, like today, he almost always wins,” I said. I looked at Jack. I was pretty sure he was going to say something else, but just then Phil came back and the two of them took off.
    I spent the whole day cleaning out the garage. Then, because I didn’t want to spend all day Sunday working on it too, I decided to work right through and finish the whole thing on Saturday night, no matter how long it took. I was making pretty good progress. By 10:00, all I had left to do was take out the bags of garbage and sweep the garage floor. I’d cleaned it up so well that Phil could even park his car in the garage now if he wanted to. He hadn’t been able to do that for as long as my mother and I had been living there.
    I took a quick break and went into the house to get a soda from the fridge. Philand Jack and a bunch of Phil’s friends were sitting around the dining room table, playing poker. When Phil heard me come into the kitchen, he called for me to bring him a cold