The Royal Flush Saga

Abstract

Miranda Genet was the daughter of my next-door neighbor. She was a beauty. There's no other way to say it. Seventeen, blond hair, a round, young face so quick to smile. Twinkling eyes a color that makes me think of the ice on Lake Superior where Jigger and I used to go fishing every winter. When I was younger, I would have been smitten. But, geezer that I am (sixty next January), it was impos sible for me to see her as anything but a child. She was the sort of young person who makes you smile when you see her. Bright, ambitious, and good-looking, undoubtedly the cream of the somewhat stunted crop we produce in what we call the north country, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Her father, Jack Genet, would sometimes tell me, his voice swelling with pride, how she got top marks in math, how she planned to take the Advanced Placement test for French, or how she was reading The Odyssey, not even for a school assignment, for fun. I had a firsthand demo of how smart she was when she showed me how to use the secondhand computer I'd bought so Jigger could send me e-mails from Iraq. Her father was the town doctor, but Miranda's love was music. At odd times of the day you would hear the sound of a piano drift ing from her house. The classical stuff I recognized vaguely from Interlochen Public Radio as Shubert or Chopin or one of those guys. Or there'd be jazz standards like Ain't Misbehavin' or St. Louis Blues, tunes she would just throw together, she told me one time, because she never played them the same way twice. Hi, Mr. Nelson, she'd yell from her porch when she saw me drive the oP septic truck into my driveway after a day of pumping tanks, and when I waved back she took it as an invitation to tell me about