Lucy was always Lucky’s favorite. It bothered Devon a little when he was a kid, but even then the family all knew she needed Lucky more than the rest of them did.
“I’m drawing a special deck of cards,” she told Devon once. She was eleven, skinny, and with that ridiculously long attention span, that ferocious concentration that meant she was already beating him at checkers and chess and poker and go fish and basically anything that didn’t involve hitting with pillows. “See, Seth is the Jack with a scale of justice because he’s going to be a lawyer.”
“Lawyer?”
“He likes to argue.”
He started to smile and she frowned at him fiercely, her Pay Attention glare. “You’re the Jack with a microscope.” His microscope, carefully rendered in ink and colored pencil, was a little out of scale, but otherwise looked really good.
“Do you think we could get these made up into a real deck of cards?” she asked.
“I don’t know, Luce,” he said. If anyone could, it would be Lucy. He looked at some of the others. Lucky had a poker chip. There was a card for their dog, Harry, carrying a bone in the shape of a club.
“Who’s this?” he asked.
“That’s mom.” Lucy looked up at him. “Uncle Lucky says she’s like the perfect mom for you guys.”
The unspoken part being that their mother never got Lucy at all. Never saw what the boys did, that Lucy was the smartest of all of them. Too smart for school, or any system she didn’t devise on her own.
He looked at the card. “I don’t get it,” he said. The card didn’t have any emblems.
“She’s like the Jack of Spades, only female, of course,” Lucy said.