I
Under the blue Bicycle cards, my grandmother’s calico quilt was frayed, but my mind stayed with the game. Clock Patience, my favorite game from 150 Ways to Play Solitaire by Alphonse Moyse. It would be hours before our mother was home from law school. Our parents had recently divorced, so my sister Jen and I had moved with my mother into our grandparents’ summer apartment. My sister was downstairs watching The Brady Bunch. By age eight, she was already a master of multi-tasking, stomach-down on the floor, her head bobbing between screen and book. I liked the quiet of the cards.

II
There is no skill involved in most solitaire games other than the ability to pay attention. With Clock, each time a new hand is dealt, there is a one in thirteen chance of winning. Each re-deal, my odds are the same. The illusion is that the more hands in a row that one loses, the more likely the next hand will be won. But that is a false perception.

III
Looking back, I wonder what possessed me to waste so much time on Clock. Or was it a waste? Time itself is a human-imposed numbers game, dividing years into days into hours into minutes into seconds. Maybe it was a way to beat time which had been divided into a before and after with our move from a public school in Alexandria, Virginia, to a private school at the Jersey shore. Long division had been covered before fourth grade in my new school, and I struggled in math for the first time. I had nothing to hide from the clock of cards on my bed, the way I hid from my new friends that I had divorced parents. The cards were totally in my control. Or at least it seemed that way.

IV
Games have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. My sister and I have always been serious rule-followers. Jen especially could not abide any rule-breaking in herself or others. The first thing Jen did when playing a new game was to read and memorize the rule-book. She did not like to alter the rules in any way. Cards were the game of choice in my family, though there was also watching University of Oklahoma football games, but that was more like a religion.

V
My granddaddy started playing gin rummy with us as soon as we were able to hold ten cards. The stakes varied from a nickel to a quarter, real money back then. He never went easy on us. He took our money without trying to teach us where we went wrong. Granddaddy Hugh liked to bet illegally on Oklahoma sports teams. Mother opposes gambling of any sort. Jen and I savored winning itself. We didn’t need money to sweeten the pot.

VI
My sister and I became excellent card players. We were so competitive with each other that many a game of spit, war, crazy eights, and concentration ended in tears. Gin taught us the basics of remembering cards played and how best to strategize with suits and numbers. We often beat the grownups.

VII
Considering how often cards were my favorite distraction, I never thought about how cards connected to the calendar: fifty-two cards for fifty-two weeks in a year; four suits for the four seasons; two colors for night and day; thirteen cards in a suit for thirteen lunar cycles in a year; twelve court cards, Kings, Queens, and Jacks, for twelve months. Why in fifty years of card-playing did I not think about that before?  These reminders of the natural world reveal how far our rage for order reaches. Cards give entry to the lowest-tech cave of human-made rules. The metaphorical power over worlds and timelines is the same, however, whether using computer screens or cards made of paper: the illusion of control. Deciding when to turn a card over in Solitaire is power. I have been manipulating the calendar.

VIII
My friend Allen introduced me to a new card game. Called Thirteen, it is reputedly a popular card game in prison, but I never asked Allen how he knew that. I wonder how Allen’s prior life as a bouncer at a strip club called The Naked Eye prepared him to become a Thirteen master. Also called Three Thirteen, it is a gin-based game in which eleven rounds are dealt out, starting with three cards each, adding one card each hand, four, then five, on up, ending with a thirteen-card hand. After losing again and again to Allen, I would press him to play again. No matter how many times in a row he beat me, Allen was always up for another game.

IX 
When Allen heard my sister was struggling after a break-up with her boyfriend of fifteen years, he told me Jen could come visit him any time in San Diego. He would sleep on the couch and give her his bed for as long as she needed. He offered this, never having met Jen, whose rule-following had led her to law and a partnership in a large Washington, DC firm. Though I had trouble seeing Jen in Allen’s Imperial Beach apartment, the offer moved me.

X 
After years with a troubled man, and taking on too many family financial burdens, my sister had developed a serious anxiety disorder. The strong, funny sister I grew up with was buried in anxieties that crushed her as if an earthquake had collapsed a building upon her.  For a couple of months, I moved in with her. She was no longer able to watch sports, reality TV, read true-crime novels, all the things that provided relief from her high-stress job. I tried everything to snap her out of it. We meditated, took walks, went to museums. Some days there seemed no escape from the anxiety that came in waves.  Crying episodes possessed her with such force that often, she was knocked to the ground.

XI 
One day as she was rolling on the floor sobbing, I had an idea. Why not go back to our childhood of cards; perhaps it was a distraction worth trying. I would teach her a new game. If Thirteen worked in prison, maybe it could give Jen relief from her prison. I taught Jen how to play Thirteen. For the duration of the game, she stopped crying. From then on, it was my magic pill. Whenever I couldn’t bear one more second of seeing her in pain, I would pull out the cards and say, “Thirteen?” like some crazed game show hostess. For some reason, this card game was just the right balance of focus and rules for her brain to cling to without making her feel over-taxed or anxious.

XII
The patience I had developed as a child playing Clock solitaire came in handy. The endurance to watch my sister worsen day after day and show her that I believed she would get better was like waiting for a winning hand. I clung to the illusion that the more days in a row she was down, the greater the chance she would triumph tomorrow. For the first time in all our years of playing cards together, I was tempted to let her win.  I had more practice at Thirteen, so I was better. It seemed cruel to keep winning.  But she would know if I let her win. I believed that as she played more, she would get better, and she did.

XIII
The optimism of Thirteen is that your luck can drastically change from hand to hand. You have eleven times to start over. After a string of bad luck, starting over becomes more and more important. If players are evenly matched, and luck goes back and forth, either player is able to win the whole game if she has a strong showing the last hand. Thirteen helped us get through a hard time. My sister and I live hundreds of miles apart, but we speak on the phone every evening. I am still watching the Clock and know even if Jen is no longer downstairs watching TV, that more games of Thirteen are in the cards for us, as one day we will want to teach my new grandson how to play.

Sarah Key’s work includes cookbooks, essays on the Huffington Post, and several dozen poems in print and online, including anthologies such as Nasty Women Poets and American Writers Review 2020. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Calyx, Poet Lore, Minerva Rising, Poetry Center San Jose, Tulane Review, and Tuesday; An Art Project. After studying poetry at Frost Place, Cave Canem, and the Unterberg Poetry Center, Sarah now learns from her students at a community college in the South Bronx where they call her Poet in Practice. Find her online at sarahkeynyc.com.