Supporting cast · The Good Father
The handicapper at the OTB in the West Edge strip mall, who teaches David Marsh to read a racing form, the circles and squares and slashes, when the betting moves from a phone in the dark to a counter on a Saturday.
Hank is a fixture of the off-track-betting parlor that sits in the West Edge strip mall on Route 9, between the nail salon and the used-appliance store, the door with the fading black-and-white OTB sign and the sand bucket of cigarette ends at the threshold. He marks a Daily Racing Form in a private shorthand, the circles and squares and slashes, the accumulated grammar of a man who has spent a long time reading the same kind of page.
When David’s gambling outgrows the sports model and the phone and becomes the slower, older world of the horses, Hank is the one who shows him how to read the form. David subscribes to the Daily Racing Form, mailed not to the house, where Sarah would find it at 4:45 in the morning, but to the school’s P.O. box, and carries it to the OTB on Saturdays with Hank’s notation already on it, and then his own beginning to appear beside it. Hank is the gentle face of the deeper level of the trap: not the bright app with the green check mark, but the counter, the paper, the men who have been here a long time and will be here a long time more.