"You landed on Kentucky Avenue; you owe me one thousand-fifty dollars," I say to my father as I stick my hand out to retrieve my winnings. Our whole family is sitting in the dining room eating vanilla ice cream cones in fifty-degree weather. The lazy hum of the heater turning on and the dim sound of Monster Garage coming from the living room fills as background noise.

My dad is sitting at the front of the table; the place where the man of the house should sit. He sits as tall as a redwood, with much pride in his accomplishments. His shoulders are squared up and his ice cream cone is cradled in his left hand. He looks at his piece and notices that he has landed on my property with red hotels. He then looks at the white dice checking to make sure he was not one short. Mentally, I could see that he was counting from St. James Place.

"Okay," reluctantly rumbles the heavily accented voice of my father, as he counts his bills. With his thick accent, he put as much value on his word as you would with each syllable in the Declaration of Independence; he did most things that way. You hear him whispering the numbers to himself in English and sometimes in Spanish; one, two, tres. His large fingers run over the play money with so much care you might have thought that they had a seven-cent tax.

"Want me to count it for you?" I ask avariciously, wanting my money as fast as possible. He looks at me as though I had just slapped him in the face. Why would I want a sixteen-year-old girl counting my money, when I could do it myself? His face seems to ask me with so much defense, any normal person would have assumed that he was angry with me. I can tell when he is livid; his face turns to the color of tomatoes. His facial features are all that matter when deciding when Papí was mad or not. With such a thick accent everything he says in English sounds as though he is angry.

Mom is getting up from the table as a sign that she's quitting. My sister takes her place on the board and sits there with all properties mortgaged and fifty dollars to her silver hat piece. She is possessed with the same greed, and is happy that Papí is losing money for he bankrupted her just less than ten minutes ago. "Just give it to her, don't be greedy," she says rooting me on.

" Espertae, I'm counting," he says to her in what sounds like an annoyed voice. He kept on counting his money. He made it seem as though he was tired, pretending that each dollar was a dollar he worked for. A dollar he slaved for each day in Fresno. If my sister and I pretended with him, we might even see the sweat on his back, the loud noise of the sanders in the background, and the smell of sawdust in our nostrils. We might have seen him slave over each red hotel on Tennessee Avenue. He makes even the simplest of games so exhausting.

He seems to take forever. "One thousand, ah man! Necesito fifty dollars," he says more to himself than to my sister or me. My sister laughs at him, but his face is amused. Papí hates it when people laugh at him, but we were playing a game, laughing was part of the deal.

"Oh, this is mine too," he said in Spanish, plucking my sister's fifty dollar bills from the table. He hands it to me, leaving my sister dirt poor. He smiles at me slyly, as though he had won a fight that I did not know existed.

It takes her a second to realize what he had just done. "Hey! That's mine! My sister acidly says to my father. It takes my father and I ten more seconds to laugh at that. My father's face is turning bright cherry red, an expression that's usually rare. Papí was laughing!

"I guess you love your daughter," I mordantly say to him and laugh again. There we are sitting down at the kitchen table laughing at my father stealing money from my poor sister. It was hard to efface the laughter once it began. My father was in such exaltation that tears started to fall out of his eyes.

My sister was holding her stomach trying not to laugh too hard, while I was laughing so hard, you might have mistaken me for a donkey. Mom comes into the kitchen demanding what we are laughing at and when we try to explain the words become jumbled and meaningless.

Papi is trying to regain composure, wiping away at laughing, tears, yet it is not working. Every time he thinks about it, he starts laughing even more. Mom is smiling now, seemingly pleased that we are having a good time; rarely does the whole family have a good time with each other.

My father gives me only a thousand dollars and I magnanimously accept it. Just hearing my father laugh would be something I would pay fifty monopoly dollars for.

"Okay, who's next?" my dad asks me, back to his serious tone.