She works the graveyard shift. Her aunt drives Dusty to and from school every day and takes care of him afternoons while Elle sleeps. Dusty goes to public school where he meets with a speech therapist but is otherwise in a regular class since he can read and write as well as anybody in second grade — better, in fact, because of his speech problem. When he writes, people understand him. He carries a memo pad in his pocket at all times.
Every evening at six, Elle gets out of bed and cooks supper — pancakes or eggs if she’s in a breakfast mood, otherwise macaroni and cheese, Boca burgers, tofu dogs. She’s making vegetarians of them all. Her aunt and uncle like their steaks and chops, but they are gracious and accept Elle’s cooking as her contribution to the household.
Most nights after supper, Roland calls from California. He talks to Dusty first, then to Elle. “What’s in Reno that isn’t here?” he asks her. “What do you want?”
“I want to be somebody,” she says, quietly, so no one in the house can hear her.
“You are,” he says.
“Somebody important,” she says.
“You are,” he says. “You’re my wife.”
“More important than that.”
“You’re the mother of my son.”
“More important than that.”
In the casino where she works there’s no night or day, only flashing lights and gaudy chandeliers and mirrored ceilings and patterned carpets that reek of cigarette smoke and fried food. Elle wears a strapless uniform and black stockings and serves drinks to people in vacation clothes. The losers are sad, but the winners are worse: men with chips piled in front of them, loud men with gold chains and ruddy faces, their eyes narrow and black as seeds. She bends over when she serves them and they give her big tips.
When her shift is over she puts on sunglasses and walks outside. The morning light is painful. The younger waitresses like to put off daylight for another hour or two by going to the casino across the street. It’s their way of being friendly without having to get to know each other.
One morning they invite Elle to go with them. They don’t know her. They don’t know she’s just left her husband. They don’t even know she has a husband, or a son.
“Okay,” she says, trying not to sound excited.
She hasn’t gambled since she was a child learning poker from her uncle. He taught her Texas Hold ’Em, Omaha Hi-Lo, Four-and-Four, Lamebrains, Criss-Cross, Night Baseball, and Follow the Queen — Elle’s favorite, a seven-card stud game in which the card that follows a turned-up queen is wild, and whenever another queen is turned up, the wild card changes. Elle and her uncle and cousins would sit around the kitchen table wearing visored caps, eating sliced bologna on saltines with mustard. Her uncle had names for the cards: Fever, Sexy, Savannah, Eddie, Arnold, Typewriter, Jake, Pretty Lady, Cowboy. He was not a sentimental teacher; he never purposely let anyone win, and Elle rarely did. Even playing penny-ante she sometimes lost all her allowance money. “I told you not to bluff,” her uncle would say. “In a low-stakes game it doesn’t pay to bluff because you can’t force anybody out. In a wild card game, don’t bet without a wild card.”
The casino across the street is bigger than the one where she works, with more machines and more tables. She’s intimidated by table poker, and she doesn’t want to throw her money away on the slots like the other waitresses. Just inside the door there’s a bank of video poker machines. She sits down at the first open one, an old machine with ghosts of cards burned into the screen. She slides in a twenty, the only cash she has. The game is Jacks or Better.
After ten minutes she’s lost most of her money. She knows her uncle would tell her to stop while she still has enough for a pack of cigarettes. What keeps her playing isn’t a feeling of luck, but something more dangerous: the feeling of having nothing to lose.
She presses a button and the machine deals her two spades, the nine and ten, and three diamonds, the jack, queen, and king — a straight. She can feel her life changing. A man walks up beside her. He is thin and sallow, with combed-back hair. His eyes are hard; he isn’t smiling. “Go for it,” he says, his voice low and serious. Elle thinks he must know something. She decides to draw to her diamonds. And sure enough, the miracle that will ruin her: the ten and ace appear. A buzzer goes off. People in the casino look up. The other waitresses, her new friends, leave their machines and come over. “What nerve,” they say, “to go for the royal!” She beams and clutches her pay ticket. Her heart is beating all the way into her fingertips.
She looks around for her mystery man, but he is lost in the crowd, so completely gone she wonders if he was ever there at all.
Dusty never talks at the supper table. He doodles in his memo pad and waits for his father to call.
One night Elle has had enough. “I asked you not to do that,” she says, and snatches the pad away. The pages are covered with drawings of guitars, cutaways like Roland’s. The drawings are tiny and perfect and make Elle even angrier.
She changes her strategy, increases her bets. She stays out later every morning. Some days she doesn’t get home until noon, and by then she is almost too tired to sleep. She closes the thick rubber shades that make her room look like night. She turns on a floor fan to filter out noise. The fan sounds like an ocean. It makes her think of California, and of Roland. During her first year with him, they went through her inheritance. She wonders if it’s possible to win back everything she has lost.
A week after Dusty’s eighth birthday, a package arrives in the maiclass="underline" Roland’s old jean jacket. Dusty loves it. Elle has never seen him love anything so much. He insists on wearing it every day, even in the heat. It swallows him, makes him look small and lost.
A royal should come up on average about once every forty thousand hands, so sooner or later she’s bound to hit another one. The key is speed. The faster she plays, the sooner she’ll win. So far she has used up her initial winnings and is down a thousand, but she isn’t discouraged. She doesn’t think of losing as losing, she thinks of it as investing, preparing to win again.
She always plays the same machine. It’s comfortable, the seat far enough from the screen that she can see all the cards without moving her head. She uses both hands on the deal and hold buttons. She builds up credits so that she isn’t constantly pumping in money.
If she doesn’t stop to eat or smoke, she can play six hundred games an hour.
Roland says he wants to be a family again. He’s moving to Reno. Elle has to remind herself that this is what she’s been waiting for.
Her uncle rents them an apartment. He wants to help them the way Roland’s parents helped them in California, when they were first taking Dusty to doctors.
The apartment is half of a duplex, a small, flat building on a street of small flat buildings with chain-link fences and skinny, creaking cottonwood trees and dogs that bare their teeth when they bark. Each side of the duplex has its own garage. Elle and Roland have never had a garage. It’s small and dark like their apartment, and airless, barely wide enough for a single car, but it has an automatic door and automatic lights.
Their one bit of affluence.
Elle’s uncle sets Roland up in a training course for slot technicians. He says it’s important for a man to feel like he can support his family, and slot techs make good money. Roland says to Elle, “I’m too old to be going back to school.” He’s forty-two. In the time they’ve been apart, not quite a year, he’s begun to go bald like his father. Elle doesn’t mind. It’s a relief to know that from now on, she will look better than him. He can be the one who worries.