“You’re not old,” she says. “You’re middle-aged.”
He takes classes called Introduction to Slots, Money Validation, Applications of Electricity, Slot Mechanics, Slot Electronics, Slot Microprocessors, and Troubleshooting. After six months, he gets a certificate. Elle frames it for him. She is trying to be happy.
One night while she’s in the bedroom getting dressed for work, Roland walks up behind her and wraps his arms around her waist. They look at each other in the mirror. “You look good,” he tells her. Her skin is smooth and clear. Her hair is a single color now — a blond so pale it looks ivory, like a wedding gown — and she’s let it grow longer and she uses a lotion that makes it curly.
“I do what I can,” she says.
“You know,” he says, “things are going to be different this time.”
She pets his arm. She wants to believe him. But besides having him back, and living in the duplex, not much has changed. She still spends her nights cocktailing, her mornings at her machine, her afternoons sleeping. Her aunt keeps Dusty after school and Roland picks him up in the evening. When they come home, Elle gets out of bed and cooks supper and they eat at the coffee table so that Roland can watch Wonder Years reruns on TV, the show that opens with Joe Cocker singing “With a Little Help from my Friends.”
“Those were my years,” Roland tells Dusty.
She slides her hands up and down the sides of her machine, where the brass plating has worn off. She closes her eyes and pictures her mystery man with his slicked-back hair. “Talk to me,” she says. “Talk to me.”
The wind in Nevada is full of grit. Gold dust, Roland calls it.
He lands a day job at a casino in Sparks. Every night he comes home with the casino smell — smoke, grease, stale cologne. Elle has it too, though she never knew until she smelled it on Roland. Sometimes when they lie in bed together she can’t tell his skin from hers.
The duplex is small and looks dirty even when it’s clean. The sink clogs, the toilet backs up. Things break. One morning while Roland is showering, the nozzle flies off and hits him on the head.
They talk about saving for a house. They’re both making decent money. Roland is over his cocaine habit — he quit cold turkey soon after Elle and Dusty left him — and he’s been turning over his paycheck so that he can’t ruin their finances again. He has turned everything over to Elle so that whatever happens this time can’t be his fault.
Every day on her way home, Elle stops in the post office and collects the mail — bills, advertisements, bank statements. She knows how close to broke they are, but she doesn’t tell Roland. She doesn’t want him to know how much she’s investing in her machine.
She needs to win. And not just for the money. For her, winning has never been about money.
Dusty’s new teacher invites Elle and Roland to a parent-teacher conference. Roland takes the morning off, and he and Elle drive to the school together.
Dusty’s teacher, Miss Sink, is younger than most of the waitresses where Elle works, with cleavage showing between the lapels of her dress. Roland looks her up and down. Elle knows what he’s thinking. I used to be a musician. There was a time when you would’ve stood in line to fuck me.
“Dusty’s speech has improved dramatically,” Miss Sink says, her own enunciation so precise she sounds like she’s chewing the words. “He’s doing well in all his subjects. But we’re having a little problem with his conduct. He passes notes in class.” She hands Elle a page from Dusty’s memo pad. On it is a drawing of a skunk, very lifelike, except the skunk has Miss Sink’s face — her wide eyes, her clotted eyelashes, her snub nose, her pursed mouth. Under the picture is a caption: “Miss Stink.”
Roland studies the picture. “This is good. Where’d he learn to draw like this?”
Miss Sink tugs at her dress as if it’s suddenly too tight. “If this were Dusty’s only drawing,” she says, sniffing, “I wouldn’t have called you in. But he constantly disrupts the class with his notes. I had to confiscate his pad.”
“He needs his pad,” Elle says, even though all she has to do is buy him another one. Fifty-nine cents. “It’s like a body part.”
“Then he needs to learn to use it responsibly.”
“We’ll talk to him,” Roland says. He puts his hand on Elle’s back.
“That’s all I’m asking,” Miss Sink says.
She escorts them to the classroom door and thanks them for coming. Elle pulls the door shut behind them, harder than she means to, hard enough to rattle the glass pane. She can’t believe she just gave up a morning at her machine for this.
One evening when she is alone with Dusty, she asks him, “Would you like a little brother?”
He is sitting on the floor, drawing. He doesn’t look up. “Not little,” he says. “Big.”
Of course, Elle thinks. A big brother could take care of him, teach him things. Rescue him from his parents. From a mother who tries too hard to love him, and a father who tries too hard to love his mother.
Elle has promised to take Roland and Dusty fishing. She buys them rods and reels. She packs a cooler with cheese sandwiches and navel oranges and water bottles. Dusty fills his CD notebook, Elle fills the car with gas, and the three of them head north on Highway 445, toward Pyramid Lake. The road is empty, the desert huge and pale.
“This is where my parents died,” Elle says, more to herself than anyone else. “Somewhere out here.” There is no white cross to mark the place where her parents’ car burned.
“What’s it like to die?” Dusty asks from the back seat.
Roland says over his shoulder, “You’re too young to worry about dying, buddy. Let’s listen to some tunes. What’d you bring?”
“When people die,” Dusty says, “they leave and don’t come back.”
“Did you bring any Ry Cooder?”
“Honey,” Elle says, “nobody knows what it’s like to die.” She watches Dusty in the rearview mirror. He is flipping through his CDs, his face blank, innocent.
When her parents died, her uncle told her their time had come. She wonders if that’s true, if people carry their deaths inside them like flowers that know when to bloom.
“Death,” Roland says in the loud, sure voice he uses when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, “is like the desert.” He points out the window. “Like this. A whole lot of nothing, forever.”
Pyramid Lake belongs to the Paiute Indians.
According to legend, a man from the Paiute tribe traveled to the California coast where he fell in love with a “woman of the sea”—a mermaid, whom he was forbidden to marry. But he married her anyway, in secret, and took her home with him. They had clear weather for the first part of the journey, but when they crossed the mountains at Tahoe, it began to rain. Rain came down in torrents. It followed the couple through the Truckee meadows, all the way to what is now Pyramid Lake.
The mermaid could not bear children, so — the legend goes — she stole babies from the Paiute women and took them to live with her in the lake. You can hear them even now, the Indians say: high, gurgly sounds that can’t be explained by the wind or any force of nature except the spirits of the stolen babies, crying for their mothers.
Elle’s mother claimed she’d once heard the water babies. She was visiting a friend who lived by the lake, and one afternoon she and her friend heard small voices crying and water splashing. They followed the sounds to the lake and looked all around, but there was no one. In every direction, the lake — bright blue, a mirror of the sky — was empty. As soon as they realized what they must be hearing, they closed their eyes. “Bad things happen if you see them,” Elle’s mother said.