Shortly before she passed away, Edna had convinced Harold that they should move to Saddlewood. They were ready for a simpler life, she’d told him. Harold had recently retired from General Electric where he’d painted diesel locomotives for fifty-one years. Edna was tired of her part time job at the daycare center. They had worked hard, she explained, had raised two children, watched as those children grew and formed families of their own, and now it was time for something else. They settled on Saddlewood, with its extensive network of curbed sidewalks, its shuffleboard courts, its rec room filled with overstuffed couches and big-screen TVs. And then, two months after their arrival, Harold awoke to find Edna lying still and quiet beside him. It was the quiet he could not get over, a quiet so overwhelming that he’d known even before he felt the coolness of her skin. What followed was to be expected. There was, of course, the grief. Nearly five months after her death, Harold sometimes still reached for Edna in the early hours of morning, followed by fits of sobbing when he found only the soft down of her pillow. His children had stayed with him for the funeral and through the days that ensued, a blur of phone calls and lawyers, sandwich trays and Valium. But they had long since returned to their respective lives: Harold Jr. to his investment banking in Orlando, Carol to her tumultuous marriage to a TV director in the green rolling hills of Burbank. Since that time Harold’s grief had changed, thawed into something more manageable. Mostly what remained was a feeling Harold could not quite pinpoint, a clinging unease he occasionally encountered, like stepping into cobwebs.
Harold strongly suspected that part of the problem had to do with change. He sensed it everywhere: at the single place setting at the breakfast nook, in the empty drawers of his dresser, and at Saddlewood itself, a place Harold had been reluctant to move to. Harold and Edna had been married for forty-eight years and in that time had only moved once. It was a reliable sort of life, one that Harold embraced. At G.E. he had been a model employee: never late, never sick, never complaining or arguing with the line boss. Not counting the eighteen months he’d spent aboard the USS Juneau during Korea, skirting the emerald waters of the Tsushima Strait, Harold had never missed a day. The other workers joked that if he failed to show, you could be certain he was dead. Harold hadn’t been bothered by it. His father had told him to always show up, to do the best with what you were given and the rest would take care of itself. Now, for the first time in his life, Harold felt miserable while doing exactly that.
On Sunday Harold cancelled his tee time with his friend Billy Jenks, a retired ophthamologist, and went instead to the community center’s rec room. Artificial light shone down from ceiling units, accentuating the bluish hair of the women assembled at the card table in the corner, playing canasta. Harold walked over to the bulletin board that hung from the cold egg-shell colored wall. The cork was covered with xeroxed flyers announcing garage sales and pottery club meetings. There were take-out menus and business cards as well as pictures of the residents’ grandchildren at dance rehearsals and in little league uniforms. A quarter of the board was dedicated to upcoming events and Harold scanned it for any new additions. Near the bottom was a black and white flyer announcing an outing to the newly built Presque Isle Downs and Casino. Harold had heard about the casino, the huge undertaking its construction had been, the polarizing effect it had had on the community. Harold was not a gambler, and had no opinion on the matter. As far as he could recall, he had never set foot inside a casino. Tiny strips had been cut in the bottom of the flyer with the departure time and date printed on each. Harold tore one off and slipped it into his shirt pocket.
The next Tuesday, Harold boarded the Greyhound outside the community center. He waited patiently as the woman in front of him climbed the steps slowly, the varicose veins in the backs of her thighs running like blue and purple circuitry beneath pale skin. He chose an empty row near the rear of the bus and stared out the window at the scenery streaming by. Fallow fields stretching toward the horizon, grain silos and farmhouses in disrepair, sparse sections of woodland on either side of Interstate 90, the naked branches like deep cracks against the granite sky. It was the middle of April. Another long, particularly bad Lake Erie winter had passed. Edna had been gone since Thanksgiving. Harold had briefly considered a move that would place him near one of his children, but hated the idea of himself as a burden. Instead, he did his best to embrace a new life at Saddlewood, preparing Skyline chili dip for potluck dinners, attending scavenger hunts and tango lessons. The facilities were well-maintained and offered constant diversions for which, Harold knew, he ought to be grateful.
It was early afternoon when they arrived at the casino. Harold disembarked with the others and walked into the sprawling marble atrium. The thing that struck him first was the noise. The clanging of bells reverberating from the tightly-spaced rows of slots, the strain of horns from a jazz quartet playing in the bar, the incomprehensible chatter of a hundred conversations going at once. Everywhere, it seemed, there was the steady clinking of coins against metal as machines paid out. To the right of Harold, a woman jumped off a stool and began cheering wildly over the shrieking siren of a jackpot. It was like standing in the midway of a carnival. Puffs of smoke rose into the air from between the rows of slots and hung in a low gray cloud, reminding Harold of the living quarters below deck on the Juneau, where he and the other petty officers would gather to smoke and speculate. Harold moved slowly down the wide carpeted walkway. All around him the casino hummed with excitement: a silver Mercedes rotated on a raised platform, a blackjack table erupted in cheers. Harold could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, his pulse quicken. Everywhere he looked there was something to see. When a cocktail waitress in a low-cut shimmering dress approached and asked if he would like a drink, Harold turned to her, his eyes wide, his hands trembling at his sides.
“Is it always like this?” he asked. The waitress scanned the casino floor, the look on her face as disinterested as if she was channel-surfing.
“No,” she said. “Today we’re a little slow.”
Harold returned to the casino every day for the next three weeks. When Saddlewood didn’t have a Greyhound chartered, Harold took the city bus, an hour and fifteen minutes each way. He packed his lunch and ate at the casino, chewing his ham sandwich while walking through the rows of slots, learning the difference between progressives and bonus multipliers, memorizing the various sounds each machine made when a jackpot hit. He stood beside the roulette table watching the ball spin in a blur around the polished mahogany of the wheel, silently rooting for the old women in their embroidered sweatshirts, who clutched their pocketbooks to their sides and bet less than everyone else. He learned craps simply by observing, watching while the shooter selected the dice and placed chips on the pass line, other players slowly filling in around the perimeter of the table like boats docking. He met the casino employees, from the pit bosses to the janitors. He memorized their names and faces, their hometowns.