Rosa did not marry, or even date, Charlie but ended up marrying one of the cops who had rescued Julie. She had five children a year apart, and ended up fat, just like her mother and her aunts. She started a business baking chocolate cream pies and raisin oatmeal cookies and distributing them to the hotel buffets.
Charlie became a headwaiter at one of the dinner restaurants and married a croupier from one of the casinos. He never did become the next Sinatra or even make it as a singer in one of the smaller hotel lounges.
Laura became a psychiatric social worker. She and Julie and their parents had needed a number of years of therapy after they returned from Las Vegas and Laura had felt helped by it. But she never mentioned to anyone that she always slept with a small brown teddy bear with a blue ribbon around its neck.
Ironically Julie was the one who became a writer. She wrote mysteries. She was never compared to Agatha Christie, though. Her books were very dark and brooding, and bad things always happened to small children. She never returned to Las Vegas, after the trial, and won’t go anywhere near a slot machine.
Brenda insisted that Jeff put the one thousand dollars that he won toward the kids’ college accounts. After the girls finished college, Brenda and Jeff divorced.
“It was bound to happen,” Laura said. “I’m surprised they waited this long.”
“I feel kind of guilty, that it was all my fault,” Julie said. “I never should have sneaked off and gone to those slot machines by myself.”
“It wasn’t you. It started before you ever bet anything. It was the thousand dollars that Daddy won,” Laura said. “They had an agreement to play only nickels and dimes and he sneaked back to the hotel and broke it. And then he hid the money and didn’t even tell Mommy that he had it. And I don’t believe, if you hadn’t been kidnapped, that he would have told her either. Even when Charlie asked if he had won any money in the casino, he lied. Mommy could never really trust him again. He should have stuck to nickels and dimes.”
“Yeah, nickels and dimes,” Julie said. “Only nickels and dimes.”
EVEN GAMBLERS HAVE TO EAT by Ruth Cavin
It was a local scandal-the kind exciting enough that the neighborhood women kept making some excuse to run to the grocery store to discuss a new twist of the plot with their friends. First, Aaron Plotkin was leaving Akron and his good job at Topnotch Tire for some deserted place in the West. And why? As he put it, to “change his life for the better.”
“What could be so better?” inquired the women of one another. The rest of his life, he could stay at Topnotch Tire-he’s their genius, no? Could they make tires without him? Who else can add and subtract like Aaron Plotkin? [The speaker’s knowledge of accounting skills was not extensive.] “And in this Depression yet, where college graduates are selling apples on the sidewalk! And what about Molly? She’s supposed to go out to the middle of the desert with him? Thank God they aren’t already married! It’s meshuggah! Crazy!”
The desert wasn’t in Molly’s future. She flatly refused to go. “Leave Mr. MacReady in the lurch?” Molly felt the weight ofher position; she was Vice President MacReady’s private secretary. (The women speculated, possibly unfairly, just what that word “private” signified, in this case.) “Give up my own job?” Molly told Aaron scathingly. “Uh-uh! I stay here!”
But Aaron went. Leaving Molly, both parents and six siblings back in Akron, he followed his dream. The gossip chorus would really have sizzled if the women had got wind of that tidbit. Because Aaron’s almost lifelong dream was to cook for a living.
The bug had bit him as he watched his mother, who cooked for her brood with love and grumbles. But men didn’t cook-not unless they were paid for it, not unless it was their job, not unless they could be called “chefs.” Aaron wanted to be a professional chef. Reading in the newspaper about job opportunities in the West, he saw his chance. He’d live simply and work until he had enough saved to open a restaurant. A small one. No fancy stuff. Good home cooking. To start, at least. Later on-who knows?
And that’s how it worked out. He got a job. He rented a tiny room in a town called “Las Vegas.” A Mexican on his shift said the words meant “The Meadows.” Some “meadows” in the middle of the desert!
Aaron missed his family terribly, even Max, his wild younger brother. (Molly hardly at all). But his dream restaurant was taking shape in his mind. Las Vegas would grow from its present size-one church, a few rackety bars and the only store, selling whatever was available, to a place sought by tourists. Meanwhile, he worked, slept and saved.
He had made casual friends with a few of his coworkers, all men. He knew no women-the women in Las Vegas were either married or questionable. The few entertainers arriving with the new hotels, could, of course, have been from another planet as far as Aaron was concerned. And the “ladies of the night”-he found it embarrassing just to walk by the building near his rooming house where they held forth. He did invite Molly to come “just for a visit,” but her answer-“Not on your life!”-didn’t upset him the way he would have expected. Aaron was much more interested in his kitchen than his bedroom. Much as he’d like to see her, he would have had to step away from his stove and look after her. In spite of a rapidly growing influx of tourists, Las Vegas was still a gritty town. Fistfights were a regularfeature of barroom evenings. Visitors and some residents had been knocked out and robbed after midnight on the night streets, and the few respectable women in Vegas never went out unaccompanied after dark. There had been some shootouts, and there was talk of clandestine meetings of the Ku Klux Klan. Vegas kept the sheriff on his toes.
Now, with the horizon bright with the imminent repeal of the gambling ban, bad boys from the East were hurrying into the town. They were bad boys with money and visions of casinos as cornucopias overflowing with the gambling dollars of tourists from Los Angeles and other lucrative settlements as far as the Pacific Coast and-who knows?-the Atlantic Coast as well. But they were hardly making the town respectable; gangsters didn’t miraculously turn into gentlemen when they stepped off the train in Nevada.
There were plenty of rumors that some of the men paying visits to the new hotels on the street that had been named the Strip were bootleggers from the East, trying to set up moneymaking gambling deals. Only half believing it, Aaron stepped carefully when the new people were around.
From the start, Aaron’s Eats picked up a customer base. Well, it was the only real restaurant in town.
The day before the celebration of “One Year Anniversary of Aaron’s Eats,” Aaron was up on a ladder hanging crepe paper ribbons above the tables when he heard someone open the street door. A little nervously, he turned and was amazed to see his youngest brother, Max, standing in the middle of the floor.
“Max!” he cried, hastily climbing down from the ladder. “What in God’s name are you doing here?” The fervor of his greeting had an undertone of something different. You couldn’t help loving Max, but their grandfather had rightly always called him Der kleine Tyvel-the little devil-and it was only partly from affection. Max was not always in trouble, but then again, he wasn’t always out of it either.
“You’ll be glad I came,” Max said.
“Of course I’m glad you came.”
“I’ve got a great deal for you.”
“Yeah? I can’t wait to hear it. But sit down. I’ve got some cold beer.” And he established his brother at one of the oil-cloth covered tables while he went to the kitchen for the bottles.
“Now,” Aaron said. “What’ve you got yourself into now?”