Cha-Cha suspected that Troy was referring to his girlfriend, Jillian, and he didn’t like it. She and Troy’s relationship was so volatile that Jillian just might burn the house down out of spite.
“If anyone without a Turner name should buy it, it should be Rahul,” Netti said. She and Rahul, an Indian man who worked in accounting at her office, had lived together for fifteen years. He held more clout among the Turners than Jillian, but he still wasn’t blood.
“Rahul owns all those properties in Dearborn—”
Here an argument broke out, because Troy didn’t see what was wrong with Jillian being the buyer, and Netti came too close to telling him what the rest of them thought. Then Tina said the whole plan felt dishonest, which set everyone’s eyes to rolling and forced Cha-Cha to side with his wife, despite wanting to roll his eyes too. Russell and Francey were both willing to see the Yarrow house go, and Marlene burst into tears when they admitted this. In true Turner fashion, the only thing they all could agree to (after Russell agreed to treat) was tabling the matter in favor of finding somewhere to eat dinner. Troy said he already had dinner plans. Marlene volunteered to stay back with Viola and keep an eye on Tina’s wings.
Motor City, Friday Night
Francis Turner’s garden had turned to weeds shortly after his death. The house’s surviving residents had their reasons for not picking up trowel and hoe in his memory: Lelah was working two jobs, not to mention taking care of Brianne, and Viola said simply, “Francis never liked me pokin around with his plants when he was alive, so why would I start pokin now?” No one had a good answer to that. The state of the garden, coupled with a string of car thefts on Yarrow, prompted Miles, the eighth Turner child, to invest in a garage. He said a garage accessible through the back kitchen door would not only protect a vehicle or two but also provide a way for passengers to get into and out of the house during the winter months without slogging through the snow on the street. So the backyard was paved, and an aluminum-and-wood two-car garage fitted to the back of the house like a caboose.
Lelah, not wanting to risk another night with her car in plain sight, planned to park in the garage. She turned in to the alley behind the house, a poorly paved strip that separated the Turner property from a boarded-up house that faced Fischer Street, and climbed out of her car to unlock the back gate. She tried to ignore the blackness of the alley behind her as she fumbled with her key. The trees from neighboring lots hung low, and she felt the hard bodies of unripe mulberries crush beneath her feet. They should have sprung for an automated gate like Mr. McNair’s, she thought, because once she drove through the gate she had to get back out of her car to lock it behind her. After this she manually unlocked and raised the garage door.
She couldn’t bring herself to go into the house. Inside the garage she smelled mildew and damp earth through her rolled-up windows. Various medical supplies stacked haphazardly in the small space and hanging from the rafters created a geriatric phalanx around her Pontiac. An old walker and its dirty, impaled tennis balls, a disassembled hospital bed, boxes and boxes of gauze, huge boxes of adult diapers—male ones Francis hadn’t lived long enough to wear and newer boxes of female ones that Viola could probably use. Too much. She wasn’t sleepy at all, so getting out of the car meant how many hours alone in the big room, in the dark, with nothing but her thoughts? Too many. She backed the car out, closed the garage, and exited the backyard.
The chips looked like candy. Pastel, melt-away things that didn’t make sense to save. The feel of them, the click and dry slide of them in her palm, was gratifying. Some people in Gamblers Anonymous, a place she hadn’t been in months, claimed the tiny ball, spinning and spinning around on its wheel, was the reason they loved the game. “It’s like you get a bonus, a little bit of a show from that ball,” Zach, a white man who always wore a suit and tie, once said. Other people in the group had nodded knowingly.
Lelah stood at the foot of the roulette table. Just having a look, she told herself. If she were playing, she would never stand here, so far away from the wheel and the top half of the board, a position where she’d end up asking strangers to put her chips where she wanted them to go. If she were playing, she’d request the orange chips, depending on the dealer. But she couldn’t play right now. She’d spent the last of her cash on lunch for herself and Bobbie, and she didn’t know whether she’d be approved for unemployment, so she couldn’t spend the $183 in the bank.
“No more bets,” the dealer said. He waved a pudgy, upturned palm over the table. People settled back into their chairs.
The ball landed on double zero. There were a few cheers but mostly groans. It was a crowded night in Motor City Casino.
“The one time I take my money off those zeros, they come up,” the light-skinned woman next to Lelah said. “I been splittin the zeros all night.”
She looked at Lelah, waited for a response.
“I know, I saw you,” Lelah said. “That’s how it always goes though, right? That means you’ll hit soon.”
“Shit, I hope so,” the woman said. Her fake eyelashes made her look drowsy, like a middle-aged blinking baby doll. She wore a rhinestone-trimmed dark denim jacket and matching jeans. Brown cowboy boots with a low heel. “All I know is that I’ll be back to splittin these zeros from now on.”
Lelah grinned at her. She enjoyed this false camaraderie almost as much as she did the chips.
She told herself she’d come to Motor City to eat. Her twenty-five complimentary tickets for the buffet were the only tangible benefit of thousands of games of roulette. She also had a Motor City VIP card. The irony of being a homeless, “very important” anything was not lost on Lelah as she had presented the black and purple card to the valet out front. She had anticipated a strange stare or at least a smirk as he helped her out of her overflowing car, but he hadn’t seemed to notice. It had occurred to her, slightly depressed her, that she wasn’t the only homeless gambler in Motor City tonight.
It was a low-stakes table, $5 to get on the board. The woman in the cowboy boots split the zeros again with $25 worth of lavender chips—an amount Lelah considered risky, seeing as how double zero had just come up. She said nothing though. Faux camaraderie was appreciated, but outright advice was not.
Lelah knew she was an addict. She’d come to terms with this truth long before her eviction, which marked a new low. The first indicator had been almost four years earlier when she’d been desperate enough to ask Brenda, her cubicle mate at the phone company, to loan her $200, just until payday. She asked Brenda instead of one of her siblings because she didn’t want to have to lie about where she would spend the money. That $200 had bloomed to $1,000 in about a year’s time, and after she had paid Brenda back, she found other coworkers to befriend and borrow from. A few hundred from Jamaal, a sweet, chubby twenty-year-old with dreadlocks who worked on the third floor and maybe had a crush on her; $60 from Yang, an older Chinese woman who used to sell pork buns from her cube before management forbade all sales except for the Girl Scout variety; $1,200 from Dwayne, a fifty-year-old widower with a potbelly and a gold-plated left incisor who absolutely had a crush on her but insisted he wanted nothing in return for the loan. “Now that my Sheila’s gone, I got nothing and nobody to spend on,” he’d said.
Dwayne proved to be a problem. He waited by her Pontiac in the parking deck after her shift a few weeks after he’d loaned her the money, and as Lelah approached the car she realized his pants were undone, and that little brown bump Dwayne was rubbing his thumb over so quickly was not the knuckle of his other thumb but in fact the head of his lonely widower penis. They fired Dwayne, but at the grievance meeting HR brought up the money she’d borrowed going all the way back to Brenda. They claimed she’d borrowed more than five thousand dollars over the four years, but that didn’t sound right to Lelah. She could only account for about three thousand, and she’d paid back everybody but Dwayne. “Jesus, you could’ve told us you were pumping little old ladies for cash before we got in here,” h
er union rep had said. She had been suspended without pay for over a month now and was still waiting to see if she would be terminated.
She followed her own code when it came to playing roulette. She never bet all inside, or all out; she spread her chips around the table, she never begged the dealer to let her play out her last chip, and she didn’t make loud proclamations, speak directly to the little white ball as if it gave a damn about her, or pray for those inanimate, albeit beautiful chips to behave any particular way. She tried not to act like a strung-out, desperate addict, even if that was how she felt.
“No more bets.”
The pit boss, a busty redheaded woman in a pants suit, whispered something into the dealer’s ear, looked hard at the people gathered around the table, then walked a few paces away. Even this moment of choreographed intimidation was a familiar comfort to Lelah.
The ball landed on 27.
“Aw hell,” the woman splitting the zeros said.
Lelah always played 27. Brianne was born on the twenty-seventh of February, as was Troy, the closest sibling to Lelah in age. Lelah’s chest tightened, and somewhere near her sternum she felt a bit of warmth. She wanted to play. Badly. Now was a smart time to move on to the buffet, she knew, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the dealer. He swept up all of the chips, a jumble of sherbet-colored winnings for the casino, because no one had bet on her number.
She stood up. Took off her jacket. She should have walked away, but she couldn’t. It was awkward, being at a table but not playing at the table. You had to smile, look indifferent and simultaneously interested enough to justify taking up space. Her armpits started sweating.
Several chips covered number 27 this turn. Too late for them, Lelah thought. The woman put the rest of her lavender chips, Lelah estimated twenty, between 0 and 00 again. She looked up at Lelah and winked.
“No more bets,” the dealer said.
“I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!” The woman next to her jumped up from her stool. The ball was on 00. Lelah congratulated her as the dealer slid her a small fort of chips, more than five hundred dollars.
If she were a seasoned gambler, this woman would stay put and ride this upswing out, likely eating away at her winnings in the process. This was what Lelah would have done. But the woman asked the dealer to give her the chips in twenties and stood up to go.
“For you,” she said to Lelah. She handed her a blue and yellow $20 chip.
“For me, for what?”
“You said I’d hit and I did.”
“You would’ve anyway. I can’t,” Lelah said, even though she knew she could.
“Like hell you can’t,” the woman said. Then she leaned in closer, whispered, “Roulette ain’t a spectator sport.”
Lelah closed her fingers around the chip but did not sit down at the table.
“Well, thank you. Here.” Lelah looked past the woman toward a cocktail waitress, put up a hand to get her attention. “At least let me buy you a free drink. I can afford a free drink.”
They both laughed.
“No, I need to run out of here with my money before I get pulled back in.” She dropped her remaining chips into her purse, a sturdy, designer-looking purse, Lelah noticed, and headed toward the cashier.
This happened to Lelah sometimes in the casino, a stranger high off of a big win gave her money just for bearing witness, and each time she felt like crying. Because she wanted the money so much. Because a stranger could be so generous, when she’d never once thought to do that after a win. Because she perhaps looked as desperate as she felt. Because, truthfully, it didn’t take much to make Lelah feel like crying. But feeling like crying was not the same as actually crying, and Lelah was up $20.
She’d been down to less than twenty bucks and pulled ahead before. Her mind ran to wild possibilities of success. There was a red convertible sitting on top of the Wheel of Fortune slots, and though she detested slots as an amateur, vulgar game, she imagined winning so much at a table that they gave the damn thing to her; just put a ramp over the front slots so she could climb up, drive her new Corvette down, and pick up the rest of her winnings at the cashier. Or maybe she’d only get a few hundred, but it would be quick and enough to buy her some time, so she’d resist the urge to try to flip the money and run out of there, hundreds in her pocket, and check in to a nice hotel. Yes, a nice hotel would be a good start, and then she’d take a day or two to figure out what to do next. This was a lot more feasible than the car scenario, she knew; she just had to strategize.
She figured she should eat first, before they ran out of the good stuff at the buffet, then she’d come back and try to make the chip last. Split it into ones at the $5 minimum table, spread it around.
As she piled limp green beans onto her plate, she thought she saw half a dozen people she recognized. The woman near the pop fountain with the red sequin hat was definitely someone Lelah had seen before; she always wore that hat, and she kept rolls of quarters for the slots in her fanny pack. Lelah made a conscious effort to keep her eyes on the food, lest she run into someone from her GA meetings. The defeated did not like to acknowledge one another mid-backslide.
It would follow that Lelah returned to the table where the woman won the chip for her, but every open seat there made it so you could see the craps table behind it. On a Friday night the craps crowd was too lively, and Lelah couldn’t risk being distracted. She chose a five-dollar-minimum roulette table near the bar where an older black man named Jim was dealing. Lelah couldn’t recall anything spectacular happening to her at Jim’s table before, but she didn’t have any negative recollections either, so she gave him a try. It was considered bad form to take up a seat when you had so little money to play, but Lelah was determined to make this money grow. She planned to act like she had more cash until it became a reality.
She put ten outside on black, two on 27, and three in the corner between 7, 8, 10, and 11. Jim spun the ball and it landed on 8. That meant she’d get ten from her outside bet and twenty-four from the corner. This brought her to $54, a much more reasonable amount to work with. She took off her jacket.
Lelah never kept a strict count of her money after every play. The exact amount wasn’t as important to her while in the thick of the game as much as the feel of her stack of chips. Could she cover them with her entire palm, or did she have tall enough stacks that her hand sat on top of them, and the colors—the orange ones she preferred, persimmon, in fact—still peeked from between her fingers? Yes, this was the thing to measure by. Let the dollar amount be a pleasant surprise after several rounds. She kept playing inside and out, sometimes black, sometimes red, a few corners, a few splits, but always straight up on 27.
Her tablemates came and went. She registered their movements—new faces and body shapes—but not the particulars anymore. The camaraderie seduced her in the beginning, it was a way to warm up to the task at hand, but after a while if she didn’t go broke she’d slip into a space of just her and her hands and the chips that she tried to keep under them. A stillness like sleep, but better than sleep because it didn’t bring dreams. She was just a mind and a pair of hands calculating, pushing chips out, pulling some back in and running her thumb along the length of stacks to feel how much she’d gained or lost. She never once tried to explain this feeling in her GA meetings. She couldn’t even share with them the simplest reasons of why she played. They were always talking about feeling alive, or feeling numb. How the little white ball made them feel a jolt in their heart, or maybe how the moment of pulling on an old-fashioned slot handle for the first time in a night was better than an orgasm. Lelah did not feel alive when she played roulette. That wasn’t the point, she’d wanted to say. It wasn’t to feel alive, but it also wasn’t to feel numb. It was about knowing what to do intuitively, and thinking about one thing only, the possibility of winning, the possibility of walking away the victor, finally.
“You want to change some of those for twenties?” the dealer asked.
He’s talking
to me, Lelah realized, and she looked down for the first time in at least ten plays. Her hand rested on a cluster of persimmon stacks about six inches tall. Three hundred dollars, give or take, she could feel it. Jim, the dealer, stared at her.
“Sure,” she said. “How about one hundred in twenties, one eighty in fives, and whatever’s left in ones again.”
Jim obliged, and Lelah slid a cobalt $5 chip back to him for his assistance.
She had enough for a hotel room now. She knew she should leave. Slide her chips into her purse like that generous woman did earlier and make a beeline for the cashier. But her watch said 11 P.M. Just another half hour and she could be up $600. With $600 she could find a place to stay for a week, maybe two weeks if she settled for a shitty motel. She could flip the money into something worth leaving with. Not could, she would. She just had to try. She put $60 on black, $10 on 00 because it hadn’t hit yet, $40 on the third 12 of the board, and $20 on 27.
No matter how still Lelah’s mind became as she played, she was never careless; her purse stayed in her lap, her cell phone tucked in her front pocket. Vernon was the one to tell her that over two decades ago, back when they’d taken trips off base in Missouri to the riverboat casinos. “The same guy sitting next to you shooting the shit all night will steal your wallet in a heartbeat,” he’d said, and she’d nodded. This was toward the end of their marriage, and the riverboats, newly opened, were one of the few places where the two of them still had fun. Neither of them was interested in winning money, but Vernon had an engineer’s knack for figuring things out, breaking systems down into their parts. They conceived Brianne after one of these trips, and although they weren’t exactly in love anymore, Lelah believed they had created their daughter in hope.
“No more bets.”
The ball landed on 14. She had no chips on 14, which meant $120 was gone. The remaining $180 was still more than she had in the bank, but what could you get with that? Not much. If you walked out with $180 when you could have had $600, you didn’t walk away the victor. She put money on the same spots again, just half as much.
The Turner House Page 5