by Jan Brogan
But I think, mainly, I wanted to forget about Barry, about the swiftness of the gunshot and the feeling in my gut that told me that his murder had been a hit. That despite Leonard’s other lies, there was some truth at the core of it all, some truth that would never come out because of my own screwups.
Where better to get away from yourself than inside a casino? I wanted to be inside that atmosphere of opportunity. I wanted to feel that promise as a tingle in my skin, an excitement that traveled upward from the pit of my stomach. I wanted to concentrate on the numbers. I wanted to concentrate so hard that I couldn’t think of anything but how many face cards had been dealt and how many were left in the shoe.
I avoided Foxwoods and the bad luck I’d had there and drove the extra twenty minutes or so to the Mohegan Sun, where I’d had my good fortune. I borrowed $500 on my MasterCard and went to the exact same blackjack table where I’d learned to play the game and had won $450.
There were two older women who both looked like grandmothers playing against the dealer. I decided that grandmothers were good luck and sat beside the one in the white cardigan sweater who was cradling a quilted handbag. She did not smile at me indulgently, in grandmotherly fashion, or even look up from her cards. “Hit me,” she said to the dealer, who complied.
I had to wait until the new shoe was being dealt; I began cautiously with a ten-dollar bet. I won my first hand with seventeen. The dealer broke at twenty-five. I considered this the best possible omen.
Neither grandmother looked at me. One was preoccupied by the vodka and sodas she kept ordering. The other, the one with the handbag, was on a losing streak, and by the way she kept her shoulder angled to me, I guessed she blamed me for the turn of her luck.
But I didn’t care because I stayed hot for the first dozen hands, winning twice as much as I lost. A middle-aged man who said he was from New Jersey joined us. He drank Manhattans, smoked small black cigars, and kept licking the tips of his fingers before he touched the cards. At first, I thought he might bring the table bad luck, but I won three hands in a row after he sat down and so did the grandmother with the quilted handbag. She even smiled, first at the man with the cigars, then at me. When he left, about an hour later, she got up to go. I worried that my luck would change. I was up almost $350 and determined not to get carried away by my euphoria. But God, it felt good to feel good. To feel competent.
The dealer at the table, a woman with a bored expression who kept looking beyond the table as if searching for more exciting players, was not big on offering advice, but I remembered what my very first dealer had told me: Quit while you’re ahead. I decided I needed a break, a moment to come down from my winning high and think strategically. I grabbed the hamburger-plate special at the food court for dinner, found an empty table, and made myself chew slowly instead of gobble.
I washed my hands thoroughly in the bathroom in case chopped meat and fried potatoes was too pedestrian to bring fortune. I had this contented feeling in my stomach that had nothing to do with just having eaten. My destiny was before me. This was going to be a good night in my new life.
I took one walk around the four seasons of the main hall and scouted several high-stakes tables. When I spotted Will sitting at one, eyes narrowed, chin lifted, back straight in his chair, I considered it another omen. He looked confident, decisive, street-smart. And when I noticed that he was wearing the same lucky silver pendant around his neck, I took the empty seat beside him and began emptying chips out of my knapsack.
“Hey,” he said, with a smile. “Barry’s friend.”
“Hallie,” I said, reminding him of my name.
He smiled again, but in a distracted way. He had a big pile of chips beside him and bet $50 on his hand. I took a breath and followed suit.
I won my first two hands and was convinced I’d read the table right: Will was clearly a source of good luck. But then I lost five hands in a row and gave back $150. Still, I knew that the trick was to wait out a run of bad luck. Will ordered a club soda with lemon that he sipped during my next round of losses. I was now down $200 and thinking about going home.
But what was at home? An empty apartment? I couldn’t even listen to late-night radio anymore. If I heard Leonard’s sanctimonious call for statewide morality, I thought I might smash the radio into bits. So, even after I’d lost the whole $500, I decided to go back to the ATM machine and borrow another $500 from a different credit card.
It didn’t seem like such a big deal. Will was down $3,000, but confident that if he stuck it out, his luck would turn. “Basic strategy,” he kept saying to me. “You just have to wait it out and play basic strategy.”
It occurred to me that if Leonard and Barry had gambled together, Will might know Leonard.
“How many years ago?” he asked.
“Two or three.”
He shook his head. “I’ve only been coming here for maybe two years. It’s all fuzzy of course, but I think Barry was usually alone.”
It occurred to me that Leonard could even be making up the part about his own gambling, and suddenly the reality of my idiocy was back upon me. How I’d been so touched that Leonard had trusted me with tapes from his show. How he’d counted on that. How I’d let Barry down.
I couldn’t go home a loser. Not tonight.
The dealer, a twenty-something guy named Henry who had his already thinning hair shaved into a whiffle, didn’t reply when I said I’d be right back. An Asian man at the other end of the table suggested I might want to take a dinner break.
“I already ate,” I said.
When I got back to the table with the cash, I won three hands in a row and the euphoria returned. I won $200 and had $700 in chips at my side when I noticed that Will, too, had a growing pile of chips.
“Sometimes all you need is a little patience,” he said.
That line became my refrain, especially when I lost the entire $700.
The young, balding dealer began to shuffle a new shoe of cards. It was almost midnight and I was exhausted, but I couldn’t go home down $1,000, with the feeling of loss in my stomach. So I took $500 more from another credit card that had just extended my credit line. Sometime after one o’clock in the morning, I grabbed another $500 from the machine.
I was down to my last $50 when I saw Will yawn. I looked over and noticed that all his chips were gone. He shook himself off and got up from the table. “You’re not leaving, are you?” I asked.
He looked at his watch and then at me. “It’s almost two A.M.; don’t you have to work?”
“I’m trying to be patient,” I said.
He let out a low, sarcastic chuckle, and I wasn’t sure if he was laughing at me or at himself. “Go home,” he said. “Don’t chase bad luck.”
“What about being patient?”
“Nobody can be patient at two in the morning. It’s too late to think straight anymore. Call it a day.”
Collecting the spent cards in front of me, the dealer met my eye and nodded sagely. The air smelled of stale smoke, but the glass ashtray at my elbow had been wiped clean. It was then when I realized that everyone else had gone home.
CHAPTER
15
MORE THAN JUST about anything in the world, I wanted to stay in bed, sleep until noon, facedown, with the pillow over my head. But my mind clicked awake at six A.M. with a rush of worries that felt like insects in the mattress. I kicked off the covers and sat up. An eerie, early-morning light reminded me that it was Halloween. October 31. Rent was due tomorrow.
I wished this hangover were from alcohol so that I could throw up. I wanted to empty my stomach, my entire life, into a toilet, watch it swirl away into a sewer somewhere. But vomiting into the toilet was too small a penalty. And I wasn’t likely to feel better afterward. Because afterward, I still would have lost $2,000.
Standing, I felt as shaky as if I were hung over—$2,000. That wasn’t even counting the $450 I’d lost at Foxwoods. What the hell was I going to do? Even if I didn’t spend a single c
ent from my next two paychecks, I wouldn’t be able to make rent.
I’d cleaned out my checking account and maxed all my credit cards. I had a strange, hot feeling in my stomach, along with a case of the chills. Even in my darkest days, when I’d been fired from bartending, I’d always been able to make rent.
I stumbled over my running shoes on the way to the kitchen counter. I couldn’t run this morning, couldn’t risk seeing Matt Cavanaugh. Not today. He’d look at me with those sincere brown eyes and I’d feel his judgment like something sticky that wouldn’t scrape off. Even if he didn’t say a word about the front-page retraction, I’d hear it all too clearly: I tried to tell you, Hallie, but you wouldn’t listen.
I dropped to a stool at the bar, put my head on the counter, and stared at the little flecks in the Formica, like stars in a very small, very limited universe. I thought of the spelling-bee story I had to write today. A low moan escaped.
When I finally lifted my head, I saw that the light was blinking on the answering machine. It occurred to me that I’d never gotten back to my mother about the stuffed cabbage.
I didn’t want to think about my mother—my frugal mother—and what she would say. Two thousand dollars. The same amount she’d taken from her savings account and loaned to me, trusting me to pay her back, like a responsible adult. I winced in a way that included my entire body. After a while, I decided that I couldn’t afford take-out coffee and rose to make myself a cup of the despised instant. Staring at the swirl of sludge-colored liquid, I listened to my messages. There were three: one from my mother wondering if my heat was back on, one from Walter telling me he had a gig playing in Newport on Thursday and needed to crash at my apartment, and one from Leonard.
The one from Leonard must have come late last night because his voice sounded hoarse, as if he’d been screaming for many segments. “Pick up,” he said. A pause. “I know you’re there, and I know you must have listened to the show. Pick up! Pick up! I need to talk to you.”
And just hearing Walter’s New York accent made me feel guilty all over again. He’d managed to pull his life together after losing a girlfriend to a drug overdose without veering back to the dark side. Not in almost five years. What was wrong with me? Had I not listened to one word he’d said?
Knowing my mother would be out, I quickly called and left her an upbeat-sounding message about how warm my apartment was now and how I’d try to come see her next week. Then I forced myself to swallow half the cup of instant coffee before flinging it into the sink. I don’t know how long I stood there before the burning in the back of my throat finally stopped. Before I stopped hearing Marcy Kittner’s voice repeat like a mantra in my head: He tries to lure in new reporters. He tries to lure in new reporters. He tries to lure in new reporters.
I headed to the shower, trying to wash this refrain away. I stood under the water until it went cold, hoping to rinse off all traces of myself. The woman with poor judgment. Chaser of Bad Luck. Loser by Catastrophe! But when I toweled off, I felt no better.
All my laundry was still sitting, unwashed, in the bag, so I hunted through my closet until I found an old jeans skirt I never wore because it was too short and a turtleneck shirt I had intended to turn into a cleaning rag because of a chocolate stain on the sleeve. Looking at myself in the mirror was a mistake. At thirty-five, I still looked immature, with clothes that didn’t fit, hair that was too long for my face, and eyes that would never be shrewd.
My stomach was mostly empty, my legs still shaky, and I was exhausted from lack of sleep, but luckily, I’d left a twenty-dollar bill at home in my bureau drawer. So I stripped the sheets off both the bed and the futon, gathered the towels from the bathroom, and stuffed them into my already full laundry bag. The good thing about being back in the bureau, I told myself, was the convenience of the strip-mall Laundromat and the abundance of slow news days. I’d clean and dry every piece of clothing, every towel and every bedsheet I owned. It seemed critical, all of a sudden, that I had clean clothes to put on, that my life, at least, had that much order.
By eleven o’clock, I’d finished the spelling-bee story for Thursday’s regional education section and skipped out of the office to start my laundry. I was alone in the bright, canary-yellow Laundromat with hurtling hot water sanitizing my underwear and the rhythmic churning of my sheets and towels in the dryer.
There were ten minutes left on the dryer, and normally, I’d go back to the office, but I was tired of putting on a happy face for Carolyn, tired of pretending I was a perfectly competent person whom she could trust. I dropped to a seat on the plastic bench. Listening to the rhythm of the machines, I stared blankly out the glass window onto the vista of the strip-mall parking lot: the South Kingstown Apothecary, the Peddler’s Five, and Fraser’s Liquors, the storefronts of my small, getting-smaller, world.
I wondered how I was going to manage. Peanut butter sandwiches from home instead of take-out Greek salads from Poppy’s. I could put off electric and telephone bills and pay the minimum credit card payments. Still, there was no way I could make rent. I tried to pull the numbers out of my head, but I couldn’t. I kept multiplying my take-home pay by weeks, subtracting the cost of gasoline, car payments, and groceries and falling short for another month and a half. When I’d moved in, Hal Andosa, a landlord who often came to the door personally to collect, had emphasized the importance of prompt rental payments. I’d been quick to assure him that I’d never in my life been a day late with the rent.
If my father were still alive, I could go to him for a loan. My Irish father, who in his own day had thrown away a few dollars in the pub, would’ve given me the required lecture on responsibility but quickly conspired to keep it from my mother. I winced again remembering her detailed advice about good gambling that night at Foxwoods.
I tried to concentrate on the comforting rhythm of the machinery, but I was distracted by two men in the parking lot getting out of a Chevy Lumina and heading toward the liquor store. They had the swift, purposeful movements of people who knew for sure they needed a drink. Wearing jackets of the sporting variety, big leather arms and some sort of football-or hockey-team logo on the back, they looked like the kind of guys who called radio sports programs and argued passionately about bad trades. I always wondered what kind of people bought liquor in the mornings.
The same kind of people who played blackjack at a casino until two A.M., a voice inside my head said. The same kind of people who called Leonard of Late Night every single night.
A dryer stopped abruptly with a grunt. I looked around, almost expecting to see my sheets spit out onto the floor. Two thousand dollars in a casino. What was I going to do?
Never go to a casino again, the little voice continued. Had I listened every night to Leonard’s show and not picked up that gambling was addictive? Or had I assumed, for some unknown reason, that the addictive part didn’t apply to me? I knew now that I had to give up all forms of it, even the little scratch cards and the Powerball tickets. I had to face what I’d known all along: Moderation wasn’t one of my personality traits.
I had a vision of Drew that day at the market, standing behind the register and staring off into those aisles of bad memories. His father’s gambling had caused him so much pain. Leonard might have been lying about the loan sharks, but not Drew. That had come from his heart.
I took a deep, cleansing breath of soap-scented Laundromat air and tried to exhale those thoughts from my system. There was nothing I could do to make it up to Drew, or to Barry. I was off that story, forever. The practical side of me had to accept that or I’d be completely lost.
Laundry was constructive: a good first step, a simple task I might be able to accomplish. But as I began emptying the dryer, I realized I’d overloaded it again. Everything from the sheets to my sweat socks was still twisted and damp.
The change machine was out of order, so I decided to go to the liquor store for more quarters. I passed the two sports-radio guys in the parking lot as they practically dance
d their way back to the Chevy Lumina. I heard the first bars of a heavy-metal song before the doors slammed and the car tore out of the parking lot.
Opening the door to the liquor store triggered a computer-chip gizmo that belted out a throaty “Ha!Ha!Ha!” from a sinister goblin. Mrs. Fraser, who was on her knees unpacking a case of wine into a wrought-iron rack, looked up from the floor. She was a divorced woman in her early fifties with tight gray curls and defined biceps. She wore a short-sleeved T-shirt over three-quarter-length leggings, and the kind of high-top aerobics sneakers that went out of style in the eighties. Because it was Halloween, she’d added a black velvet witch’s hat.
I waited for her to finish heaving the last of the bottles into the rungs before asking if she could make change. The last time the Laundromat change machine was out of order, Mrs. Fraser had begrudgingly parted with her quarters. This time, she popped back behind the cash register and opened the drawer with a big smile on her face. “See those guys who peeled out of the lot?” she asked without waiting for an answer. “I almost didn’t sell one of ’em a scratch ticket ’cause I thought he was underage. But the big one in the Bruins jacket had ID. Wouldn’t you know, he bought a winner? Five grand.”
That got my attention. “Five grand. Really?” I took the quarters. “On what game?”
“Caesar’s Palace Two. Just got it in this week. You played it yet?” She could barely contain her excitement. “They’re promoting it like crazy on the radio. Pays up to one million dollars. Been selling like mad.”
“On a one-dollar ticket?” I heard myself say. Buying a scratch ticket was gambling. I knew that. Buying one would be like betting on horses instead of on cards. Still, I now had two dollars in laundry coins in my hand.