The exterior lights of the hotel-casino shivered and spasmed in a red and gold trace along the edges and peaks of the towers and the low-rise block-wide expanse of gaming floors between them. A bright crimson “Huzzah!” crowned the tip of each spire, flickering intermittently, in stark relief against the smoky orange slowly bleeding out from the western sky.
Anywhere outside of Vegas or Atlantic City, Tuesday night casinos are a certain kind of sad. The pleather pants, thigh highs, and effortful hairdos of the weekend have scattered away from the hive with more or less money than they walked in with. The multi-star restaurants have shuttered up, sleeping off their weekend high until Friday roils around again. Legend has it that most gaming machines are programmed so they won’t pay out on a weeknight. If someone hits big when there’s no one there to catch the flashing lights and sirens, did it really happen?
Nonetheless, there are low-stakes tables with sleepy dealers-in-training, automated roulette spins on, and the slots spit just enough credits for intermittent reinforcement. A small band of locals in sweatpants and sports hoodies protect their spots, sometimes spreading a wreathe of empty snack bags and cigarette ash in widening circles around their favorite machines. Flashing on the marquees between promos for “CASH BASH SUNDAY SMASH” and “Saturday Night WWE Blackjack Smack Down” are the brief messages that also appear on pamphlets scattered throughout the building: Know When to Stop and Do NOT Leave Children Unattended.
Roni was never left unattended in a casino. As a child she’d fallen asleep behind the bar at the after-hours place her great aunt ran out of her apartment in rural New Hampshire. She’d had her first beer there too, a Michelob Ultra Lite that her aunt slid down the kitchen counter.
“What are you doing?” Roni’s mother had snapped, “She’s not gonna like it.”
Roni mustered all the fortitude her six-year-old body could summon to keep from spitting the noxious liquid across the bar. She wanted to hang out with her mom, be one of the big girls.
“See? She likes it just fine. Just like her daddy.”
Her mom’s cheeks flushed. Roni had the prickling sense she’d done something wrong, but the anxiety that purred up her spine into the base of her skull was washed out with a few more determined sips. Sometime later, another damp bottle landed in her small hand, and she remembers curling up beneath a bar stool on the burgundy tile as the usual small group of flannel-wearing timber mill workers crowded into the one-bedroom apartment and settled themselves in around the card table. The next morning, she woke up, magically transported to her own bed, and she couldn’t wait to go to Aunt Josie’s again.
As a young adult or late teen, she and one of her friends had fed a Golden Tiger slot machine token after token at a roadside tiki bar. They slipped enough golden hexagons between the tiger’s plastic teeth that the connection between those tokens and the cash they represented was lost. They’d had to wash dishes at the snack bar throughout the next day in exchange for the keys to her friend’s Chevrolet.
Year later, she and another friend had staggered into a high-stakes side-room in Reno. Roni hadn’t understood until she cashed out her chips why one man had tried to kiss her, and another had taken a swing when her dice landed on a black patch near the back of the table.
Another time, with another friend, she’d chosen red and watched all the color drain from his face when dice came up snake-eyes.
Then there were the sulkies and steeple chases, the uncanny knack she swore she had for knowing which horse would win and which would place.
“If I had your luck, I’d gamble all the time,” a coworker had once told her on the bus ride back from Saratoga.
“So would I,” Roni smirked.
So, tonight, Roni wasn’t nearly as annoyed as she pretended to be when she told her friends her Airbnb had canceled, and she’d had to rebook a room on her way to the airport. They were descending from multiple states for an annual convention that everyone in the industry half-loved and half-dreaded simultaneously. Corporate compliance is like that most days.
Roni worked as an internal auditor for a substance abuse treatment center. As the corporate compliance officer, her job was to stress the COO and CFO and all the supervisory staff out early enough that they could course correct for the real show down with the state agencies. It was more than picking apart charts and searching for errors and missing signatures though. She saw her job as a way of tangling closed the loopholes insurance companies used to deny and shrift coverage. If she could find evidence of treatment efficacy and stitch closed the more glaring gaps in documentation, she could stretch out a client’s time on site long enough that they might get the help they need. When people asked what she did she said, “paperwork.”
The casino was too far away to be convenient, but cheap enough that convenience didn’t seem so crucial. Distance also meant she’d have a good reason for skipping the messier late-night-early-morning stages of the convention. She could hear about Bill in HR and Brenda in Accounting and their sloppy make-outs later. She didn’t need to see the spit glistening on their chins.
Distance also meant she could make her own mess elsewhere, without an audience of familiars. Not that she was planning on disaster, but tonight, she wanted the option to unravel.
As the rideshare driver pulled away in his tan station wagon, she felt something in her back loosen, and her shoulders relaxed. As she stepped forward, the entrance doors slid apart and a warm burst of smoke scented air puffed her bangs back from her face.
“The problem with you isn’t that you lose, it’s that you play beyond the win,” her mother once counseled her. They were at a surfside arcade near a boardwalk in a small tourist town. Maryland, maybe.
“But how do I know I won’t win more,” she’d asked, picking sand from her tanning lotioned arms, “If I quit, I won’t know what could’ve happened.”
“Sometimes it’s best to cut your losses, kid. These games are rigged anyway.”
“If they’re rigged, how am I winning?”
“Those are small wins, kiddo, to keep you coming back. After that,” she said, nodding towards the tie-dye kitten plushy with a metallic blue unicorn horn in Roni’s hand, “after that, you aren’t getting a thing. Trust me.”
The problem with casinos is they alter time. There are no windows, no clocks. Certain machines chirp and chime at steady intervals like hospital monitors, whether or not they’re in use, but after a while there’s no knowing how long you’ve been posted at your station.
Eventually your body needs something. You’re thirsty, low on cigarettes, or you have to pee, and that’s when you check your watch or these days your cell phone and realize—shit—it’s been hours! Roni remembered this trick. She’d learned to stand at the bar or the machine she was feeding instead of sitting. She set a ninety-minute timer on her phone.
Oriented by three, Roni thinks, remembering the clinical shorthand she’s picked up for how we lose ourselves. Following a head injury, or when dementia or a psychotic break is suspected, physicians check to see if you know when, where, and who you are.
We lose ourselves in the order we first gain awareness. Babies come to recognize themselves as separate from their mothers. Once there’s a self, it can be differentiated from space. Then, gradually, the movements of certain things through space creates expectations, and we learn time. She isn’t me, she isn’t here, when the door creaks, she’ll be back. When I cry out, she reappears. Sometimes. When our cognitive abilities are in decline, time evaporates first. Next goes location. Then, the narrative we’ve composed ourselves out of suddenly flatlines into a blank screen. Sometimes it flickers back. Lucidity. Sometimes the blankness stretches longer and wider.
Roni’s dad had encephalopathy the last month of his life. When she arrived at his bedside, he turned to the nurse and said, “She’s pretty! Isn’t she pretty?” And Roni recognized from the spark in his eye that he was meeting her for the first time. Daughter: erased.
For days the physical therapists and OTs would ask him the date, and he’d come up with September or June. They began writing Today is ______ on the white board that hung on the wall by his bedside, and every morning an orderly would erase the day before and mark the new now. It didn’t help. As she watched the snow outside his window harden into a thick crust of mud mottled ice, Roni thought it might be better for him to go on believing he was in Florida, believing it was summer and someone he loved would return home soon. Eventually, the orderlies stopped updating the board.
Roni knows better than to play hold ‘em, craps, or roulette in the high stakes room now. She’s won and lost enough over the years. But blackjack, that’s her happy place, the luck intermingled with minimum strategy all for the goal of an elegant twenty-one. As a child and teen, she’d wanted nothing more than the freedom of twenty-one. No more need for fake IDs. No more sneaking into dive bars and clubs through back entrances. No more bribes or guises.
“Sweep your hair over your face,” her father once instructed. “If you rub your eyes a little, it’ll look like you’ve been crying or like you’ve been out the better part of the night. Either way, the bouncer’s less likely to give you a hard time.”
Tonight, she’s well past twenty-one. Old enough to feel her vanity prickle up when she’s carded, despite knowing it’s state policy to check everyone’s ID nowadays.
Seven. Five. “Hit me.” Three. She double taps the green matting next to her cards. Praise be to the gambling Gods—Huzzah—it’s a fucking six! Roni is three hundred dollars richer on the first round. Still five hundred up by the next time her phone vibrates, and she resets the ninety-minute alarm. How many times has she clicked repeat without registering the actual time? One more Huzzah! and a string of tapping out too early interspersed with overshooting the mark. Bust.
Eventually she waves a brief goodbye to her tablemates and the loose gaggle of spectators that attends every table room and finds the bar nestled in the back corner of the gamming floor. As an adult, Roni has never been left unattended at a casino for long. As a child, she once built a sandcastle beneath a boardwalk on a beach nearby an arcade.
“Dark and stormy,” a woman shouts from the corner of the bar. “Dark and stormy!” She repeats, though the bartender is out of ear shot.
When she was a child, Roni had yelled and yelled for her mom, who had abandoned the blue and white striped beach towel they’d anchored to the sand with chunks of broken cinderblock. The tide had reached high enough to soak the bottom half of the towel and was pulling one of Ronni’s little sneakers out into the bay.
“Darkandstormydarkandstormydarkand—oh my God that cigarette smells so good!”
Roni’s the only person at the bar with a lit Marb, so it’s clear who she’s talking to. She ignores the young woman with the high-pitched voice and red nails. Those are the only details she’s gathered of her so far, besides her obvious drunkenness and desire to drink more.
Roni dragged the waterlogged towel up to the edge of the rock wall that divided the beach from the street. Eventually, it happened fast and slow at the same time, the water reached her toes as her back pressed up against the wall. She was to small to win a tug-o-war with the tide, and she let the towel drift out of reach.
“Hey, kid! What the hell are you doing there?” A stocky bald man in an airbrushed surf tee and loose yellow board shorts called down as he leaned over the wall and held out his hand. “Grab on! There’s about to be a storm.”
Roni wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, but this stranger made more sense than waiting for her mother as the water rose. She stood on her tiptoes and raised her hand up to meet his. He pulled her up and over the wall in a single flex.
“Where the fuck are your parents?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you lost?”
“No.”
“Then where are your parents?”
“My mom’s the one that wandered off,” Roni protested, her eyes stinging as she blinked back the salt. She didn’t want the man who’d rescued her to think she was irresponsible.
Meanwhile at the Huzzah bar, another man, blond, lanky, in a half-unbuttoned white button-down and black pajama pants that spelled out “Cash & Grab” in pink lettering across the ass hugged the dark and stormy orderer from behind.
“Liza, what is it?”
“I think I want a cigarette. I haven’t had one in forever but whenever I drink, I want one, you know? Like, I don’t smoke, I’m not a smoker at all but sometimes I’ve just got to have a smoke, you know?”
“Totally. But, Liza, I thought you quit?”
“I diiiiid, silly, I just told you.”
“What time is it?”
“Time for you to get me a dark and stormy, this guy isn’t paying attention to me.”
“Got it babe, just wait for him to come over again.”
As a child, Roni took a strange man’s hand and walked the length of an old boardwalk as the tide rose and the sky dimmed. When they hit the arcade strip, rain hammered down and he took her inside the bouncy house shaped like a pink castle. No mother.
Inside the hall of mirrors, he let her hand go and she found the bald man everywhere and nowhere at the same time, a series of repeating faces staring back at her. She began to cry and scrunched up into a little ball on the floor.
“It’s okay, kid, don’t do that. Hey, how about we ride the Ferris wheel? We’ll be high enough up there that maybe you can spot your mom.”
Roni looked into the angled mirror mounted in the corner of the bar. The woman’s caramel and sand-colored spirals bounced enthusiastically around her shoulders as she tossed her head from side to side in her I’m not a smoker, I just smoke campaign.
When they finally did locate Roni’s mom she was at the Shoot ‘Em Up booth where Roni had learned to fire a gun earlier that day. Actually, she’d learned to correct for an airsoft gun that fired down and to the left every time. To hit the cardboard rabbits on the highest row as they traced along their twine pulley, you had to fire towards the roof of the tent like a madman. The plump blue-haired carnie done up in faux wild west garb had showed her how after and exasperating hour where Roni failed to fell any of the cardboard animals but refused to leave. Roni didn’t know her name, but she called her Blue. Now, the plush animal prizes were swaying around Blue’s shoulders. It looked as though she was trying to burrow face first into the wall layered with giant dolphins, lavender pandas, and enormous starfish.
“Ah-hemmm,” huffed the bald man, and the animals’ gyration lessened. “I’m looking for this little girl’s mother.”
Blue bounced back from the wall and out popped Ronni’s mother from between two human-sized purple plushie tigers with cartoon grins stitched to their faces.
“Veronica? What are you doing here? I told you to wait for me at the beach.”
Corporate compliance is all about rules. You scour and review, searching for unentered notes, timestamp errors, and diagnostic codes that don’t match up with the information entered. Your job is to find what’s amiss and direct other people to fix it. You know the consequences. An unentered client note is easy for a clinician to overlook when they’re entering dozens of notes a day every day. An unentered note is all some benefactors need to void an agreement, proof that continuity of care has not been maintained, and a site is unworthy of further funding. You become the paperwork police. The people doing the real work dread your calls; Roni knows this. She also knows that without this internal damage control, eventually, no one would get to do their work at all, or they would do it without reimbursement, which eventually shuts a place down. There are margins of error. She calculates and makes them small enough to evade major consequence. Don’t play beyond your win.
“Don’t push it,” pajama bottoms is saying to dark and stormy. “Remember when we got booted from that rooftop place because you were a bitch to the bartender?”
“Oh boo—what the fuck am I doing wrong? I’m at a bar and I want a drink. And that cigarette smells so good.”
“Do you want one?”
The woman’s blue-gray eyes lock with Roni’s. “I shouldn’t,” she near-whispers, “I quit a long time ago. It’s just sometimes when I’m drinking, you know.”
“I do.”
“What are you drinking there?”
“Seltzer.”
“That’s what I should have! Switch to water, you know?”
Roni knows this is wrong, but she isn’t sure how wrong get, and tonight she’s interested in the differential. “You can have one if you want it, here.” She rolls a single cigarette down the bar towards the woman, veering up and down around small puddles of spill.
The problem with children is they don’t experience time the same way adults do. Part of the trouble with adults is they forget this in their interactions with kids. As a child, Roni was left unattended in a Denny’s with a woman called Blue when her mother went to fill the meter. Fill the meter was code for go to the state liquor store and get provisions. Neither Blue nor Roni knew this code. She was only gone for forty-five minutes, maybe an hour. Blue kept checking her watch. Roni counted her cigarettes. One. Two. Three. By the seventh light in the chain, Blue asked Roni if she’d like one.
“I’m seven.”
“So what?”
Liza’s fingertips touched Roni’s as she nabbed the cigarette with feigned hesitance.
“What kind do you smoke?”
“These aren’t my brand. They’re from the vending machine over there, one of the ones where if you crush a bead in the filter, it can be menthol if you want it to be.
“Oh! Yes! These are my favorites.”
Roni didn’t know you had to inhale for the light to ignite the tip. Her lips were sticky from the cherry topping on her Belgian waffles. Her fingers were sticky from the overflow of foam from her cherry coke. “Suck in like it’s a straw, kid,” Blue instructed, and when the smoke shot into her lungs, Roni choked until her eyes watered.
“Babe, I thought you quit?” The pajama pants man was still slouching over Liza’s shoulder.
“But this is so good. Only when I drink it’s just so good. I see you smirking over there,” she laughed at Roni, “You know.”
“Why the fuck are you crying” Roni’s mother admonished when she slipped into the booth next to Blue, “I was gone for five minutes.”
“Check the time,” Blue rolled her eyes.
Roni let the cigarette drop to the floor and imagined the table bursting into flame.
“How much do I owe you,” Liza asked.
“Nothing.”
“No, really, they’re expensive. Can I get you a drink or something?” She shrugged the man from her back, and he settled himself on a barstool next to her. “What can I give you?”
Roni leaned turned towards her, so they stood face to face. “Just promise you’ll quit in the morning.”
“I will. I only smoke—”
“When you drink, I know.”
“I want to give you something.”
“Kiss me.”
Roni, her mother, and Blue went back to motel that night. Roni settled in on the threadbare sofa with her tie-dye unicorn kitten and was told she could listen to her Discman as loud as she wanted until she fell asleep.
“In the morning, we’ll hit the road,” her mother said.
“Is Blue coming?”
“You bet! She’s been looking to make a change, like us.”
The next morning, Roni woke in the passenger seat of her mother’s Corolla, still wrapped in the oversized hotel towel she’d used as a blanket. The beach motel and the Ferris wheel receded in the rearview mirror.
“Where’s Blue?”
“Remember what I told you about not playing beyond your win?”
“Wait, where’s my kitten?”
“Don’t worry, Blue will take care of her, she needs a friend.”
Nearly thirty years later at a casino bar, Roni is kissing a woman who says she only kisses women when she’s been drinking. Roni is trying not the think of the ocean, the arcade, the funhouse mirrors, and the tie-dye kitten likely left wedged between the cushions of a dingy couch. She’s trying not to remember that her mother left Blue in the motel asleep. She’s trying not to try to remember if Blue was before or after her father. The woman leans into her harder. Hard enough Roni can tell she crushed the mentholated bead in her cigarette. Not hard enough that Roni can stay anchored to the present.
In another motel, Roni woke to find her mother wasn’t in the room. She went to sleep after sunset, holding the note that read be back soon.
On another night, in another year, Roni would have let Liza and the man come up to her room or gone to theirs. Maybe she would have let him watch. Maybe he would’ve tried to join, and she’d have pushed him off. Maybe he would have laughed. Maybe he would have gotten violent. Maybe he would have been offended and slumped out of the room. Maybe he would have joined. Maybe she would have left before sunrise. She might have been ashamed. She might have enjoyed the game.
On another night, with another woman, maybe another man, Roni would have gambled and left her room card under the ash tray before slipping back to the hotel tower, hoping to lose herself for a while.
The third time Roni woke up with the note crumpled in her hand, she couldn’t find enough change for the vending machine by the motel checking desk. She asked the clerk if she could borrow some money, just until her mother got back.
“You’re here alone, kid?”
Nearly thirty years later, Roni is trying to silence the question that keeps rising in the back of her mind like a blue wave. Was she cutting her losses when she left me? She kisses dark and stormy harder.
When they pull back from each other the spectators at the bar cheer, pajama pants man included. Then, Huzzah! sounds up from a nearby nickel slot as someone hits a minor jackpot, and applause erupts from the small crowd.
Quit before you overplay your win, Roni thinks, and amid the sirens, chimes, and cascade of lights, she slips away.