Chapter 10
CINDY
Two days after the count room, I do something reckless on purpose. I text him first.
Hypothetical. If a girl wanted to show her broke dancer friends what the inside of a five-star casino looks like, what would it cost her?
I stare at the phone for a long minute after I hit send, already drafting the apology. The reply takes eleven seconds.
Nothing. Tomorrow night. They’ll be collected at eight.
Collected? They’re not laundry.
Eight, Cynthia.
That’s the whole negotiation. I braced for a no, for a lecture about visibility, about how the kept woman doesn’t get to requisition the kingdom for her girls.
What I get is logistics. An hour later a number I don’t know texts to ask after my guests’ dietary restrictions, signed by a man whose actual job title is casino host, like that’s a normal thing for a job to be.
I forward it to the group chat. Lacey answers inside a minute. Tell them I’m allergic to bills.
The car shows up at eight on the dot, the big blacked-out one with the driver who never talks, and I ride along for the pickups because I want to see their faces.
Their faces do not disappoint. Joss comes down from the duplex she shares with Stevie dressed like a court date, gets in the way you’d get into a stranger’s van, scanning for the catch.
Stevie, dressed like a prom, strokes the leather seat once, then sits on her hands.
Crystal stops dead on her curb, looks at the car, looks at me through the open door, and screams. A small one. A scream of manageable size.
“This is the one with the tiny fridge,” she announces, climbing over Stevie. “I’ve been in this one. There’s water bottles nobody’s allowed to drink. Watch, nobody will drink them.”
Promise is the last pickup, standing outside her building in her good coat with her arms crossed, half sure this is a scam. She gets in, takes one slow look around the cabin, then looks at me with twenty years of having seen everything there is.
“Baby,” she says. “What exactly did you catch?”
“A rich one.”
“Mm.” She settles back into the leather. “Don’t throw it back till after dinner.”
The driver takes us up the gold drive past the cab line, right to the doors, where two men in suits are already waiting to open everything we might conceivably touch.
I’ve been here before. I thought I’d gotten used to it.
Then I get to watch it happen to my girls, the doors, the black marble, the ceiling painted like heaven’s waiting room, and the whole place hits me all over again, secondhand.
Stevie’s head goes all the way back. “That’s a painted ceiling. Who paints a ceiling?”
“Russians,” Joss says.
“It’s a cathedral,” Crystal breathes. “It’s a cathedral where God takes Visa.”
In the elevator, which is mirrored, gold, bigger than my old bathroom, the girls go quiet for the first time all night, watching the numbers climb.
I watch them instead. Lacey’s fixing her lipstick with the focus of a surgeon.
Promise has her chin up like she rides this elevator every day of her life, which is how Promise does scared.
I catch my own reflection between them, a girl who used to split a six-dollar pizza with these women after close, standing in a tower of money like she has a right to be here. My eyes go hot with no warning at all.
Crystal sees. Crystal sees everything that matters and nothing that doesn’t. She doesn’t say a word, just hooks her pinky through mine down where nobody can see it, and faces front.
The suite is two floors above anything I’ve ever had a reason to visit.
The host opens the double doors on a room the size of the Wet Sunset with a view of the entire burning Strip, and my family files in the way you’d enter a church or a crime scene.
There’s champagne in a bucket. There are robes laid out on the bed, thick white ones, our sizes, which means somebody asked somebody who asked somebody.
There’s a card on the table with my name on it in handwriting I know, dark certain strokes. The floor is yours. Within reason. S.
“Within reason,” Joss reads over my shoulder. “That’s a dare.”
Dinner happens in a private room over the gaming floor, at a table that could seat the whole day shift, with a menu that has no prices on it.
“If there’s no prices,” Promise says, scanning it like a contract, “then we’re the price.”
“Tonight we’re not,” I tell her. “Tonight somebody else is the price. Order the lobster.”
She orders the lobster. She orders it the way a queen pardons somebody, gracious, suspicious, once.
Crystal orders by pointing at the longest words and asking the waiter to surprise her, which is how she ends up with something involving gold leaf that she refuses to eat for ten minutes because it’s too pretty, then eats in four bites.
Lacey orders a steak, then a second steak to go, then asks if the to-go steak can also be a surprise for the morning version of her, and the waiter, unflappable, says he’ll see what the kitchen can do.
Somebody pours champagne all around. I carry mine like a prop the way the smart ones do at his parties, one glass all night, going nowhere.
It’s the best meal any of us has ever had, which we know because Stevie says so out loud with her eyes shut, and nobody, for once, argues.
Then we hit the floor.
I expect to spend the night translating, keeping everybody clear of the velvet ropes.
What happens instead is that the casino has clearly been briefed, because everywhere we drift, the staff already have the look of men who’ve been told to make problems impossible.
Chips appear. Drinks appear. A pit boss with a face like a closed fist calls Lacey madam until she has to go sit down.
Lacey is down forty actual dollars of her own actual money inside the hour, on a slot machine she swears is speaking to her. “It’s about to go,” she keeps saying, patting it like livestock. “I can feel it in the sounds.”
“That’s the sound of it eating,” Promise says.
“It loves me.”
“Forty dollars ago it loved you.”
I find Stevie at the long gold bar with her phone out and a look I know from a campfire. The text is already typed. I can see the gray wall of it from four feet away.
“How long is it?”
“It’s short.”
“Stevie.”
“It has sections,” she admits.
I hold out my hand. We’ve done this before. The bartender, bless him, produces an ice bucket without being asked, and the phone goes down among the bottles, which is what passes for the cooler in a place like this. Stevie watches it sink like she’s burying a relative at sea.
“He’s not even that great,” she says, mostly to herself.
“Nobody who gets a four-part text is that great.”
“He has a boat.”
“It’s a jet ski, babe.” Joss materializes the way she does whenever gossip surfaces anywhere in a half-mile radius. “It’s a financed jet ski, and his mother co-signed.”
Joss herself has gone to work on the staff.
By eleven she knows which pit boss is sleeping with which cocktail waitress, which whale tips in chips, which one tips in watches, and the full tragic history of the floor manager’s hair plugs.
She reports it all back to us in installments, like a war correspondent.
I’d worry about her, except the staff seem to be enjoying it, the way people enjoy finally being asked.
Crystal, meanwhile, is conducting a seminar.
I lose her for twenty minutes, which with Crystal is a lifetime, and find her at a blackjack table she isn’t even playing at, planted between two enormous men in golf shirts, all three of them laughing like cousins at a wedding.
By the time I extract her she has learned that they’re brothers from Ohio in town for a trade show, that one of them is going through a divorce he probably deserves, and that their mother just got a new hip.
They, in exchange, have learned where all of us work, the story of my knee, which she frames as a tragedy with a happy ending pending, and the fact that she has personally met the owner of this entire casino, who is, quote, intense.
“You can’t tell strangers all our business,” I say, towing her off by the elbow, keeping it light because there’s no other way to carry it.
“They weren’t strangers.” She says it like the obvious thing it is, to her. “They were Mike and Danny.”
That’s the whole of Crystal. There are no strangers.
There never have been. There’s a planet of friends she hasn’t gotten to yet, the line is long, and she’s working through it as fast as one heart can go.
I tuck her under my arm. The watchful thing in me that never fully sleeps puts a small flag on the moment, the way it flags everything lately.
I leave the flag alone. Tonight isn’t for that.
Around midnight she wins four hundred dollars at roulette on her birthday numbers and bursts into tears at the table.
Actual tears, both hands over her mouth, the croupier glancing around for backup.
Twenty minutes later I go looking for her again.
I catch her in the back hall by the restrooms, pressing folded bills into the hands of a cocktail waitress whose mascara has gone south, telling her with total authority that the man wasn’t worth it, that no man who does that is worth it, and that this part is for the babysitter.
The waitress is a stranger. Was. Past tense never survives long around Crystal.
I back out of the hallway before either of them sees me, because if Crystal sees me she’ll explain, and some things are better witnessed than explained.
It’s close to midnight when the floor changes.