“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.
I know he’s down here before I see him, because the noise dips the way it only dips for one man in this building. He comes through the tables in charcoal, no tie, and I watch my friends spot him one at a time. Joss straightens. Stevie grabs Joss. Promise doesn’t move at all, she just shifts her weight, putting half an inch more of herself between him and the girls. Crystal waves. Big, whole-arm, unembarrassed. The owner of the most dangerous floor in Nevada gets waved at like a ship coming in, and something at the corner of his mouth comes very close to surrender.
“Ladies,” he says, arriving. “I trust the house is behaving.”
“The house keeps giving us things,” Promise says, level, looking at him the way she looks at men who tip too big too early.
“The house can afford it. Your friend overpaid for years.” He says it mild, like he’s reporting the time. “I’m settling arrears.”
He stays four minutes. I time it by feel. He has something for each of them, the right something. Lacey’s possessed slot machine will be looked at. Stevie’s ice bucket is pronounced a sound investment. Joss asks, on behalf of journalism, whether he has any single friends, which he fields with a face that never moves while his eyes go bright in a way I’d call laughing on a normal man. Crystal he listens to. The whole report, Mike, Danny, the divorce, the hip, the trade show, and he takes it in gravely, like field intelligence.
“You should know she cried in the elevator,” Crystal adds, jerking a thumb at me.
“I did not cry.”
“Her eyes got shiny. I have witnesses.”
