For days after seeing the woman who might have been Qing, I slept poorly. Eight-hour shifts at the nail salon seeped by in a haze, and Leon only registered at the periphery of my vision. To your delight, I heated up frozen pizza for dinner. You asked if you could have money to buy bootleg DVDs from the lady who sold them in the Colombian restaurant and I handed the cash over without a word. When I came home from work to find you and Michael and Vivian engrossed in a movie about a man blowing up people with a machine gun, I went into the bedroom and shut the door. It was too much effort to protest. Soon it would be winter again.
I sat at the window, looking down at the block, the darkening sky filling me with a strange terror. I saw a man with a cane making his way across the street, Mrs. Johnson walking arm in arm up the hill with her daughter, the two women talking close to each other. I went into the living room and joined you in front of the TV.
THE BUS TO ATLANTIC CITY smelled like feet, its upholstery dusty, faded into uniform shades of beige and brown, and its seats were at capacity, rows of heads protruding from ski jackets, topped with baggy knit hats in primary colors. Leon and I sat in the back, half the age of the other riders, eating pork buns from a bag emblazoned with a yellow happy face. The bus emerged from a tunnel onto a garble of highways. The high-rises flattened and spread into parking lots and concrete dividers, dim and gray in the winter light. Only the signs were bright green, the names of New Jersey towns I read aloud to myself: Hacken Sack. Pah Ramus. Old people snored against the windows, some coughing and hacking and rattling, as if they were running low on batteries. My sneakers produced kissing noises as they moved against the floor. I took the last pork bun, sinking my teeth into the sweet, spongy dough.
Atlantic City was a gift from Quan, who’d bled so much money at the casinos they gave him vouchers for free hotel rooms, dinners, drinks. Didi had accompanied him in the past, but this time gave a voucher to me and Leon, though we weren’t gamblers. “You need the time away more than I do,” she said. “It’s a pre-wedding gift.” Besides, Quan had quit gambling. Now he was attending weekly meetings for people who gambled too much.
So Leon and I checked into Caesars for free, a carpet-padded casino of ringing noises and lights. We bought a bottle of Hennessy and drank too much, which gave me a headache. Yet the freshness of being out of the city, even in this too-bright room that felt like the oxygen had been sucked out and run through a machine and pumped back in, made me reach for more Hennessy. Two shots, slammed fast, and the heaviness receded. Four shots and Leon was reshaped into the man he had been when I first met him, a prize I had wanted to win, whose attention was sudden, precarious, instead of this man whose aging sometimes took me by surprise, like when he was putting money on his card at the subway station and I noticed how his body was stiffer, his neck thinner, the skin around his throat loosening. There were days his arms hurt so much he couldn’t work. And I was different, too, though I lived in the same body that had once slept with Haifeng, been packed into a box, delivered a baby, craved Leon so much its hands shook. A body changed in increments, and while this shifting seemed slow, it was unstoppable. The flesh got weightier, the skin coarser. Hairs in places they hadn’t been before. But it was the same body, even if there was no visible sign of its past. Like muscle memory, a body could recall things on a hidden, cellular level.
“What happened to the moving company?” I asked Leon, and he said Santiago had changed his mind.
“He’s going into landscaping now. He says there will be a job for me there. So I’m going to work in landscaping.”
Leon’s optimism was ridiculous, even harmful. “But does he have a plan?” I doubted he would ever work for Santiago. “Is he taking out a loan? Does he have a business partner?”
“Oh, Santiago is Santiago. He’ll figure it out.”
I was irritated at Santiago, at Leon, even at Rocky. Nearly six months had passed since I had gone to her house, but when I asked how the visit to the space for rent in Riverdale had gone, she chirped, “We’ll see!” I was still a nail tech, still working for the same lousy tips.
At the lower-limit blackjack table, tugging choppy pieces of hair around my ears, I tried to remember the rules. Twenty-one was bust. Dealer stood on seventeen. Coming straight from work, I hadn’t had a chance to wire my pay to the loan shark, and my payday cash was inside the pocket of my denim jacket. I parted with a crumpled twenty-dollar bill, the dealer delivered an ace and a five, and I signaled for a hit. The dealer gave me a four, totaling nineteen, and stood at eighteen.
“Look, I won.”
“Let’s win more,” Leon said, and we wandered to Palace East, where the old people from the bus pressed hungrily on slot machines. Fueled by Hennessy, Leon bet big, and when we won at blackjack, we moved on to poker. The couple across the table was pointy and pale, the woman’s low-cut dress displaying cleavage dotted with sunspots, bisected by a large diamond dangling from a chain. Leon gave the dealer so many chips I had to look away.
When I looked back at the table, the couple’s faces were pinched and the dealer was pushing the pile toward us.
“Three of a kind,” Leon said.
“Yes!”
We jumped up and down.
“It’s a game,” I said. “It’s all a game.”
He thought I was talking about cards.
“No, no, nonono.” It wasn’t real money. Nothing was real. Twenty could become two hundred in a minute. I wanted to hear the bells go off on the slot machines, see the walls fill with the reflections of flashing lights. I wanted, badly, to win.
We drifted out to a hallway, the carpet so fluffy I wanted to rub my face across the fibers. No one else was around. “I mean, us. Me. Leon!” I grabbed his arm. “We’re living in a game.” Not only the card tables and slot machines, but our lives. We lived as if we were still villagers, forbidden from changing jobs or moving to a new place, but all this time, we could have been playing and winning.
He poked my nose with his finger. The lines around his mouth deepened. “You’re drunk, Little Star.”
He flashed that gap between his front teeth, I nibbled his earlobe and the floor swayed. I had forgotten how much I loved him. How could I have forgotten, why was I so serious, what was there to worry about? I would marry him. He was more than enough.
He steadied my shoulders. “You should go lie down.”
“Aren’t you going to come with me?”
Leon looked at the money in his hands.
“Okay, go play.” I took the skin on the back of his elbow and twisted it. “But come to the room soon so you can be with me.”
“Yow,” he said, jumping a little.
I squeezed his butt. “Hurry.”
He moved down the hall away from me, walking backwards, blowing smacky kisses.