The Leavers(75)

“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.

At home we slept facing opposite sides of the bed, exchanging the occasional peck on the cheek. It had been months since we’d had sex, and instead of frustration I felt nothing and wanted nothing, like I had outgrown that part of me. Only rarely did I think of how it had been when I had first moved in with Leon. When you and Michael were at school and Vivian took a shower, we used to run into the bedroom. Standing up, palms hard against the wall, Leon’s hand over my lips, his fingers crammed into my mouth. But ever since I saw Qing, I’d been noticing hot men on the subway, on the street.

In the hotel room, upstairs from the casino, I flopped across the bed and called the apartment. You answered.

“What are you doing?”

“Watching TV.”

“Be good and listen to Vivian. I’ll be home tomorrow and have something for you.”

You answered in English. “A present? I love presents.”

“I know you do.”

Buzzed, liquored, I folded myself into the blankets and floated on visions of my hair pulled up in an elaborate froth of curls like Didi’s, Leon in a suit and tie. The money he was winning could pay off my debt and pay for a wedding banquet, one bigger than Didi and Quan’s.

Didi was taking English classes at a school in Midtown. She told me how good the teachers were, how much she was learning. Her teacher had published a newsletter with his top students’ essays, and she brought a white pamphlet to the salon and pointed to an article on the front. “Look, I’m a published author.” All the nail techs had gathered around as she read the article out loud, a paragraph about how she and Quan had visited her sister in Boston. Didi had used the wrong word in one sentence, “wake” when she meant “woke,” but there were so many other words I didn’t recognize.

I was being left behind. I saw Leon injured, unable to work, eating chips in an undershirt like Rocky’s husband, while I worked longer shifts to pay his doctor’s bills. I rolled from one end of the giant bed to the other, then off the bed and onto the floor, spooning myself against the legs of a chair. I raised myself up, grabbed my jacket, and stumbled out to the boardwalk. As I walked away from the hotel, the wooden slats squeaked beneath my feet.