“Marvelous,” Joseph said. “Hazel would have wanted a girl just like you to wear it. I always wish we had girls in the family, there being so many of those hats, but. . .” He smiled sadly. “I want you to have this. I wish you could have all of them. But I don’t know how you’d store them all—”
“Oh, thank you, Joseph. I love it. So much. It’s. . . it’s the most wonderful present.” Casey hugged the bookstore owner, reaching over his walker, and he hugged her back. His frail body felt small to her, and she wanted to protect him.
The bus came soon after, and they boarded it. Joseph got off first at his stop, and Casey remained until she got to midtown, but she wore the hat on the bus for the rest of the trip, feeling like a queen. As the bus approached her office building, she packed up the hat in its box. Once in the office, she hid the gift beneath her desk.
At the end of the day, Unu came not ten minutes after she phoned him. The old Volvo station wagon whirred as it came to a stop in front of her office building. He was always on time, and it meant a great deal to Casey, who was not very good at waiting. Her overnight bag was in the trunk, and the drive there took less than two hours.
One of the managers, Randy, was a friend of Unu’s from back home. He gave them meal vouchers and handed her some tokens for slot machines.
The complimentary suite was enormous but unattractive. There was a gigantic Jacuzzi tub in the bathroom as well as a shower. “I want to take a bath,” she said, her eyes brightening at the thought of a long soak. She dashed to her bag to find her toiletries. The hotel shampoo and soap weren’t nearly as nice as the things at the Carlyle Hotel. The memory of staying there the night she’d found Jay screwing those girls made her feel funny. It had been four years ago to the month. She hadn’t shared a hotel room with anyone but Jay before.
Casey pulled a towel off the rack and looked behind the door for a bathrobe. The rack fell off the door with a crash.
“Leave it,” he said. “You silly girl. You don’t come to a casino to take a bath. You can take one before going to bed. Let’s go eat. I’m starving,” he said.
The quantity of food at the buffet was obscene: industrial blocks of cheese, punch bowls full of pasta, platters of red meats and cutlets, horn-of-plenty baskets overflowing with breads and pastries. There was a whole wall dedicated to desserts. The diners piled food on their plates and tucked in quickly. Casey was very tired. She was happy to see Unu as excited as a boy, but she was desperate to go upstairs and rest.
“Blackjack, Casey,” he said after their coffee and pie. “Blackjack.” He shifted his shoulders comically.
Casey smiled at him and nodded, but she was thinking about Hazel McReed’s hat, which she’d left in the trunk of the car. The color and shape had made her curious about Hazel.
Unu took care of the check with the meal vouchers and left a twenty-dollar tip. He was raring to go play cards. For him, the casino must have been the way walking through Bayard Toll was for her, she thought—the stimulation, the temptations, its diverting effects. In life there were so many things you couldn’t afford, yet you couldn’t bear to go through it without some hope, and you had to at least visit your wishes periodically. For her, she craved beauty and images of another life, and for Unu, he must’ve fallen under the allure of chance.
The smoking floor was where the better players hung out, Unu explained. But even for a girl with a near two-pack habit, her eyes watered and her throat constricted. Seeing Unu get so excited here disturbed her a little. His physical appearance was markedly different from that of everyone else there—he was tall, youthful, and clean looking. There was no other way to describe him. His skin was so clear, his brown eyes bright with good sleep, and he still wore these prep-school clothes—not much different from the things he’d worn as a boy in private school. All he needed was a blue blazer, and he’d become the nice fraternity brother he’d been at Dartmouth. This was Casey’s first time at a casino, and naively, she’d expected something glamorous, like in a gangster movie; instead, the floor was crowded with the beaten faces of paunchy old men, drawn women with marionette lines edging their mouths. There was an obvious sadness about the people there, and if she weren’t with her boyfriend, she would’ve turned around and walked away.
Blackjack sounded like a simple enough game—the object was to accumulate cards with point totals near twenty-one or twenty-one itself. You were bust if you went over twenty-one. Face cards were worth ten points, and aces were worth either one or eleven points. But soon enough, Casey saw there were greater complexities and jargon that would take some schooling, and she was neither alert enough nor sufficiently interested to follow what Unu was teaching.