Page 40 of A Midlife Gamble

‘Go a little higher?’ Tony shrugged. ‘We seem to be lucky. You and I.’

She looked across the room, back to the table where she’d first found him. Twenty-five dollars a hand.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ Tony said. ‘We’ll play two hands there. That’s all. And if we lose both then you’re only back to where you started. More or less.’

‘That’s true,’ Kay murmured. If she lost both hands, she would only be five dollars down from where she’d begun, however long ago. And for the sheer enjoyment of the time she’d spent playing, she would have paid a lot more than five dollars. How much had it cost to go on the High Roller? Or take a gondola ride? It was, she decided, money well spent. And the relief of that conclusion had her pushing her stool back and standing up. Gambling with real money was a heck of a lot more exciting than gambling with matchsticks. ‘Ok,’ she said, as much to herself, as to Tony. ‘Colour me up!’ she said to the dealer.

Emma flicked her fingers in Kay's direction. ‘Look at you,’ she cackled. ‘Got the lingo down pat.’

And now she laughed. She was in Vegas! Asking a dealer to colour her up! Playing cards at third base and winning! For the first time in a long, long time, she was winning at something! ‘It was lovely meeting you ladies,’ she said as she turned to go. ‘Maybe see you again?’

‘Oh sure,’ Emma rasped. ‘We’re here pretty much all the time.’

‘Almost as much as Tony,’ Joanne muttered.

But Kay didn’t hear. She was already onto higher stakes, where the winning continued.

One bad hand and then three winning hands in a row and she was looking at just short of two hundred and fifty dollars in chips, stacked up in front of her. Tony had kept on winning too. And together they were like a couple of naughty kids. She saw him glance down at his phone a couple of times and although she guessed it was Marianne, any feelings of guilt she might have had at keeping him at the table were easy to bury, spiralling away and thinning out like a smoker’s exhale. This was her trip, she reasoned, her time, and she might never be here again.

For the third time since she’d started playing, she was dealt a matching pair. Again she split her bet and in a moment the like of which Kay had never experienced before, she took four green chips and placed two above each of her cards. Now she was in for a hundred dollars! So what! It was the most unrealistic hundred dollars that had ever passed through her hands. Hard plastic discs that could just as easily have belonged to theConnect 4she’d spent hours and hours playing with Alex when he was a child. She hadn’t had it ten minutes ago, this hundred dollars, so it hardly seemed to matter if she would have it in another ten.

But she did. The chips came back to her double-fold, because the dealer dealt her a king and a seven and then dealt himself twenty-six. So now she was four hundred and fifty dollars up, from a fifty-dollar start. She stared at the little stack in front of her. Doubling up on the next hand, pushing another hundred in, she’d be looking at six hundred and…

And then Tony stood up and put his hand on her shoulder.

Startled, she looked at him.

‘We’re a good team, aren’t we?’

‘We are,’ Kay laughed. Tony had won as well. An awful lot from what she could see, but he was betting larger amounts and she couldn’t quite see, because he’d pushed his stack to the dealer.

‘Remember what I said when you were watching a couple of days ago? Quit while you’re ahead, Kay.Always.’ And he nodded at her stack of chips.

‘Of course, of course.’ And although she didn’t want to, she knew he was right. She stood up, bubbles of excitement forming. Four hundred and fifty dollars! She couldn’t wait to tell Alex. And Helen and Caro. She could buy a bottle of champagne for Caro… If Caro was going to accept Shook’s proposal, she would buy champagne… And then she remembered… She looked down at her chips, and juggled them from one hand to the other. Helen would need to come back from wherever it was she’d gone. And even then, if she bought the champagne, what would they all do? Drink it in silence?

‘Five hundred dollars!’Kay said again, her face animated.

Helen smiled as she turned to look out of the window. There wasn’t much about the way they were travelling to Tony’s ranch that felt cowboy-like to her, but she didn’t mind. The windows of the SUV were tinted, the seats a polished leather and the air, thank goodness, deliciously cool. She was far enough away from Caro, who sat the other side of Kay, for the rope of tension between them to have taken slack. Much of which had to do with Kay’s win. Five hundred dollars was a lovely amount. Helen’s heart swelled. Kay was delighted, and in return, Helen was delighted for her. And the timing couldn’t have been better. Like a tablecloth shaken in the air, Kay’s good fortune had swept away the crumbs of tension from earlier, her buoyancy infectious. It was, in fact, keeping the day afloat. So much so that Helen had been able to pass off her earlier behaviour with the excuse of a headache, the sudden need to get some fresh air and stretch her legs after the stuffy close-up experience of Tussauds. It hadn’t even mattered that no one except Tony had believed her. The excuse was sufficient in itself. Like a ladder thrown across a crevasse, it was the only way to keep going on a path none of them could turn back from. Everyone had grabbed it. Turning back, she patted Kay’s knee. ‘Don’t get addicted now.’

‘Oh,’ Kay laughed. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Good. Dinner’s on you then!’

Through the rear-view mirror, Tony looked back at them. ‘Not tonight. Tonight Lula is cooking up steak and baked potato, BBQ beans and homemade coleslaw.’

And despite everything, Helen’s stomach gave a low growl. When was she going to stop eating?

‘Lula?’ Marianne asked.

‘The housekeeper,’ Tony answered.

‘He must be absolutely loaded,’ Helen whispered.

Kay nodded. ‘And he just won a lot more than I did.’

Helen nodded, lifting her chin as she looked at the back of Tony’s head. Her eyes slid across to Marianne, sitting up front beside him. She wasn’t sure if she was amused by this unlikely relationship, or envious of it. Unable to decide and unwilling to give it a moment’s more thought, she leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes. A respite from the overload of Vegas was exactly what she needed. Rushing out like that, into the heat of the sidewalk, the sounds and the smells and the constant movement of people, she’d felt disorientated, her senses muffled, as if the city itself were underwater and the real world out of reach. She was looking forward to getting to the ranch.It’s complicated,Caro had said. At which point, Helen had felt as if she had two stark choices. Stay and confront Caro. Or leave. But, weakened as she had been by the threat of confrontation with Caro, Vegas had engulfed her. Other people’s elbows nudging, other people’s hair touching, their smell, their voices. And there had been nowhere to retreat to.

She’d crossed the boulevard to find herself in the entrance of an indoor shopping centre, a tall area, flooded with natural light and brimming with greenery, where vines climbed twenty feet upward and lavish hibiscus flowers grew in abundance. An unexpected oasis that had allowed her the respite to sit, and breathe, to study closely the tiny browned edge of the hibiscus flower close to her hand.

---