door—JANE’S ATTIC. We speculated as to who this Jane might be—a ghostly old woman haunting the gold miner she widowed? A young woman fleeing an arranged marriage?—while we organized our books and filled the recently remodeled bathroom with bottles of shampoo and conditioner and the rest of our toiletries. Finally, I spread my old comforter over the bed, and we sat down on top of it.
“What now?” Gracie asked.
I looked around. There was still a bit more to unpack, but we’d been at it for two hours already. “Well—” I started.
“Let’s go explore!”
Snow was just beginning to fall in thick flurries as we made our way down the hill in the darkness, but once we left the residential section and neared Deadwood’s Main Street, the lights seemed almost as bright as daytime. SILVERADO screamed the sign in front of the first casino we came to, row after row of slot machines visible through the front windows. We turned north onto Lower Main to find what looked to have been a thriving downtown at some point—casinos, restaurants, hotels, boutique clothing stores, and souvenir shops—each trying to look as if they still belonged in the Old West.
But like the brick road they lined, each appeared to be nearly deserted.
Many of the souvenir shops were already closed, but we stared through their windows anyway. It still felt almost criminal to simply wander around with no rules. We could take as much time as we wanted. We could go anywhere we liked. And we needed absolutely no reason at all. The freedom was heady. We kept going, past Pam’s Purple Door, past the Bullock Hotel, Belle Joli winery, Tin Lizzie’s, and the Gem Saloon. We admired the decorative streetlamps wrapped in snow-dusted garlands that lined both sides of the street, and followed their alternating red and green bulbs all the way to the end of the road: the Four Aces.
The entrance opened directly onto a brightly lit gaming floor, with the musical noise of slot machines and tables for blackjack and three-card poker. Aside from a large man slumped in front of a slot machine in the next room, the only people visible were casino employees: a couple of dealers, the bartender, and a maintenance worker. One of the dealers gave me an inordinately long stare, but I averted my gaze and continued on. Grace and I pulled up chairs at the bar and sat down. It was my first time at a bar—Grace had gone with friends a couple of times back in Kansas—but I tried to play it cool and pretend I wasn’t freaked out by the whole experience.
On the other side of the counter, a pretty, thirty-something blonde in a short black skirt, a revealing white button-up, and plenty of eyeliner turned around and gave us a maternal smile. She’d have to check our IDs. I told her that Grace wasn’t twenty-one and I wasn’t drinking, so there was no need. She looked puzzled but smiled and offered us hot chocolate. We sipped it through tiny red and white straws and chatted with her.
“Cora,” she said, extending a hand. “So … what are you girls doing here?”
We explained, giving the least amount of information possible: that we were visiting town for a month, between Grace’s fall and spring semesters. That we didn’t really know anything about the area. And that we had come to read books. Cora’s smile was broad. “Books!” She laughed. She seemed to think we were hilarious, and her voice had a gentle warmth that made me like her immediately. I forgot to be guarded.
It started off innocently enough: Why Deadwood? I told Cora that our eldest brother was a fan of the show on HBO.
“Your eldest brother?” she wondered. “How many siblings do you have?”
“There are eleven of us total,” I answered automatically.
“Eleven! Your family must be religious.”
“Baptist,” I said.
“What kind of Baptist?”
My eyes widened. How had we gotten here so fast?
“Independent,” I dodged.
She nodded sagely. Maybe it was my tone or my expression, or maybe Grace and I were unwittingly giving off a “runaways” vibe, but Cora seemed to intuit that our family’s religion and our presence in Deadwood were not entirely unrelated. She began to tell us about her mother, a woman who had created a religion of her own by cobbling together elements of Judaism and fringe Christian denominations.
“My mother was very ‘book smart,’ and she read a lot about a lot of different religions. She was very strict. She thought she knew better