Lakewood - Megan Giddings Page 0,1

grandma. But it was also exhausting to have so many people looking into her face, looking at the parts of it and trying to find Miss Toni.

A waitress carrying a tray squeezed in among them and cleared her throat. “Courtesy of Miss Toni.” She passed two Dark & Stormys to Lena and Deziree. The waitress paused, her face crumpled, and she fled.

“Was she at the funeral?” Lena asked.

“Maybe? In the back?” Deziree held her Dark & Stormy up, clinked it against Lena’s. “Cheers.”

The women stayed around them, chitchatting about how Toni had done such a great job raising them both, as if Deziree wasn’t going to turn 43 that year. Lena turned back to Deziree’s screen: She was up 65 dollars now.

“I’ll be right back,” Lena said. She walked to the nearest bathroom, taking her drink with her. She sat in the stall farthest from the door. Took the deepest breath she could, then let it out slowly. Contorted her face into different expressions—happy, anguished, I’m-going-to-get-you-bitch—and took a long drink. There were two extra lime slices in it like her grandmother always ordered. How many Dark & Stormys do I have to have, she wondered, to feel like you’re here with us? A song about being so in desire with someone you felt like you had burst into flames was leaking through the speakers in the ceiling.

“Lena?” her mother said.

She finished her drink, set the glass on the floor, and went out to Deziree.

“Everything okay?” Lena asked. The mirror gave a full view of the back of her mother’s head. It looked as if she had been pulling on her hair. Her black bra straps poked out. Her eyes were bloodshot, her fingers trembling. It was hard to tell whether it was because of the poor bathroom lighting or because of illness, but Deziree’s skin was now sallow.

“We can go home,” Lena said. She smoothed her mother’s hair, adjusted the straps back into place. Watched her hands and mouth for tremors. They were still. Deziree’s dark lipstick was smudged, but still looked pretty good.

“I lost it all,” Deziree said. They paused for a moment, and laughed.

Lena coughed when she was finished. She couldn’t help asking, “You took your medicine today, right?”

“I wouldn’t have been able to do anything today without it.”

They left the bathroom and headed to Miss Toni’s favorite blackjack dealer. When he noticed them, he signaled a waitress, who brought over two more Dark & Stormys. “May you have Toni’s luck tonight,” he said. Then, with a laugh, “Please don’t have her luck. I need a job.”

They smiled at each other, then did what they always did. Snapped their fingers for luck and clasped hands. One of the first things Lena could remember was her grandma teaching her blackjack. The game’s rules, but also things like remembering—as with most individual sports—that it was also a game you mostly played against yourself. You had to be confident, engaged, patient. Don’t allow yourself to be polluted by the dealer’s silence or the chitchat of the people around you.

Lena leaned forward a little. Focused on counting, paying attention to everyone’s cards, watching the dealer’s hands and eyes, looking for tells. She sipped her drink slowly, at a rate fast enough to make her feet ache a little less, but not enough to feel too bold. And when she hit blackjack for the first time, she automatically turned to the right, where her grandmother might be, before quickly turning and squeezing Deziree’s hands with delight.

An hour later and two hundred dollars richer—an amount Miss Toni would have called “fine”—they shimmied and danced their way over to the buffet to eat blueberry-bacon gelato and lobster and scrambled eggs. As they waited to get served coffee, Deziree kept putting one hand over her forehead and rubbing the spot between her eyebrows. “Don’t worry,” she kept saying.

Deziree sagged down, her head and forearms resting on the table. She didn’t notice the purple gelato drip pattern that she was creating on the front of her dress.

Lena asked the waitress for a double Americano.

“She drunk?” the waitress asked. She was young, probably a college student. Hair dyed purple, a nose ring. She had also been at the funeral, Lena realized.

“Nah. She good.”

“This is the best I’ve felt in days.” Deziree was crumpling into illness, grief, exhaustion. Her voice came out slurred.

“She gonna need a chair?”

Lena took off her own left shoe beneath the table and rubbed her toes hard. “We’ll be out of here in ten, I