When she didn’t have a mark on the line, she would hang out at casinos, working the card tables and waiting for opportunity to present itself. Sometimes my mother would dress me up in my fanciest outfit—blue velvet, pink taffeta, itchy yellow lace, bought on sale at Ross Dress for Less—and take me to the glitzy palaces where she plied her trade. She’d deposit me in the casino’s nicest restaurant with a fat book and a ten-dollar bill; the waitresses would coddle me with bar nuts and fizzy orange drinks while my mother cruised the floor. If it was a quiet night, my mother would take me around with her and show me how to slip a billfold out of a jacket pocket, hook a wallet from a purse on the back of a chair. Imparting little lessons along the way: A bulging back pocket is a better bet than an open purse. Men link their egos to the size of their billfold, while women find cash too bulky. Or: Don’t be impulsive. Always look for opportunity, but don’t act on it until you’ve thought three steps ahead.
“It’s not big money,” she’d whisper as she rifled through a money clip in a casino bathroom, “but enough to cover a car payment. So, not bad, right?”
It all seemed so normal to me when I was young. This was just my mother’s job. Other people’s parents cleaned houses or scraped plaque off teeth or sat in offices typing at computers; my mother went to casinos and took money from strangers. And really what she did was no different from what the casino owners did; or, at least, that’s what she told me. “The world can be divided into two kinds of people: those who wait to have things given to them and those who take what they want.” She would hug me close, her false eyelashes brushing my forehead, the scent of her skin like honey. “I know better than to wait.”
My world was my mother, her body the only home I’d ever known. It was the one place where I always belonged, in a world in which everything else was permanently in flux; where “friends” were girls you left behind, a name on a spindled pen pal postcard. I don’t blame her, even now, for my misfit childhood. We moved so often not because she wasn’t trying to be a good mom but because she was trying too hard. She always believed that the next stop would be better, for her and for me. That’s why we didn’t speak to her parents, that’s why we left my father behind: because she was protecting me.
As an adolescent, I skated through school by making myself invisible—always sitting in the back of the classroom, reading a novel that I’d sandwich between the pages of my textbooks. I was overweight, rainbow-haired, and dressed in aggressively emo ensembles that deterred potential friends and staved off the disappointment of their ultimate rejection. I made perfectly mediocre grades that were neither bad enough for anyone in charge to flag my existence, nor good enough to be singled out for special attention. But by my freshman year at a goliath, cracked-concrete high school in Las Vegas, an English teacher finally noted my “missed potential” and called my mother in for a conference. And suddenly I was being sent in for mysterious tests, the results of which my mother wouldn’t show me, but they made her walk around our apartment with her lips pressed into a thin line of determination. Pamphlets began piling up on the counters; my mother pressing stamps onto fat envelopes with triumphant gusto. A new Future was being planned for me.
One spring night toward the end of freshman year, my mother slipped into my bedroom just before lights-out. She perched on the edge of my bed in her cocktail dress, gently pried the book I was reading out of my hands, and began a speech in her soft, whispery voice: “Nina, baby, it’s time we started really focusing on your future.”
I laughed. “You mean, like, do I want to be an astronaut or a ballerina when I grow up?” I grabbed for my book.
My mother held the book out of reach. “I’m dead serious, Nina Ross. You are not going