Bright Shards of Someplace Else Read Free Page A

to see if you can get the interest charges off the debt.”
    â€œWho do you owe?”
    â€œI owe some money to Firekeeper’s Casino. I have a credit card with them. I lost some money playing slots. I think there was something wrong with the machines that day, or something. Usually I can just watch the lights and the fruit and get a payout pretty regularly. I have a system. This one night the same two bananas and a cherry kept coming up. Maybe you could say there was a glitch.”
    She was lying about the banana and cherry thing, but not about her system. Typically she did get a payout, although she had to admit that her system usually involved simply getting blitzed and pulling from a five-gallon bucket full of tokens at her feet. The servers and staff would all whistle when she came in with the bucket, and the other gamblers—those who were tourists and not locals, so to speak—might turn and look at her like she was something more real, in that context, than they were. The rest of the herd didn’t look up.To her credit, the bucket was never actually full. She filled the bottom with several hotel-bar-sized bottles of wine and liquor, covered them with a tin pie plate, then topped it off with tokens. She wasn’t about to blow her money on the house’s pricey drinks, so all night she would feed the slots and surreptitiously fill up her red plastic cup. She’d watch the fruit and the lights and get to feeling that she was decoding a language every time she pulled the handle. When the payout came, it was like she’d been speaking pidgin to an uncomprehending foreigner and had suddenly achieved fluency. The dings and bells told her she had made herself understood.
    â€œI don’t think that would work,” the boy said. “And why were you gambling so much? The odds of those machines are, like, really bad.”
    Grace had to expect some judgment, she figured. She had lost thousands over the years. She had little left for legal fees and nothing left of her mother’s inheritance. She wasn’t above prostrating herself in front of the boy, if that’s what it took to get the job done.
    â€œWhat can I say? I’m stupid. I mean, you get a payout so you keep playing. Sometimes I don’t know when to fold ’em, as they say. But there are people a lot worse off than I am.”
    â€œJust because people are worse off doesn’t mean you aren’t bad.” He seemed to consider his own words. “I guess I should say ‘no offense.’ So, no offense.”
    â€œNone taken. Hey, we all make mistakes. I’m sure you get in fights with your little friends or steal their crayons sometimes.” She sucked down the last of her drink, then picked the now-tiny ice cubes from her cup and pressed them into the dirt of a potted plant on the side table.
    â€œI don’t get in fights with friends because there are none to fight. And I don’t use crayons. Colored pencils give a lot better control.”
    Should she latch onto the friend comment and try to find some deeper emotional ground with the boy? Or was it best to just roll on past? The house and the mother told the story: this unusual, cloistered boy no doubt lived a solitary life, too precocious for his peersand too young for any adults to take seriously. She could tell him that she, too, considered herself an outsider, with few allies in the world and even fewer friends. But why draw attention to that? Better to just give him the phone. The call would offer him an escape from his circumscribed life as a boy-genius; that was better than the two of them moaning about loneliness. She ruffled his hair with awkward affection; her hands, wet with ice, got nicely dry in his blond mop.
    â€œI hear you. I’m a colored pencil girl, all the way. Try drawing an eyeball with a crayon! Ready?”
    The boy nodded, and again she laid out the relevant information. Grace jumped up from the couch as he