“Um, Wren?” he exclaimed suddenly. One of his numbers was a match.
“What, what is it? Did we win?”
He looked back and forth, his number, 17, and the winning number at the top, also 17. He didn’t trust his eyes, was probably just a little overexcited. It couldn’t be right. But no, sure enough, his card was a winner.
“We won!” he shouted.
“We won!” Wren echoed.
“We won!” they said in unison.
“We won five hundred bucks!”
Wren’s face fell a bit. “Oh,” she said. “That’s it?”
“Wren.” Arthur grabbed her shoulders, held her like he was giving her an urgent, dying message. “This is huge.”
Now he was getting legitimately excited.
“I guess, yeah,” she mumbled.
“Five hundred dollars is a lot of money.”
“But it doesn’t make you wealthy,” she pointed out. “It’s barely a run to the grocery store.” Not the way she did it, mindlessly swiping random items off the shelves and into the cart if they were shiny and interesting, like a bored cat. It was plenty if you shopped the sales. But that was beside the point right now.
“No. But we can save this. If we put it away in our investment account and stay patient, in thirty years this five hundred dollars could be worth…” There was a twinkle of adrenaline in Wren’s eyes as she imagined the end results of Arthur’s quick mental math. “Nine thousand dollars!”
“OH MY GOD!” she yelled. Arthur could immediately sense the dripping sarcasm as she slipped into an overexcited Valley girl accent. “Nine thousand dollars! And we only have to wait thirty years? Why didn’t you say so?! Oh my freaking God!”
“OK, I get it. You’re not psyched.”
“No, I’m not psyched! Nine thousand dollars will barely buy us cat food in thirty years.”
“I don’t understand. Are we getting a cat?” Multiple cats?
“No, we’ll be living off it ourselves at this rate. Come on! Where’s your ambition, Arthur? Where’s your sense of adventure? Why are you settling?”
He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to not see this as a huge win. Wren hadn’t grown up with a lot of money, he knew that, so he couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t be over the moon about anything that could help them give their baby some of the things that she never had.
“Being with you when I’m eighty. That’s the adventure, that’s what I want more than anything,” he said quietly. “I know it’s not always sexy and exciting, but we have to put in the work now to get there.”
“I know,” she said. “But even if we do everything right, nothing is guaranteed, is it? I don’t know where I’ll be, orifI’ll be, in thirty years. What I know is I’m here with you right now, and I want to make this life worth living.”
It sounded romantic and incredible when she said it. Heartbreaking, too, remembering that her parents had been ripped away from her far too young. She didn’t grow up with a good picture of two people who had worked hard to build their future together and lived to see it through. Her uncle did his best, but he was a sad and distant man. Everyone else rotated in and out of her life, much too focused on their own problems to be anything resembling a role model.
“OK, so what…” he said. “What do we do with our winnings?”
“We turn it into more.”
“More lotto tickets? I don’t think so. We got lucky once. I’ll be physically sick if we blow this trying to capture lightning in a bottle again.”
“Come on.” She nudged him. “Think bigger.”
He did. And there was only one place he knew where you could quickly turn money into more money, or, far more likely, lose it all in an instant.
It was sunset by the time they reached their destination: a hulking beige building illuminated by golden lighting. The sky behind it was pink and purple, Ravens purple, Wren pointed out, and the name on the side of the structure read simply:Horseshoe.
Yes, they had arrived at Baltimore’s one and only casino. A glitzing money grab near M&T Bank Stadium that was supposed to revitalize the entire neighborhood, creating a vibrant arts and entertainment district, not to mention pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the public school system. Arthur had not seen evidence of any of this actually happening, but he did see an abandoned structure in the near distance covered in graffiti, and an intoxicated woman hurling her guts up just a few feet shy of a trash can.
