The Casino Sign My Mother Read

The buffet

I drove us the twenty minutes to Tunica.

I want to be careful how I tell this, because it is easy to make a casino sound like something it is not. It is not glamorous. It is a big building out in the soybean fields with a parking lot the size of a county, and inside it is carpet and noise and old folks with paper cups, and it smells like cold air and fried food, and most of the people in there are exactly our kind of people spending money they counted twice.

But the steak buffet is honestly good and it is cheap, and that is why I picked it, and that is only part of why I picked it.

I picked it because Greg lost my land money in that building. I wanted to walk my mother in there on her brand new eyes and buy her a fourteen dollar steak with the receipt from his machine, and I wanted to walk back out, and I wanted that building to have given something back to this family for once instead of only taking.

I did not tell her any of that. I just drove.

She did not know this was the place. She had never been. She has never gambled a day in her life. To her it was only a big lit-up building growing out of the dark, getting bigger as we came up the long entrance road, and she sat forward against her seat belt looking at it.

The sign

The marquee sign is the first thing you see. It stands out at the edge of the lot on a tall pole, taller than the building, a giant lit board that scrolls through the specials and the shows and the jackpot numbers in letters six feet high, red and gold and white, bright enough to read from a mile off across those flat fields.

I pulled into the lot and I was looking for a space, and I was not even paying attention to her, and that is why it caught me the way it did.

My mother read the sign out loud.

“Prime rib Thursday,” she read. Slow. Careful. The way you read when you are not sure your mouth remembers how. “Nine ninety-nine. Players club members. Gospel brunch Sunday. Doors at ten.”

I stopped the car in the middle of the lane.

She did not notice she was doing it. That is the thing I will carry to my own grave. She was not performing it for me. She had just seen words, big bright words up in the dark, and her mouth had done the thing it used to do without asking her, the thing it had not done in two years. She read them out loud the way she used to read me the prairie books at the kitchen table, in the voice that did all the people.

“Keep going,” I said. My own voice came out wrong.

“Big winner. Every. Hour.” She laughed a little. “Live music Fridays and Saturdays. Steak. Seafood.” She turned and looked at me, and her eyes in the light off that sign were wet and enormous and brand new and they found my face in the dark with no trouble at all. “I’m reading, Dana. I’m reading the sign. Out loud. I’m just reading it.”