The Tryout

The young man who was going to decide whether to hire her looked about the age of Diane Kellerman’s youngest nephew, and he asked her to deal him a few hands so he could watch her mechanics, and Diane said of course and squared the cards and thought, thirty-one years, and I am auditioning. They were at a dead table on the edge of the pit at the Atlantis, out south by the convention center, the carpet newer and quieter under her feet than any carpet she had stood on in her life, and the young shift manager pulled up a chair across the felt where a player would sit and folded his hands and said, whenever you’re ready.

She was fifty-five. She had dealt her first hand of blackjack in the winter of nineteen eighty-eight at a downtown club that no longer existed, had moved up the street to the Silver Legacy the year it opened in ninety-five, and had stayed on that floor through everything, through the good years when the buses came in from California all weekend and the tokes were fat, and through the long slow years after, when the buses stopped coming because California had built its own casinos an hour from home and a person no longer had to drive over the mountain to lose a paycheck. She had watched the downtown go quiet around her a house at a time. She had watched them string the three big properties at the north end of Virginia together under one owner, the Eldorado and the Legacy and the Circus, all of it one company now with one name she still could not make herself use, and she had told herself for four years that it did not touch her, that the felt was the felt, that a good dealer was a good dealer wherever the cards fell. And then her hours had started getting cut, and the day shift had thinned, and she had done the arithmetic on her rent and understood that the money in this town had gotten up and moved south while she was not looking, out here to the resorts by the convention center and east to the big one by the freeway, where the rooms were full and the tables stayed open and a woman her age still had to sit down across from a boy and prove she could pitch a card.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he said again, kindly, which was worse.

She dealt. Her hands did the thing they had done a hundred thousand times, the cards coming off the shoe clean and flat and skidding to a stop just short of his chips, and she paid an imaginary bet and took an imaginary one and cut a stack of greens and dropped them down in a neat falling ladder without looking, and she watched him watch her, and she could not read his face, which meant he was decent at his job. The younger ones learned the mechanics in six weeks at a dealing school and could pitch a card as pretty as anybody. What they could not do yet, what only the years gave you, was run a full table of strangers and keep the game moving and keep the count in your head and never once let the table feel hurried, and she wondered whether that was worth anything anymore, whether a house this size even wanted it, or whether it wanted only clean hands and a low wage and a smile that did not cost the company a pension.

Her family had been standing behind Reno bars and tables since before there was a decent road out of it. Old Otto Kellerman had opened a saloon on Virginia Street in eighteen seventy-one, four years after the town had a name, and his son Frank had kept it running all through Prohibition by calling it a soft drink parlor and serving whatever a man asked for in a coffee cup, and Frank’s girl Helen had dealt and cocktailed at the Mapes the year it opened, up on the corner by the river, the finest hotel in the state at the time, ten stories with a sky room on top. They had blown the Mapes up when Diane was thirty-six. She had stood in the crowd on the far bank in the cold January morning it came down and watched the whole tall shape of it drop into its own dust in about six seconds, the place her grandmother had been proud to work, and she remembered thinking even then, before she had any of the words for it, that a town could throw away the very thing it used to be and go on standing there like nothing had happened.

“You’ve got beautiful hands,” the young man said. “How long downtown?”

“Long,” Diane said.

He nodded and did not ask why she was leaving, because he knew, because everybody in the business knew, because he had probably interviewed a dozen of her that year, downtown people coming south with thirty years on them and their hours cut to nothing, sitting where she sat. He asked her instead to deal a shoe as if the table were full, six spots, and to talk to the empty chairs while she did it, the way she would to a live table, and Diane felt something in her go tired and stubborn at the same time, and she thought, all right, and she filled the six spots in her mind with the faces she had dealt to for thirty years, the regulars and the tourists and the drunks and the sweet lonely ones who came to a table just to be talked to, and she dealt to them and told them to be good to their sixteens and welcomed a new one to the game and told a man who was not there that the count did not care what he had done last hand, and she paid them and took from them and moved around the layout in the old unhurried rhythm, and for a minute she forgot the boy entirely and it was just her and the cards and the people who were not there.

When she looked up he had stopped writing on his little pad.

“We run the tokes as one pool, all the dealers, split by hours,” he said. “It’s a good house. People are decent. It’s a drive for you, out here, from wherever you are.”

“I’ll drive,” Diane said.

He tapped his pen twice against the pad, looking at her, and she could not tell if the tapping meant yes or meant he was letting her down easy, and she did not ask, because you did not ask, because the one thing thirty-one years had taught her past everything else was that you dealt the hand you were given and you kept your face still and you waited to be told, and so she gathered the cards in and squared the deck and set it down on the green between them, and looked back at him, and waited to see what he would say.

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