Virginia Street at 3am

Cass locked the grate over the bar’s front window a little after three in the morning and started the walk home the way she did five nights a week, south down Virginia Street away from the lights, and she had gone half a block before she noticed that her ears were ringing in the particular way they did after a good night, a full night, and that the street around her was almost perfectly quiet, and that both of those things were true at once was the whole strange shape of the town she had landed in without meaning to.

She was twenty-four. She had come to Reno two years back for no better reason than that a friend had a couch and the rent was nothing, and she had gotten a job pouring drinks at a place on the south end of the street that had not existed three years before she got there, a narrow room with a mural on one wall and cocktails that took real time to make, and she had stayed because the work was good and because the town, once you were inside it, turned out to be smaller and warmer than it looked from the highway. On a Saturday now the bar was three deep until last call. People her age, mostly. People who had not come here to gamble.

That was the thing she was still learning to read as she walked, the two Renos laid end to end along this one street. Behind her, north, past the river, downtown stood the way it had stood for eighty years, the casinos throwing their light up into the sky whether anyone was under it or not, and over it all the arch spanning the street with its thousands of bulbs still burning red and gold at three in the morning, THE BIGGEST LITTLE CITY IN THE WORLD, promising a party to a street that mostly did not have one going anymore. She had walked under it her first week in town and felt the pull of the old promise, the neon and the round-the-clock churn of it, and then she had learned what the locals knew, which was that a lot of those towers were emptier than they looked, that some of them had gone dark and been carved into apartments, that the all-night machine downtown was still running but running for fewer and fewer people, out of habit, the way a heart keeps going in a body that has already turned over most of its work to something else.

The something else was down here, where she was walking, and it kept regular hours. Her bar closed at two most nights. The taco place and the coffee roaster and the record store and the vintage shops down here all locked their doors at a decent time and their people went home and slept, which was the most radical thing about the whole southern end of the street, that it had decided a city could be a place where people lived and not only a place they were kept awake and separated from their money. Cass crossed at a dead light against no traffic at all and thought, as she did most nights, that she was walking home through the exact seam where the old town was handing off to the new one, and that almost nobody was awake to see it but her.

She passed the taco cart that parked on the corner after midnight for exactly the people like her, the cooks and the barbacks and the dishwashers coming off the late shifts up and down the street, and the man who ran it lifted his chin at her the way he always did, and she lifted hers back, and neither of them said anything, because at this hour between the two Renos there was a kind of freemasonry of the still-awake that did not need words. She bought nothing. She had eaten standing up at ten, the way she always did, a bowl of something the kitchen sent out before the rush, and she had a few soft ones folded in her jacket and the rest of the night in her shoe, and she was doing the arithmetic on it as she walked without meaning to, the way she did every night now, the number that was rent laid against the number that was everything else, the two of them getting closer together every month like a door swinging slowly shut.

She could feel the change starting to move faster now, though. You heard it at the bar, in the accents that were not local anymore, the people who said they had just come over from the Bay, who talked about the factory going up out east past Sparks like it was weather, a front moving in. The rent on her friend’s couch that had been nothing two years ago was not nothing now. Two of the regulars had lost their apartments that summer when the buildings sold. Her own lease was up in the spring and she had already heard what the new number was going to be, and she had done the arithmetic walking home more than one night, tips against rent, and had not liked where it came out. Something was coming into the town, some large warm money-shaped weather, and she could not yet tell if it was going to lift her up with it or simply lift the floor of the place out from under her feet.

A cop car went by slow and did not slow further. A man asleep in a doorway did not stir. The mountains were a black cutout against a sky going the faint gray it went before it was light, and the air had the first cool edge of the coming fall in it, and Cass pulled her jacket closed and kept walking south, past the shuttered galleries and the muraled walls she could no longer see the colors of, into the part of the street where the sidewalks got rougher and the buildings got lower and the rents, for another few months anyway, were still something a girl who poured drinks could pay.

Her block came up on the left. She could see her building, the two windows dark, the crooked step she knew to step over. She had her keys already in her hand, warm from her pocket, and she was thinking about nothing more than her bed and the ceiling fan and how her feet hurt, the ordinary end of an ordinary good night, and she was not thinking, quite, about the spring, or the number, or where she would go if the number won.

Behind her the arch went on burning over the empty downtown, spelling out its old bright boast to nobody, and ahead of her the sky kept getting lighter, and Cass stepped over the crooked step and put her key to the lock and stopped for just a second, in the last of the dark, before she turned it.

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