And I Do Not Forgive You by Amber Sparks

Author:Amber Sparks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2019-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines

In LAS VEGAS, THE WOMAN HAD FOUND THE KIND OF LUCK she liked best.

Her best luck involved invisibility, the kind that allowed people to overlook her sticky fingers and her quiet dine-and-dashes. She was tan and brown and beige and gray, plain and unobtrusive as backdrop. She wasn’t offensive or even unattractive. Just the one person in the bar you’d pass over as you scanned the potential pickings. The one you couldn’t ID in a police lineup.

Her plainness had been a source of some small pain in her youth; often, she would wonder if she’d ever find love, ever cash in her virginity. Eventually, the disappointment of loneliness gave way to a kind of exhilaration, the understanding that she alone possessed a sort of superpower. As long as she was careful and committed only small crimes, and carried a little luck with her, she could do more or less as she liked.

When she ordered drinks, she chose what was on tap and didn’t linger long—she kept her face blank and drank briskly, though not quickly enough to arouse attention. She sidled off the barstool and strolled out calmly, and often the empty glass left behind was the only way anyone knew she’d been there. In stores, she could pocket things and stroll right out—even when they had camera footage, she was so nondescript the police just shook their heads. She looked, they said, like anyone’s mother. How on earth would they find her?

She moved around a lot, never stayed in one neighborhood long. It was always cities and suburbs, because there she never stood out; so many invisible people haunt the shops and strip malls of suburban America. And now she found herself in Las Vegas, unwilling to leave though she’d surely outstayed her welcome by now. Her luck had just been too good.

She was, she thought, the only person in Vegas who wasn’t there to gamble (though she supposed what she was doing was a version of that) or drink or marry. Or, she corrected herself, to do business; Vegas these days had a whole sideline in conventions and meetings, full as it was of large, cheap hotels and plenty of diversion. She was also, she thought, the only person who actually liked the Strip, but not because it was the Strip. She liked it because of what she became inside it. The grandiose, improbable casinos, competing with one another for pomp versus circumstance, flashing marquis desire versus plaster Paris and Rome. It was all so impossibly large and complex and so well-oiled that a person like her could disappear inside, a plain little pinball pinging around inside a neon nerve network.

She spent her days wandering the false streets of Venice, the plaza of Rome, the Eiffel Tower. She sat with a drink sometimes, watched countless strangers win and lose more money than she’d ever have—sometimes skillfully, sometimes not. Luck, she thought, featured into most winning, but there was also a small group of

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