A Gamble Either Way by Lauren Street

Author:Lauren Street [Street, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

Rileigh was relatively sure that Mildred Hanover would look after Mama, but because all Mama’s friends were in denial, she couldn’t count on them to be as watchful as they needed to be. You couldn’t let a three-year-old wander around unsupervised, and though her cognitive ability hadn’t been severely affected yet, a first grader had greater impulse control and better judgement than Rileigh’s mother.

Then there were her delusions. Her friends didn’t want to think that Lily was not dragging a full string of fish anymore. They chose to ignore her quirks, as they called them, her idiosyncrasies, her, just Lily being Lily moments. Her friend, Millie, was fond of saying: “Lily Bishop still has every marble she came into the world with, and a whole bunch more she’s collected along the way.” That made Mama sound fun and charming, and certainly she was. But she was also a woman who had forgotten the recipes for all the dishes she’d prepared her whole life — meatloaf might have ham in it, and lemon meringue pie, no sugar. She thought she was dating Rhett Butler. And — this was the hard part — she clung with all her strength to the delusion that her oldest daughter was coming home someday.

Rileigh found Mama where she had left her, at the third of the six slot machines on the starboard wall of the casino. Mama and Millie had parked ther when they got on the boat and they’d never left. Rileigh had no idea how many chips her mother might have fed into the machine. Georgia had stopped her earlier and said she’d seen Mama jumping up and down, excited that she’d won six hundred dollars. Rileigh was grateful that she’d won, but she had no intention of buying Mama more chips when she ran out.

As Rileigh walked up to her mother, adorable chubby fairy godmother that she was, and Millie as Mary Poppins, she saw Georgia crossing the room toward them, holding her skirt together.

Georgia’s costume made a statement. But it was an inside joke and only a handful of people even understood it. It was a really bad idea for a Halloween costume.

“I’m literally falling apart,” Georgia announced, flouncing down on the stool next to Mama in the Princess Bride dress she’d made of duct tape. Red duct tape. The inside joke was that long ago Rileigh, had used red duct tape to tape Georgia to a chair so she couldn’t go out on a date with a drug dealer. She’d gone anyway, got busted, and came within a hair’s-breadth of spending the best years of her life in prison because of it.

Georgia had created the dress by weaving red duct tape stuck to itself into a single piece of “fabric” That she’d then used to make the long skirt of the dress by duct-taping it together at the waist. She’d made the top of the dress by wrapping her upper body in duct tape. That part had been no problem.

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