CASINO, Mary Collins [top ten books to read txt] 📗

of why she needed it, and they didn’t ask.
Getting herself off drugs was the hardest thing she’d ever done, yet with an unheard of amount of determination, she soon had herself cleaned up. She’d driven twelve hundred miles to get away from that life and she didn’t want to ever go back.

CHAPTER TWO

Looking through her mail as she took it out of the mailbox, JoAnne hoped there was a reply from one of the publishing houses she'd sent query letters to, but not today, only bills and advertisements. Writing her first love story at the early age of seven, this was her first time ever trying to get anything published. There were boxes full of manuscripts in the attic of her mother’s old house, along with other childhood memories, some of which she didn’t want to bring back to mind.
Arriving at work fifteen minutes late, JoAnne found the door of the restaurant unlocked. That meant either Freddie, her boss, was already there, or Marty, her roommate had left it unlocked. Not seeing signs of Freddie being there, she assumed it was the latter.
Singing as she worked, JoAnne rushed to get thing set up for lunch. The song “Money” by the Beetles kept running through her mind, as she sliced veggies and fruits for the salad bar. If she hurried, Freddie would never know that she come in late. He’d warned her about it several times, even threatening to fire her if it happened again.
Making two pots of tea, she put them into the tea cooler and dumped three pitchers of ice in. She then made two pots of coffee, one regular and one decaf. She’d just finished sitting the salad bar up when Freddie came in. She could always tell when he’d won at the casino; he went every night after work. If he came in whistling, she knew he’d won on the black jack tables. If he came in throwing things around and barking orders at her, she knew he’d lost. This morning he was whistling.
“How much did you win?” she asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” he replied in his gruff, from lack of sleep, voice.
“Evidently you didn’t win enough to keep you out of my hair today.” She pretended to be kidding, but she liked it much better when he wasn’t here.
“Did I hear someone say you won at the casino?” Jerry, the cook, said as he walked in and put his cigarette out in the sink.
“I’ve told you not to do that.” Freddie smoked, yet he didn’t like it in the building.
“How much did you win?” Jerry was a big man, six feet four inches tall and weighed two hundred and eighty five pounds. He’d come to work for Freddie two years ago to pay off a gambling debt, but he didn’t have it paid off yet.
“Not enough, so get to work so I can make some money today.”
Freddie’s Pizza House was a small restaurant on the outskirts of town, a mile from the high school. The casino was a mile in the other direction, so on weekends he got the high school kids after the ball games, and the gamblers who’d lost their money and stop by for pizza instead of going for the steak dinner at the casino.
JoAnne didn’t say anything about Marty leaving the door unlocked, there wasn’t anything there to steal anyway. One time she’d left it unlocked and some high school kids came in and took some sodas and candy bars. From the way Freddie carried on you’d think they’d stolen a million dollars. For the next three months, he stayed until closing, or sometimes he’d leave then come back at closing to lock up, but after a while, he started letting Marty close again.
Marty worked night shift from five until one in the morning. JoAnne came in at ten and set up the lunch buffet. They opened the restaurant at eleven. She hated her job here, but the tips paid her half of the rent on the small two-bedroom apartment she shared with Marty, and put gas in her old car. She bought the car three years earlier, it was a 1969 Ford Mustang with 100,000 miles on it then, and now had 120,000. She only drove it to work and sometimes to the casino. Most of the time she walked to the mall, it was so hard to find a parking place and her apartment was only three blocks away. That’s one reason she took the apartment, the convenience of the location, and the fact that the rent was cheap.
With the buffet set up and ready for lunch, she poured herself a soda and sat down at the table in the back corner of the dining room. At eleven o’clock, she unlocked the door and put out the “open” sign. The customers were already lined up outside waiting to get in as they usually were on Fridays. There were many people out shopping and getting ready for the Fourth of July, which was coming up next weekend. Nobody wanted to miss the celebration in Shreveport Louisiana on the fourth, people came from as far as a hundred miles or more to see it.
The parade started at four o’clock, and competitors come from everywhere for the barbecue rib cook at six. After dark, the fireworks display was the biggest JoAnne had ever seen in her life, Of course she hadn’t seen that many. The one in the small town of Weaver, where she’d grown up, only lasted fifteen minutes and consisted of a few bottle rockets and streamers. Until she came to Shreveport, she didn’t realize Independence Day was such a big holiday.
One hundred and twenty people came for the lunch buffet that day; she usually averaged around a dollar per customer in tips, and hoped she had enough to go to the casino after work. She and Marty always took anything they made over a hundred dollars to gamble on.
At four fifty nine, Marty came in.
“It’s about time!” Freddie yelled as she came into the kitchen and picked up her apron.
“It’s not five yet,” She yelled right back at him, “I can tell you didn’t win at the casino last night.”
“Little do you know.” That was Freddie’s way of making conversation. He wasn’t as tough as he wanted people to think, but he talked as if he could move mountains. Of course, JoAnne and Marty knew how to handle him.
Taking off her apron, JoAnne laid her tips out on the table and made herself a cup of coffee. One hundred, thirty-two dollars, and fifty cents, she counted and thought I can go to the casino.
She cashed in her ones in exchange for a one hundred dollar bill, which she put in her wallet. The thirty-two dollars would be gambling money; she put it in her back pocket.
The deal between JoAnne and Marty was…anything either of them won at the casino would be split between the two of them. Thus far, they’d won four hundred dollars once and one hundred twice. Their losses were much greater, probably around a thousand dollars…a few dollars at a time.
“See you at home in the morning,” JoAnne said to Marty on her way out the door, “Unless I win big at the casino, then I’m getting the hell out of town as fast as I can.” She liked kidding with Marty. They’d been friends and roommates ever since the day Marty came to work at Freddie’s five years ago. At the time, she was sleeping in her car, a 1981 Chevy Caprice. At the time, JoAnne had recently moved to Shreveport, from Weaver, and started working for Freddie only two weeks earlier. She’d rented a two-bedroom apartment because she couldn’t find a one bedroom, and was looking for a roommate. The two of them hit it off right away and JoAnne invited Marty to share the rent on the apartment. Marty accepted and they’d been friends ever since.
Most people that came into the restaurant thought they were sisters, because they had the same brown eyes and looked so much alike, and if Marty didn’t bleach her hair blond, it would be the same dark brown as JoAnne’s.
The strong smell of cigarette smoke and stale perfume made JoAnne’s head swim as she walked into the Casino, but she’d adapt to it after a while, she always did. Someone sat at her favorite slot machine, and he didn’t look as if he’d be leaving anytime soon, so she sat down at the one next to him. Having stopped at the cashier to trade the ones for a twenty and a ten dollar bill, she fed them into the money slide on the machine, she hated feeding the machine one dollar at a time.
JoAnne played five credits at a time for several hours, running the credits up and down. The one time she had it up to four hundred she thought about cashing out. That would be a hundred dollars, same as a full day’s work.
She stayed on the machine until all the credits were gone, and as she started to leave she remembered the two dollars and fifty cents she still had in her pocket. Reaching in, she took the two one-dollar bills out and put them into the slot machine, eight credits registered on the machine. She played all eight credits at once, and as she got up to leave, the bells started ringing and security came hurrying over to where she sat. She’d hit for twelve thousand dollars. Jumping up from the stool, she screamed, “I won! I won!” She’d never had twelve thousand dollars in her life. The security guard was talking to her, telling her to sign the paper one of them handed her. She looked at the amount written on the paper. No, it wasn’t twelve thousand. Taking a closer look, she realized it was one hundred and twenty thousand. She didn’t believe it, and needed to be pinched. One of her dreams had come true; she could quit her job at Freddie’s, go back to school and learn a profession, but what did she want to do? She could pursue her dream as a writer. Everything started running through her mind all at once, there was so much she could do with the money.
She took the check the cashier handed to her. After taxes, it was printed out for one hundred thousand dollars. Should she call Marty now…or wait until her shift was over at Freddie’s? That was more money than she’d ever seen at one time. She couldn’t wait, she had to call Marty or maybe she’d go back to Freddie’s and show her the check. Marty being from a wealthy family probably wouldn’t be as excited as she was.
JoAnne was the oldest of five children and raised dirt poor, in the small town of Weaver, Louisiana. She started working at the age of fifteen to help her mother support her younger siblings, being her father drank his meager earnings, as a janitor, up. After graduating