The woman beside him was playing three slots at once, moving between them with the dexterity of an assembly-line worker. The taut line that was her mouth made her look as determined as someone assembling war munitions. She was a war munitions, assembly-line worker--on her annual one-week vacation that she spent, annually, keeping the wheels of three slots spinning. Not for the money, Jimmy knew, but for the OM of glamor where night was day and day was day too, winter, like the poor, a distant fiction never heard in this Scotchgarded Garden where eternity was a constant 72° and every wedding officiated by Elvis. Jimmy knew, because he recognized in the woman the same determined exhaustion that he faced each day in his morning mirror and faced each night in his evening mirror and met throughout the day in the faces of everyone whose defining moment had become the answer to the question of whether or not they were going to keep marching to the beat of a different drum machine.
The woman pushed the PLAY button on one slot machine, simultaneously scooping coins from the hopper of the next to feed the third. 'To win you got to play,' Jimmy thought, watching her. Her hands were black from the money.