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Levolor blinds, and mopped the Mexican-tile floor. She did a first-rate job. She believed in the moral value of hard work, and she always gave her employers their money’s worth.
    She usually worked during the day, not at night. This afternoon, however, she’d been playing a pair of lucky slot machines at the Mirage Hotel, and she hadn’t wanted to walk away from them while they were paying off so generously. Some people for whom she cleaned house insisted that she keep regularly scheduled appointments, and they did a slow burn if she showed up more than a few minutes late. But Tina Evans was sympathetic; she knew how important the slot machines were to Vivienne, and she wasn’t upset if Vivienne occasionally had to reschedule her visit.
    Vivienne was a nickel duchess. That was the term by which casino employees still referred to local, elderly women whose social lives revolved around an obsessive interest in one-armed bandits, even though the nickel machines were pretty much ancient history. Nickel duchesses always played the cheap slot machines—nickels and dimes in the old days, now quarters—never the dollar- or five-dollar slots. They pulled the handles for hours at a time, often making a twenty-dollar bill last a long afternoon. Their gaming philosophy was simple: It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, as long as you stay in the game. With that attitude plus a few money-management skills, they were able to hang on longer than most slot players who plunged at the dollar machines after getting nowhere with quarters, and because of their patience and perseverance, the duchesses won more jackpots than did the tide of tourists that ebbed and flowed around them. Even these days, when most machines could be played with electronically validated value cards, the nickel duchesses wore black gloves to keep their hands from becoming filthy after hours of handling coins and pulling levers; they always sat on stools while they played, and they remembered to alternate hands when operating the machines in order not to strain the muscles of one arm, and they carried bottles of liniment just in case.
    The duchesses, who for the most part were widows and spinsters, often ate lunch and dinner together. They cheered one another on those rare occasions when one of them hit a really large jackpot; and when one of them died, the others went to the funeral en masse. Together they formed an odd but solid community, with a satisfying sense of belonging. In a country that worshiped youth, most elderly Americans devoutly desired to discover a place where they belonged, but unlike the duchesses, many of them never found it.
    Vivienne had a daughter, a son-in-law, and three grandchildren in Sacramento. For five years, ever since her sixty-fifth birthday, they had been pressuring her to live with them. She loved them as much as life itself, and she knew they truly wanted her with them; they were not inviting her out of a misguided sense of guilt and obligation. Nevertheless, she didn’t want to live in Sacramento. After several visits there, she had decided that it must be one of the dullest cities in the world. Vivienne liked the action, noise, lights, and excitement of Las Vegas. Besides, living in Sacramento, she wouldn’t be a nickel duchess any longer; she wouldn’t be anyone special; she would be just another elderly lady, living with her daughter’s family, playing grandma, marking time, waiting to die.
    A life like that would be intolerable.
    Vivienne valued her independence more than anything else. She prayed that she would remain healthy enough to continue working and living on her own until, at last, her time came and all the little windows on the machine of life produced lemons.
    As she was mopping the last corner of the kitchen floor, as she was thinking about how dreary life would be without her friends and her slot machines, she heard a sound in another part of the house. Toward the front. The living room.
    She froze,