Free The Secret Letters by Abby Bardi

can’t give you that information right now, but I’ll keep you posted.”
    â€œHey, do you need a dishwasher?”
    â€œYeah, you know, I think we’ll probably need one for the evening shift, Tuesday through Sunday.” I said this like I already had the whole schedule mapped out.
    â€œCool.”
    â€œYeah, it’s going to be great.”
    â€œYou’re really living the dream.”
    â€œThat’s exactly what I’m doing, Ray. I’m living the dream.”
    He gave me a thumbs-up sign, then turned it into a little pattern, like he was writing something in the air. I could tell he had new respect for me now that I was going to be his boss. He was a pretty good worker, as long as you kept a tight rein on him. Milo’s problem was he was too nice to people and let them take advantage.
    We sat for a while, not saying much, and then he jumped to his feet, gathered up his napkins, and said he had things to do. I couldn’t imagine what those things could be, but it didn’t matter. I held my palm up again, and he held his up, too.
    It hadn’t occurred to me to open a casino until the words popped out of my mouth, but now that I sat and thought about it, I realized it was a great idea, the greatest idea I’d ever had. The one thing I knew about Native Americans was they had opened a bunch of gambling palaces all over the country and were living large. God knows we deserved it after the way we’d been treated by the white man, I thought.
    I finished my coffee, took the cup back to Star and thanked her again, then decided to take a stroll downhill toward my apartment. On the first floor of my building, directly across from the Wild Hare, was the Chelsea Grill. I’d heard a rumor they were in some financial trouble and could go belly-up any second. The front window lined their dining room like a picture frame, and inside were five rows of tables with white tablecloths, a little Perrier bottle of flowers on each table. All the tables were empty.
    I decided to go in and snoop around. At the sound of the front door opening, a woman rushed out the kitchen door, the manager, Heidi. When she saw it was just me, she wiped the customer-service look off her face and said, “Hey Julie.”
    â€œHow’s business?” I asked, then was sorry because it made her look so sad.
    â€œNever better.” She added, “And I mean that.”
    I decided to give her a job at the casino when I opened it, but I figured it wasbest not to mention that yet. I looked around. The dining room was wide and pretty, and the kitchen was in the back, behind a swinging metal door. Everyone knew it was an awkward kitchen because the restaurant backed onto the creek, so there was only the street entrance, and deliveries could only come through the front door. For years their chefs had been coming into the Hare after work and complaining about that until they got too plastered to care. There was a constant revolving door of them because they got bored and quit, and the Grill’s few customers tended to complain that the food wasn’t very fresh, probably due to the lack of turnover. The chefs found that depressing as hell, but there wasn’t much they could do about it. The owner lived in Vermont and didn’t care what went on. It was Heidi who put fresh flowers on the tables each morning and threw them out again each night.
    â€œI like this room,” I said. Something about it reminded me of those saloons in old cowboy movies. “It has potential.”
    â€œWe always say that,” Heidi said. She was wearing a long, flower-pattern dress that made her look like a couch. “We tell Keith that all the time so he won’t close us down.”
    â€œHow many people do you seat in here, about sixty?”
    â€œIt’s seventy if we push it.” She waved at the tables like they were full of people. “In theory.”
    â€œHow are the