For some reason, I really like casinos. I recognize that they prey on vulnerable people and enable addiction, and that they’re loud and smoky and gross and horrible. But I can’t help myself. I like sitting at a table and playing cards with strangers. On the evening in question, I was playing with a woman from the Texas panhandle named Marjorie. She told me that she’d been married for sixty-one years. I asked her what the secret was, and she said, “Separate checking accounts.”

I asked her what brought her to Wendover, and she said she wanted to see the salt flats. And the casino, of course. She and her husband gambled one weekend a year. I asked her how it was going, and she said, “You ask a lot of questions.”

Which I do, when I’m gambling. In every other environment, I am extremely averse to encounters with strangers. I don’t tend to chat with airplane seatmates or cab drivers, and I am an awkward and strained conversationalist in most situations. But put me at a blackjack table with Marjorie, and suddenly I’m Perry Mason.

The other person at my table, eighty-seven-year-old Anne from central Oregon, also wasn’t much of a talker, so I turned to the dealer, who was required to talk to me as a condition of his employment. He had a handlebar mustache, and a name tag identifying him as James. I couldn’t tell if he was twenty-one or forty-one. I asked him if he was from Wendover.

“Born and bred,” he answered.

I asked him what he thought of it, and he told me it was a nice place. Lots of hiking. Great if you like hunting and fishing. And the salt flats were cool, of course, if you liked fast cars, which he did.

After a moment he said, “Not a great place for kids, though.”

“Do you have kids?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But I was one.”

There’s a certain way I talk about the things I don’t talk about. Maybe that’s true for all of us. We have ways of closing off the conversation so that we don’t ever get directly asked what we can’t bear to answer. The silence that followed James’s comment about having been a kid reminded me of that, and reminded me that I had also been a kid. Of course, it’s possible that James was only referring to Wendover’s shortage of playgrounds—but I doubted it. I started sweating. The casino’s noises—the dinging of slot machines, the shouts at the craps table—were suddenly overwhelming. I thought about that old Faulkner line that the past isn’t dead; it’s not even past. One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of. I played out the hand, tipped the dealer, thanked the table for the conversation, and cashed out my remaining chips.