Friday nights I’d pick up the dwarf on the way down to the casino. He bet me that I’d call him that: the dwarf. It was not something I aspired to do. I’m not the kind of woman without sensitivities. For three years I’d lived with Jeremy, my boss at the credit agency where the dwarf and I worked, a man who stuttered so badly that dialogues became impossible. Spatter everywhere, and sometimes a good four minutes for a single question. Initially his stammer had attracted me, his mouth freezing with the passion of what he tried to say in a kind of seizure. In the end he left me a note, which I much preferred to the agony of a spoken break-up. Of the ten pages, I’d only read five. I wiped the note clean of his spittle and kept it just where he’d left it for me, under the bathroom sink, between the tampons and bleach.

We were both working at a debt consolidation firm then, the dwarf and I. The agency spilt into two divisions: the Consolidators and the Forgivers. I’d long wanted to be one of the Forgivers, and Jeremy had promoted me in his goodbye letter. He said I needed to feel the pain of others who racked up credit card debt and gambled hopelessly. This came at the end of page five, at which point I’d stopped reading. The dwarf worked in the mailroom, delivering the hardship letters to my desk.

“Your first day,” I said. I took the stacks of letters he held out to me and moved them to the inbox. “I’m Heidi.”

Of course I could see right away that he was a dwarf, and because of our obvious height difference, I was careful to stay seated.

He took my hand and shook it, harder than I’d expected, and then cocked his head to one side, an odd smile lifting one side of his mouth.

“You don’t look like a Heidi,” he said, “but, okay. If you say so.”

Even sitting I estimated I was a full three inches taller than the dwarf. I had to assume he was aware of this, too.

“It wasn’t my say so, to be honest,” I said, “and maybe my parents were banking on a girl who’d grow up to wear braids and move to the mountains. Who can say?”

The dwarf smiled again, this time with both sides of his lips lifted, and folded his arms. His hands did not fit directly under his armpits. He must have seen me take note of this because he looked down at his hands and then dropped his arms to his sides.

“Right,” he said. “Nobody can tell what we’re going to turn out to be. I’m sure my parents weren’t banking on me, as you put it. Right, Heidi?”

He turned on his heel as if to walk away. I rolled the chair forward and began to stand up but then thought better of it. His repetition of my name unsettled me. Jeremy had rarely said it. H’s had always given him trouble.

“Hey,” I called after him. “You didn’t tell me yours.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute or so, his body turned at an angle, mid-step. His arms reached just below his chest area, which looked well toned, even muscled. I tried to imagine him working out with weights, the way Jeremy did before sex, sitting on the edge of the bed doing arm curls while I lay against the pillow, grateful for the silence. In those moments there was only the sound of his breath. No words.

“Listen,” he said, turning back to me. He leaned on the top of my desk with his fingers splayed. I kept my eyes on his face and tried not to look at the hands, much as I wanted to. “I’m sure you’re trying to be nice, Heidi, but it’s like this at every job I’ve ever had. You’re just doing what they all do, trying make me feel what you’d call normal, trying to get my name and all that.” He paused for a minute and leaned even closer. I could see the outline of Tic Tacs in his breast pocket. “I appreciate the effort, Heidi. But in a couple of days, maybe a couple of minutes, even, you’ll be saying it. ‘The dwarf,’ you know, ‘the dwarf from the mailroom.’ Maybe you’ll even add that last part. ‘From the mailroom,’ like there may be some other dwarf around here, hiding out.”

I looked down at his hands then, leaning on my desk and wrinkling some of the letterhead. I felt I had that right. He watched me as I stared down at his hands, at the slightly bulging knuckles and bluntness of the fingers, as if they’d been cut off for no other reason but lack of time, as if Nature had been in the middle of finishing his hands and stopped working before allowing them to grow. Just like that. Blunt.

“We don’t have any others,” I said finally. For some reason I reached for the papers under his hands and slid them out, forcing him to stand up. “We do have a stutterer, though. His name’s Jeremy. I know because we lived together.”

He laughed then, and I laughed, too, because of the awkwardness of all of it, and because the men on the Forgiveness Committee were staring at me from the office across the hall. I didn’t want to go in there then. I didn’t want to vote on the hardship letters. I was probably going to be fired for referring to Jeremy as a “stutterer.” I had a letter filled with accusations that I’d never finished reading. Something about the dwarf seemed to understand all that.

I followed him down the hall and stopped next to him by the water cooler. The top of his head reached just under my ribcage, I realized.

“Just so you know, I won’t do that,” I said. I reached for a paper cup of water and downed it for emphasis.

“Do what?” he asked, and reached for his own cup, taking his time to fill it and then holding it, not drinking.

“What you said back there,” I said.

“You mean, call me ‘the dwarf?’”

“Yeah,” I said, low, wishing there were more water in my cup. “That.”

He laughed and tilted his head back, drinking the water in a long gulp.

“Want to bet?” he asked.

And we did. Twenty bucks.

***

Of course I lost. By that time I’d gotten accustomed to losing, not just Jeremy, but at the casino, too. When it first opened about a year before, I’d started taking drives down late at night, after Jeremy was asleep, leaving the windows down and letting my hair whip against my face. Working at the agency had made me careless, and maybe then I secretly hoped that I’d become one of those people who had to beg for forgiveness. Who’s to say? I’d never allowed myself to lose more than a few hundred. And I always went alone. By the time I met the dwarf I’d stayed away from the casino for nearly a year. I had debt; of course I did. No one becomes a Forgiver who hasn’t. One tearful night before he left and I couldn’t make my half of the rent I’d confessed my late-night casino runs to Jeremy. At first he was calm, but then he accused me of betraying the very same people we were trying to help, those men and women pleading for freedom from the accusing voices on the other end of their phones.

“But those people are your bread and butter,” I said. “Without them there is no agency. Don’t tell me you can’t see that.”

It had of course been a mistake to tell Jeremy not to tell me something, as of course his stuttering moved into high gear as he launched into a diatribe.

“You should read one of those letters,” he said, then wiped his mouth with both of his hands. “You’d feel differently then.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ve told you before. Make me a Forgiver.”

Even though he didn’t promote me until the break-up letter, what he’d said had gotten to me. I still bought scratch-off tickets and occasionally drove as far as the on-ramp late at night. But I’d missed the casino. How much, I hadn’t realized, until the dwarf and I made that first bet.

One day we were going over a letter written by a woman who had lost her job, three mobile homes, a leased Volkswagen, and two Siamese cats. The cats were not part of the claim and had died of natural causes. She’d accumulated two hundred thousand dollars in debt through various credit card accounts in order to keep her mentally challenged son in a group home. The mention of the son had done me in. She’d even included his picture, almond shaped eyes, too-large tongue and all.

“Forgive,” I’d said, raising my hand and breaking protocol.

The others looked at each other and then back at me. Burt, the committee leader, leaned back in his chair and sighed.

“It doesn’t work that way,” he said. He covered the picture of the woman’s son with his hand. I couldn’t say for sure whether the gesture was a purposeful one because he nearly spilled his coffee as he moved his hand. I like to think it was. “We’ve been through this before.”

One of the others, Seth, who was just out of college and still lived with his parents, gave me a smirk.

Seth slid the photo of the woman’s son from under Burt’s hand.

“This is about debt, Heidi, not about feelings.”

Just then the dwarf appeared in the doorway with a package in his hands.

“Feelings and debt,” the dwarf said. “Same things.”

Seth looked at Burt and then turned back to the dwarf, who wouldn’t move from the doorway. He dangled the pen in the air and then said, “One of you has to sign.”

I got up. When he handed me the pen, I took it and then tried to look for the key pass we all wore around our necks, but he was so much smaller that I couldn’t read it. He turned and walked out of the room, down the hall that led to the elevator to the mail room.

“That was interesting,” Seth said, and Burt gave him a look before telling us we had a vote to consider, that we shouldn’t allow the interruption to distract us.

“What was interesting?” I said to Seth afterward, after I’d been outvoted, after the woman’s case had been sent back to the Consolidators. “The dwarf?”

I’d done it, just as he said I would. I walked away from Seth and went down to the mail room where I found him perched on a high stool. I handed him the twenty without a word.

***

That night I picked him up in front of his apartment building, an old foundry that had been converted years before with twenty foot windows and refurbished brick. This would become our routine for the next three months, me driving and the dwarf waiting out front for me in a custom overcoat. Jeremy would have immediately assumed that the dwarf lived above his means. The dwarf’s building had all those amenities, I knew, because he told me on that ride down about the concierge and the dry cleaning pick-up service. I wondered briefly how he afforded a place like that on a clerk’s salary, but I didn’t ask. I wasn’t with Jeremy anymore, I reminded myself.

On the way down he asked me about the letters, about the one from the woman I’d just voted on, about how it felt to be part of a committee who made judgments on someone’s bad luck. I told him I hadn’t thought of it that way, that the job was new, that I’d gotten it as part of a break-up settlement from Jeremy.

“Right,” he said. “The stutterer.”

I felt my face redden and coughed into my hand.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” I said.

He cracked the window.

“I’ve met the guy,” he said. “He hired me. You can say no more.”

We laughed then, and I felt myself relax for the rest of the drive down. I told him about my late-night runs to the casino, how I’d had trouble making the rent. He smiled at me more than a few times in the car that first ride, that lopsided smile of his. I think now he felt sorry for me, but why I couldn’t say. When I’d turn my head to talk to him, I noticed the tendons in his neck pulling, as if the strain of carrying the weight of his head had taken its toll on them.

We valet-parked the car, though I was used to driving around and finding a spot in one of the underground garages. Too time-consuming, he said, and handed the valet one of the bills from the roll of twenties he pulled from inside his overcoat. He peeled first one from the role, and then another. When the valet bent to shake his hand, the dwarf just waved and kept walking.

We stood at the Grand Entrance and leaned against one of the concrete sculptures, the kind that twist this way and that up to the fifty-foot ceilings. I sat down on a marble bench next to the sculpture and looked up at the smoke eaters in the ceiling, letting the sight of the lifting smog and the lights and the sound of bells move through me. I smoked in casinos, too, but only when seated next to a heavy smoker who exhaled in my direction, blurring the cherries and flaming seven’s with their clouds. A pair of animatronic coyotes pricked their ears from their spot on a faux canyon in the middle of the casino and moved their heads up and down as if nodding at us.

“All right, Heidi,” he said and handed me a twenty from inside the overcoat. “For luck.”

I tried to give it back, told him it was unnecessary, but he walked ahead of me and said, “No, no. This is how it has to be. You have to take it.”

I understood gamblers’ superstitions and had a few of my own. I never took a seat at a slot after it had paid out one of the top three jackpots, and I rarely played close to the tables, which was where the dwarf wanted to go: craps. We went our separate ways after making our way through the crowds and to the enormous marble fountain at the other side of the casino that cast up sprays to a syncopated light show. I watched him move toward the tables and disappear. Everything in the casino was huge, I realized, slipping into a slot machine not far from the crap table, breaking my own rule. Maybe the enormity of it all comforted him, I thought, made him feel larger. Or maybe it allowed him to feel invisible, not stared at the way he had been when we walked through the main entrance.

I was thinking of this and only this, that much I remember, when I slipped the twenty dollar bill he’d given me and hit the jackpot: three thousand dollars on the first pull.

***

We’d show up at our jobs during the week and meet in front of his apartment every Friday night to drive down to the casino where I’d hit jackpot after jackpot. Every day I’d sit with Burt and Seth and the others on the Committee and vote to forgive, no matter how careless the letter, no matter how lackluster the hardship.

I’d hit fourteen jackpots by then, averaging two or three per night. I’d paid off any remaining balances on my credit cards and hid a stash of money under the bathroom sink where Jeremy’s letter still sat.

“So, what is it with you and the dwarf?” Seth asked, sidling up next to me and placing one hand on the roof of my car. “Do you have a thing for him, or what?”

This was bad karma, I thought. If I got into it with Seth, he could bring about an end to my winning streak. Everything about Seth reeked of bad luck–the suit that bunched up on his shoulders, his crooked bottom teeth, the two blue veins like lighting bolts on the right side of his head bolts that he tried to cover by wearing his hair long. I saw them whenever he leaned forward. Besides, he and Jeremy often had drinks together after work, and each jackpot I’d won served to prove to me how my luck had changed since Jeremy had moved out.

“Right, Seth,” I said. “I have a thing for him.”

He laughed and tapped his keys on the roof of my car.

“Yeah, I heard that about you,” he said. “You like stutterers, too, huh? I guess that’s your thing. Some guys have all the luck.”

I tried to move his arm to open the car door, but he held it there, hard. For a minute I was scared, just briefly, and then I got angry, as I watched those veins of his, pulsating. But before I could say anything, the dwarf appeared. Seth took his hand off the roof of the car and backed away as I got in. I slammed the door, hard.

The dwarf held the door open and threw a stack of twenties at Seth. He jumped away from the money as if burned, and the dwarf threw his head back and laughed.

“What are you doing?” I screamed, but he just kept laughing as we watched the twenties swirl around Seth’s shoes there in the underground parking lot until they lifted upward and around him like a cloud.

***

That night I hit no jackpots. I played with the same frequency I had every other trip, the same machines in the very same order. After I’d lost the first thousand dollars, I moved to the area closer to the tables where I’d first come with the dwarf. I sat next to a smoker and lit a menthol. I’d lost another thousand when I spotted the dwarf at the crap tables. He stood on a makeshift platform and shot the dice, the other men yelling. I stood watching him for a long time, the way his torso moved forward against the narrowness of his hips, the way his overcoat brushed against the table as he shook the dice in his hands. I thought of all the twenties he’d thrown at Seth and the ones still in his pocket. I listened to the clicking of chips and watched the pit boss reach over to shake his hand.

Finally the dwarf bowed his head and got down from the platform. One of the other men at the table slapped him on the back.

“How much did you win?” I asked when we got back to the car. “I didn’t,” he said, after a long silence. “What makes you think I won?”

***

That night when we got back to his apartment it was after three in the morning. Usually we said our goodbyes quickly in the car where I let him off under the street light directly in front of his building. He looked at his watch and then at the doorway to his building. He leaned his head against the back of the seat. I thought of that first time in the car together, how I’d noticed the tendons in his neck and worried over the strain his head must have put on them. For a minute I thought of Jeremy and his face twisted up the first time he struggled to tell me he loved me, but then I pushed the thought out of my mind. He’d been the one to leave me, I reminded myself. It had not been the other way around.

“I want you to come in,” he said, without looking at me.

“I want you to come inside.”

I felt my stomach squeeze as I looked down at his hands, how I’d once thought of them as unfinished, how I hoped he’d never know I’d had such a cruel thought. How I’d allowed myself never to find out his name.

“Mark,” he said, as if reading my mind. He looked over at me. “I never told you.”

“It’s my fault,” I said. “There’s no excuse for not trying to find it out.”

“Okay, then,” he said. “Heidi.”

“Mark,” I said, and we laughed.

We walked to the front of the building where he held the door for me. I kept thinking about Seth and the way he’d taunted me in the parking garage, about the way he’d looked at the dwarf–-at Mark–-and at me with such disdain. I kept thinking how the men voted me down, about the way I felt the day that Jeremy, how I’d scolded myself for being dumped by a stutterer. Those were the words I’d used inside my own head: the stutterer. The dwarf. What had become of me?

He kept the lights out in the apartment. I felt his hand close around mine, the fingers thick and warm, as he led me in, whispering to me to move this way or that, step to the right, the left. My God, I thought, I do have a thing for a dwarf, and I banged my foot against something heavy, a coffee table, maybe, or an armoire. He eased me farther inside, until I felt the floor shift and carpet under my feet. He whispered for me to lie down, and I did, with his help, his hands at my back guiding me until we were lying side by side. I chewed my lower lip and closed my eyes.

“You have to open them,” he said, “or it won’t happen.”

He reached for my hand. I was about to say that I’d made a mistake, that he’d met me in a dark time, that I’d obviously not gotten over the stutterer-–Jeremy–-that I’d been wrong to lead him on by betting and then taking him to the casino, that I was sorry, so sorry.

And then it happened.

Just as I was about to sit up, a pinprick of light appeared in the ceiling. At first it was bright, but then it softened to a dim glow that opened and slid to the left. I squinted against as other pinpricks appeared, each one opening and blooming into itself, until each one turned a bright green and the crinkling began.

The first bill floated down from the ceiling and landed on my chest. I let go of Mark’s hand and grabbed it, bringing it up close to my face until I could make out the twenty dollar sign on the front. Then one by one they rained down on us, the bills sliding over each other as we lay there on our backs, letting the money shift until we were lying in a pile so deep that it covered my arms and legs, even my hair.

I pulled my face into the warmth of his overcoat until the money stopped.

***

I don’t know what he did with all of it, even to this day. I watched with him as the money rained down from his ceiling three more times. There was never a way to predict how much would fall at any one time, or for how long. Once, he said, it fell for three hours, and another time, seven minutes. He’d had bills checked for counterfeiting by a friend who worked at the bank down the road from our agency. All of it had been real. He’d called the superintendent in to check the tiles in the ceiling, even had several of them removed because he complained of leaks, but no money had been found stashed up inside the insulation.

We went to the casino one last time. I watched as he tipped the valet, the cocktail waitress, even a maintenance worker who couldn’t stop staring at us as we stood by the enormous fountain holding hands. I smoked cigarettes while he watched me tap the slot machine screen and cheered for my blazing seven’s.

The day he left I wasn’t surprised. It was the only thing to do. The minute he’d let me in that night, I think we both knew he would have to go.

I took the bags filled with twenties that he’d insisted that I keep. There was no other goodbye. I stuffed piles in my pillow case, in my underwear drawer, under the cabinet where Jeremy’s note had lain all those months. Afterward I sat on the bathroom floor and read the note. Some of the accusations stung, but I had deserved them. When I finished reading, I shoved the note into one of the bags filled with twenties and drove to the office. I saw Seth watching me from the committee room. Jeremy twisted as he was about to speak, but I stopped him by plopping the bag on the table, the crinkling sound of the money and the note filling the room.

“I vote to forgive,” I said.