“You gave me 87 chips,” the woman said. The smell of cigarettes was thick on her breath, mingling with but not masked by her perfume. “I only had enough for 85 chips.”

“Just take them,” I said. I was sure she had miscounted, but the casino was raking in enough hand over foot that $2 in chips was well within the predicted shrinkage of chips that were lost or taken outside and never redeemed.

“No, no, I’m honest,” the woman said. “Take the chips back.”

The old lady was a regular, and one of the people I regularly saw going through little “luck rituals” on the casino floor. She’d tap the slot machine lever three times before every pull, ask lucky-looking passersby for numbers to bet on in roulette. If trying to manipulate what she perceived as the forces of luck in the universe with such rituals

“Ma’am, you can have the chips,” I repeated. “We’d rather you keep them than risk giving you too few.” That was another thing; giving out too few chips was a serious violation of state law. In a state that was still uncomfortable and conservative enough to maintain the legal fiction that all casinos were on riverboats, no less.

“No, I’m honest,” said the woman. “I won’t take them.”

“Ma’am…”

“I’m honest!”

It was like a mantra, a life preserver, that supposed honesty. Maybe she was convinced that getting lucky with too many chips up front would lead to disastrous losses at the tables or in the machines. Or maybe it was a desperate fiction in the face of however many thousands of dollars she had lost at our casino–dollars she probably claimed to have spent elsewhere.

Either way, there were people in line and a person urging me to rip them off. “Very well,” I said, peeling two chips off the pile. “Enjoy your stay.”

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