Summary

"Promises."

This chapter begins with the author’s description of watching his mother in a casino, while he himself has ten stolen dollars in his pocket and no idea of his weight. He describes frequently watching his mother in similar casinos in similar circumstances, feeling better “believing you were worse off in your addiction than I was” (213). He then describes falling deep into a gambling addiction, winning and losing large sums of money, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of a colleague named Flora, with whom he had started a relationship and from whom he had stolen that ten dollars. He describes how his gambling addiction contributed to is gaining all his lost weight back, how his mother texted him a loving message even while they were both deep in gambling, and how he and Flora kept making promises...