The racetrack is crowded with summer customers. The women wear straw sunhats and the men smoke cigars. Eddie and Noel leave work early to play Eddie’s birthday number, 39, in the Daily Double. They sit on slatted fold-down seats. At their feet are paper cups of beer, amidst a carpet of discarded tickets.

Earlier, Eddie won the first race of the day. He’d put half of those winnings on the second race and won that as well, the first time such a thing had ever happened to him. That gave him $209. After losing twice in smaller bets, he put it all on a horse to win in the sixth, because, as he and Noel agreed, in exuberant logic, he’d arrived with next to nothing, so what harm done if he went home the same way?

“Just think, if you win,” Noel says now, “you’ll have all that dough for the kid.”

The bell rings. The horses are off. They bunch together on the far straightaway, their colorful silks blurring with their bumpy movement. Eddie has No. 8, a horse named Jersey Finch, which isn’t a bad gamble, not at four to one, but what Noel has just said about “the kid”—the one Eddie and Marguerite are planning to adopt—flushes him with guilt. They could have used that money. Why did he do things like this?

The crowd rises. The horses come down the stretch. Jersey Finch moves outside and lengthens into full stride. The cheering mixes with the thundering hooves. Noel hollers. Eddie squeezes his ticket. He is more nervous than he wants to be. His skin goes bumpy. One horse pulls ahead of the pack.

Jersey Finch!

Now Eddie has nearly $800.

“I gotta call home,” he says.

“You’ll ruin it, “Noel says.

“What are you talking about?”

“You tell somebody, you ruin your luck.”

“You’re nuts.”

“Don’t do it.”

“I’m calling her. It’ll make her happy.”

“It won’t make her happy.”

He limps to a pay phone and drops in a nickel. Marguerite answers. Eddie tells her the news. Noel is right. She is not happy. She tells him to come home. He tells her to stop telling him what to do.

“We have a baby coming,” she scolds. “You can’t keep behaving like this.”

Eddie hangs up the phone with a heat behind his ears. He goes back to Noel, who is eating peanuts at the railing.

“Let me guess, “Noel says.

They go to the window and pick another horse. Eddie takes the money from his pocket. Half of him doesn’t want it anymore and half of him wants twice as much, so he can throw it on the bed when he gets home and tell his wife, “Here, buy whatever you want, OK?”

Noel watches him push the bills through the opening. He raises his eyebrows.

“I know, I know,” Eddie says.

What he does not know is that Marguerite, unable to call him back, has chosen to drive to the track and find him. She feels badly about yelling, this being his birthday, and she wants to apologize; she also wants him to stop. She knows from evenings past that Noel will insist they stay until closing—Noel is like that. And since the track is only ten minutes away, she grabs her handbag and drives their secondhand Nash Rambler down Ocean Parkway. She turns right on Lester Street. The sun is gone and the sky is in flux. Most of the cars are coming from the other direction. She approaches the Lester Street overpass, which used to be how customers reached the track, up the stairs, over the street and back down the stairs again, until the track owners paid the city for a traffic light, which left the overpass, for the most part, deserted.

But on this night, it is not deserted. It holds two teenagers who do not want to be found, two 17-year-olds who, hours earlier, had been chased from a liquor store after stealing five cartons of cigarettes and three pints of Old Harper’s whiskey. Now, having finished the alcohol and smoked many of the cigarettes, they are bored with the evening, and they dangle their empty bottles over the lip of the rusted railing.

“Dare me?” one says.

“Dare ya,” says the other.

The first one lets the bottle drop and they duck behind the metal grate to watch. It just misses a car and shatters onto the pavement.

“Whoooo,” the second one yells. “Did you see that!”

“Drop yours now, chicken.”

The second one stands, holds out his bottle, and chooses the sparse traffic of the right-hand lane. He wiggles the bottle back and forth, trying to time the drop to land between vehicles, as if this was some sort of art and he was some sort of artist.

His fingers release. He almost smiles.

Forty feet below, Marguerite never thinks to look up, never thinks that anything might be happening on that overpass, never thinks about anything besides getting Eddie out of that racetrack while he still has some money left. She is wondering what section of the grandstand to look in, even as the Old Harper’s whiskey bottle smashes her windshield into a spray of flying glass. Her car veers into the concrete divider. Her body is tossed like a doll slamming against the door and the dashboard and the steering wheel, lacerating her liver and breaking her arm and thumping her head so hard she loses touch with the sounds of the evening. She does not hear the screeching of cars. She does not hear the honking of horns. She does not hear the retreat of rubber-soled sneakers, running down the Lester Street overpass and off into the night.

Love, like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.

The accident on Lester Street sent Marguerite to the hospital. She was confined to bed rest for nearly six months. Her injured liver recovered eventually, but the expense and the delay cost them the adoption. The child they were expecting went to someone else. The unspoken blame for this never found a resting place—it simply moved like a shadow from husband to wife. Marguerite went quiet for a long time. Eddie lost himself in work. The shadow took a place at their table and they ate in its presence, amid the lonely clanking of forks and plates. When they spoke, they spoke of small things. The water of their love was hidden beneath the roots. Eddie never bet the horses again. His visits with Noel came to a gradual end, each of them unable to discuss much over breakfast that didn’t feel like an effort.

An amusement park in California introduced the first tubular steel tracks—they twisted at severe angles unachievable with wood—and suddenly, roller coasters, which had faded to near oblivion, were back in fashion. Mr. Bullock, the park owner, had ordered a steel-track model for Ruby Pier, and Eddie oversaw the construction. He barked at the installers, checking their every move. He didn’t trust anything this fast. Sixty-degree angles? He was sure someone would get hurt. Anyhow, it gave him a distraction.

The Stardust Band Shell was torn down. So was the Zipper ride. And the Tunnel of Love, which kids found too corny now. A few years later, a new boat ride called a log flume was constructed, and, to Eddie’s surprise, it was hugely popular. The riders floated through troughs of water and dropped, at the end, into a large splash pool. Eddie couldn’t figure why people so loved getting wet, when the ocean was 300 yards away. But he maintained it just the same, working shoeless in the water, ensuring that the boats never loosened from the tracks.

In time, husband and wife began talking again, and one night, Eddie even spoke about adopting. Marguerite rubbed her forehead and said, “We’re too old now.”

Eddie said, “What’s too old to a child?”

The years passed. And while a child never came, their wound slowly healed, and their companionship rose to fill the space they were saving for another. In the mornings, she made him toast and coffee, and he dropped her at her cleaning job then drove back to the pier. Sometimes, in the afternoons, she got off early and walked the boardwalk with him, following his rounds, riding carousel horses or yellow-painted clamshells as Eddie explained the rotors and cables and listened for the engines’ hum.