Vegas Girls

by Heather Skyler

  She considered taking a peek in the mailbox, which was right beside the front door, but she dreaded getting out of the car and being observed by those two boys as she crossed the street and lifted the black lid of the box.

  After another fifteen minutes of watching the house and the boys playing Frisbee, Ramona gave up, deciding to try the place at a different time of day. She had told Ivy she wouldn’t be gone long, that she’d be home in time for dinner and bring wine with her, and dessert, but she was too close to her apartment building not to go and see it.

  In under five minutes, she was in her old neighborhood, which alternated between wealth and decay as it had when she lived here. Old stately homes surrounded by tall elms were followed by small box houses with dried-out lawns and an abundance of chain-link and plastic toys. She passed an empty desert lot with rolling tumbleweed; a comely, stucco law office; the back of an apartment building marred by graffiti. Palm trees, telephone wires, a cracked, wide street that led to her apartment building, still standing right where she’d left it almost twenty years ago.

  The two-story, thirty-unit building was pale pink stucco in the shape of a U. In the scoop of this U were dry grass, two benches, and a white, tiered fountain. She parked at the curb, then got out of her car and went to sit beside the fountain, which was dry. At a house half a block away, two men worked together on a car; other than that, the street was empty.

  When she was growing up here, the fountain gurgled and sang. It reminded Ramona of a wedding cake, and she often sat on the bench beside it, just watching the water cascade from the top tier to the bottom. Sometimes she sat here with Ivy, usually at dusk, each of them tossing pennies into the water and making impossible wishes. Ramona used to wish her dead brother back to life and for her mother to be restored.

  The bench was warm beneath her legs, and the sun had lowered just enough to bore into her shoulders with a force she’d almost forgotten. California’s sun, at least near her apartment, was never so obvious or harsh. Ramona shaded her eyes and scanned the row of apartments on the second floor, holding her breath. There was her old door, number sixteen. A white slip was flung over the rail of the balcony, a red ten-speed parked beside it. Both were evidence that her mother was no longer alive. She would never have hung a slip out for everyone to see, and she had never ridden a bike, at least in Ramona’s presence.

  There was a light tap on her shoulder, and she turned to find a teenage boy leaning down from what seemed like a great height, his braces glinting in the sun as he asked, “Are you Cecilia?”

  “No,” Ramona said and shook her head. The boy had bad skin and lank, greasy hair, but he smelled good, like limes or oranges.

  “Oh, sorry.” He straightened up and smoothed down his hair, making it look even worse.

  “Do you live here?” Ramona asked, looking around for the apartment from which the boy had just emerged, but every door she could see was sealed shut.

  “Just during the week,” he said.

  “Why aren’t you at school?”

  “School’s over. It’s five thirty.”

  “And who’s Cecilia?”

  The boy held up both hands, as if fending off a blow. “Jeez, what’s with the questions? I’m not doing anything wrong.”

  Ramona watched him for a moment with a solemn stare, wanting to intimidate this kid for no good reason. Sitting here beside this dead fountain made her unbalanced, skittish, and wary. She shrugged her answer then turned away, hoping the boy understood he was officially dismissed, but instead of leaving he moved past her and sat on the other bench.

  He crossed his legs and swung one back and forth. “I know Cecilia online but I’ve never met her in person. She’s supposed to be sixteen and have short red hair, but it would be easy to lie. She could be anyone. Even you.”

  “Even me,” Ramona said and nodded her head.

  “I doubt she’ll show,” the boy said, turning his head to look up and down the street.

  “Why not?” Ramona asked, suddenly wanting to make it up to him, to erase her rude behavior. “You seem like a nice kid.”

  “The problem is she doesn’t have a car. She said her friend would drive her over here, but she’s already ten minutes late, so I’m thinking that didn’t work out.”

  “You never know,” Ramona said. “Maybe they just hit some traffic.”

  They were both quiet for a moment. The buzz of a power tool broke the air into pieces, so that only now, Ramona recognized how quiet the street had been. It was the two men down the block, working on the car. After a few seconds, they shut off the tool, and there was silence again, then whoops of congratulation.

  “I guess they fixed it,” Ramona said.

  “Doubtful,” the boy said, but didn’t explain.

  She noticed that he was wearing a very thin black tie with his black shirt. She wondered at the point of a tie you could hardly see, but decided she liked the gesture of it, dressing up to meet a girl from the Internet.

  Ramona watched the balcony with the slip as if expecting her long dead mother to emerge. She could almost see her standing there, calling down that dinner was ready. Every Monday, she made spaghetti sauce with ground beef and peppers, and this meal would last them through the entire week. The sauce had always been a little too thick and spicy for Ramona, who ate most of it anyway.

  Her mother would be wearing her cocktail waitress uniform at the table, a tight scarlet sheath with a high collar and cutout oval in the back that emphasized her small, boyish frame. Her long black hair would already be coiled neatly in a braid on the top of her head, gold earrings dangling beside her cheeks. The smell in the apartment was ground beef and tomatoes mixed with intense lilac perfume, a smell so potent it made Ramona’s head ache. Neither of them spoke during dinner at the round table in the kitchen. After the meal and her mother’s departure for the casino, Ramona would wash the dishes. Her mother had only been twenty-eight or twenty-nine at the time, almost ten years younger than she herself was now.

  “Did you know a woman named Charlotte who used to live here?” Ramona asked the boy. “Or Mrs. White? Sometimes people called her Charlie too.”

  “No, but my dad might have,” the boy said. “You want me to go ask him? He’s just watching TV.” He pointed toward a door across the courtyard.

  “No, that’s all right.”

  As if on cue, the door the boy had pointed to opened, and a heavyset man stepped out and crossed the dead grass to stand beside the boy. “Time for homework,” he said, giving the kid’s head an affectionate pat. “And you didn’t finish your pasta or clear your plate. That means you owe me, let’s see, one load of laundry and two nights of dishes now.”

  The boy rolled his eyes and huffed, then said, “Dad, this lady wants to know if you knew someone named Charlotte who used to live here.”

  The man turned to Ramona and smiled, revealing an acne-pocked face, similar to his son’s. “Charlotte White?”

  Ramona nodded.

  “Yes, in fact, I did. She was a really sweet lady.”

  Ramona’s throat had gone dry.

  “Were you a friend of hers?” the man asked.

  “She was my mother,” Ramona said, her voice emerging hoarse and tentative.

  The man smiled at this news. “I didn’t know Charlie had any kids,” he said. “Well, I heard about the son who died—I’m so sorry about that—but I didn’t know she had a daughter.”

  So her dead brother was known, but not her. This did not surprise Ramona. She stood and held out her hand to shake. The man took her palm, and his handshake was weak and floppy, what her boyfriend Nash would call a “flounder.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” the man said when he released her hand.

  Ramona nodded, unsure how to accept this kindness. Her loss had happened long ago, much longer ago than her mother’s death; still, it was nice for this man to be sorry for it. “Thank you,” she said, then rose and looked at the boy who was still searching the street.


  “She’s not coming,” Ramona told him, then shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “Who’s not coming?” the father asked.

  “Nobody,” the boy said. “It’s nothing.”

  Ramona waved good-bye then walked over to her car and got inside where she sat for a while looking up at door number sixteen. What did it mean, she wondered, to be disowned by your mother? It wasn’t a question she had allowed herself to ask in a very long time. Up on the balcony, the bike propped by the door shone in the sun, and the white slip hung beside it like a ghost or a discarded skin.

  JEREMY

  After dropping Ivy back at her house, Jeremy circled the neighborhood for a while in his car, not yet wanting to leave her proximity. As he drove, he searched again for her mother, slowing to look inside parked cars, trolling alongside the low wall at the end of the neighborhood beside the mountain, but the silver Monte Carlo he’d noticed over a week ago now was nowhere in sight. If only he’d pulled over on that day, rapped on the woman’s window, and said hello, then he would know for sure whether she was Ivy’s mother or not, and would have something valuable to offer, rather than a glimpse of a possible stranger.

  When he finally left Ivy’s radius, streaming with evening traffic away from the newness of her part of town and toward the center of decay, as he was now coming to think of his part of town, he felt the usual pressure begin building in his chest, a gray mass circling beneath his rib cage the way he imagined a tornado formed, with swirling, excruciating suppleness.

  Gretchen wouldn’t be home from work yet; in fact, she didn’t get off until ten thirty tonight, and he didn’t have any catering jobs until tomorrow afternoon. The specter of his empty apartment rose in his mind. He hadn’t slept there in over a week and the place was neat, unlived in, as lonely as a stone.

  When he glimpsed the neon blue sign for the T-bird Lounge ahead on his left, he pulled into the lot and went inside. It was early, just now five o’clock, and only a handful of people hunched in the red booths or ringed the small bar in the restaurant’s center. Two girls who looked underage—long glossy hair streaming down their backs—played pool in the far corner.

  Jeremy got a beer at the bar, then slid into a booth and sipped at it. He had imagined just having this one beer and then heading back on the road toward home, newly fortified, but now that he was inside he had an itch to see someone, to hang out and talk, so he flipped open his phone and called Mark to come and meet him. They hadn’t seen each other in at least six months, but he had news for him, now that he’d seen Ramona, so Mark would be the perfect companion. Talking about Ramona could lead into talking about Ivy, and then it would feel like old times, sitting here in this bar where they’d spent many hours together during and after high school, talking about the exact same thing. Maybe the pool table would clear out soon and they could play a couple of games.

  Mark picked up on the second ring. He’d just gotten off duty and agreed to swing by for one drink on the way home. Jeremy got another beer, then went to the jukebox and looked through all the song choices. They had the same music they had always had, with the addition of a few new bands, and Jeremy picked out a string of five songs that appealed to him: Prince, Bowie, Springsteen, and two Green Day songs for good measure. He had once bemoaned the music choices here, could even remember standing at this very jukebox with Ramona, bitching about the lame selection. Why no Black Flag, no Misfits or Social Distortion? But since then his musical tastes had expanded to include just about everything, and it was a rare occurrence when he felt the need for the harsh sounds of his old favorites.

  Back inside his red booth, he listened to the music with anticipation, savoring the taste of his beer and the feeling of peace that was finally seeping into him. His nerves had been jangled all day with the expectation of seeing Ivy and then with actually seeing her, and now that their meeting was behind him he could feel his insides finally begin to unwind.

  Across the room, he watched the two girls playing pool. They were older than he’d first thought, maybe even thirty, and he considered going over to talk to them, but he wanted Mark’s full attention when he arrived, so he stayed put. The door opened and he watched for his friend’s hulking form to appear, but a couple slunk in and crossed the room and sat in a booth closer to the pool table.

  He watched the couple holding hands across the table and leaning their heads close, and realized the woman was Kristina, from the book club and the old restaurant. Jeremy didn’t recognize the man. What were the odds of running into her twice in one week? It struck him as a sign, an omen, and he decided it meant that he should make amends. This woman represented his past of drunken thievery, of every bad decision he’d ever made, and if he apologized to her, maybe he’d feel free.

  Even as he rose and made his way toward her table, he knew his goal was absurd, that she would not want to lay eyes on him let alone listen to some belated apology for an entire era of bad behavior, but he felt a pressing need to speak to her again. “Thunder Road” was playing now, and he hummed along as he walked toward their table, trying to devise what he wanted to say.

  They both looked up when he reached them. Kristina wore a red dress, bright as a blinking siren, and her lips were painted the same color. The man reminded him of a newscaster, with his neat, dark hair and false smile. Jeremy felt unsteady gazing down at them, though not drunk or even buzzed, far from it. Kristina scowled at him, as if he’d interrupted something serious, and he tried to smooth out her expression with a smile. “Hey, Kristina. We meet again.”

  “Hi,” her lips pressed tightly together, then she seemed to decide something and sighed. “This is Peter. Peter, this is …”

  “Jeremy,” he quickly filled in and offered his hand to the man, who gave him an overly hearty handshake.

  “We used to work together,” Kristina said, “at this place called the Crescent that caught fire about ten years ago and thankfully burned to the ground.”

  “Someone probably set that fire on purpose to get rid of the smell,” Jeremy said.

  “Fried food,” Kristina explained to Peter. “And smoke and mustard, all swirled together.”

  The man smiled agreeably, but didn’t say anything. It was obvious he didn’t care about the Crescent or Jeremy or even any detail from Kristina’s past. He was wearing a suit with no tie, the collar of his white shirt open, and he reminded Jeremy a little of the man who used to pick Kristina up after work, the wealthy one who liked the elf costume. He wondered if this man was wealthy too, but he didn’t think so, just comfortable, just organized and middle class. It was amazing how much wealth you could accrue at a young age—and this man looked to be several years younger than him and Kristina—if you traveled a straight line from high school to college to a professional job. Jeremy had learned this from his younger brother, though too late to do himself any good.

  A silence hovered around them now, and Jeremy knew he should say his good-byes and return to his booth, but he didn’t feel finished. “I wanted to tell you, the other night at that book club, that I’m sorry I was such a jerk back then, at the Crescent.”

  “Book club?” Peter asked, frowning.

  Kristina shook her head as if to say “don’t ask.” “Okay, thanks,” she said, and smiled at him, though it was a fake smile, a smile to hurry him away.

  “I mean, I guess we were all young and doing stupid things, but I seemed to do more stupid things than most people,” he was rambling now but unable to stop. “It’s just that my heart was broken when my girlfriend left me and moved away, and then my band broke up, and all I’d ever wanted to do was be some sort of underground punk star but instead found myself as a prep chef—the lowest person on the totem pole—at that shitty restaurant, and I was just so angry, so disappointed with everything in my life. But really it turned out to be a good thing because I found out that I actually like cooking, love cooking, and now I have a career doing just that, and I’m finally almost happy.”

  They were both staring up at hi
m with slightly stunned expressions, and he was embarrassed but also relieved, unburdened. Two large hands pressed down on his shoulders, and for a minute he thought it was the bouncer and he was being kicked out, but when he turned he saw Mark’s broad face. “Hey, buddy,” Jeremy said, and he hugged him, something he’d never done before. The sheer bulk of Mark felt good, but Jeremy released him quickly, sensing Mark’s discomfort, and pounded him on the back. “Let’s go over here. I have a booth.”

  He didn’t introduce Mark to Kristina or Peter, or even tell them good-bye, have a nice night, just turned away with his friend and crossed the room to his booth where his empty beer glass sat waiting.

  “What was that all about?” Mark asked, nodding toward Kristina’s booth. “Those people didn’t look very happy to see you.”

  “I used to work with her,” Jeremy said.

  Mark nodded, apparently satisfied with this answer. He was still wearing his police uniform, and Jeremy couldn’t help but admire the sight of him, all that bulk neatly packaged in his dark blue shirt. He had been almost chubby in high school and not particularly athletic, but now he was mostly muscle and gave off the impression of a bear at rest.

  “How are the kids?” Jeremy asked, though he couldn’t remember how many there were or even their genders.

  “Great. Delilah is almost finished with junior high, which was rough, brother, let me tell you. And Rory and Cole start third grade next year. Kat wants to put them in this private school because they’re having some discipline problems at Williams, but I don’t see how that’s going to happen unless a rich uncle dies, and I don’t have any rich uncles.” He laughed, then signaled to a waitress and ordered two more beers.