Lady Luck's Map of Vegas

by Barbara Samuel

  Praise for

  Barbara Samuel

  “Miss Samuel writes like a dream, and her contemporary family stories combine real-life dilemmas with sweet romance in totally irresistible packages.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “One of my favorite authors! Settle into your most comfortable chair, enjoy, then tell your friends. Barbara Samuel is irresistible. She writes compelling,poignant stories that will touch the heart of any woman.

  —Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  “[Samuel's] characters are warmly drawn and sympathetic, their problems real and believable….”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Like Elizabeth Berg and Luanne Rice, Samuel has a gift for mining hidden meaning from seemingly ordinary moments of time.”

  —The Romance Reader

  “[Barbara Samuel is] noted for her skillful writing, excellent characterizations and emotionally involving novels….”

  —Library Journal

  “[Barbara Samuel] creates an in-depth view of what truly matters in life-lasting relationships, especially the solidarity between generations of women. Readers should have their handkerchiefs ready….”

  —Booklist

  Also by Barbara Samuel

  No Place Like Home

  A Piece of Heaven

  The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue

  Madame Mirabou's School of Love

  For the two women who shaped me—my mother, Rosalie Putnam Hair, who taught me to be a tiger, fierce and wary and strong; and my grandmother, Retta Madoline O'Neal Putnam, whose job it was to convince me I was a genius at whatever I tried.

  Acknowledgements

  I have so many thanks to offer this time. Thanks to Bill Stevenson for rocky road ice cream and keeping me company on research trips down Route 66, to Las Vegas and Santa Fe; thanks for all the walking and talking out plot points and reminding me that books only get written when writers sit down and do it. Thanks especially for the graveyard at Truchas, three days after El Dia de los Muertos—a sight I will never forget. Thanks to Teresa Hill, for repeated reads and reassurances and asking the right questions when I needed it; Christie Ridgway and Elizabeth Bevarly for discussions and focusing issues; the whole of RomEx, for thousands of hours of support in both life and writing. Thanks to Jackie and Kitten Hair for a wonderful evening in Las Vegas, and a special wave to my uncle Bill Hair, now departed to the great casino in the sky, because some of the seeds of his life grew into this tree. And always, thanks to my agent and editors: Meg Ruley, Linda Marrow, and her assistant, Arielle Zibrak. The one thing I know for sure is that I couldn't do it without you guys.

  Part One

  CHEYENNE CANON INN

  Located in Cheyenne Canon Park. This historic ten-room mission-style mansion was once an upscale bordello and gambling hall. Prices range from $99 to $219 a night.

  Prologue

  Eldora

  I'm on the bus home from Cripple Creek, my purse fat with winnings from the slot machines, when it hits me. I'm staring out at the deep gorge between two mountains, where there's still a lot of snow in the gullies, and I'm thinking about bears and how they stay warm all through the winter, but that's really because I'm worried about my girl, Gypsy, and where she might be sleeping this April night.

  But then it hits me, outta nowhere: There isn't a soul on this earth who knows me for who I really am. It's not real pretty, you understand, and I've got a lot to answer for.

  Then I think: I'm tired of it. It's a burden when your whole life is a lie. You start getting confused over what's true and what's not.

  Staring into those deep canyons, where a person could fall and get lost and not be found for years, I also know there is only one person I can tell. That's India, my other daughter.

  India. The only thing I ever really got right. Not the shaping or making of her—she did all that herself—just the letting of her into the world. Providing a space for her to grow in my body, and trying to find a good roof to put over her head. Both their heads, of course, Gypsy and India. You don't love one child more than the other, but let's be realistic here. Some are easier to love than others, and India was my easy one.

  It's funny that she drives me around now all the time. When she was about two, she'd never miss a chance to hop in behind the wheel of my Thunderbird. She loved to pretend she was driving!

  She was so little, always smaller than her sister, even though they're identical twins—that was a big surprise, let me tell you!—that she'd have to kneel in the seat to reach the steering wheel. I'd climb in beside her, Gypsy sitting outside the car in the grass playing one of her little games. I'd leave the door open so I could keep an eye on her, and me and India would be off. She'd say, “Where you want to go, Mama? Let's go.” And off we'd go, driving away in her imagination. To Paris, which she picked up on television. To the store. To anywhere.

  Once upon a time my daughter adored me. God, she was the cuddliest child you ever saw, loved curling up in my lap like some little animal, burrowing under my breasts, her plump little arms wrapped around my waist. “Love you, Mama,” she would say. I'd stroke her thick black hair and kiss her head. She always smelled so good, my little girl. “Love you, too, baby,” I'd say.

  Gypsy never was like that. From the minute she was born, she was kinda separate. I guess it makes sense, knowing what we do. I always did feel like she was a little alien girl, though I tried never to show it. She just never would let you get anywhere close, not anybody, except her sister.

  Don't know where my India went, really. She started hating me at the usual age, but unlike most girls, she didn't ever get over it. I see it, that barely veiled hostility, but what are you gonna do?

  As I'm watching the shadows grow beneath the pines outside the windows of a bus filled with senior citizens, I think she might as well hate me for who I really am.

  Chapter One

  India

  The sun is setting over Pikes Peak when I get home Tuesday afternoon. The play of pink light is as delicate as a teacup, so beautiful that a muscle in my neck untwists. The mountain feels like a relative. I find myself checking in with it a thousand times a day glancing over to see where the light is, whether the snowy cap is white or gray or pink, whether I can see a hidden valley.

  My passion for it surprises me. I grew up with it, after all, looked askance at the tourists crowding into town every summer, shooting endless, endless photos of it. It was, in those days, only a mountain. I didn't understand the appeal. Now its burly steadiness against the horizon is something I can count on, unlike life.

  I fit the key into my front door and take one last glance at the Peak before carrying my load inside. The canvas bag of supplies goes on the breakfast bar between the kitchen and the sparse living room that I've not decorated with much of anything because I'm not planning to stay. The mail I hold in my hand, because it is my policy to handle each piece of mail only once. The bills go in one pile, the junk—most of it— in another, the business letters in a third pile.

  Two are from clients, and I take the time to open those first. They are checks. One is a retainer for a site I've agreed to design for a Denver photographer, the other a hefty—yes—final payment for an enormous, complicated site for an eccentric old writer. I smile, thinking of him. Paul David Walters, a grizzled adventurer with four ex-wives, led me on a merry chase for three months, changing his mind every ten minutes, but his wits were sharp and his insights into the function of the Web were brilliant. It's the best site I've designed in years and it is in my portfolio. The payment, too, is quite sweet. Solvency for another three months, four if I'm frugal.

  Tucked between the utility bill and a flyer for a new restaurant down the street is a postcard f
rom my twin sister, Gypsy. I glance involuntarily at the bag of groceries on the counter, then pick up the card for a closer look.

  It's an index card with a miniaturized version of one of Gypsy's paintings on the blank side. She works mainly with descansos, the roadside crosses planted at the sites of accidents, and graveyards, and this is an abstract graveyard with a blur of pinks and yellows and stylized crosses, so odd and beautiful it draws the eye almost against one's will. Gypsy's paintings invite the viewer to come closer, lean in, hear a secret, a mystery. I stare at this one a long time, wishing I really could.

  On the back, where the lines are, is a message scribbled in Gypsy's pointed, spidery hand. Unfortunately, the only thing I can read is my name, India, and the date, which she's written in numbers at the top. Last week. That's a good sign.

  The rest is written in a language I wished I remembered, the one we created as babies and used between ourselves until we lost it at around eleven or twelve—which is actually quite late; most twins stop using their secret languages by first or second grade—or rather, I lost it. Gypsy kept it, and when she is delusional, as she is now, it is the only language she uses to communicate with me.

  I stare at the words with great concentration, as I always do, sure that the veil between past and present will lift one of these days, and I will suddenly remember the code. I even went to a hypnotist once to see if she could help me. It hadn't worked.

  And no miracle occurs now, either. The only clue I can gather from the card is the postmark: Tucumcari, New Mexico. It's something.

  I put it down on the counter, take off my coat and hang it in the nearly empty coat closet, then I go back to the kitchen to put away the groceries—a can of Eagle-brand condensed milk, maraschino cherries, paraffin, baking chocolate; chicken breasts and coriander; onions, bas-mati rice; the whole milk Jack likes in his tea. The cherries, so very red and round, are irresistible, so I open the jar and take three of them by the stem, popping them into my mouth one at a time. Then the bottle goes into the fridge, on the door, next to the olives I keep for my mother. The milk is slightly out of place, and I nudge it into its place beneath the light.

  At the back of my neck I feel the lure of Gypsy's card, and close my eyes, trying—in the way of twins, not some new-age fruitcake—to sense her, sense her mind. It's not there.

  And there, at the bottom of the grocery bag, is a box, tapping its foot while it waits for me to face it. I'll hear that little tap all evening unless I answer it, so I carry it into the bathroom and close the door. Gypsy once laughed uproariously when she found out I close the door even when I'm alone, but there are some things that just require privacy. I'm not like her and my mother, who don't have a single body secret in the universe. I'm sorry, but I don't need to share or know any of those things.

  I read the directions on the box twice to be sure I understand them, then, safe behind the closed door, I follow them. I wash my hands and wait.

  It doesn't take very long. In minutes, the lines on the pregnancy test form a distinct, undeniable plus sign.

  Pregnant.

  Carefully, I wrap up the stick and the box in lengths of toilet paper, as if there is someone else here who might see it in the trash, then carry it out to the kitchen and throw it away safely under the sink.

  Pregnant.

  I'm swept with an intense dizziness, and put a hand over my belly. It's a weird thing to do, considering my horror, but it's involuntary. Am I trying to sense it? Repulse it?

  But instead, for one long, yearning second, I see my lover against the screen of my eyelids, his black hair, his quirky smile—and for one single flash of time, I imagine a daughter with tumbling black curls and a tilt to her eyes.

  No.

  With a sense of seasickness, I open my eyes, list sideways and pick up the postcard from Gypsy. It contains all the reasons I cannot take the chance no matter how much I might wish it.

  My mother no longer drives, so two hours later, I am sitting in the dark at the parking lot of Winchell's Doughnuts on Eighth Street, waiting for her bus to arrive from Cripple Creek. There is a nearly full moon pouring down on the Peak, making the snow shine. I think again that the mountain is beautiful enough to make up for a lot of things I've had to face about living in Colorado Springs again.

  I'm sitting in my mother's car, since she refuses to ride in anything else. It reeks of cigarettes and old leather, and I turn on the heater full blast and roll down the window. A man passing by turns his head and whistles quietly. Over the car, not me. It's a 1957 Thunderbird, turquoise, which Eldora has owned since it rolled off the lot, and it's in cherry condition since one of the last things my father did before he died was restore it, top to bottom. I'm fairly certain my mother loves this car more than she loves me.

  I'm a little early, so I spend the time going through my purse, which I'm persnickety about. It's been a day or two since I've had a chance to organize it, make sure everything is in its place. There are three sections and two small, zippered pockets. In one section are my comb, lipstick, small mirror in a rubberized pocket that keeps it from breaking, a fingernail clipper, and an emery board. All in their places. In the middle section that zips, I keep three pens with caps, a small notepad, and a calculator. The tops are off two of the pens and I replace them firmly, zipping the pocket. In section three is my wallet, and I open it to be sure all the cards are in their places—the grocery store cards in one section, the credit cards in another. I also keep my keys in the third section, but they're currently in the ignition.

  In one of the smaller zippered pockets I keep a ChapStick and my cell phone. In the other, inside the bag, are the usual female supplies— I open it and look at the tampons and realize with a shock that I might not need them for a while. What would that be like? A hollow feeling goes through me.

  The bus lumbers in. It's the early evening service, so everyone getting off is over the age of fifty. They go to gamble early before the casinos get too smoky and then return home by nine so they can take their evening medications and have a good night's sleep, the binging and ringing of slot machines dancing in their heads. The lucky ones are easy to spot. They're laughing and joking, jingling change in their cotton jackets.

  I know when Eldora will be next because there is a handsome, Mediterranean-looking senior, dapper with silver at his temples, who gets off the bus and turns around to hold out his hand to the woman behind him. She steps down carefully in her high heels and slim slacks, her perfect red hair shining beneath the streetlight. Even in the dark, I can see her long acrylic nails, nails she has done every other week by a Vietnamese boy at the local strip mall. Technically, she's a senior like the rest of them, sixty-three, but my mother has been the most glorious female in any room since they laid her in a nursery and all the other fathers wished that she was their baby instead of the plain one they got.

  She laughs her throaty laugh at something the man says and lifts a graceful hand in farewell. He'll think about her for weeks.

  As she comes toward the car, she waves at me, too, but doesn't hurry her long-legged walk any. In the dark, it would be easy to mistake that body for one thirty years younger. Legs long as a spider's, shoulders straight and square beneath her neat, boxy jacket. A diamond at her throat catches the light and winks at me as she climbs in, smelling of bourbon and Tabu and cigarettes. “I,” she says in her whiskey voice, “had a very good day.”

  “Did you?” I start the car, glare at her when she takes a cigarette out of the pack.

  She makes a noise. “I haven't had one for two hours, India! And it is my car.”

  I put my hand on the gearshift and just look at her. She puts it back, snaps her case closed. “You are such a fuddy-duddy.”

  “Ah, well. So you won a lot, huh?”

  “Six hundred dollars!”

  I blink. “Wow. Was it that Monopoly machine?”

  “No! That blasted thing isn't paying worth a squat these days. No, this was a quarter machine in the back of the Midnight
Rose. It paid and paid and paid, and I finally hit the big one.” She fidgets, opens her purse, closes it. “That nice man you saw at the bus was sitting right beside me, bringing me luck.”

  “Did you give him your phone number?”

  “Oh, don't be silly. After Don Redding, all other men are just shadows.”

  Don is my father, who died six months ago. This pierces me because until he died, I never thought Eldora was particularly besotted, and I feel guilty for hoping she'll find another husband to dote on her so I'm off the hook. “Well, at least you got out and had a good time.”

  “I did. It was nice.”

  At a stoplight I hand her the postcard I got in today's mail. “I heard from Gypsy.”

  My mother looks at it, her mouth working as she tries to decipher it.

  “Don't worry,” I say, “I don't know what it means, either.”

  “I can't see the postmark in this light. Is it readable?”

  “Tucumcari,” I say. The word is layered with meaning. For me, for my mother, and for my poor, schizophrenic sister.

  Eldora is quiet for a moment. At a red light on Colorado Avenue, not six blocks from the house I grew up in, she says, “You know, I was thinking about her up there. Had a little brainstorm.”

  “Pray tell.”

  “You're gonna argue with me, so I don't want you to say yes or no right now, all right?”

  “Mom—”

  “Don't start arguing before I even say it!”

  The light turns green, thank God. If I hurry I can be at her house before she gets it all out, and then I can pretend to forget about it. “Go ahead.” I try to sound more patient than I feel.

  “I want you to drive me to Las Vegas.”

  “No.”

  “I said don't answer yet. Just hear me out.”