What Stays in Vegas

by Labonte, Beth

  I blinked stupidly at the screen as Kendra dropped off a ton of work for me to do for the Riverlin Zoning Commission filing. Today was the filing deadline and, as usual, everything at Flamhauser-Geist is left to the last minute.

  I half-listened to her instructions while keeping one eye on my Inbox. What the hell had I been thinking? What was I trying to get myself into? When Kendra left I turned on my Dictaphone and tried to push thoughts of Nick Trask out of my mind, while a few not so innocent thoughts tried to push their way in. My stomach was in knots, and every time a little envelope icon appeared in my taskbar I had a couple of heart attacks. None of them were from Nick though, so I began typing up the cover letter Kendra had left for me. I forgot about my love life for a second as her voice read me the following sentence:

  We believe that the project will not only bring revenue to this previously undeveloped part of the city, but will also create at least thirty-five new jobs.

  I debated telling her that perhaps these were not the types of jobs that Riverlin was looking to create. It is hard to imagine that thanks to the mind numbingly boring work I do each day, a place like The Jiggly Kitty is able to exist. Everything is kitten themed down to the sign over the restroom that reads “Litter Boxes,” which I find in extremely poor taste as there is absolutely nothing sexy about a litter box. There is also the demeaning bowl of imaginary milk built into the end of the stage which the girls are required to “lap up” before ending their performance. And rather than beckoning dancers to their side of the stage by waving dollar bills in the air, a long stick with feathers and tinsel at the end is handed to each patron as they enter the club. Welcome citizens of Riverlin! Your new careers await! It occurred to me as I was typing the letter that Rob Dorfman may have had some serious issues growing up.

  Later in the afternoon Mike Halloran, our intern, appeared in my doorway with an armload of plans, ready to hit the road. He had exactly forty-five minutes to get to city hall before the four o'clock deadline, and Riverlin was approximately forty-seven minutes away.

  I printed out my letter and told him to wait a second while I got Kendra's signature. Mike earned all of our respect a week ago when he got into a six car pileup on his way to Las Vegas City Hall. Without missing a beat, he fled the scene and made it there exactly one minute before they closed. He wedged his foot into the door, entering into a battle of strength with the city clerk, but Mike is a strong kid, and she reluctantly gave in.

  Mike was later cited by the police for leaving the scene of an accident, but Flamhauser-Geist took care of the fine. It is that kind of dedication that our company appreciates, and in Mike they saw much promise. He was fresh blood. One more warm body willing to contribute to the degradation of one more American city.

  I finally got an email reply from Nick who had been tied up in meetings for most of the day. When I read what it said my jaw nearly hit the floor, and me being a lady, that is all that I can tell you.

  - 13 -

  “I’ve got something for you," said Kendra. From behind her back she pulled a small framed painting and laid it on my desk. Two women sat at a bar, one in pink and one in lilac, both sipping on color coordinated martinis.

  “For me?” I asked in awe. It was beautiful, and it matched my office perfectly. When on Earth she had time to do this was beyond me, as we had been hitting the clubs pretty hard over the past week.

  “I painted it the other night, you know, the one that we didn’t go out drinking. What was that, Monday?” She gave me a wink. “I know how much you liked the others. Think of it as a thank you gift.”

  “You don’t need to make me presents!" I said. "I’ve been having a blast hanging out with you. I haven’t been to so many bars in my entire life.”

  “Well good,” she said, running her finger along the frame, “then you won't mind when I tell you that we’re going out this weekend. And....” she paused for dramatic effect, “I’ve found us dates!” She giggled like a maniac and high-tailed it back to her office before I could even process what she had just said. Dates?

  “Kendra!” I followed her into her office. “Dates? Are you serious? First of all, when and where on earth did you find us dates? Second, do I have any say in this?”

  “I was grabbing lunch over at Finnegan’s, right, and these two guys got in line behind me.” She started unwrapping a humongous sandwich. Shredded lettuce sprinkled out onto her desk. “The shorter guy, he goes ‘you have a really nice figure.’ I mean who uses the word ‘figure’ anymore you know?” She plucked out pickles one by one and deposited them into a napkin.

  “So far he sounds pretty creepy,” I said, crinkling my nose. “How come you didn’t just order that without pickles?”

  “I was a little distracted. So I turned around to look at who said it, and that’s when I noticed his friend.” Her eyes lit up.

  “His friend was Brad Pitt?”

  “No, silly. His friend was Bryce Storm, male model turned Hollywood cosmetic dentist to the stars!”

  I stared at her. I may have blinked a few times.

  “Come on, Bryce Storm. He’s done the teeth of half of Hollywood, he’s a regular on Why Am I Ugly? You must know him.”

  I blinked a few more times.

  Kendra rolled her eyes at me. “Well, anyway, they’re hanging out at the MGM Grand Saturday night and asked me to join. I told them only if I could bring a friend, and of course they loved the idea.”

  “Of course they loved the idea, they’re probably rapists!” All I could picture was a guy who told random women they had nice figures slipping me a roofie.

  “They’re not rapists, they’re dentists. It’ll be fine, it’s not even really a date.” She rolled her eyes again. “I was exaggerating. We’ll just meet them for a few drinks. If they turn out to be lame, we can lose them. At least we’ll get some free drinks out of it.” She toasted me with her Coca-Cola bottle.

  “Who said I even want to go on a date? Maybe I’m seeing somebody, did you ever think of that?”

  “Who? The married guy from back home? Come on Tess, I know you don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “I’ll have you know,” I said, stabbing my finger in her direction, “that he is having trouble with his wife, and he misses me.” I stuck out my tongue and went back into my office.

  It was true. Ever since I accidentally sent that naughty email to Nick last week, we had been exchanging some pretty inappropriate emails and texts. And while I was enjoying it, I was also feeling a teensy bit guilty, which is something I never thought I would feel with Nick. I had always dreamed about the day he would arrive at my doorstep with a bouquet of roses and confess that it was me, that it had always been me, and everything in the universe would just fall into place.

  Yet something felt off about the way things were going down. Maybe it was partly because I was still hanging out with Chris, and every time a naughty text message came in while we were playing air hockey, I told him it was from my mom.

  “So come to my house at nine, okay?” Kendra shouted. “And wear something cute!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I answered. "Sophisticated slutty." I would be there, I couldn’t let her meet these psychos by herself. An awful thought suddenly occurred to me and I ran back into her office. "Hey, if you’re all over this Bryce guy, that means you’re sticking me with the ‘nice figure’ creep aren’t you?”

  She took a conveniently huge bite out of her sandwich.

  “Mmmphmmh.” She pointed to her mouth and shrugged.

  ***

  Kendra was already half in the bag when I picked her up on Saturday night. I found her puttering around behind the bar in her basement, sipping on a Long Island Iced Tea. The smell of her perfume hit me as soon as I walked in - it was definitely something by one pop star or another. She had really laid it on thick. Latin beats pumped out of the speakers that were stationed around the room, and a 56” plasma flat screen television hung on the wall across from the bar. Six bikini clad models were booty shaking into the ca
mera.

  “MTV, huh?” I raised an eyebrow. The girls were now gyrating from within a hot tub. There was a man in the tub too, but he had no teeth. I take that back, he had three teeth, all of which were gold. I tried to imagine running into that guy at the grocery store, and I wasn't so sure he could convince me to go back to his hot tub with him. This is why I haven’t watched MTV since I was twenty-two. Something in my brain shut off on my twenty-third birthday and I just don’t seem to get it anymore. Kendra, on the other hand, was thirty-two and loving it. Though I suspect the marital crisis she was going through had something to do with it.

  “Look at those girls,” said Kendra. “I look as good as them, right?” She turned to face the back of the bar and did a pretty terrible impersonation. I lost sight of her as she dipped down to the floor, but I did hear something crack.

  “Of course you do,” I said. “But maybe next time you should stretch first.”

  She stood up, rubbing her knee. “Remind me not to try that move again.” She mixed another Long Island Iced Tea with a Playboy bunny stirrer and pushed it across the bar to me.

  “No Jiggly Kitty stirrers?” I asked. “Where’s your loyalty?”

  Kendra laughed. “I used to have a bunch of Kitty stirrers, but they all broke. Cheap pieces of crap, Rob probably picked them out himself.”

  I took a sip of my drink and stared at the TV. The girls were now at some sort of bikini car wash, except two of them had gotten into the car, while the rest were just kind of squeezing soapy water all over themselves. The car wasn’t getting too clean.

  “So Todd called me today,” said Kendra, out of no where. I tore myself away from the television and looked at her, this time with both eyebrows raised. As far as I knew she hadn’t spoken to Todd since the day he left. The overdose of perfume and trashy music was starting to make sense.

  “Oh no, what’d he want?” I asked.

  “Just to tell me to expect the divorce papers by Fed Ex on Monday and that he’d really appreciate it if I would sign them ASAP. He actually said ASAP to me.”

  I didn’t say anything as Kendra used the term ASAP quite frequently around the office.

  “He said that him and Carlotta, that’s her name, Carlotta, just want to move on with their lives. Can you believe that? He leaves me and now he’s acting like I’m keeping him from moving on with his precious life. If he wants me to sign the papers so badly, I’ll sign the stupid papers. I would’ve driven to his lawyer’s office today and signed them in person if I knew how God damned important it was to him. I certainly don’t want to stand in the way of their happiness.”

  She had been moving all around behind the bar as she talked, picking up liquor bottles from one spot and slamming them down in another. But then she stopped, covered her mouth with her hand, and the next thing I knew she had sunk down to the floor behind the bar and was quietly sobbing.

  “Oh Kendra, no, don’t cry!” I walked behind the bar and sat down on the floor next to her. In front of us was a storage shelf lined with vodka, tequila, and countless mixers. A person couldn’t have picked a better place for an emotional breakdown.

  She laid her head on my shoulder and my arm grew wetter with each of her sobs. I could not think of what to say. All the breakups I had been through seemed so trivial and juvenile in comparison. I imagined Nick walking out on his wife to be with me. Is this what it would do to her? How horrible! How could I ever want to be the cause of this kind of pain? I felt sickened at the thought of the email I had last sent.

  “Everything will be okay,” I said at last, relying on the old standard. I became slightly braver and ventured on. “Signing those papers will be the best thing you’ve ever done, you know. And better that it happened now, instead of ten years down the road when you had kids and stuff. Besides, this whole house is yours, Ken. The house, the car, everything in it. Todd’s nothing without you. He’s screwed.”

  “Yeah, by Carlotta!” She burst into a fresh set of tears and sniffles. Something dripped onto my shoulder and she mopped it off me with a bar towel. “I’m sorry, look at me, I’m turning you into a soggy mess.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s good to let it out. I knew something was up anyway when I saw the junk you were watching on TV.” I pulled a bottle of raspberry vodka from the shelf and poured us two shots. “Here, let’s have some of this.” I raised my glass. “To your new life and our hot dates. You didn’t forget about them did you?” She giggled and shook her head. Then we downed them.

  Kendra wiped her eyes with the same bar towel she had used to mop the tears and snot off my shoulder. We stood up and brushed ourselves off.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  "Ready," said Kendra.

  Two champagne glasses on the shelf behind the bar, inscribed with the words “Congratulations Kendra & Todd,” must have caught her eye, because with one swift movement they were both smashed against the wall.

  Kendra smiled with satisfaction as we stepped over the pile of shattered glass and headed out into the night.

  - 14 -

  The MGM Grand hotel is without a doubt the largest structure that I have ever been inside. Even when you are completely sober, it is a labyrinth of casinos, restaurants, and shops that seem to scroll along beside you in an endless loop. If you’ve already had a Long Island Iced Tea and a vodka shot you may as well just give yourself up for lost.

  “Haven’t you been to this club before?” I asked as we passed by lingerie clad blackjack dealers for the third time. That is one section of the casino you don’t forget.

  “Just a couple of times,” she said. “And not once was I in my right mind.” She veered me to the left, almost into a passing group of college guys who looked us up and down and whistled.

  “Please tell me you guys are dentists,” I said to them as we passed. One of them turned and walked backwards for a few steps.

  “I’ll be whatever you want me to be!” he yelled, arms outstretched.

  “Aw, did you hear that?” I said to Kendra. “He’ll be whatever I want him to be! Why couldn’t you have run into them at Finnegan’s?” I gave a few more glances and smiles over my shoulder before Kendra yanked me off to the right and we found ourselves at the entrance to the club. If we had only taken a left instead of a right when we had come in the main lobby we would have found it in about three minutes, rather than taking the grand tour. My heels were already starting to hurt.

  Since we were half an hour too early to meet our man friends, and I was not willing to walk around a second longer to look for another bar to wait at, we paid our own cover charge and went into the club. We also reluctantly paid for our own first round of drinks and took a seat at a table, keeping an eye out for our dates as people slowly filtered in.

  We had only been seated a few minutes when my phone began vibrating and Nick's name appeared on the screen. He'd been texting me all day, and he didn't quite sound like himself. Mostly he had been saying things about how he wished I had told him my feelings sooner, that maybe things would have been different between us. I didn't exactly know how to respond to that. I mean, was three years not enough time for him to figure out that I had feelings for him, and that maybe he felt the same way about me? All the opportunities he had over the years, did it really take a drunken text message, asking what he was wearing, for things to finally click?

  Frankly, the more serious our texts and email became, the more Nick was starting to annoy me. I was starting to wish I had never initiated any of this flirtation, and after witnessing Kendra’s meltdown tonight I was starting to feel a lot like the loathed Carlotta. I had become the other woman in my best friend's marriage.

  I tried to cancel out the damage I had done by texting back neutral responses, and encouraging him to work things out with Megan instead of dwelling on what could have been. But he didn't seem to want to take the hint. I ignored his most recent text and was debating shutting off my phone entirely, when a message came through that wasn’t from Nick. It was from Chris.<
br />
  “Chris?” I said out loud.

  “Brewer?” asked Kendra.

  I looked up at her from the glow of my cell phone, regretting that I had said the name out loud. “Uh, yeah. I just got a text from him. I wonder what he wants?”

  “You're such a little vixen,” she said. “You’ve been here a month and already have the guys wrapped around your finger.”

  “Oh, please,” I said. “It’s not like that. This is Chris we’re talking about. Last week I saw him drinking out of a Spiderman thermos bottle.” I opened up his message, which was actually three messages:

  2 girls found dead on the strip

  Suspects r 2 middle-aged psycho dentists

  If you know of their whereabouts call police ASAP

  I laughed and was about to show it to Kendra when she started waving madly across the bar, as if the QE2 was leaving port.

  “They’re here!” she squealed, jumping out of her seat.

  Striding towards us in a white linen button-up shirt and dark jeans, was the one and only Bryce Storm. I recognized him from television the moment I saw him, and I must admit it was very exciting. I could practically smell the money wafting towards me from across the room as visions of a life of luxury flashed before my eyes. His hair was graying, but his face was tanned and unwrinkled, giving him that young-man-with-gray hair look that I have always kind of enjoyed.

  My fantasy, however, came to a cymbal crashing halt when I tore my eyes away from Bryce and finally noticed the man standing by his side. The man with a million dollar smile and a penchant for one too many rum and Cokes. Tooth Model.