Suzie took another drag on her cigarette and looked at Elise through the rearview mirror; they’d just met, and she was still getting used to having a person with her. It comes easier to some of us than others.

Suzie wanted to get to know Elise, but their relative positions in the car (she behind the wheel, her niece in the backseat) put her in mind of those confessional reality series on television where passengers in a cab—drunk, or otherwise unburdened by shame—shared (with only minimal prompting) stories of their most intimate drug deals and sexual adventures, and Suzie (non-partnered, childless) had no idea how you were supposed to react to such information these days. Offer a hug? A talking to? Introduce the kid to your weed guy? The problem of how to pass a responsible adult was giving Suzie one hellacious headache.

“Above my pay grade,” she mumbled, flicking the filter out the driver’s side window, and Elise pulled out an earbud and said “Huh?”

“I kind of like the shirt, myself,” Suzie said louder. “You don’t often get a chance to work rainbows and glitter into the same outfit.” Her brother had called up the night before, caffeinated with enthusiasm, to say he had just flown into Vegas for a trade show (“Luxury bath fixtures are really hot right now!”), and he and his daughter were staying in a literal-goddamn-suite at Caesars (“Thank God, I’m not the one paying for this shit!”), so didn’t Suzie want to drive up from her place in Laughlin (“It shouldn’t be more than an hour!”) and sleep over on the suite’s luxury sofa (“I’m sure it folds out!”), then maybe watch Elise tomorrow while he was working? “I’ve got buffet vouchers!” he said finally, cheer as brittle as old bones. Suzie’d already rolled her eyes the second he said, “Hello, stranger,” just to get it over with. It was the first she’d heard from Danny in six years, but that was just how they were.

“Hope I’m not interrupting anything!” Danny had lied gleefully when she picked up, and Suzie didn’t have the heart to tell him she’d been asleep at nine o’clock on a Friday, so she just said, “Fuck you, virgin,” like they were still kids.

Suzie had listened with half an ear while she shuffled to the bathroom to pee: Danny’s ex (“That bitch!”) was supposed to have custody this weekend, but she had (“This very fucking morning!”) suffered an attack of acute infection in her appendix, which now threatened to burst “explosively,” the doctor said (“Is it too much to hope it takes out that ponytail she’s married to?”) unless they removed it immediately. “They say she’’ll be fine,” Danny finished, with real sadness.

“Why don’t you just take her with you tomorrow?” Suzie had asked him. She could not quite remember his daughter’s name—Ellen? Eloise? She didn’t bother telling him to just leave the girl alone in the suite while he was at the show—she knew he wouldn’t. “Y’’all could, you know,” she said, flailing. What the fuck DO you do with a kid? Suzie gestured at no one. “Uh . . . let her walk around and . . . uh, look . . . at everything. All those fixtures! Gosh!” She put the lid down on the toilet so he wouldn’t hear her flush.

“Yeah,” Danny said. “All the kids these days are wild about the oiled-bronze trend.”

“I’m just saying I think you worry too much,” Suzie said. She let him hear her light a cigarette in hopes it would make him reconsider her fitness to watch a child.  “And I don’t know if she’d really have that good a time with me,” she went on when he said nothing. “It’s been a long time since I was around a kid.”

“She’s seventeen, not seven. You won’t have to wipe her ass, Suze. Just keep her out of trouble for a few hours! Then I can take you guys to dinner and we can catch up!”

“It’s just—”

“Jesus Christ,” Danny said, dropping all pretense of cheer. “It’s one fucking day!” Suzie heard him light his own cigarette and smiled—now she could trust what he told her. “Don’t you want to hang out? Have a little fun? I’m giving you a chance to meet your only niece and spend a little fucking time with her, and you’re acting like it’s some kind of chore!”

“I’m not saying it’s a chore, Danny. I’m just saying I don’t know how to even talk to a kid. I’ll probably scar her for life.”

And back and forth and ’round and ’round until Suzie slammed the phone down and got in the car and headed north, just like they both knew she would.

Elise sat slouched against the right-side door, arms crossed over her chest. She had replaced her earbud and was now busy glaring out the window, so Suzie could look at her carefully without risking her irritation.

It wasn’t just the shirt. Nearly everything the girl wore had rainbows on it: her leg warmers, the dozen thin metal bangles on each wrist. The T-shirt had a picture of a roller skate with rainbow wheels that said High Roller in gold glitter. Danny told Suzie last night that he’d gotten that for her from the airport gift shop as soon as they’d landed, managing to spot the shirt and find her size and complete the entire transaction while Elise stood in line for the restroom, one woman of about a dozen others thoughtless enough to have begun menstruating while on vacation.  “She was in line for twenty minutes,” Danny said with all the wonder of someone who’s never contemplated changing a tampon in an airplane bathroom. They were in the literal-goddamn-suite at Caesars Palace, and Elise had run off to the 24-hour drugstore, leaving Danny free to talk. Suzie passed the coffee and end tables nearly glowing in the dim light—it was a stunningly gilded room. “By the time she got done,” Danny said, “I was back in the lounge like nothing happened.” Suzie pocketed a tiny bottle of gin from the minibar. Danny reclined on the sofa with his hands behind his head, beaming. By finding the shirt and completing the purchase so quickly, Danny had rendered the elaborate cover story he’d conceived to explain his anticipated absence to his anticipated waiting daughter in the airport lounge utterly moot, and he was deeply proud of this. “I didn’t even have to tell her I was taking a shit!” he said to Suzie there in the literal-goddamn-suite. Suzie nodded. In the hour she’d been in Danny’s company, he’d asked her zero questions about herself or how she’d fared these last six years. Over the next eighteen, until it was time for them to leave, he’d ask her zero more.

Then Elise got back and the moment she pulled it out of the bag, Elise pronounced the shirt “Really cool, Dad” with an eyeroll and threw it on her bed in disgust. Danny tried reasoning with her at first, talking about how awesome it would look with the rest of her rainbow accessories—“That’s what you guys say now, right? Awesome?”—but she kept shaking her head and rolling her eyes until he finally twisted her arm up behind her back and told her to try the fucking shirt on. Now. Then he shoved her toward the bathroom so hard she’d had to grab the doorframe to keep from falling. When Elise turned around, her face had been red but dry—Suzie could see the pride she took in not blubbering.

Elise walked to her bed with the exaggerated slowness of royalty and plucked the offending shirt off it. Danny closed his eyes and kept them closed until he heard the bathroom door slam. He didn’t like to get rough with her, but god damn! The lip on her! It was always the fucking lip with women. They never knew when to shut up.

Suzie tried to think of something to say, something to ease the tension. But for some reason, her mind would only flash back to a tiny memory of eavesdropping on her mother on the phone in the kitchen when she thought the kids were asleep, her mother saying, “There ain’t a man alive smarter than his own dick.” It seemed unhelpful, so Suzie kept her mouth shut.

Suzie studied Elise in the rearview mirror until a horn honked, startling them both. The light had changed.

Elise gave her the briefest glance before turning back to the window. “It’s green,” she said. “You can go now.” The car behind honked again, longer this time.

“Yep,” Suzie said, stepping on the gas. “I suppose I got distracted. Sorry.” She moved to lift the cigarette back to her mouth, forgetting she’d already pitched it out the window. She was entirely at sea.

Elise snorted like a dragon. “So,” she said. “Where are we going anyway?”

Well? “Well . . . uh . . . I thought maybe we could get some lunch first,” Suzie said. “Then we could walk around. See the sights. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds great,” Elise said, bored. She put her earbuds back in and laid her cheek against the cool of the window.

•

The Peppermill’s sign was also in rainbow letters. Suzie considered pointing this out, but a look at the girl’s face made her think better of it.

“Here?” Elise said. “No offense, Aunt Suzie, but this place looks disgusting.”

“It’s nicer inside,” Suzie said. “And I hear they’ve got really good milkshakes!” she added and felt like a fool. She’s seventeen, not seven.

“Golly gee,” Elise said, rolling her eyes. Then she looked at Suzie, currently at war with her own hands to keep from lighting a cigarette, and she took a deep breath and smiled. “Hey, actually, that’s really cool,” she said and took Suzie’s arm like they’d just been elected prom royalty, and Suzie loved her instantly.

They sat in a pink velvet booth underneath an enormous fake cherry tree. The cherry trees were everywhere, lush and heavy with blossoms as if they thrived on neon and the smoke from grease fires. Elise opened her menu and gave it a cursory glance. She set it down and looked away.

“You know what you’re getting?” Suzie asked.

“Oh, I’m not going to get anything, Aunt Suzie. You go ahead,” Elise said.

“You don’t see anything you like?” Suzie said. But they have silver dollar pancakes! she stopped herself from adding. Good God, what DO teenagers like? She could not remember a single legal thing.

“I don’t want anything,” Elise said. “I’m just not hungry.” She smiled again to show she wasn’t upset.

“We can go somewhere else,” Suzie said, and, as if on cue, promptly forgot the name and location of every other restaurant in the greater Las Vegas area.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m just not hungry,” Elise repeated.

Suzie shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said. “Long as you don’t mind watching me eat.” As she said it, she realized she was starving.

“I don’t mind.”

The waitress came and Suzie ordered steak and eggs, medium rare and over easy. And a cup of coffee. “I’ll have coffee, too,” Elise said.

“And?”

“That’s it.”

The waitress frowned. She wore no nametag—none of the waitresses here did—but she looked like she had been born in a waitress uniform. Suzie imagined her name to be something old fashioned and tough, like “Velma” or “Flo.”

Velma-or-Flo turned now to Suzie and cocked her head. “You ought to tell her to lay off that stuff, Momma. It’ll stunt her growth.”

Suzie looked her up and down. “I would,“ she said slowly. “But the women in our family don’t much care for being told what to do.” She stared at Velma-or-Flo until she went away, then stared after, because she had a nice ass.

When Suzie turned back Elise said, “That was so cool!” and for a split second Suzie thought she meant Velma-or-Flo’s ass, or, perhaps, Suzie’s taste in asses, which was, admittedly, excellent. “Thanks,” she said.

“I can’t believe she called you Momma!”

“There is a resemblance,” Suzie said, waving her hand back and forth between them, and there was. They had the same coppery brown hair, the same steely eyes, the same unsilver tongue for talking to men. These two had been forged by the same smith, clearly, but there was no metal in Danny, Suzie realized suddenly. He was soft, and life had bruised him like a piece of fruit.

“Well, yeah,” Elise said. “But who says that? Momma.” She shook her head.

“My accent, I suppose,” Suzie said. “People still talk like that back home.”

“In Morgan City?”

“All over the South.”

Elise shrugged. “Dad doesn’t have an accent,” she said. “Unless he’s drunk.”

“I know he worked hard to lose it,” Suzie said, and thought about how futile that had always seemed to her, how dangerous for your heart. Because whoever you talked into loving the fake you was unlikely to treat the real you with the same affection, and they were guaranteed to meet the real you at some point. Sure, you could change how you sounded, how you looked, where you lived . . . but you could never change where you were from. You could change who you were but not who you had been, and trying to hide where you came from or who you had been there was just buying yourself a future heartbreak, because, sooner or later, life would tell on you.

The waitress came back and set their coffees down with a careful thud: hard enough to make noise but not to spill. “Y’all want cream,” she said, as if they’d already demanded some.

“Yes, please,” said Suzie. “I thank you. I’ll be better company once I’ve had some coffee.” She offered a smile to make peace.

“Liar,” the waitress said warmly. If she was upset about earlier, she didn’t show it. She fished creamer tubs out of her apron. “You do look tired,” she said. “Long night?”

“You could say so.”

The waitress smiled and put a hand on Suzie’s shoulder. “Well don’t you worry ’bout a thing, Momma. I’m here to take care of you.”

“What were you being all nice to her for?” Elise asked when the waitress was gone. “She’s the one acting like a bitch.”

Suzie shrugged. “You catch more flies with honey,” she said.  “Look how sweet she was when I said sorry.”

Elise poured sugar carefully onto her spoon, trying to heap it up as high as possible without spilling. That way she could get extra but still be able to say she only took one sugar in her coffee. Suzie had been the same way at her age.

They were quiet a moment, then Elise said, “You gonna ask her out?” and Suzie looked away to keep from laughing—she had just been musing over that very question.

“I mean, you’re a dyke, right?” Elise said. “That’s what Dad told me.”

“One way to put it.” From where they were sitting, they could hear the pirate show they put on hourly at the fountains in front of Treasure Island, barely. Only the shouts of “Yar!” were really clear, and Suzie imagined the whole show being scripted with no other word than “yar!” The pirates disembarked their boats and linked arms to dance a chorus line on the sidewalk to the strains of the Yar Symphony. The young hero pirate rescued the damsel kidnapped by the bad pirates and lashed to the main sail. Cutting her free and pulling her close, her ample bosom heaving in her torn bodice with equal parts fear and desire, the hero pirate takes the damsel’s tear-streaked face in his hands and tenderly shouts at it “Yar!”

“I mean, I know you guys are reclaiming that word, right?,” Elise said quickly.  “I’m not, like, prejudiced or anything.” In her tortured eagerness not to offend, she looked more like Suzie than ever. Suzie sipped her coffee. She’d let Elise off the hook in a second, but she had to admit to a tiny slice of schadenfreude after the long morning. “Like, half the kids at school think I’m a dyke too,” Elise went on proudly. “Just because I like rainbows!” She shook her skinny arms and the bangles chimed.

“It doesn’t bother you?” Suzie said. She could feel how badly Elise wanted to impress her and she wanted to give the kid a chance to.

“Fuck no,” Elise said. “They’re all assholes anyway.” Suzie nodded and Elise glowed with satisfaction. “I hate my school,” she went on. “I can’t fucking wait to graduate. I have all the days marked on my calendar. Just sixty-seven more to go and I’m fucking out of there.”

“You say fuck an awful lot for a girl your age,” Suzie said.

Elise stuck her chin out. “That offend you or something?” she said.

Suzie shook her head. “Nope. I was just thinking about something I heard a long time ago.”

“What?”

“That the people who say fuck the most usually aren’t.”

Elise stared at her for another moment, then turned red. She put her hands on the table and started pinching off bits of her napkin with her fingernails.

She’s seventeen, not thirty-seven—Danny should have thought to tell her that one, too. Suzie cleared her throat a little and said “Our mother used to do that. Your dad‘s and mine.”

Elise looked up. “Do what?”

“What you’re doing. Ripping up little bits of paper. She’d do it when she got worried or scared. Take a paper towel and just tear it to bits.”

“Really? Dad never told me that.” Elise looked at her mound of paper bits. “He doesn’t talk about her very much,” she said.

“No, I guess not.”

“I mean, he’s said some things, but not a lot,” Elise said. She seemed to look over her words once spoken and find them lacking. “Like what Morgan City was like,” she said, “or what your dad was like or anything. I don’t even know what he did. Like, as a job.”

“He was a trucker,” Suzie said. “Long haul. He wasn’t home much.”

“And your mom?”

“Momma had her hands full with us.” Suzie drained her mug and set it at the edge of the table for a refill. “And she had other problems.” Velma-or-Flo came up behind her and put her free hand on Suzie’s shoulder again. She leaned over to pour a fresh cup. Suzie glanced sideways despite herself.

“Like what?”

Suzie shrugged. “Seemed like Daddy only came home long enough to get her pregnant again, then take off. She was always pregnant, but besides me and Danny none of ’em stuck. She lost most of ’em a few months in, and then she had Billy, but he died young.”

Elise’s eyes went wide. “Oh my God! You had a brother that died? What from?”

“They called it ‘failure to thrive,’” Suzie said. “I think it’s called SIDS now. He was real little and sickly right from the first. I think Momma might have had him early, but I can’t remember. He was only a few months when he passed.”

“Wow,” Elise said. “Dad never told me anything about that.”

Suzie turned her hands up. “Like you said, he doesn’t talk much about the past.”

“No, not really,” Elise said. “Like, he’s said some things. Like . . .” She bit her lip and looked up at the cherry tree, considering.  “OK,” she said finally. “He said there was a fire once when he was little, but he doesn’t remember it very well.”

“He was too young,” Suzie said. “He would have been, what? Four or five? I was about ten.”

“What happened?”

“It was a car fire,” Suzie said. “We had this old Pontiac Bonneville Momma had got off a cousin of hers, but it was always breaking down. There was a man in the trailer park named Stoney who did work on cars. He told Momma it was some sort of electrical problem, but he could fix it for fifty dollars. Well, we didn’t have fifty dollars to spare, but Momma said if she could give him seventeen dollars and make up for the rest some other way she’d be plenty grateful. She counted out all the money in the house and gave him everything she didn’t need for groceries.”

“What other way?” Elise asked.

“So, Stoney got up under there and did Lord knows,” Suzie went on. “He got it running again, which was good because the nearest grocer was ten miles away. Momma left me to watch Danny and run to town for the groceries. She wasn’t gone but half an hour, but when she came back there was already smoke coming from under the hood.”

“Oh my God!”

“Yep, so she told me and Danny to stay inside, and she ran off to find Stoney and see if he couldn’t fix it. And while she was looking for him, the smoke kept getting thicker and blacker until we started seeing the flames coming out too. By the time Momma came back anybody could see it was on fire.” Suzie stopped to drink her coffee.

“But, what did you do?” Elise asked. “I mean, did you just throw some water on it or something and put it out?”

Suzie threw back her head and laughed. How do these kids stay alive? “Hell no,” she said. “You don’t put water on an electrical fire. Momma told me to call the fire department, and she ran around back and got the shovel and started throwing dirt on it fast as she could. It took the fire department about fifteen minutes to make it out to us, and by the time they did the whole front end was a piece of char. Front seats too. That car was just destroyed.”

“Oh, wow.”

Suzie nodded. “If Momma hadn’t been out there shoveling though, it might’ve hit the gas tank. She slowed it down enough to keep that from happening.”

“And it was just your mom? Nobody came out to help her? Not Stoney or any of your neighbors?”

“Nope,” Suzie said. She looked off towards the bar. “I don’t know where Stoney had got off to. I suppose everybody else was at work.” She remembered them all standing on their lawns, waiting. They watched her mother cry as she pitched dirt and gravel at the car, thick ribbons of hair pasted to her forehead with soot and sweat. Nearly every person in the park had come out when they smelled the smoke. Suzie had seen them from the living-room window where she stood with her arms crossed around Danny’s shoulders to keep him from running out. Their neighbors had stood and watched with their hands in their pockets or holding beers like they were at a cookout. They didn’t care what happened to the car or Ruth Ann, but they wanted to be ready if it blew up. Had Stoney done something to the car deliberately to make it eventually catch fire? It was certainly possible, but Suzie suspected he was just an idiot.

•

The food came out steaming. Velma-or-Flo set the steak and eggs in front of Suzie with a smile. “There you go, Momma,” she said. “Anything else for you? Hot sauce? A1?”

“Hot sauce, please and thank you,” Suzie said. Elise looked at the eggs. “You sure you don’t want anything?” Suzie asked her. The waitress got her pad and pen ready, but Elise shook her head. “No thanks,” she said. “Just maybe some ice water when you come back.” Velma-or-Flo nodded and left to get it.

“You’re going to put hot sauce on your steak, Aunt Suzie?” Elise said, and Suzie felt a light thrill at her use of the title. She felt, for the first time that day, that she might not be fucking the kid up permanently with her ignorance of the proper social attitude you take towards teenagers, or her inability to stop cursing for a day. She felt smart, adult. She could handle this kid and whatever came with her. Aunt Suzie: Real Life Grown-Up.

“It’s for the eggs,” Suzie said.

“Gross!”

“You never put hot sauce on your eggs?”

“No way, that sounds disgusting.”

Suzie reached for the salt-and-pepper shakers. “That’s how we ate them growing up, me and your dad both. Momma would near drown them in Tabasco. I guess I got a taste for it.” She shook salt over her steak. “Danny doesn’t eat them like that anymore?”

Elise shook her head. “No, but Dad doesn’t really eat breakfast anyway.” She grabbed a fresh napkin and began to pinch it apart. “So, what was she like? Your mom, I mean.”

Suzie leaned back in the booth and closed her eyes. What had she been like? “Tired, mostly,” Suzie said and opened her eyes, surprised at herself. “She just always had so much to take care of. Daddy was almost never home. He sent money, but we never knew when it was coming and it never was enough.”

“Do you think she had any other reason to be tired?” Elise said without looking up from her napkin.

“What do you mean?”

Velma-or-Flo came back with ice water and a bottle of hot sauce and a short stack of pancakes. “I just about forgot,” she said, winking at Suzie. “These come with the steak and eggs.” The pancakes had whipped cream and darts of strawberry slices on top.

“I must have too,” Suzie said. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“Let me know if you need anything else,” Velma-or-Flo said and left.

Suzie uncapped the hot sauce and shook it out onto the eggs. “I never did have much of a sweet tooth,” she said without looking up, “so you can have those pancakes.”

“I’m not really hungry,” Elise said.

“Suit yourself. There if you want ’em.” Suzie busted up her yolks and forked wet egg onto her steak. Elise finished her napkin and shaped all her bits into a cone next to the ketchup bottle. She put her hands on the tabletop and watched Suzie eat. “You really don’t want them, Aunt Suzie?” she asked, and Suzie shook her head. Elise pulled the plate over.

They ate quietly for a while, and then Suzie looked up and said it again: “What do you mean? Other reason to be tired.”

Elise shrugged and rolled her eyes without rancor this time, as if she was embarrassed. “I don’t know,” she said. “Dad said some stuff about her.”

“Like what?”

“Just . . .” Elise said and took a breath. “Just that, well, I guess she had some boyfriends. Like, when your dad was out of town.”

“Boyfriends?”

“Dad said she cheated on your dad, like a lot. He called her a whore.” Elise put her fork down. The pancakes were half gone. She went to grab another napkin but stopped herself, put her hands in her lap and twisted them.

Suzie looked at her hard for a moment, then smiled. “Your dad seems to have an opinion on everybody, doesn’t he?” she said, and went on eating.

Elise smiled too, and picked her fork back up. She hovered it over the pancakes. “But,” she said in a small voice. “But, did she? Cheat on your dad I mean?” Suzie took a drink of coffee. “I mean, I’m not saying I agree with Dad or anything, I was just wondering if—”

Music! That’s something teenagers like! “She had a record,” Suzie said, and took another drink. “By a singer named John Lee Hooker. You ever heard of him?” Elise shook her head. “He’s a blues man. From a long time ago. She got that record as a gift from a man in the trailer park. She loved the blues, but Daddy didn’t.”

She played it at night, after she’d put the kids to bed. Sometimes Suzie would wake up and hear that record playing and hear her mother talking and laughing. And sometimes Suzie would hear a man’s voice talking and laughing too. And though she never got up to look, she knew that man wasn’t her father because she never heard her father laugh, not once in her life.

“There was a song on that record called ‘Black Snake,’” Suzie said, “and sometimes when Momma and I were working around the house, folding laundry or doing dishes, she’d sing it at little. Mean, mean black snake, been crawling ’round my back door. I remember that part. I always knew she was in a good mood when she sang it.”

Suzie reached across the table and took Elise’s ice water. Her hand only shook a little bit.

“So,” she said after taking a sip. “One day, Daddy comes home for a week. So Momma’s making dinner. Getting Danny to sit right in his chair, putting the tea and the butter on the table, getting the chicken out and the biscuits in. Just making it real nice for Daddy, because he always wanted dinner to be real nice. And she’s distracted, I guess, and not thinking, because she starts singing that song to herself, real quiet, but still loud enough for Daddy to hear. Mean, mean black snake, been crawling ’round my back door. And Daddy’s just watching her real careful, because he doesn’t like the blues. And she just keeps on singing it to herself while she’s getting everything on the table. He crawl up my window, crawl up in my baby’s bed. And I can see Daddy’s face getting dark. I want to tell Momma to stop singing it because it’s making Daddy mad, but I can’t because I’m not supposed to know why it’s making Daddy mad. But I do.”

“And so she just keeps singing and putting food on the table, and he just sits there getting madder and madder. And finally, she gets the plates out and when she sets his down in front of him, he grabs her by the wrist and pulls her down on her knees so they’re looking right at each other. And he tells her—” Suzie’s throat closed up like a fist. She put a hand over her eyes. “Goddamn, I could use a smoke,” she said.

“What did he tell her?” Elise said.

He told her he’d kill her. He told her she was a whore and he’d kill her right in front of the goddamn kids before he’d let her make a fool of him. He told her to shut her whore mouth before he did it right then.

“He told her,” Suzie said, “that if there ever really was a black snake crawling around the back door, he hoped she’d have the sense to knock its brains in, rather than sing some fool song about it. Then he threw her down on the floor and walked out.”

“Wow,” Elise said. “That’s intense.”

“One way to put it.”

“But,” Elise said. “I mean, I’m not saying it was right or anything, but she was cheating on him . . .” She looked at Suzie helplessly.

Suzie thought about it. She thought about the record playing and her mother talking and laughing in the night with men who weren’t her father. Then she thought of Ruth Ann lying dazed on the floor from her head cracking on the linoleum, and of herself running to get the biscuits out of the oven because they were starting to smoke, and of Danny kneeling on the floor beside Ruth Ann crying, saying “Momma, please. Please get up. Please,” and looking up at Suzie when she didn’t. She thought of how many nights her father was gone and how her mother never asked him about them even once. How there was never enough money even though he was supposed to be working all the time. And how she never heard her mother sing anything after that day, right up until she died.

“No,” she said finally. “I wouldn’t say it was right either.” She waved to Velma-or-Flo and signaled for the check.

•

They left the car in the parking lot and headed down the Strip towards Fremont Street—it was only a mile or so. The casinos here were older, not as clean and pretty as the ones on the other end of the Strip. Men who didn’t speak any language Suzie could recognize pressed glossy ads for escort services and cheap shrimp cocktail into her hand as she passed. She dropped them in the gutter like oversized confetti.

Because it was daytime, the Fremont Street canopy wasn’t lit up yet, but its shade was welcome as they walked, looking at the souvenir shops and the neon casino marquees. They stepped up to an intersection just in time to get cut off by a caravan of pink golf carts ferrying a bachelorette party to its next destination. The women waved fruity drinks in long neon cups shaped like penises and threw condoms at the crowd like they were a parade float.

“Can you be butch if you”re straight?” Elise asked suddenly. Suzie’s phone buzzed in her pocket—Danny, done with his conference and ready to join them, she was sure—but she didn’t answer it.

“I really dig the butch aesthetic,” Elise went on, and Suzie covered her snort of laughter with a sneeze that sounded nearly genuine. Velma-or-Flo wasn’t butch, but Suzie imagined picking her up with that line. Hey baby, you wanna get nude? I really dig your aesthetic.

“I don’t see why not,” Suzie said. They were still waiting for their turn to cross, the DON’T WALK signal counting down the seconds until the light changed. However accidentally, the crosswalk countdown gave their mundane wait the sheen of coming revelation, and Suzie steeled herself. The girl wasn’t gay, so it wouldn’t be a coming out. Was she failing at school? Oh God, was she pregnant? She imagined putting an arm around a sobbing Elise and saying something comforting and wise. It’s ok kid, some of my best friends are straight.

“I love how tough butch women are,” Elise said, dropping a bunch of fliers for escorts and strip clubs into the trash can on the curb. Criers on the Strip are like reverse pickpockets— they press the fliers into your hand so stealthily that you don’t even stop walking, don’t even realize you’re holding a dozen of the damn things until you find a place to let them go.

Cars continued to dart past. A limousine of fraternity brothers—their Greek letters spelled on the long side of the car in masking tape—passed them, several of its occupants mooning the world. “But it’s probably, like, unattractive to guys, right?” she asked Suzie, and Suzie shrugged. “I mean,” Elise said, and swallowed. “Like, could I do that, you think? And still have a boyfriend? Can you be tough that way if you like guys?”

The light finally changed. Elise wasn’t sobbing as they crossed, but Suzie put an arm around her shoulders anyway. “Well, I don’t see why not,” she told her niece again. She could hear the limo of hooting frat boys even now, though they must be blocks away. “Frankly,” she said, “if you can, I’d probably recommend it.”

•

Once they’d crossed, a sign caught Suzie’s eye. Binion’s.

“Look, Elise” she said pointing, “It’s the cowboy.”

The cowboy, all forty neon feet of him, leaned against a wall with a thumb cocked toward the cigarette in his mouth as if he were part of an instructional video on how to smoke. Suzie looked up at him and back at Elise, waiting for her smart remark, but Elise just smiled and pointed to another sign across the street from the first one.

“Look,” she said. “It’s the cowboy’s wife.”

Suzie looked. The sign was maybe just as big, but this one sat with one high-heeled boot kicked out in front of her. She wore a white fringe miniskirt and a low-cut fringe top and a cowboy hat, all of it blinding white. Her teeth were blinding white too, straight and ringed with a big red lipstick smile. Suzie looked back at the cowboy. His face had neon snaked into it to make him look more animated, though whether those lines were meant to be marks of laughter or of anger, she didn’t know. Maybe he was just old. Wives were old like that, old and tired. Her mother colored gray with dirt, frantically shoveling it onto a burning car.

But the cowgirl! She was just as pink and plump and smooth as a skinned drumstick. Her hair was yellow and perfect. The cowboy’s girlfriend, maybe. She could love him but still have her own place, and she could listen to whatever music she wanted to and wear whatever clothes she pleased. Suzie studied the marquee as they walked towards it. She looked so young. And she looked so happy.

Suzie shook her head. “Sorry, kid,” she said, arm still around Elise’s shoulders.“I don’t think so.”

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