Melissa Senate (14 page)

We stopped for the night in a town called Beaver City. Our hotel appeared to be built out of rock. The super chatty desk clerk, a forty-something man with the bluest eyes I’d ever seen, told us that Beaver City was the birthplace of Butch Cassidy and Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of the television. I had him write that down on the motel stationery for Tom. I knew he’d like that.

The clerk recommended a bunch of places for us to visit, including the inactive volcanoes and the Wal-Mart in Colorado City, the polygamist enclave, where we could see women with sister wives and cartfuls of well-behaved children up close. Stella’s eyes lit up at the thought of interviewing a diner waitress who shared her husband with many women, but then decided we should stick to the plan of leaving first thing in the morning and not stopping until we hit Sin City. That still didn’t stop us from staying up past midnight, laughing about how the same man would never go for both Stella and me, that we were way too different, just like Maxine and Charlotte. But then Stella reminded me that Danny Peel, back in kindergarten, couldn’t choose between us and said he wanted us both to be his girlfriend, because, and I quote: “I have two hands, don’t I?” He slipped one into mine and one into Stella’s and off we’d gone to the playground. The trio actually lasted the entire school year.

T
WO MINUTES ON THE
L
AS
V
EGAS STRIP, AND WE ALMOST
collided with a white limo, a drunk bride’s head poking out of the sun roof.

“I
did!
” the bride trilled, then took a swig out of a bottle of wine. “I
did!
Whoo-
hoooooo!
” I shot her a thumbs-up and she let out the loudest scream of joy I’d ever heard.

It was an appropriate welcome to Sin City, which looked exactly like I imagined. Times Square had nothing on Vegas. Humongous hotels of different glowing colors, from pink to green. Hundreds, thousands maybe, of people walked up and down the boulevard, and the cars, adding to the glow of color with their red taillights, were a steady, slow-moving stream.

Stella had booked us into the New York-New York Hotel & Casino on Las Vegas Boulevard; she felt that because her child had been conceived in New York, New York, it was the place to start three thousand miles away. It was as good a starting place as any other—an ice cream parlor, a dentist’s office, a blackjack table. Or the four thousand-plus hits on Google for
law office, Las Vegas.

We stood outside the massive-never-seen-anything-like-it hotel, staring up and around and over and down. The New York-New York was such an incredible feat of architecture meets facade meets
wow
meets theme park, that I wasn’t even bothered by the one-hundred-seven-degree temperature. There was a one-hundred-fifty-foot Statue of Liberty and a stunning replica of the Empire State Building. Inside, a real live roller coaster looped around the hotel. Good thing Stella was pregnant, or she might have tried to talk me into it.

We were paying a fortune for the stay. It was a good thing we were sinking our money into the hotel; we would not be tempted to do
anything
(code word for “waste money on slot machines”) other than look for J.

Our room, which took some doing to find, had two queen-size beds with cacti on the headboards, which was the only reminder that we were in Las Vegas and not New York. We both took showers, then got ready for dinner (and, yes, we were definitely planning on using our two-for-one coupon for the fancy New York-style steak house).

“Let’s dress up,” Stella said. “I’m feeling lucky.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I feel really hopeful. Like I might really find him, Ruby.”

I stared at my sister, fresh out of the shower, her hair plastered wet against her shoulders. For the first time I understood, really understood, what my mother had meant about the just-rolled-out-of-bed-to-breakfast look. Here Stella was, no artifice, no tiny tank top with some aggressive saying or message across her ample chest, no yoga pants that showed her abs and belly button. No shimmery lip gloss or Paris Hilton-esque sunglasses. She was just Stella. A pregnant Stella looking for the father of her baby.

“I feel lucky, too,” I told her, squeezing her hand. “Are you going to wear the dress you bought at the Kittery outlets?”

She nodded and took it out of her suitcase. It looked great. That was the thing about slinky jersey—it never wrinkled. The dress was sleeveless red and halter style. “Red is my color according to Maxine. I miss her,” she said, sitting down on the edge of her bed, the dress folded on her lap. “Didn’t she and Charlotte sort of remind you of Mom?”

I’d had the same thought back at The Double Sisters Inn. Nebraska seemed so long ago, Nick’s visit like a dream. “I forgot how much I missed talking to her, telling her things. I could ask her what she thinks of all this with Tom and Nick.”

“Would you have told her?” Stella asked.

“Probably not,” I said. “She’d have gotten it out of me, though. She would have known something was wrong.”

“I knew something was wrong,” she said, glancing up at me.

“I know. I guess you know me better than I thought.”

“But you’re still not going to tell me what you’re going to do?” she asked. “Are you going to marry Nick instead?”

I raised an eyebrow. “I think you’re forgetting that Nick hasn’t proposed anything other than a chance. He wants to date me.”

“And you…”

“And I wish things could stay the same. I could be engaged to Tom, like permanently, and have my secret fantasy crush on Nick, neither moving ahead.”

She nodded. “I feel that way about this sometimes,” she said, patting her belly. “If I could just freeze time until I found J…”

“Guess time and life move on whether we’re ready or not,” I said, glancing out the window at the lights and whir of constant movement.

She smiled and disappeared into the bathroom with her dress and cosmetics bag. I pawed through my own suitcase for the one nice dress I’d packed, a pale-yellow silk wrap dress, and my high-heeled silver sandals.

The last time we got ready like this was for the senior prom. Silas was her date, and we all expected him to come to the house in some crazy outfit to protest the ordinary and expected, but he showed up in a classic tuxedo. Stella was sure he’d done it for our mother, who’d talked about nothing but the prom to us for weeks prior. She must have checked the batteries in her camera a thousand times. Stella told her she probably wouldn’t want keepsake memories of Silas in a T-shirt and jeans and Doc Martens at the BLA senior prom, but my mother said she most certainly would. And then Silas arrived in the tux.

My date was my boyfriend at the time, a nice guy named Nathanial, but he and Silas did not speak the same language and so the four of us barely saw each other at the prom. I’d forgotten about Nathanial, how Stella yawned behind his back and told me I could do “so much better.” I’d thought she was being a bratty snob and it made me want to fall in love with Nathanial all the more. While I was trying hard, he found love with some girl he was working with at a dairy farm.
Not every hot guy will be like Mark Feeler,
she would say.
You don’t have to date these bores. Let me tell you, a bore will break your heart and dump you same as a hot guy. Emily Patcher just got dumped by her dweebinski boyfriend, and she’s totally brokenhearted!

I’d thought about that lately. Wondered if I’d said yes to certain guys over the years because of the Mark Feeler debacle. Because of the Eric Miller disappearance. If you weren’t in love, you couldn’t get your heart blown to bits. I supposed that might apply to my current love life. I wasn’t quite “in love” with Tom, my fiancé, and I was madly in love with Nick, my fantasy crush. Who I hadn’t said yes to.

“Ruby!” Stella said as she came out of the bathroom. “You look hot!”

I laughed. “It’s my one fancy dress.”

“You should wear it every night,” she said, linked arms with me, and off we went.

As we waited for our Perriers in the steak house, I got down to business, a small spiral notebook open and pen at the ready. I wanted every detail of the night Stella and J met. The name of the bar, what they drank, how they hooked up in the first place, what he said, what she said, where they went afterward—before her apartment.

“I told you everything, Ruby.”

“No, you told me some basics. I want every detail. If you want to find this guy, tell me everything.”

“Okay, here’s everything. I was waiting at the bar inside Georgina’s, an Italian restaurant on Columbus. Corner of Seventy-fourth,” Stella said as the waiter delivered our drinks. “I was supposed to meet a potential client—a new painter who was blocked—but he never showed up. So twenty minutes later, I was getting up to leave, and the man who’d been a few seats down said, ‘You were stood up, too?’ So I asked if he was the painter, Pierre Something, and he said, no, his name was Jake. Or something like it.” She sipped her water. “You know, Ruby, I think it was Jake. Not James or Jason.”

“Okay, I’m going to stop you right there. Just concentrate on him at the bar, telling you his name. What does he look like? What’s he wearing?”

She closed her eyes. “A suit. I’d forgotten that! A nice suit. All I remembered before was that he wore a nice button-down dress shirt and nice dark pants. Oh, and he had a briefcase with his—” She stopped, her mouth dropping open.

“What? Monogram? His initials? Stella, that’s great! Do you think you can remember the initials? Close your eyes and—”

“Ruby, I think that’s him,” she said, her gaze trailing a man who followed a hostess to a table across the restaurant. “I think that’s him!”

I stared from him to Stella. “Really? Are you sure?”

He was sitting a good distance away; two tables blocked our view. From this vantage point, I could only see that he was tall, attractive, dark-haired, and bore a striking resemblance to Hugh Jackman.

She squinted in his direction. “I think so! He looks exactly like him.”

Talk about odds. There were clearly karmic influences at work. Forces of the universe.

She bit her lip. “Now that I actually found him without meaning to, I don’t know what to do. What do I say? Do I say anything?” She held the menu up to her face, peeking out every two seconds.

“Go over there and start with hello,” I said.

“Okay, sure. I’ll just say, ‘Hello, um, you might not remember me, but three months ago, we had a one-night stand, not that it wasn’t memorable, because it was, and it turns out that I’m pregnant. Congratulations! You’re going to be a father.’”

“You might leave out the last two bits, Stella, but that first really long run-on sentence will do just fine.”

“Really?” she asked. “I should just say that? Just spit it out?”

We spent the next five minutes working on her great speech. She would go over to his table and say, “Hi, I think we met in New York three months ago,” with something of a question mark, and then he would burst up out of his seat and say, “Stella, is it really you? I’ve been looking all over the continent for you!”

“I can fantasize,” she said. “Okay, I’m ready.” She stood up and smoothed her dress and took three quick deep breaths.

She’d barely put one foot in front of the other when a very attractive redhead in a low-cut glittering silver gown was led to his table. He stood, she sat, he sat, and the killer kiss put V Squared’s best PDA to shame. The man’s hand was practically inside her décolletage.

“Oh,” Stella said, her face crumpling as she dropped back on her chair.

Oh no
was more like it.

“Stella, remember, he doesn’t know about the baby. He just knows that he had an amazing connection with a woman on a one-night stand and then wasn’t able to find her again. And I’m sure he looked. I’m sure he went back to that restaurant and the other places you went afterward. I’m sure he walked all around your neighborhood, trying to remember which building could possibly be yours. Once he finds you again, I’m sure the redhead will be history. They probably met five minutes ago in the casino.”

“Do you really think so?” she asked, brightening. “Only couples who met five minutes ago would be all over each other like that, right?”

“Definitely,” I said.

The couple sitting at the table closer to ours got up and left, so now there was only one couple blocking our view of J and the redhead. They could easily see us, too, and it seemed that he glanced over a time or two, as if checking out the two hot babes in the sexy dresses.

If he recognized Stella, he didn’t show it.

“He doesn’t even remember me!” she whispered. “He just looked right at me. Not a flicker of recognition.”

“Well, you probably weren’t wearing a sexy cocktail dress with your hair in a glamorous updo when you met,” I reminded her.

“Actually, I was. I was on a muse interview, remember? Muses don’t wear jeans and fleece sweaters.”

I would think that plenty of more “natural” women inspired artists—Grand Junction Anna, with her yellow bike and roadside meditation classes, was probably an unintentional muse to many—but now wasn’t the time to debate the qualities of a muse.

“I’m a professional,” she added, as though she read my mind.

The waiter came over, but we asked for a few minutes to decide on the menu. Not that either of us could eat a bite.

J and the redhead were now sipping champagne, their arms linked. The routine went like this: sip, kiss, sip, kiss, sip, kiss.

“Okay, I have a plan,” I said, shoving my Perrier out of hand-talking zone. “I think you should just go over there and say the same thing we’d already worked out. In slightly less romantic-sounding terms.”

“Example?”

“I think you should pretend you’re on your way to the restroom, then stop dead in your tracks and say, ‘Excuse me, but you look
so
familiar. I could swear we met in New York City a few months ago.’”

“That sounds pretty good,” she said. “Very natural.” She closed her eyes and let out a deep breath. “I’m so nervous,” she added. “But here goes.” She stood up, then sat down.

I squeezed her hand. “If he says, ‘you must be mistaken,’ and runs out, then, okay, that’s the worst-case scenario, and I’ll be right here. But there he is, the holder of the other chromosome. The father of your baby,” I whispered. “Go.”

She gnawed, sipped her water, peered at herself in her compact, took another deep breath, did all of that all over again, and then stood. “Okay.” Then she sat back down. “Can I just write it on a napkin and airplane it over?”

I squeezed her hand. “Cloth napkins don’t airplane over. Be brave, Stell.”

“Okay,” she said again. “Here goes everything.”

I smiled and nodded. As she stood up, I realized she was about to change a person’s entire life in a moment. Of course, she’d already had that moment herself in a bathroom, alone, with a plus sign on a pregnancy test. And she did fine. No matter what Jake or James or Jason had to say, she would be fine.

She sat back down. “I need a minute, Ruby.”

“You don’t have a minute,” I said. “They’re leaving!”

J threw a bill on the table. Then, with their arms around each other, they kissed their way out of the restaurant, the redhead walking remarkably steady in four-inch heels.