Anna waited on a circular settee in the lobby of the Blue Moon Family Fun Center and Casino. An enormous arrangement of roses (artificial but convincing until she touched them) erupted volcanically from the center of the settee. She smiled at this effort—the wrongheadedness of it—since cut flowers had not been allowed in the original Blue Moon. Mama had very few superstitions (not even the acceptable Catholic ones), but she had clung to the orthodoxy of her profession. Cut flowers were seen as omens of death in a brothel, emblematic of beauty cut down in its prime. You did not bring roses to the girls without catching hell from Mama.
Brian and Wren were talking to a young woman at the counter. Behind them, in a room with a glass wall, children were frolicking in a pit of brightly colored balls. Their muffled squeals merged with the bells and whistles of the one-armed bandits in another room. Innocence and adult pleasures were efficiently segregated here.
Not like the old days at all.
She remembered the afternoon when she finally felt remorse for having written the letter to Lasko’s father.
Andy had driven over to Eagle Drugs with an apology already forming in his head, somehow believing—a full week after the fact—that he could fix things with a kind word to Lasko or a confession to his father.
I should have brought pastries, he had thought. Or a pack of Camels.
He hated to think how Lasko might have suffered because of his offhanded wickedness. Lasko’s banishment to the garage could have already assumed a dreadful new coloration—beatings, humiliation, who-knows-what. A man who had ordered his son to be “fixed” by a prostitute was capable of much more than that.
Andy had known there was little chance of finding Lasko at the drugstore—his father had no doubt removed him from public scrutiny—but he had gone to the Rexall in the hope that a conversation with Lasko would prove more benign in the presence of his boss, the even-tempered and professional Mr. Yee.
Mr. Yee, however, had been in a state when Andy arrived, muttering to himself as he swept shards of glass from the checkered linoleum floor.
The pharmacy had been robbed that morning, the old man said with a scowl. Some hooligan had broken the window and stolen pills from the cabinet.
“What sort of pills?” Andy had asked, suddenly sick with panic.
“Barbiturates!”
“What’s that?”
“Sleeping pills . . . Sorry sonofabitch!” Mr. Yee, still sweeping furiously, saw Andy’s stricken expression and collected himself long enough to offer reassurance. “Not your fault, son. If you see your buddy Lasko, tell him I need help pronto.”
But it is my fault, thought Andy as he raced through back streets and alleys toward the hideous truth that he already knew.
It’s nobody’s fault but my own.
He was thinking that as he reached Lasko’s garage.
As he entered that dim, dirt-floored room and smelled the rancid vomit and saw the body slumped like a sack of potatoes.
As he looked at that face, already gray and waxen with death.
As he choked down his sobs to keep from being heard in the house.
As he spotted the Book of Marvels and snatched the incriminating evidence from the shelf above the bed.
As he sped across the bridge toward the Blue Moon Lodge and the soft consolation of Margaret’s arms.
There had never been a moment when he wasn’t thinking it.
It’s nobody’s fault but my own.
Brian and Wren were striding toward Anna, both of them smiling, apparently successful in their search for Mr. Sudden. An ember of shame lodged in Anna’s chest was searing its way to the light of day—or the light, at any rate, of a ridiculous theme park where whorehouses were fun for the whole family. It had not been fun, God knows, but it had not been like this place. There had been life at the Blue Moon, however lurid or dull, and there had been radio romance and a long-lashed boy who danced in pirate pants and probably loved her for a while. It might have been fine with no more than that had she not been so vindictive, so childishly selfish.
She had to ask herself if she was still being selfish. This last-minute quest for peace of mind could easily wreak havoc on an innocent, someone nearly as old as she who might not welcome—not to mention deserve—this antediluvian drama. It was far too late for confession, really; the confessors had all left the building.
“He’s in the back,” said Brian, “on his coffee break.”
Wren extended her arm. “C’mon. He’s expecting us.”
Anna found herself frozen to the spot.
“Oh,” said Brian. “Maybe you’d rather do this alone?”
“Forget that shit,” said Wren. “She needs us.”
“Do you?”
“I do, yes. I don’t want to explain this a second time.” She took Wren’s arm. “I’m sorry I’ve been so vague, dear. It’s all a bit of a rat-fuck, I’m afraid.”
They made their way to an undecorated room where Mr. Oliver Sudden was seated at a folding table with his red plastic cup of coffee. He was a wiry fellow with a handlebar mustache—apparently real, if overly waxed—and the obligatory striped shirt and sassy arm garters of the casino’s male employees. Seventy-five, she guessed. An extrovert built for greeting the public, aware of his roguishness.
He rose the moment he saw her inadequate locomotion.
“Here, sweetheart, let me help.”
“Keep your seat,” she said. “These two have it covered.”
He scrambled toward a cluster of upholstered furniture at the other end of the room. “Bring her over here then. It’s more comfortable.”
Brian and Wren lowered her into an armchair, but not before her capricious old body had chirped out the tiniest fart.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “Can’t take her anywhere.”
“Didn’t hear a thing,” he said. “Sit down, folks, please.” He motioned Wren and Brian toward a plaid sofa, then turned back to Anna. “Did that just yesterday, by the way. In front of a lady from Texas.”
“Oh well,” Anna said with a dismissive wave. “Texas.”
He chuckled and sat down on the arm of the chair next to her. “I hear you got some questions for me.”
“I may be barking up the wrong tree.”
“Bark away. That’s what I do all day. Answer questions. ’Course mostly it’s about where the bathrooms are.”
She smiled. She liked this man.
“I’m wondering,” she said, “if you used to work at the old Blue Moon. The one that was a brothel.”
His mouth fell open in wonderment, exposing shiny white dentures. He grabbed the curl of his mustache as if it were the only way to close his mouth.
“Now how the hell did you know that?”
“My daughter met you. Back in the seventies. She remembered the name. Said you did chores around the place. Handyman work. We talked about you before she died.”
Mr. Sudden’s brow furrowed. “I’m truly sorry to hear that. Your children aren’t supposed to go before you do.”
She gave him a forgiving smile. “They say that, don’t they? But it’s not true. Children do it all the time.”
Anna could see that afternoon so clearly. Nineteen ninety-nine. The crumbling folly on the mound above the manor house. The aching green of the Cotswold hills. The ragged chaise where Mona had held court above her kingdom, pale as a powdered queen.
There was tactful hesitation from Mr. Sudden. “I don’t understand. Was your daughter . . . one of the ladies at the Blue Moon?”
“No . . . but she worked there for several weeks. Answering phones. I don’t think she even used her real name.”
He nodded sympathetically but without recognition.
“Red hair? Very frizzy. Like they wore it back then.”
He shook his head. “Sorry.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to remember.”
“I’m surprised she remembered me.”
“I think it was the name, to be honest. It doesn’t let you forget it.”
A blinding flash of Clark Gable teeth. “I was a late baby. My mother wasn’t expecting me. Her last name was Sudden, so . . . how could she resist?”
She studied him for a moment, assessing the kind placement of his features and something deeper and darker in those wide-spaced eyes.
“Margaret,” she said softly, as if it were a prayer.
He was understandably flummoxed. “What?”
“Your mother’s name was Margaret Sudden.”
His hand went to his mustache and held on for dear life. “You knew her?”
“I did, yes.” A slight nod was all it took to jar the tears from her eyes.
Which made her cross with herself. This was supposed to be his moment, not hers.
“I grew up at the Blue Moon Lodge,” she added. She found a tissue in her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. “Your mother read me the Winnie-the-Pooh books. She made me a dress for my sixteenth birthday. I loved her a great deal. More than I loved my mother, in fact.”
His head tilted as he squinted at her. “Should I be remembering you?”
“No, no.” She tucked away the tissue. “It was before your time. If you don’t mind my asking, what year were you born?”
“Nineteen thirty-seven.”
“Yes . . . before . . . just barely.”
“So . . . you grew up there? How do you do that?”
“Happily, for the most part.”
He smiled. “I meant—”
“My mother ran the joint. Mona Ramsey?”
He gaped at her. “Holy shit! Mother Mucca?” His eyes dropped in penitence. “Sorry. Meant no disrespect.”
“None taken, dear. I know they called her that after I left. She was a tough old coot, wasn’t she?”
“She was just a businesswoman,” he said.
Anna smiled at him. “I suspect you and I scrubbed some of the same toilets.”
He seemed to muse on that for a moment. She could practically hear the wheels turning in his head before he finally spoke:
“You’re the daughter who ran away! Ma told me about you!”
“Did she?” Anna could easily have corrected him, but she didn’t think it generous under the circumstances. There was too much left to share with this indulgent stranger. Besides, she was touched by Margaret’s early alteration of Andy’s gender. Margaret had known Anna well before Anna had become Anna, and apparently she had honored that reality after Andy fled town.
“Did she tell you what happened?”
A quick shake of his head. “Just that . . . you ran away. And nobody knew where you went. She was pretty broke up about it.”
Damn you, tears. Stay away.
She glanced over at Brian and Wren, who were watching this interrogation with increasing fascination. She gave them a faint conspiratorial smile before addressing Mr. Sudden again. “Did you grow up at the Blue Moon yourself?”
“Oh, no. Ma left as soon as she got pregnant. I grew up in Portland. Had a wife and kid, but . . . they left after a while. A little problem with speed.” He tapped those brazen white dentures. “I moved back here after Ma died in the seventies.”
“And why—if you don’t mind—did you do that?”
He shrugged. “Guess I wanted to see where we came from.”
“And my mother gave you a job.”
He nodded. “Part-time, but . . . she was a good egg. I was a train wreck back then. Musta been when your daughter met me.”
“Most certainly,” said Anna.
There was a tidy silence as she tried to compose the next question. She had already seen what she needed in the molten eddies of his eyes, an ancestral something that summoned her former life like no landmark could ever have done.
“Did your mother . . . did she ever talk to you about your father?”
He shook his head with a melancholy little smile, as if the answer were obvious. “I don’t think she ever knew. Hazard of the profession.”
“Mmm . . . but she was very careful most of the time.”
“You knew her that well, eh?”
This was no time to bring up Lysol, but that’s what Anna had on her mind. The foolproof yellow potion that kept babies at bay. The stuff Andy had used to clean chicken guts off the wall of Delphine’s cabinette the night that Margaret was bedding Lasko for the sake of his manhood. It didn’t have to have happened that night, but it could have, since Andy had taken the Lysol from Margaret’s cabinette.
“I think I knew your father,” she told Oliver Sudden.
He just widened his eyes dubiously, so she continued.
“He was just a teenager, and he took his own life. I have plenty of reason to feel guilty about that, and I would very much like to apologize to someone before I die. I’m afraid you’re the most logical candidate, because . . . well . . . you’re alive. That’s just the way it is, I’m terribly sorry. May we take you to dinner, Mr. Sudden?”
He blinked at her, then turned to Brian. “Is she always like this?”
“You have no idea,” said Brian.