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“What happens in Vegas—”
“Nope. Don’t go there and don’t believe it,” I told him.
“Got it.”
I turned to Betsy. “Where’s…” and the words trailed away. Usually words don’t fail me, but they did then.
“My daughter?” She arched an eyebrow as she finished my sentence for me.
“Sure. Where’s Marisa?”
And, as if that were her cue, I saw the girl shutting their apartment door on the second floor, locking it, and then walking briskly down the balcony, tapping a hand on the white metal railing, and down the stairs. She was like a gazelle: all legs and grace, no tween gawkiness. She had that choker and the goth eyeliner, but her lipstick today was closer to Barbie pink, which worked better on a thirteen-year-old than what, it seemed, she usually wore. But she was still dressed for abduction: a skirt the length of a wide belt and a tight black T-shirt.
When she reached us, she stood beside Betsy, and her mother put an arm around her bare shoulder. “I thought we agreed you weren’t going to wear that skirt today,” Betsy said to her.
“Nope.”
“This is Vegas,” said Frankie expansively. He was trying to be a peacemaker, but he sounded like a pervert.
“I’m Crissy,” I said to her. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Yeah,” she said, “I googled you plenty back in Vermont and more on the plane. And Betsy has shown me lots of pictures.” She gazed at me. “You had a nose job, right?”
“Right. To look more like Diana.” I wanted to make it clear that as vain as I am—and I make the bumptious dullards who compete on The Bachelor seem rather sporty and carefree when it comes to their eyebrows and boobs—I didn’t see one of Vegas’s premier plastic surgeons because I thought my nose was too big or too small. I just wanted to replicate Lady Di’s as much as possible.
Marisa turned to my sister and, as if she understood intuitively how to get under my skin, said—again calling her mother by her given name—“You should get a nose job, too, Betsy. And dye your hair so you also look like the princess. Just think of all the crazy stuff you could get away with if people couldn’t tell you two apart.”
Frankie guffawed. “Great minds thinking alike,” he said.
Betsy looked back and forth between her boyfriend and her daughter, and I couldn’t decide whether she was exasperated or intrigued. But Marisa picked up on the strange, vacillating energy from my sister.
“Or not,” the girl said. “Maybe it’s like that Billy Joel song. Don’t go changing. Whatever. I love you just the way you are.”
“You know Billy Joel?” I asked, impressed.
“Not biblically,” she said. Then: “My mom says you’re bulimic, just like Princess Diana.”
“Marisa!” Betsy snapped at her. “I told you—”
“It’s fine,” I said. The child had no filter. I approved. “I promise, I won’t give back whatever we eat at lunch. At least not intentionally. But the buffets out here? Food poisoning is always an option, so you just never know. The best thing about the pandemic—arguably, the only good thing about the pandemic—was that it closed the buffets for a bit, because a sneeze guard was no match for COVID-19. And when they reopened, they had better hygiene in place.”
“So, you’re off to Summerlin?” said Frankie. I was pleased with the way that Marisa or the heat was making him sweat.
“We are.”
“I’ll look forward to seeing you again, Crissy,” Frankie said. “You show me secret Vegas, and someday I can show you secret Grand Cayman—we have a club there—or secret Phnom Penh.”
“You know secret Phnom Penh?”
The bounder winked. “I do. And secret Moscow.”
“Frankie’s old bank used to do business in Russia, South Korea, and Cambodia,” Betsy said.
Her boyfriend said something in Russian, and I understood not a word. He waited a moment and then said in English, “I could show you a restaurant in Moscow with a veal Orloff that would turn a vegetarian into Peter the Great.”
“Was he a rather passionate carnivore?”
“He was.”
