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I watched the girl use a piece of bread like a sponge to sop up alfredo sauce.
“Did you never meet your biologic parents?” I asked her. Betsy gave me one of those looks that I suppose Queen Elizabeth was often giving Prince Andrew before we knew what an all-in reprobate he was, and supposed he was merely a randy young royal.
“No. I’ll never find my dad. Maybe someday I’ll find my mom.”
“Marisa’s mother tried raising her when she was a baby in the Lund Home in Burlington,” Betsy told me.
“Ted Bundy started at the Lund Home,” Marisa added. “He’s their most famous alumni.”
“Alumnus,” I corrected her.
“Opioids and addiction,” explained Betsy. “It’s the downfall of lots of young moms, including Marisa’s. I used to see it a lot.”
If Marisa hadn’t been present, I would have reminded Betsy of her own predilection for THC, and her forays into LSD and—in the end—shrooms. But shrooms would have been taking a cleaver to both our souls, so it’s probably good that Marisa was there.
“What do you think of Betsy’s new job?” I asked my niece.
“Administrative assistant for a cryptocurrency company? Ridiculous. They hardly have any employees. But she’s about to make a lot more money than she was ever going to make as a social worker trying to keep a kid like me from becoming my mom—my biologic mom, I mean.”
“Do you understand cryptocurrency?”
“Of course. I googled it.”
“I don’t understand it at all,” I said.
“You can buy a small amount via PayPal. I can walk you through it, if you want to invest.”
“No,” I said. “I’m okay.”
“It’s a good investment. A few grand becomes a few hundred grand before you know it. Or, a few grand becomes, like, three cents. It’s very volatile. But mostly it just goes up.”
“Sounds like Las Vegas is the perfect place for Futurium,” I said, though I had my doubts.
“It’s not gambling,” said Marisa. “It’s investing. Talk to Frankie.”
“In Russian or in English?”
“Hah,” Marisa said. I liked it that she got my jokes.
“He is quite the chap, that Frankie Limback,” I said to my sister.
“He is. Unbelievably smart.”
“Is that what you see in him?”
“It’s among the things I see in him. Sometime in the next year or so, he’s going to take us to Grand Cayman. Futurium has an office there.”
“And a club,” I said.
“Yup.”
“Grand Cayman and Las Vegas. Awfully strange bedfellows,” I observed, though I wasn’t sure that was true. Las Vegas was built on tectonic plates of corruption. Las Vegas had people who knew how to bury the bodies so they’d never be found. Did the Cayman Islands? Yes. An ocean is at least as good as the desert when it comes to the sleight of hand one needs to forever conceal a corpse.
“No weirder than Princess Di and Las Vegas,” my sister responded.
“Fair point.”
“I hear there’s been a lot of drama at the Buckingham Palace. Are you okay?”
