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There were moments when Betsy thought she might puddle in the heat of Las Vegas, melt like a Popsicle on the sidewalk. Frankie had warned her, but it was one thing to be told you’re about to start living in a desert paved over with blacktop; it was another to be dropped there unceremoniously after a life lived almost entirely amidst the maple trees of Vermont. One of the first things that struck her about Vegas was the utter lack of vegetation. Having grown up in New England, she noticed it. She felt it. She knew she would miss Vermont’s autumnal pyrotechnics when the maple, birch, and beech leaves were transformed in their death throes into kaleidoscopes of color.
Marisa did better than her, but that was because she rarely climbed out from the sanctuary of the apartment complex’s swimming pool those first days. Betsy had already discovered that, in addition to being a prodigiously gifted mathematician, she was a voracious reader, but now Marisa was reading fewer books and instead devouring articles about Las Vegas, Princess Diana, and cryptocurrency. Betsy had bought her a used tablet soon after she began fostering her (everything worked except FaceTime), and now the girl would stand in the shallow end of the pool and lean her elbows on the concrete side, and devour article after article. Marisa had picked out a bikini that was more revealing than Betsy would have liked when they’d gone shopping, but as Betsy had told her sister, you picked your fights. Marisa allowed Betsy to slather her back and shoulders with sunblock or she’d stand in the water with a T-shirt over the bikini top so she wouldn’t get burned, and Betsy viewed that as a win. She discovered that many of their neighbors were retirees who had come to Nevada because it was a great state to stretch your savings: Social Security benefits weren’t taxed, nor were withdrawals from IRAs or pensions, and there was no state income tax.
There were lots of people at the apartment building who worked at the casinos. Two doors down was a croupier at the Venetian and directly below them resided a bartender at the MGM Grand.
The person who Betsy wanted to get to know more was a blackjack dealer at the Luxor, a single woman a decade older than her who had moved here from Detroit after her marriage had collapsed. She had a son who was about to start at Michigan State. Her name was Ayobami, and her mother was from Lagos and her father from London. Prior to becoming a dealer, she’d taught kindergarten, and she had come to Vegas with a job in hand at a school. But then she discovered she could make twice as much helping people lose money at blackjack, and some nights the tips left her—and this was a word Crissy used in her act, but Ayobami used naturally—gobsmacked. Even people who lost big sometimes gave her their last chip. Betsy could see why: she was charming and funny and beautiful. The two of them met at the pool and hit it off. Ayobami had grown up in Michigan and so she had neither a British nor Nigerian accent, but she was capable of replicating both.
“The next time my parents visit,” she said one afternoon, soon after they met, “I must bring them to your sister’s show. I was born two months before Diana and Charles got hitched. And so even though my mom and dad had been in America a couple of years by then, my mom still watched every moment of the royal wedding while nursing me or changing a diaper.”
“I gather it was quite a TV event.”
“It was. My parents have a more jaded view of the monarchy now than they did back in the day. Back then, we didn’t know that Charles and Diana weren’t going to have a storybook marriage or that Andrew was a pig who’d become pals with predators. It would be forty years before the royal family would drive away Meghan Markle and Harry. And, make no mistake, that poor couple was driven away, and it was all because Meghan was biracial. We all know that’s the truth. The only one my parents still like is Diana.”
“But once upon a time…”
“Once upon a time, my parents liked them all. Back then, they viewed even Elizabeth as downright forward thinking when it came to race.”
Betsy saw Marisa looking up at them. She was, as usual, standing in the water and reading on her tablet.
“When can we go see the show, Betsy?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” she replied.
“That’s been your answer since we got here.”
“Scheduling is—”
“You and Crissy have a weird relationship, I get it. But you’ve still been to see it,” Marisa said. The girl knew that Betsy had, in fact, seen it four times. She’d seen it twice pre-Nigel and twice once the Scotsman had been added.
“If you don’t want to go again, I could take Marisa,” Ayobami volunteered. “There’s nothing in it that a thirteen-year-old shouldn’t see, right?”
“Not a thing. Of course, Marisa will be the youngest person in the house. You’ll be second.”
“I’ve heard such nice things about the show,” Betsy’s new friend told her. “I can’t believe it’s not in a bigger casino. Didn’t she win a Bolv?”
“I have no idea what that is. But it sounds kind of filthy,” Betsy joked. She knew that when Ayobami had said a bigger casino, she’d meant a nicer one. One on the strip.
“Bolv. Best of Las Vegas. I think your sister won Best Impersonator—which is a very high bar out here, since we have nothing but impersonators and cover bands.”
Betsy nodded. “Yes, she did win that. Maybe more than once.”
“And I know one of our senators loves it. John Aldred. He saw it a couple of times. He was in there at least once with his wife, and one or two times when they were separated.”
“When they were separated,” she repeated. “Are they divorced now?”
“The opposite. Reconciled,” Ayobami answered. “Anyway, your sister is the princess, people say. She is Diana.”
Betsy closed her eyes behind her shades. Inadvertently, with her emphasis on that verb, is, Ayobami had touched upon what was for Betsy the most disturbing part of her sister’s re-creation. When a person so completely subsumes herself behind the mask of another, what must it be like to stare into the mirror? What must it be like to gaze upon your reflection and see someone else—someone who just isn’t you?
* * *
Betsy liked Frankie’s Tesla, and not solely because it was electric and had a smaller carbon footprint than a gasoline-powered car. She liked the luxury she felt ensconced in its ventilated, buttery-soft, faux-leather seats. Had she ever been cocooned in a vehicle like that before she met Frankie?
And she liked his new house. His “ranch.” It was on a cul-de-sac, one of only three houses at the end of a long road, and one of the other two belonged to a lobbyist who seemed to work with both Futurium and a crazy congresswoman named Erika Schweiker. The third was empty and had been for sale for months.
Frankie called it his slot machine dacha when he closed on it because it was triple fives: five years old, five bedrooms, five acres. It was out toward Red Rocks, and the sunsets were electric. Like a lot of luxury homes outside of Vegas, it felt like a series of modern boxes welded together, and the inside was airy and light: white walls, dark floors, and the most modern kitchen Betsy had ever seen. But it also had touches of new money swag, such as a spiral staircase to the second floor and a flat fountain against one of the living room walls that looked like a modern art painting but made the interior space sound like you were near a waterfall—or, perhaps, like it was always raining, which was ironic in Las Vegas because it almost never was. A marble plinth in need of a bust or, at least, a massive floral arrangement stood in the entryway just inside the front door. The architect had made sure the pool matched the house, three hard-edged squares creating an L, and one block was deep enough for a diving board. The pool, lit blue at night by underwater lights, had a cactarium on the far side that was otherworldly in its beauty. Beside the pool was a pergola constructed of faux teak that looked authentic but, apparently, would outlive Frankie’s grandchildren.
The air-conditioning, which was on whenever Betsy was there, was silent.
