So she stumbled through this time, with Marshall doing something new every week, and her mother thrilled with every sound and gesture. Now and then, her mom would pull out a jacket and say, “Would you like to take this to Del?” or “I’m going to give these shoes to the auxiliary; is that fine?”
Their days filled up with visits. Nearly everyone she’d ever known was still in Clinton Hill, but they didn’t ask about her life in Nevada. Perhaps Vegas was a taboo, embarrassing to ask about, like whether or not she was a virgin when she and Walter got married (of course not) or whether Leon Kronenberg had really felt her breast (he had, more than once).
It rankled her that people found it awkward to talk about Vegas. She imagined that they looked at her and thought instead of the showgirls in Minsky’s Follies. They disapproved, when topless dancers were not that big a deal, though it was amazing when they all walked out in a line, their backs to the audience, and then spun around in unison, pasties whirling. All those beautiful girls, tall, with long legs and false eyelashes—the effect was dramatic. It did surprise one.
Of course, people here would not approve of the way she and Del lived, the things they did: Marshall in his playpen in a casino, the late nights in a club, the drinks and the cash and the energy of it all. June wanted not to care about this—nobody would ever expect she did care—but it lingered in her mind.
Finally, she bought her own ticket back and didn’t tell Del or her mother until after it was done. Once she had made the decision, she could feel sad about leaving Clinton Hill. Something in her responded to this place: to its gray sky, its squawk of seagulls over the bay, its light, its air, the way people talked, even the smell of the tanneries in summer. These all moved her, they were so familiar, and yet it was impossible. Vegas was her home now.
Del picked her up at the airport.
June was anxious, so her hands shook. She walked down the stairs from the plane with Marshall in her arms. He looked suddenly like a little boy, wearing red pants and a blue jacket. He had on shiny cordovan shoes, with laces, which June had bought him in New York. She was wearing a brown-and-white dress, with a wide patent belt, and a small hat pinned on the side of her head. She had given a lot of thought to their appearance. She was rarely nervous, but here she was, about to see her husband, to show him his adored son, and she felt light-headed and wondered if they were wanted.
Del was standing in the sun about twenty feet back from the bottom of the jet stairs, just behind a woman and her two children who were waiting for someone else. He looked uneasy too. He had his hat in his hands, and when he saw them, he raised it high, as if to wave them in. June relaxed and held up her hand, and Marshall dug his face into her shoulder and kicked his new shoes into her stomach. Then Del was holding them both, and he was kissing her head and kissing Marshall, and Marshall was not sure whether to laugh or cry, and June couldn’t remember why she had been afraid; why she had imagined that Del had not missed her.
“Well, my grown-up man. What tricks have you got to show your dad?”
Del had Marshall in his arms, he was grinning, and Marshall seemed to remember him; he dropped his face toward Del, and their heads cracked together, like a shot. Marshall started to cry, and June made a sound, and Del rubbed his head ruefully. Then June reached up and kissed Del, and he kissed her back, and she felt the warmth of it right through her middle, and knew she was right. This was where she belonged. Where Marshall belonged. She was so glad to be home.
5
On the day Ray Jackson was killed, June was at the house with Marshall. When the door opened, she expected Del to be bringing ice cream, but instead, her husband stumbled in, looking raw and panicked in a way she had never seen. He wrapped his arms around her and cried. When he finally spoke, his words were almost unintelligible. Just for an instant, June wondered how Del would react if something ever happened to her.
He choked out that Ray had been shot—by some lousy drunk, a drifter—and June thought that Ray must have had the night’s take with him. When he was in town, he took the money to the bank for Del. It could have been Del. It could have been Del who was shot. Later, June questioned this thought. Cora slipped that Ray had been on his way home from the bank when it happened, and Leo told the pit bosses not to bring their kids in to swim for a while.
That didn’t sound like a drifter.
But that first day, when she barely recognized her husband for the enormity of his grief, June kept silent about the relief that flooded her, imagining that it had been a drifter after the take, and that somehow, incredibly, it had not been Del with the cash that morning.
Del’s friendship with Ray was part of the life he had lived before her. She knew how much he meant to her husband, but she didn’t really know him. He was on the payroll. Security. He went back and forth between LA and Las Vegas. Whatever Ray did for Del rarely put him at the El Capitan, and when he was there, he was formal with June. He called her ma’am, in a way that made her feel silly. She didn’t want him to treat her this way, and yet she hadn’t known how to make him stop. The few times she had tried, smiling or laughing or offering an inside joke about Del, he had been quiet, and she had felt embarrassed.
Ray had the capacity to be still. Twice, June hadn’t even realized he was in a room with her. He was large and very dark, and June had seen him dance, sinuous and graceful. He spoke softly, even when everyone around him was excited, or in the middle of a casino floor, with the racket of dealers calling bets and coins dropping into bins. There had been only one time when Ray had treated June with any familiarity. She was pregnant with Marshall, and unexpectedly, he had placed a thick finger on her stomach and then leaned in to whisper how glad he was that she and Del would have a child. This gesture had moved June; somehow he cared for her baby.
Of course, Ray had children of his own—two or three; she wasn’t sure. In all these years, she and Del had never had him and his wife to dinner, the two had never joined them at their booth in the Midnight Room. This seemed strange now, that June would not know someone Del loved so deeply, that she would have met Ray’s wife only once, that she would not know his children’s names or exactly how old they were. When she returned his wife’s ring a few months after they were married, June suggested to Del that they all go out to dinner, but Del looked at her oddly—where would they have gone?—and said that he would send the ring over with one of the casino hosts. June should pick out some flowers, and perhaps a hat. Ray’s wife liked hats.
So June had ordered an extravagantly expensive hat from New York, and she thought Del might comment on the price, but instead he simply thanked her for choosing it.
In the weeks that followed, June worried about Ray’s wife and his children. She asked Del if they could do something for them, and he answered sharply that of course he already had.