Sweet Sinful Nights

Her brothers were in the backyard. Michael, the handiest of the crew, was fixing a fencepost with their grandfather, while Ryan and Colin drank beers and tended to the grill. The homey scene was almost enough to make anyone forget why the six of them were so close.

“I hear from Colin that you’re doing business with your old flame,” Victoria said, as they finished their final stretch. There was no judgment in her tone. No haughty raise of the eyebrow. Victoria was never like that, not now, and not when she’d taken them in when they were teens. She’d done her best to finish the job her son had started, seeing the four of them through the end of their high school years after their mother went to prison for conspiracy to commit murder, sentenced in a swift and speedy trial mere months after the killing of their father.

Shannon’s stomach clenched, as it often did just thinking of the last moments of her father’s life. Thomas Paige was shot four times in the driveway of their own home, a run-down, ramshackle house in North Las Vegas, the worst section of the city, riddled with crime. He’d been found with fatal gunshot wounds and an emptied wallet, as if a robbery had simply gone wrong. A robbery was plausible enough in that neighborhood.

Shannon and her brothers didn’t come from means. They came from desperation. They were bred from broken dreams, from a mother who’d wanted to be a Vegas star but never had the talent, so instead eked out a meager living as a seamstress, and from a father stuck driving cabs in the nightshift. But his situation started to change, and he’d thought he’d finally caught his lucky break when he began driving limos. He started making more money, and after a couple of years at his new gig, the future looked bright.

But there was no lucky break the June night he was shot after eight hours of chauffeuring rich kids from the swank suburbs to their after-prom parties.

Social services sent the pack of unruly Paige-Prince kids to live with their paternal grandparents once their mom was arrested for murder. Shannon hadn’t even started high school then, and at the time she’d never fully comprehended how horrible her grandparents must have felt. Their son was dead, his life taken at the hands of his wife, the very same woman who’d carried these four messed-up, fucked-up, troubled kids who had been dropped on their doorstep as teens—orphaned through death and then through prison bars.

As she grew older, Shannon came to understand the terrible balancing act that her father’s parents had had to pull off to raise them with love and kindness during those last few critical years. Shannon and her three brothers were grafted by murder into their grandparent’s home, united by the death of the flesh and blood that linked the two generations.

Some days, she missed her father fiercely. Today, she felt that empty longing envelop her in a split second as she stepped out of the pose, finishing their yoga session, and looked at a sun-faded photo of her father in his young twenties that hung above the end table on the sun porch. Sepia now in tone, the image showed his hands wrapped around Michael’s waist as he hoisted the toddler onto a slide. She could remember him taking her to the park, too, sometimes with his parents. He’d loved the outdoors, and loved to soak up the sun with his kids.

Her grandparents were the reason she returned to Vegas after a few years working in London, Miami, and Santa Fe for various dance companies and touring shows. Despite all that had happened, Las Vegas was the epicenter of her fractured family, her grandparents the heartbeat. Together with her brothers, they’d moved their grandparents into a new house in a safe and affluent section of Vegas. They’d made a pact as teens to live differently than their parents, to pull themselves out of the shit circumstances they’d grown up in, and to make sure they’d never be like their mother, who’d do anything for money.

Who’d done the worst for money.

Shannon looked at the picture again, pressed her fingers to her lips, and then touched her dad’s photo in the frame. Victoria did the same, and murmured, “Rest in peace.” Shannon’s throat hitched. Even now, even eighteen years later, she still felt so much emotion welling up inside her.

Better to focus on the conversation about Brent than to drift off into photos of days gone by.

“You hear correctly,” Shannon said, answering Victoria’s question about working with her old flame. “He hired my company to arrange for some dancers and choreography at his night clubs.”

They walked across the cool tiled floor to the kitchen. Victoria turned on the tap and poured some water, and handed a glass to Shannon, who downed half of it quickly. “He’s a sweet boy,” Victoria said in a whisper, first checking to see if any of Shannon’s brothers were in earshot.

“Boy,” Shannon said with a laugh. Brent was hardly a boy. He was all man, and the memory of how he’d touched her on his bar the other morning crashed back into her, like a comet of lust.

“He came back to bring me my ring, you know,” Victoria said, leaning her hip against the counter as she pushed a hand through her silvery hair.