LITMIR.BIZ

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the rules were anymore. I just felt hurt, confused, and—above all—angry.

      David had wanted to talk more, but I’d told him I needed some space. He couldn’t avoid providing it, because he had to go to Tonopah in the morning. A talk show host from Denver had turned up with a bullet in his head in the same motel room where Howard Hughes once got married.

      Designer hallucinogens would have been more fun, but it was plain old caffeine that got me to work in the morning. At least it was Tuesday. Mondays are rough on calendar girls, but Tuesdays are generally pretty easy. My boss had editorial meetings in the morning, and I usually caught up on my personal email before attacking my long list of press releases.

      There were four messages in my inbox, and three were spam. “Road Trip!” read the subject line of the fourth. I took a gulp of coffee and clicked it open.

       Dear Copper,

      Will you be around this week? I was going to fly to Berkeley, but I found a car I couldn’t resist, and now I’m driving. I’m leaving Austin later this week, and planning to make Vegas by Saturday afternoon. Mind if I crash with you for a night or two? It would be great to catch up.

       Love,

       Daniel

      I set my mug down and almost smiled. This was revolving-door timing at its best. Out with Soon-to-Be-Daddy-David and in with Thought-It-Was-Over-Daniel. The only thing still connecting me to the love of my college life was his last farewell at the airport when he was in Las Vegas at Christmastime.

      “Bye,” I had said.

      “Bye for now,” Daniel had insisted.

      Damned if he wasn’t right.

       Daniel,

      Of course you can crash with me! I’m still living in the apartment at my brother’s house. Do you need directions? What time do you think you might get here?

      XO

      Copper

      I hesitated before I clicked “Send.” Did an X and an O imply something I really didn’t mean? No, I decided. I write “XO” when I write to my mother. It’s just cute and friendly and totally platonic. Or at least I could claim it was.

      “Copper, do you dye your hair?” The voice shattered my thoughts like a wrecking ball on old stucco. I looked up to find Mary Beth Sweeney filling the entrance to my cubicle.

      “Are you a natural blonde?” she asked.

      “Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

      “Are you sure?” Mary Beth took a couple of steps toward me, and I couldn’t help shrinking back as she reached a hand toward my hair. “I thought maybe because your name is Copper, you might really be a redhead.”

      “It’s a family name,” I said, flipping my hair over my shoulder and out of her reach.

      “Crap,” Mary Beth said.

      “Excuse me?”

      “I’m working on a story about hair dye,” she said. “There’s a new study linking it with depression and obesity.”

      Gee, thanks, Mary Beth. Not only was she insinuating that I was lying about whether I color my hair, she was also suggesting that I’m a gloomy fatso, which describes her considerably better than it does me. Mary Beth has gray roots that vanish like clockwork under a fresh coat of magenta-tinged auburn every couple of months, and she wears expand-o-matic pantsuits. She’s been at The Light since the days of the Mob, and she knows everyone in town, along with their credit ratings, police records, political affiliations, sexual preferences, blood types, cup sizes, medical histories, grade point averages, and mothers’ maiden names. It was difficult to believe she didn’t know that my first name had nothing to do with my hair color.

      “I wanted to ask you if you’d be worried enough about the study to stop using hair dye.”

      “Maybe you should ask Alexandra Leonard,” I said. “She told me she’s been dyeing her hair since she was in eighth grade.”

      “I don’t want to quote her. She has a byline. I need a nobody.”

      I bit my tongue. Someday I’d show her who was a nobody.

      “You’d be perfect, Copper. You’re slim and perky. Would you risk losing that for golden hair?”

      “I guess I don’t have to,” I said, feeling a little mollified. “Sorry I can’t help you.”

      “Oh, well,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “Never mind. I’ll come back when I need something about boyfriends or tattoos.” I sighed, almost glad that I had more serious things to think about. Although I couldn’t help wondering how she knew about my tattoos.

      Mary Beth’s chunky heels were still clopping down the hall when my cell phone buzzed.

      “Hi, Copper.”

      It was Sierra. Ordinarily, I don’t particularly like it when my sister-in-law calls me at work, but her next words made me forgive her instantly. “Dinner tonight? I’m making pizza.”

      Sierra’s not terrible. It’s just that she and my brother are also my landlords. I swore I’d move out of the studio apartment over their garage right after Christmas, but somehow August arrived, and we all still shared an address. Their landlord skills have improved slightly since I moved in a year ago, but they’re still guilty of a little too much in loco parentis. Michael, who’s an Episcopal priest and twelve years older than me, has always felt obligated to act as Dad pro tem, and ever since he and Sierra adopted a toddler last December, I’ve had an extra mom, too.

      For Sierra, motherhood is a sacred vocation that has inducted her into a divinely sanctioned sisterhood headed up by the Virgin Mary. All that saintliness can be a little hard to take, especially considering that Sierra once made her living as an exotic dancer. Fortunately, there’s an adorable little boy in the picture who howls with delight every time he sees me. Nicky is just learning how to talk. If it didn’t make people uneasy, I’d howl with delight every time I saw him, too.

      Sierra is also the best cook I know, and tonight a family dinner at the vicarage—that’s what I call their house—was just the sort of R and R I needed. I loved the thought of forgetting about boyfriends and sinking my teeth into a big fat slice of homemade pizza with the fabulous linguica she gets at the International Marketplace. Sierra, bless her heart, even makes her own dough.

      “Want to go to a fund-raiser for the Neon Museum tomorrow night?” Michael asked as I was finishing my second slice. “Sierra can’t make it.”

      “Will it be at the Boneyard?” I asked.

      “The party’s downtown at the El Sereno,” Michael said, “but there’ll be buses to the Boneyard all evening.”

      “Count me in,” I said as I failed to remove a big spot of tomato sauce from the front of my white tank top. “I’ve been dying to get inside that place ever since I found out it existed.”

      The Boneyard is where neon signs go when they die. It’s at the north end of Las Vegas Boulevard, and you can see the tops of rusted neon wonders sticking up over coils of razor wire when you drive by. I don’t know what it is about bulb-studded arrows, crumbling genies, oversized slippers, and other relics from bygone bingo parlors, motels, casinos, and trailer parks, but I’d been eager to take a closer look ever since David explained why the signs from businesses with many different owners all ended up in one gaudy cemetery.

      “It’s because the company that’s made most of the signs on the Strip over the years has always preferred to lease them rather than sell them outright,” he’d told me. “When old buildings die, the obsolete glitz goes to the Boneyard.”

      And now, at last, I was going to the Boneyard, too. It didn’t make me forget about David, but it was definitely a nice distraction.

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