The sisters made a striking pair. My aunt a brassy, sassy redhead; my mom platinum as a new dime. They’d dumped us kids off with our grandmother while they hit the road for Vegas in my aunt’s 1958 Hudson. The “green beetle” we called it. My aunt, widowed going on two years, my mother newly-divorced, they were on their way to hear Frank Sinatra croon at the MGM, play a few slots, maybe meet some fellas with pockets bulging cash.
They hadn’t counted on the heat on Route 15, the radiator spitting steam into the air as the old car chugged to its death by the side of the road. Not a lot of traffic out in the desert in those days and they’d stripped down to their slips by the time the ball of dust rose in the distance heading their way.
A Cadillac, shiny and new with not two, but three rows of seats slowed to a stop alongside them. Neither my aunt nor my mother had ever seen such a car and both completely forgot their modesty. As my mother tells it, the back window rolled down and from inside appeared two eyes the color of Texas bluebonnets.
Now I’m not saying there was any sort of coincidence, but it wasn’t long after that my baby brother came along. And Lord, could that child sing.
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Biography
Jayne Martin scans the skies for the return of the mothership that left her behind. Forced to make her way among the native populace, she fears she has become one of them and struggles to recall the collective consciousness of her world, where all were one and gravity was a myth. jaynemartin-writer.com
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