Santa Fe Noir by Ariel Gore

Author:Ariel Gore [Gore, Ariel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781617757778
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2020-02-27T23:00:00+00:00

THE NIGHT OF THE FLOOD

by Ana June

Casa Solana

I’m going on thirty-six hours at the blackjack table counting cards and watching my chips pile up when Russell, the night manager, tells me I got a call.

“Tina, it’s your sister,” he says, and I shrug him off because I already told him I’m not to be disturbed. Throws off my rhythm, and I lose track of what I’m doing.

“Tell her I’m not here,” I bark over my shoulder.

But of course I’m on the phone with my sister after my next hand because she tells Russell she’ll just keep calling and doesn’t mind tying up the phone lines. It’s a small casino, and my sister knows me too well.

“Aunt Mimi died,” my sister says without so much as a hello.

I don’t even pause. “Why are you calling me here to tell me that?” I hiss into the phone.

People have called me cruel but I think they just don’t understand me. Those people are fully irritating. It’s been fifteen years since I’ve seen my Aunt Mimi. Fifteen years since the summer I spent at her hippie, armpit-smelling house in Santa Fe “drying out and finding my mystery again.” Bunch of hippie bullshit, really, that involved doing yoga with her students daily (skinny white women, mostly, with veiny arms who twittered to each other about balancing their constitutions) and eating plants. But I was seventeen then, and I’d crumpled the family station wagon around a light pole when I was on a bender. Internment at Aunt Mimi’s seemed preferable to the other choice my parents offered: rehab.

Little did I know . . .

“I told you, I’m in Los Angeles all week,” my sister snaps. “Go check on Mom. See how she’s holding up, for fuck’s sake. She’s been trying to contact you too, and frankly, you’re just lucky I didn’t tell her where you are.” She pauses, then goes for the jugular: “Katrina.” My sister knows how much I hate my full name, so our conversation is over. I slam down the phone.

I’m outside next, squinting at the skyline, all neon and amber glow against the clouds. I pull a cigarette from my purse. Try to feel something for my Aunt Mimi, but fail. She meant well, but there’s literally nothing about her that evokes anything like grief in me. I try, honest I do, as I smoke my cigarette to the filter and flick it toward a puddle a few feet away. The orange tracer lingers in the night; I turn, go back inside, and lose all my money.

* * *

A month later, I get a card in the mail and nearly drop it when I see who it’s from. Aunt Mimi’s full name, Mildred Grant, and her Santa Fe address are etched across the upper left corner in her unmistakable script. The envelope is postmarked three days earlier, as though Aunt Mimi’s ghost is trying to catch up on things left undone.

I mean, probably someone found it and popped it in the mail, right? I rip it open.

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