Читать книгу Full Service Blonde - Megan Edwards - Страница 8

“The job at the Bucks County Reporter is perfect for you.”

“It is. You’re right.”

“Darling, you’ll love Pennsylvania!”

“No, Mom. I’m going to Las Vegas.”

This little interchange took place last April, right after the letter carrier had dropped off two pristine white envelopes to my parents’ house and I had opened them in the kitchen while my mom drank her late-morning coffee.

I remember it as though it happened ten minutes ago. I had graduated from college three years earlier. The internship scene in New York City was getting old, as was commuting from my parents’ house in Connecticut.

All at once on that crisp spring morning, I had two genuine full-time job offers. I read them both to my mother, prompting the interchange I reported above.

Things might have been so different. If, for example, the offer from Bucks County had arrived a day earlier instead of in tandem with the one from southern Nevada.

Or maybe if it hadn’t been the era of “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas.” If I hadn’t seen—and enjoyed—all those seductive commercials promising guilt-free anonymity in Sin City, who knows how I would have responded to the lovely offer of an assistant editorship on the right side of the tracks in Pennsylvania?

But the slogan was ubiquitous and irresistible, and as I reread the letter offering me a position at The Las Vegas Light, I could swear it glowed with a hint of neon.

Of course, Mom was right that Pennsylvania was the safer choice. But even she had no inkling then of just how right she was. Even with her often overactive imagination, my worrywart mother couldn’t have dreamed up what actually lay in store for me. Looking back, I wonder if things would have been different if she had been able to foretell the future.

Copper, burglars are going to ransack your apartment. A thug in a ski mask is going to slash you with a knife. You’re going to get mixed up in murder. And that’s not the worst of it. Copper, darling, you’re going to make friends with a prostitute!

It wouldn’t have mattered. I was twenty-four and itching to build a career. Las Vegas was a beehive of pop culture, and stultifying suburban security held as much appeal as an iron lung. Once I decided to go to Las Vegas, no one could have talked me out of it.