I took a breath.
The outside of the Diamond Sun Casino could not have looked more ordinary. Okay, it was pink, but I thought these kinds of places were supposed to be glitzy, and this one squatted down the road like a big cake box. And there was a white wedding cake next to it—a huge tent, really, that glowed faintly inside. The gaudy sign by the road was unlit. But there was one light down below, waving back and forth under the chin of a round-eyed girl. I pulled up alongside her.
“Are you Gratuity?” she asked. “You are, aren’t you?”
I tried to answer but she was well on to other subjects.
“Is this your car? Does it float? Did you drive yourself? How old are you? Is that a ghost?”
I saw my opening and pounced.
“Can you take me to my mom?”
The girl frowned. “Mimom?”
“My. Mom,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, but they said not until after the meeting. The big meeting in the poker tent. Your mom’s kind of leading it.”
That couldn’t be right.
“Did you say my mom is—”
“Not till after the meeting. But you can go in if you want. Do you need someone to drive your car up for you?”
I was already on my way, pulling around a lot of other cars to the tent.
“I think someone made a mistake,” I said to J.Lo.
“Whyfor?”
“It must be a different Lucy Tucci. Mine wouldn’t be leading a meeting. She…just wouldn’t.”
J.Lo was silent.
“I can’t believe it,” I said, and I felt a sting in my eyes. “We’ve been trying so hard. Things are…God! Things are supposed to work out when you…when you’ve been…”
“I am thinking we should go insides,” said J.Lo. “I am thinking we should see what is and what isn’t.”
I bit my lip and nodded as Slushious shuddered to a halt.
At the entrance to the tent were two men with guns. Big, black guns like from action movies. One man had the wrong size neck for his head and was dressed completely in green army camouflage. If I’d been in a less jumpy mood I might’ve suggested he not stand in front of a glowing white tent in the desert if he was trying so hard not to be seen, but it never felt like the right moment. The other guy wore a black T-shirt that said “Bad Dog.” But they both smiled a little when we approached.
“Hey, you two,” said Camo Guy. “Is your mom or dad inside?”
There it was. That was the question, right? I tried to answer but I absolutely couldn’t. It was like I forgot how. Too many seconds passed.
“YES,” said J.Lo, in his announcer voice. “OUR MOMMY IS INSIDE OF THE GIANT SHEET. THANK YOU.”
I came back to my senses. “Can we go in?” I asked. “Please?”
The men exchanged looks.
“Hey, I know this is going to sound stupid,” Camo said to J.Lo, “but we should probably have you take your costume off. Just to check.”
After I hurriedly explained about JayJay and his condition with the barking and peeing on people’s legs, they stepped back. But that wasn’t really what got us inside.
“Please,” I said. “I’ve been trying to find my mom. Her name is Lucy Tucci.”
Both men were suddenly all smiles.
“She’s your mom?” said Bad Dog. “Aw, she’s wonderful. She helped us get the water turned on in our trailer park three days early.”
“She’s got Dan Landry’s ear, that’s for sure,” said Camo.
It took me a moment to realize this was just a figure of speech.
“I heard you were on your way,” Camo added. “I thought there was only one of you.”
“Nope,” I mumbled. “Two.” But who could say, really? The Lucy Tucci inside this tent might have six kids, for all I knew. She could have twelve and weigh three hundred pounds and be Chinese.
“Tell her ‘Hi’ from Bob Knowles,” Camo said. “And Peter Goldthwait!” said Bad Dog. Then the men lifted the tent flap for us, and we slipped inside.
“Next time,” hissed J.Lo, “I would like to decide what is my condition, thank you.”
The tent was strung with white Christmas lights and packed with people, all facing a stage on one end. And on the stage stood a redheaded man in a wifebeater with a Viking tattooed on his chest. People were booing him.
“I don’t know who that is leading the meeting,” I sighed, “but he doesn’t even look like my mother.”
“Shut up!” the redhead was saying. “I have the stage! All I’m saying is, now that we’ve all had to leave our real homes, we got a chance to get America right! There can be a place for the Saxon Americans, and a place for the coloreds, and a place for—shut up!”
The booing was getting louder, and thank goodness. I tried to look the audience over, but I’m short for my age, and the Christmas lights gave only a dull amber glow that made it hard to see.
I grabbed J.Lo’s arm and led him through the crowd toward the stage. It was slow going, and we got a lot of dirty looks. I scanned the faces and almost thought I saw Mom a couple times, but each time I was wrong.
For a while it seemed perfectly quiet. All I could hear was my own heart echoing in my ears. I guess the last two minutes of the redhead’s speech just turned into a stampede of swear words, so it’s just as well.
Then suddenly I found her.
Redhead left the podium and stepped down, and my mom took his place. She was holding up her hands and nodding at the people who still jeered him, and she glowed like an absolute candle in the stage lights.
“I know, I know,” she was saying. “You have every right. Just like he has the right, right? You don’t have to like what he says, but letting him say it makes us Americans, and treating people the way we’d like to be treated makes us human, doesn’t it? That’s how I was raised, anyway.”
I watched in awe as the boos stopped and people even started nodding their heads, shouting, “That’s right,” if you can believe it.
“Now, I think we should take this chance to talk about everything we’ve heard from our speakers tonight. Does anyone want to take the podium?” Mom said as her eyes swept the room. “Let’s see some hands,” she said, and hands went up. “Who wants to—good, a lot of us. Um…why don’t we star—”
Then her face shined right on me, and the word she’d been saying was cut short. She was beaming, and everyone turned to look at me. Some of the people in the crowd must have understood who I was, because they were beaming, too.