“I did, Mr. Vega,” I said. “The Silver Coin sign, in the summer of 1988. Twenty eight thousand bulbs, by hand.” Dominic Vega, the manager, took a half step forward and shook my hand with both of his. His eyes were wet. “Mr. Moreno, I started as a busboy here the week you lit it,” he said. “My father brought me to the parking lot at night to watch it come on. It is the reason I went into hospitality.” Then he glanced toward the wall behind our table, where the guitar of my late wife Linda hung in its case under glass, and his face changed. “Sir. I have something to tell you about that guitar.”
Ricky had gone gray. He was forty years old that very night, and he sat at the head of the table with his hands in his lap like a boy called to the principal. Stacy, his wife, kept her eyes on the guitar. Dominic Vega cleared his throat. “Eight months ago a pawn dealer from Henderson sold this guitar to our general manager for six thousand dollars. He wanted something with local history for the new steakhouse. He did not know whose it was.” He turned to me. “Mr. Moreno, I read the set lists in the case. I started to suspect. When your son made the reservation under your name, I knew.”
I took out the white envelope. It was the one I had carried to every meeting for ten weeks. “I bought it back first, Dominic,” I said. “Last week. Your general manager kindly agreed to sell it to me, at cost. I have the receipt right here.” I laid it on the tablecloth next to the sale of Moreno Sign Company, fifteen million two hundred thousand dollars, and a third paper that nobody had seen. “Linda wrote this in 2019, in the hospital,” I said. “I have not read it aloud to anyone. I think the time has come.”
A guitar on a casino wall belonged to a singer who loved her son, and a sign maker lit one more song for the family.
It was a song, written on the back of a casino napkin, in the shaky pencil of a woman whose hands had begun to fail. I did not need to look at the words. I knew them. “Ricky, Ricky, you were a kicking baby. You kicked inside me every time I sang. Whatever road you find yourself on, whatever bad luck, whatever mistake, there is a place at my table and a song for you.” My son put his napkin to his face and sobbed. He was a grown man, with a gambler face and a good suit and a hole in the middle of him, and for the first time in my life I saw it clearly.
“Dad, I owe the casino ninety seven thousand dollars,” he said. “Markers. I pawned Mom guitar for twenty two hundred to cover the interest. I told Stacy you had done it, because I could not stand for her to know.” Stacy took his hand with a small cry. “Ricky, why did you not tell me?” He shook his head. “Because I was ashamed to be your husband and a gambler in the same body.” Dominic Vega, with remarkable tact, found a reason to inspect the dessert cart. The piano bar player at the front, who had been playing Patsy Cline in a mournful key, quietly put his hands in his lap.
I sat beside my son. “Ricky, I am eighty one years old,” I said. “I have bent glass for sixty years. I know what happens to glass when you heat it too fast. It cracks. People are the same. You were heated too fast, by a world that wanted you to be rich.” He leaned into my shoulder. I said, “I will pay the casino, once. But you are going to give me your credit cards, and you will sign the voluntary exclusion form this very night, in front of Dominic, so you cannot enter any casino in Nevada for five years.” He did not argue. He just nodded.
Dominic fetched the form, and my son signed it with a trembling hand. Then the manager took the case from the wall, and the glass, and set it on the table in front of me. I opened it. The Gibson lay in its worn velvet, a sunburst finish, with her scratches along the lower bout from forty years of lounge stages. I lifted it out and held it for the first time since she passed. I cannot play. I never could. I turned it around and put it in my son hands, and said, “Ricky, you used to play. Play something.”
He looked at the guitar for a long moment. He had not touched one since 1999. His fingers found the strings as though they had never left, and he tuned it in the quiet of the restaurant, by ear, the way she taught him. Then he began to play, slowly, the first chords of Crazy. His voice was thin and cracked. Stacy put her hand on his shoulder. Across the room, the pianist at the bar caught the key and came in behind him, soft as a hand on the back, and the entire steakhouse went silent. The waiters stopped. A bartender laid down his rag.
By the second verse, half the restaurant was singing along. Dominic Vega was singing. The couple at the next table, from Omaha, were singing. I did not sing. I sat with my hand on the empty chair of Linda and watched the lights of the Strip come on outside the windows, red and gold and blue, the work of my own hands in a hundred places. When Ricky finished, he lowered the guitar and looked at me with wet, shining eyes, like the boy he used to be at the top of the stairs. “Dad, did I get it right?” he asked.
We built a new sign that fall, for the entrance to the Henderson music school that I endowed in her name. Neon, bent by my own hands, red and white. It reads Linda Moreno Music Fund, and under it, in small blue letters, For the Singers. Ricky teaches there on Saturdays now, guitar to children, and he has not entered a casino in a year. Last Saturday he played Crazy again for a class of eight year olds, badly, and every one of them applauded. I stood at the back with my arms folded, and the Gibson hung on the wall above him, under the lights.
