My Kind of Town
My Kind of Town
>> MGM Grand -- Las Vegas Going with Flo
Flo Kajiyama Ah Sun stood on the plaza beneath the big lion, punched in the number her son Quinn had given her for his room at Queen's.
So he was a cop, she thought as the call went through, like his dad. No, not just like his dad. Quinn was trying to uncover a crime his father tried so hard to bury.
"Wow, Mom, thanks for calling back so soon!" Quinn said. In fact, he was doubly grateful, and it would have been hard to tell which was the greater cause: being able to ask his mom about the mysterious Bobo Ah Sun or wanting to get rid of nurse Nina Ramones, who was having a hard time with Quinn rekindling a relationship with his cousin while she was out on strike. "It's my mom, long distance," Flo heard him say, a moment later a door slam.
Some things a mother didn't need to know. "I don't have long, but you sounded anxious to know about Bobo, so I wanted to call back tonight."
"I have a bunch of questions, Mom, especially after we just found out the weirdest news. Did you know that Lily and Laird are really half-siblings?"
"What?!"
"Yeah, Uncle Sheets is not Lily's real father!"
"How on earth did you come up with this?"
"From a DNA test -- they were both giving blood for me."
"Oh my ..." Flo said, thinking out loud. "You know, I remember Grace showed early, just a couple of months after she and Sheets got married, and she was not happy about it. It was not an enjoyable pregnancy -- not like you were for me."
"Really?" All these years Quinn believed he was the reason his mother had left his father when Quinn was 11 and moved to Vegas to become a full-time gambler.
Flo heard the surprise in his voice. "Yes, honey, I did enjoy that time. I knew it was going to be my only pregnancy and I wanted to enjoy it." Quinn didn't know how to respond, so he changed the subject.
"So OK, Mom, now I have two basic questions. Who is Lily's real father? And what does Bobo have to do with the feud between my father and Uncle Sheets?"
"How much do you really want to know? How honest do you really want me to be? How far should I go?" Asking her son as much as herself.
"I'm a big boy now."
"Your father and I, our marriage, it was not going to last forever," Flo said.
Look who's changing the subject now, Quinn thought -- not correctly.
"The questions you're asking me now, about Bobo and Lily's real father, you're also asking about why I left."
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin
with weekly summaries on Sunday.
He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com