Lady Luck's Map of Vegas

by Barbara Samuel

"It's a burden when your whole life is a lie. You start getting confused over what's true and what's not. There's not a soul on this earth who knows me for who I really am. It's not real pretty, you understand, and I've got a lot to answer for."

63 year old Eldora and her 40 year old daughter, India, go on a road trip to Vegas. They are also looking for Gypsy, India's mentally ill, artistic twin. Eldora tells India her real, unedited, life story on the way.

Quotes I like:

"She seems a ditzy sort, my mother, but her taste in music is as vast and varied as her taste in books, and there is an entire bedroom devoted to her collection of books."

"I didn't have many girlfriends, which sometimes hurt my heart, and I didn't have a mother to tell me it was jealousy, plain and simple. Or so I tell myself now. Maybe I just wasn't that likable."

"Maybe I'm my own curse, which is more likely. My own luck, all the way around, bad and good."

"In this small city, all I'd ever be was Nobody on the Highway to Nowhere."

"It's true, you just have no idea what love means until a child swells your heart up like that. Love doesn't necessarily mean you're a good parent, however."

"There comes a point where you just have to move on, instead of standing there howling and nursing your wounds. Everybody gets body-slammed by life once in a while, and how you get through it is what shows your character."

"When you get right down to it, that's all there is. Love. Not the neat kind you put in a card and spritz with cologne, but all of it, the big messy mucky kinds and the imperfect kinds. That'd make a good neon sign, wouldn't it? All love. All the time.