Editor’s note: This story’s the third and final tale in a trilogy of award-winning fiction author Scott Holleran’s Boom-Boom tales. Read the first story, “Boom-Boom Goes to Jail,” here. Read the second story, “Boom-Boom Adds Spice,” here. Browse, read and share Short Story Editor Scott Holleran’s—and others’—short fiction writing in Short Stories.
By Scott Holleran
Priscilla exited the car on a street corner at the Monadnock Towers. As soon as she stepped out, she looked up at two skyscrapers stretching into the clouds. She knew she was going to the top. Soon, she’d meet and dine with the world’s top fashion designer, Bob Gorr, also known as Dr. Fabulous. Priscilla clutched a portfolio, carrying her purse in one hand and a trio of covered hangers in the other as she pushed the car door closed with her foot, turned and walked toward the lobby.
Instantly, she recognized the man seated at a table in a corner of the top floor, his tall, slim frame fitted in a charcoal gray blazer and bright red slacks beneath a mint green blouse tucked with a dark blue and red scarf patterned with a motif of metals, gears and machines. Seated like a long-limbed, red-gray sketch model come to life, the angular Dr. Fabulous looked like he was cushioned by clouds.
When he saw her trailing the host, who carried the hangers, he promptly stood, extended his long arm and a large, expressive hand and he greeted her like an ingenue from a Fred Astaire movie. “Priscilla,” he said with a cap on the final vowel like he’d known her since childhood and hadn’t seen her since she was two. “Call me Bob.” She put the purse under her arm with the portfolio and stood with her hand in his hand as she raised her chin and looked up. “Doctor Fabulous.”
They talked, he ordered and they dined. She had never eaten a five-course meal, let alone in such an opulent setting. As the sun set while he flipped though the drawings of her designs, the Ohio River started taking on the city’s lights. She looked down at Sin-Sin Addie’s and thought of Pete, Salvatore and Vivienne as she took another sip of the Dom Perignon Champagne he’d ordered. Finally, he set the case down. Looking down at the city of Cincinnati, without saying a word, he carefully snapped the portfolio flap into place. Turning to her, he said: “You’re hired.” Priscilla gasped as he leaned in and told her: “These are exquisite, Priscilla. Better than what I saw from your show though with the same irreverence and beaded genius. I love the shorter lines and naked necklines. Very daring. You’re from another time.” He sat back and folded the long legs, one over the other like he was lounging at a tennis match. “I’m going to enjoy this.”
As he ordered coffee and dessert, he outlined the terms of her contract as a designer for his vast empire in the fashion industry. In silky tones, he spoke of labels, stitching, production, factories, shipping, fabrics, perfumes and merchandise. Priscilla listened in a blend of wonder, enchantment and earnestness. When he gave her the number he proposed for the first-year contract, she turned a shade of pink, nodding, and said only, “yes, that’s acceptable,” as if she’d done this a hundred times, adding with awkwardness: “Have you ever been to Cincinnati?”
That’s when he laughed. The deep, hardy laughter came from his gut and she couldn’t help but laugh, too. “You’re a treasure, Priscilla. Now, we’ll be working together, so you’ll need to stop calling me that. Call me Bob.”
Bob wired the money to her bank account. Priscilla was dispatched to Milan, Rome, Paris, London and, finally, New York City, where she toured the wholesale showroom, a Dr. Fabulous factory in lower Manhattan—and another one in New Jersey—and the company headquarters on Fifth Avenue. At the time, her husband Francisco was closing a deal to bring his comic book, “Money Woman,” to the nation’s top comics studio. Priscilla’s friend Foster had enrolled in an acting class and, after auditioning, was cast in the lead role of a revival at a playhouse a few blocks from downtown Cincinnati. Priscilla, messaging Foster congratulations on opening night reviews and making video calls to Frisk—and, occasionally, Warner, barking and yelping at the sound of her voice—felt on top of the world.
Bob’s Dr. Fabulous fashion show debuting her new line of evening wear was a smash. As Priscilla exited backstage after taking a bow to the phalanx of bright lights and cameras, Bob looked at her, lowered his chin and smiled with his eyes. As she passed, with the audience of buyers and fashion press roaring in applause, he simply said: “You are going to be a star.” Priscilla beamed. Clutching his sinewy arm, she urged: “Get out there, Bob—this is your company!”
Bob Gorr shook his head and said: “not today—this is your time.”
Yet it wasn’t. Within months, sales stalled. Priscilla’s Boom-Boom line lost money. The designs failed to connect with the customer. Every benchmark Dr. Fabulous had talked about fizzled. Even the starlet red carpet poses went bust. Pop stars, top Tony and Oscar winners and the world’s most popular model wore the Boom-Boom dresses, skirts and tops. Priscilla’s was the most photographed line of the season. Women weren’t buying what she’d made. Media backlash was fierce. Priscilla read the headlines, video captions and posts. Finally, she phoned Bob. “I won’t hold you to this,” she said. “It happens,” he told her, making an effort to sound upbeat. “I’m not always right.” Priscilla, sitting alone in the dark at her apartment in New York, said: “I’ll make this right.” After a long, silent pause, she heard: “You can’t.”
Husband Frisk, who knew how to make her laugh, didn’t know what to say. He kept telling his wife that he loved her no matter what. Foster, too, earning praise for performances off Broadway, listened with love and understanding yet she was preoccupied. Priscilla’s best friend knew she couldn’t deliver what Priscilla needed. Vivienne had problems, too, struggling to keep Sin-Sin Addie’s in business. “She’s packing up the joint,” Frisk told her via video one night from their new house in the suburbs. “Looks like she’ll open a smaller place where Mawby’s used to be a few blocks from the riverfront.” That’s when another call came in.
It was her father on the other end of the line. His voice was defeated, spent. He sounded like he had fallen into a well. The man she heard as a child singing “That’s Amore” while cooking the family dinner in the kitchen with an upward lilt in his voice sounded lost. Priscilla’s dad was in distress. “Your mother’s gone,” he told her. “I’m sorry, Priscilla. I know you weren’t close. I know you loved her.”
Priscilla, who had moved back to Cincinnati, dwelled on her grief for months. She had lost her work both as a dancer and as a designer, and now she’d lost her mother and the only home she’d known away from her husband, the nightclub where her self-made life began. Frisk had made the deal for his new comic book series and was traveling to a movie studio outside Las Vegas for creative meetings. “Money Woman” was scheduled to go into production next year. Foster was headlining on Broadway and packing seats. Priscilla sat on the new sofa in the new home with Warner perched at her side—he rarely left her side these days—as she wept. Night after night, day after day—for all the unspoken, undone and unloved, she wept.
One night, she made herself walk the dog. Warner had been looking up at her with those brown eyes while whimpering and Priscilla knew what that meant. With Frisk still in Vegas, she latched the leash to the dog that had put her in jail where she’d met the woman who changed her life. Out she went on a suburban dog walk.
“Boom-Boom? Is that you??” The cracked voice came from behind her. Warner wagged his tail as she turned. “I remember when you danced at Addie’s on the river.” In the streetlight she could see the wrinkled face of an older man with thick white hair. He looked sharp in an unzipped down jacket and trousers, not exactly like a typical customer at the club. She smiled. “Do I know you?” “No,” the old man chuckled, “though I know you. You were my favorite dancer. I never had a crush on you and I rarely gave you tips back when Vivienne let us tip,” he laughed, “before Cinnamon joined you on stage. Your moves were smooth as silk and you looked like a million bucks. I’d go there when I needed company.” The old man looked down. “Those were rough days. Addie’s was a bright spot. I’d lost my wife to cancer, my business was struggling. I felt worthless.” He looked into Priscilla’s eyes and said, “That was five years ago.” “What happened?” Priscilla asked.
“I found myself—again. I realized that being lonely was a natural part of life in the wake of loss or coming to grips with what I’d never gained. Seeing you dance—you were the most light-hearted thing about the place—made it easier for me to redeem what I already possessed. I hunkered down like my mom taught me. I got to work. Business bounced back. The market goes up. The market goes down. I caught an upswing.” He looked around and smiled. “Now I live here. Never could’ve imagined I’d live in this neighborhood when I was a kid.” He looked over and smiled at the furry little beige dog wagging his tail. “Looks like you did well for yourself, too. I don’t know about all that fashion stuff. Whether you’re dancing or designing, whatever you’re doing, you’re still a bright spot. Good to see you again.” With that, he nodded and went about his nightly walk.
The next night, Priscilla took the car for a drive to the riverfront. She pulled into an alley, headlights falling upon a man seated on a crate in the back of the nightclub where it all started. Everything was boarded up. There was Pete, seated in an untucked flannel shirt with a few weeks of facial hair. She pulled up and rolled down the car window. “Hey Pete,” she said. He looked up. “Prissy,” he said in slow reply as if they’d seen each other last night after the show. “Get in the car, Pete,” she told the bouncer. “You’re coming home with me.” He shook his head, which she ignored, asking: “Can you keep me company? Frisk’s in Vegas, Foster’s in lights and I need a friend.” She looked into Pete’s eyes. “Can you stay with me?”
Three weeks later, she was serving Pete homemade stew in the kitchen and telling him to tidy up the guest room. By then, he’d shaved, changed several light bulbs and fixed a faucet. He’d also started tossing a ball to Warner in the backyard. She knew Pete needed a friend, too, and they got to know each other better than they had before. When Pete offered Priscilla money for groceries, she turned him down. Every evening at dusk, they sat on the back porch, drank herbal tea and didn’t say a word. “I should’ve asked Sven out,” he finally said one night to the sound of crickets. Prissy stared at the sky and thought of her mom. “Not too late, Pete.”
“It’s sooner than you think,” her father finally said one day on a video call to Priscilla from the assisted living center. “On my last night at the jazz club, in my finest leather shoes, which had cost me a week’s worth of wages, wearing a tux after the sound check as the lights came up, I looked out at the audience. Every seat was packed with Cincinnati’s wealthiest, most refined audience—and I knew right then that it was too soon for my singing career. The world was starting to rot. You didn’t need to stop reading news to know that. Gloom was everywhere—in cardboard homes on sidewalks and in people’s faces and voices—the sound of pure anxiety—and, on that night, it was in their hunchbacked shoulders as I sang songs that could’ve lifted them up and given them a sense of themselves.” Priscilla’s father, Harold Miller from Akron, Ohio, paused. She had never heard her father take such a long, thoughtful silence. He’d never spoken of his days and nights singing jazz, let alone with such soliloquy. Finally, he solved a mystery: “They coulda been alive. Some coulda been in love. I was giving them the tunes. No one wanted to dance,” he explained. “I knew then it was the assembly line for me, like my dad and his dad, too.”
Harry Miller went on and, in his voice, Priscilla heard the faintest trace of a father who’d defied the world with joyful ways: “I remember the day you came home from your high school talent contest,” he said in an upswing, like a song. “I knew from the look on your face that you hadn’t won that contest. I loved you deeper when I watched you walk toward me in slow, deliberate steps and you worked up the courage to tell me that you hadn’t won.” Her father’s voice smiled, adding: “I knew then that the world would probably not be ready for you either. That it was likely to be too soon for you, too. You told me that the kids had nicknamed you Boom-Boom because the counterweight fell down—almost hitting you as you came off stage. Watching you become the performer I could never be—making a living enjoying what you do as a dancer under a name given in cruelty—is my proudest achievement as a father. Whether you’re gone before the world’s ready for you, you’re ready for the world. You’ve made yourself an artist in the worst of times.” Then, he whispered as if saying the words was hurting yet he said them with a sense of triumph: “This is an achievement. Take that to the end, Prissy. You’re the light—you…are…everything.” Priscilla wanted to believe her old father and the old Sin-Sin Addie’s customer in the night. She wanted proof.
“Money Woman” premiered on a Tuesday night with fanfare. Profits floundered. With Foster in the title role, looking smart in her superheroine uniform, plots were interesting and the show gained an audience in spite of the absence of promotion. Traffic went down after the first episode, then traffic went up and up again, then took a dip in ratings, then back up. It went on like that. Reviews were decent, mostly good. The audience lacked enthusiasm as plots faded to mediocrity. Then, Frisk, who had negotiated creative control in his contract, had an idea.
Priscilla felt him shaking her one night at three o’clock in the morning. She groaned: “What is it?” “I need to talk with you,” Frisk said, his eyes wide, his voice alert. “Come into the living room.” He got up and went into the other room. Priscilla pushed herself up, put on a bathrobe and looked at Warner, still sleeping on the bed and barely opening his eyes before he closed them again. She went into the living room. She plunked herself next to her husband.
“I’m going to take over the show,” he declared as though he’d decided something important. “I’m exercising an option in my contract and bringing ‘Money Woman’ to a smaller production company with a better philosophy, a rational grasp of the character concept and loyalty.”
Frisk leaned into Priscilla and said: “I want you in charge of costumes. I’m keeping Foster in the role. It’s going to be a better, bolder show with a new wardrobe. I want Money Woman at her worst to look like a million dollars. I want my character in mint condition. I want to work with my family—that’s you and Foster.” Suddenly, Warner, as if he heard and understood his master, leapt from the bed and ran into the living room, barking in triplicate as if he wanted in on the action. Still half-asleep and motivated to go back to sleep, Priscilla answered her husband: “Let’s do it—let’s depict, dress and dramatize Money Woman.” “Let’s,” her smiling husband replied. Then, reassuring him—not just about the work at hand— she said: “Let’s go to work.”
As Priscilla stood, arching her back, she told him: “First, let’s go back to bed,” and, walking back to the bedroom, she half-turned like she was back on stage at Sin-Sin Addie’s, waited a beat and added: “Boom-Boom’s pent-up for your boom, baby.” “C’mon, Warner,” she said, while the dog followed as she listened to the sound of her husband laughing. Priscilla smiled to herself as she winked to her dog. “‘Bout time I paid him back with a laugh, right?”
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Classic Chicago Magazine Short Story Editor Scott Holleran lived in Chicago for 21 years and writes the non-fictional Industrial Revolutions column as well as short stories. Read his first book, Long Run: Short Stories Volume One, and his non-fiction, Autonomia, at scottholleran.substack.com. Listen to the author read his fiction—awarded a 2025 literary prize in Chicago’s Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards—aloud at ShortStoriesByScottHolleran.substack.com. Scott Holleran lives in Southern California.
