He stood up. “I--I need our friendship, Marisa. It means a lot to me. I thought we could—”
She leveled a glare of incredulity at him. “No! The answer is no. Get out of my sight, Woody.”
Before her former lover could reply, the front door chimed again and a couple strolled in. Unmistakable tourists--tanned older man wearing a polo shirt, cargo shorts and deck shoes, tanned older woman in Bermuda shorts, a tank top and Keds. They stopped and looked at a display Marisa had created from some 1940s cooking utensils. She walked away from Woody and struck up a conversation with the total strangers about where they had come from and where they were going.
Woody
soon
walked
out,
setting on his hat and throwing a “be seeing you,” over his shoulder. Marisa ignored him.
The couple, JimandMariefromOhio, on their way to Roswell to visit the UFO museum, sauntered to the lunch counter as if they had nothing to do but kill time. Inwardly, Marisa sighed.
As they took a seat and plucked the yellow laminated menu from between the napkin holder and the salt and pepper shakers, Marisa glanced at Woody’s mug on the counter. He had left a dollar beside it. She charged $1.25 for a cup of regular coffee and he knew it.
Bastard.
She caught a breath to halt her tears and stuffed the dollar into her pocket, then carried the mug to the kitchen and set it in the sink with a sharp clunk. She opened the oven door and found the bread pudding overcooked and curdled. Shit. She pulled it from the oven and set it in the sink, also, to be flushed down the garbage disposal after it cooled. Drawing a deep breath, she returned to the lunch counter and gave her undivided attention to JimandMariefromOhio.
The retired couple put their heads together and decided to try the homemade chicken salad sandwich. Marisa had poached the chicken herself in a mixture of white wine and herbs, then shredded it and added white grapes and pecans to the traditional ingredients, along with her special dressing. It was her own recipe and, like most customers who tried it, JimandMarie thought it delicious. They stayed and talked for more than an hour, for which she was grateful. If they hadn’t been present to keep her mind and mouth busy, she might have broken down.
As they left, the locomotive clock began to chug and
whistle. She locked the front door, hung up the CLOSED sign and
tramped back to the singlewide, wishing for a girlfriend who would lend a dry shoulder. But besides herself and Mama, only one other female resided in Agua Dulce. Tanya Shepherd ran a beauty salon and gift shop in the space next door to Pecos Belle’s. Unfortunately, Tanya was out of town.
Chapter 4
When Marisa reached the trailer, Mama was waiting for her, wearing her walking shoes and sitting primly in a chair at the dining table. Her blue eyes glinted with life. Her voice sounded stronger as she described something funny she had seen on TV and she laughed at the appropriate time. Her mind seemed clearer than it had been earlier.
Mama’s illness was such a puzzle. Sometimes she would be so lucid Marisa and she could have an almost normal conversation. Marisa often thought that if she could just recognize the thing that triggered the spurt of normalcy, she could pass it on to the doctor and maybe he could invent a solution.
As they talked about the need to get Mama into Tanya’s shop for a hair-do, they ate a simple lunch of leftovers--reheated baked chicken and steamed broccoli. After a hamburger for supper and Cheerios for breakfast, Marisa wanted to provide her mother with something healthy.
Marisa herself ate healthier these days. Back when she was cooking in various fast food joints, convenience had driven her to sample all that fried food, and thus, she had put on weight. In the year that had passed since she came back to take care of Mama, she had lost thirty pounds.
She also had been walking and jogging, more to fight a deep-seated anger straining to escape
than out of any fierce dedication to physical fitness. Sometimes she trekked as far as five miles
thinking and talking to herself about the mysteries of life, before she realized how far she had traveled and then she still had to turn around and walk back. She had worn out three pairs of name-brand running shoes and her legs and butt muscles had become as firm as when she was a kid. Her thirty-four-year-old body looked better than when it was twenty.
“I’m going to change clothes and we’ll take that walk,” she told Mama after they finished lunch. She had her mother swallow the handful of vitamins she fed her every day, having read somewhere that some of the vitamins showed promise in halting the progress of Alzeimer’s Disease.
Marisa changed from her cowgirl clothes to sweats and Reeboks. She covered Mama’s head with a bonnet and her own head with a bill cap. Then they strolled up the driveway toward the XO ranch, engaged in a discussion of Lanny’s cows. Being able to discuss Agua Dulce’s uncertain future or to cry her heart out to Mama about Woody would be nice. But while Mama’s thinking appeared to be slightly better, an in-depth conversation was impossible. An empty discussion of Lanny’s cows was the best they could do.
Less than a mile later, they returned home with Mama hot and exhausted. The spring sun and the low eighties temperature were too much. In another month, the temperature would be in the nineties and Mama’s walking days would be over until winter came again.
Marisa poured her mother a glass of tea over ice, helped her to the chair in front of TV, then went to the bedroom to change clothes again. The jeans and cowboy boots she had been wearing earlier held no appeal. Role-playing called for an enthusiasm she couldn’t muster. She put on loose cotton slacks and a gray T-shirt with bold white script saying, I’LL TRY TO BE NICER IF YOU TRY TO BE SMARTER. The cranky statement matched her mood.
She stamped to Pecos Belle’s, pissed off again, at life, at men. She couldn’t deny she had felt that way about men for years. Most of the time she fought it off, but since returning to Agua Dulce and being reminded of her mother’s lonely past, the anger hovered just under her skin like a mad dog waiting to lunge and she couldn’t shake it. A good part of the time she didn’t try. The emotion was a dichotomy she didn’t understand because, in truth, she preferred the company of men to that of women.
Back in the Pecos Belle’s kitchen, as her focus zeroed in on
Woody’s mug sitting in the sink and the bread pudding she had let burn, the truth hit. In all likelihood, unless she got arrested, she would never see Keith Wood again. Tears welled up as she flushed the bread pudding down the disposal, but she was forced to suppress them because three people showed up to eat.
She kept her composure and ended up feeding sandwiches and hamburgers to a dozen customers. They complimented her on the food and after eating, they lingered, buying souvenirs and some small antique pieces, ogling the dinosaur footprints and the gorilla statue, petting the stuffed rattlesnake and fondling every artifact and piece of junk in the flea market. She was glad to see them go so she could get down to some serious self pity.
If no more customers came in, she would have several hours to think and grieve over love lost.
He’s not worth a minute of your unhappiness, an inner voice told her. In thirty-four years, haven’t you learned a thing or two about men?
You bet, another voice answered. What she had learned was that all it took to replace one was another one. And before that unlikely occurrence, the best distraction was to throw herself into challenging chores.
By six o’clock, she had cleaned the soft-serve ice cream machine and polished the gray Formica back counter and every object on it until everything shone. She had mopped the black and white checkered floor all around the lunch counter and the eating area with the heavy string mop, filling the whole place with the fresh smell of Pine-Sol.
Finished with all of that, she had pinned new, un-faded posters of giant hamburgers and sandwiches on the wall above the back counter. After her neighbor Tanya, who was an artist, said the wall looked blah, Marisa had painted it hot pink. Now she
routinely put up new posters and photographs the Pepsi Cola truck driver seemed only too happy to supply for her, especially if she wore a revealing shirt when she asked him.
As it had turned out, the hot pink walls complemented the gray countertops and the black and white floor tiles in the eating area. Together they gave the appearance of a décor that had been planned rather than achieved accidentally. Baby-boomer Elvis and James Dean fans loved it.
The dying sun beamed amber through the front windows into the flea market, the rays reaching all the way back to the café and casting everything in soft gold. Marisa called it a day and began wiping down the tables, thinking ahead about a soothing bath after Mama ate supper and after every chore was done. In Mama’s more coherent days, she used to say there was always a blessing. Marisa just had to remember to look for it.
Marisa had just finished wiping down the lunch counter when the front door opened and a lone guy came in, a motorcycle helmet tucked under one arm. He halted just inside the doorway and peeled off his sunglasses, the black aviator type with mirrored lenses. She glanced through the plate-glass display window into the darkening color of late afternoon and saw a black Harley-Davidson parked out front. She hoped he hadn’t come for supper.
The newcomer stood a moment, surveying the room, wall to wall, ceiling to floor. Was he casing the joint? Though she tried not to let robbery enter her mind, the possibility was ever present in the back of her consciousness. With no agent of law enforcement stationed closer than Wink, Pecos Belle’s was a good bet for a thief who had no way of knowing how sorely disappointed he would be with the loot.
After a few seconds, the stranger in his heavy boots clumped over to the jukebox standing against the wall. The thing was a Seeburg, manufactured in 1954, the kind that had once been placed in restaurants and diners. It wasn’t a cherry, but whoever refurbished it had done a decent job. It had a $3,000 price tag and if this guy wanted to buy it, Marisa would figure out a way to strap it onto that Harley.
She dropped her dishtowel on the drainboard under the lunch counter and dried her hands. “Help you with something?”
He was now bent over the jukebox, engaged in a more thorough examination. “This thing work?”
His baritone voice carried across the room, as rich as if it had come from the jukebox speakers.
“Sure,” she answered. “I play it all the time.”
Thinking about what she could do with $3,000 generated a spike of energy. She made her way through an assortment of vintage name-brand signs and a set of turquoise plastic patio chairs and finally reached the juke box. She pushed its plug into the wall outlet behind it and, to her relief, the old thing lit up like brand-new.
She straightened, but still had to tilt back her head to look the stranger in the face. Being five-feet-eight, she could look many men in the eye, so this stranger was taller than average. He looked like Mel Gibson, his eyes long-lashed and blue as the desert sky. The eyes held an intensity, like they could penetrate concrete, but with a fan of laugh lines at the corners, they looked friendly. Mel Gibson eyes. No doubt about it. “Uh, you have to put quarters in it,” she said.
A slow smile eased across his mouth as he looked right back at her and dug in the pocket of his tight Levi’s. S-E-X lit up like an aura around him. He had it, that mysterious allure she had always been able to spot in a man the instant she met him. He liked who he was and was comfortable with the fit of his skin. A feeling she couldn’t describe slithered through her.
He came up with a quarter and dropped it into the coin slot. As he made a selection she noticed his hands. Agile fingers and clean short nails. Masculine hands, but not those of a laborer. After a whirr and a series of clicks, orchestra music swelled as if Pecos Belle’s were a concert hall. Frank Sinatra broke into “All the Way.”
“What’s on the menu?” he asked.
“Uh, anything you want, I guess, so long as it’s a sandwich or a burger. The daily special’s all gone. We’ve got a menu you can look at. Oh, and breakfast. I serve breakfast all day. You know, bacon or sausage and eggs....and toast.”
“Coffee?”
She smiled, feeling like an empty headed loon. “Now that we’ve always got plenty of. Better’n Starbucks.”
He smiled, too, and it warmed her to the soles of her running shoes. He had defined lips and perfect teeth.
“Great,” he said. “Let’s have some. Where’s that menu?”
She led him back to the lunch counter, his boots clump-clump-clumping on the tile floor. She plucked a menu from between a napkin holder and a sugar dispenser and handed it over. “You can have anything on it. Only takes me a few minutes to cook a fresh hamburger. We’re well-known around the area for our burgers. We use real meat.”
He smiled again. Those intense eyes continued to bore into her. “Great. As opposed to what?”
“That artificial stuff,” she answered, resisting the urge to straighten her clothing. “I grind it myself, out of sirloin. No fillers, no enrichers.”
He placed his helmet and sunglasses on the counter, then removed his leather jacket, folded it and laid it on a stool. He was wearing a henley waffle-weave shirt in a color that almost matched his blue eyes. He pushed up the sleeves, showing sinewy forearms, then combed his fingers through his short brown hair that had been disheveled by his helmet. She found herself looking for a wedding band, but she didn’t see one.