Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(30)
And while Duke didn’t consider himself among the ignorant mystified by Gypsy spells, he certainly considered himself cursed. Cursed with Romy Sonnenschein for two more months. And he would hardly call her presence that afternoon as hypnotic, much less enchanting.
Freckles shimmering in the Indian summer’s hazy morning sunlight, she sat like a self-satisfied cat, dampened huaraches kicked off and bare feet tucked beneath her on the pickup’s bench seat.
She was taking obvious delight in the forty-five-minute drive to Austin. Her gaze, traveling from one side of the road to the other, absorbed withered fields and abandoned houses, their limestone walls crumbling – even a bone-dry pond with a weathered posting that warned about swimming at your own risk.
From one ear, hidden by his faded red handkerchief, dangled a singular pearl drop earring that glinted with the continual twist of her neck. “Did you lose an earring?” he asked, just waiting to hear what fascinating yarn she would next spin. He could imagine it now – a vivid explanation of how the earring had dropped into a magic potion she had been concocting or some other such nonsense.
Those green, slumberous eyes slid slowly to him, and her smile was just as slow in coming. “Well, ye see, t’was at an art gallery in The Hague that I first saw the Dutch Golden Age paintings – and Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring.’ That painting convinced meself that I, too, needed only one earring. Not a gold one, mind ye, but a pearl one. And, Holy Mary, if Old Duke – me grandfather – didn’t go and buy me one.”
An art gallery? He doubted she had ever seen the inside of one. But, God above, what a novel mind she had. “Get you that pearl earring – or swipe it from some unsuspecting and bemused female patron in the art gallery?”
“Nay, t’was when we were doing the stint with the circus, and he was performing his trick riding stunts that he bought it. Ye see, he had been one sexy man in his prime. Afterwards, this lady, she had more feathers in her hair than a peacock, well, she sashayed up to Old Duke and –”
Confounded, he cut off her spate of words. “You’re telling me you also performed at circuses, too? Well, you weren’t the dude who swallowed the swords or the fat woman with the beard. What did you do – besides steal purses?”
She waggled her finger at him. “I can see,” she said huffily, “that you have no interest in me story.”
But then, just as quickly, she dimpled a smile. “So, while we’re in Austin,” she said, striking out the conversation in an entirely different direction, “what say I find ye a wife to take?”
He returned his attention to the two-lane paved road. “I say no, with a capital N and an exclamation mark.”
“An exclamation mark?”
“You really do need to learn to read and write, Sunshine.”
“Well, settling down with the proper wife – that is what ye told me ye wanted. But ye know, Duke, I dunna believe ye.”
That remark yanked his gaze back to her elfin features. “And just what do you think I want?”
“Tis as plain as that strong nose on yuir handsome face.”
She thought him handsome? He had never given his looks that much thought. Thoughts of making a go at whatever circumstances currently beset him had taken up, it seemed, most of his life.
“The clues are all around yuirself. The beach mat and netting covering yuir bedroom window. Yuir seafarer’s chest beneath it. The dock planking that ye call a kitchen table. Even yuir dog’s name – Ulysses. And that library book we’re picking up – The Travels of Marco Polo, isna it? Dunna all of it bespeak of yuir heart’s yearning for adventure and far horizons?”
“Gawd Awmighty,” he groaned, “you’re full of more shit than a brick outhouse.”
After putting up with her far-fetched imagination for forty-five minutes, he welcomed Charlotte’s calm thinking. It was as logical as the Dewey Decimal System.
They both had attended the one-room school house for grades one through six. Two years older, she had befriended the bruised and knocked-about little boy and later the defiant, two-fisted kid, despite small town shunning. She had been his lifeline when he was fourteen and a stroke had taken his mother.
Charlotte Burns had gone on to attend Baylor College for Women and get a teacher’s degree – and he had gone on to waste away his youth in wanderings. She had married some successful college athlete. Nine months ago, the guy had drowned, on an outing on Austin’s Guadalupe, and his insurance had left her and their daughter with adequate financial means.
Like the public library, Charlotte possessed a quality of stability.
Settling her eyeglasses atop her poof of abundant brown hair, she looked up at him from warm but somber dark brown eyes. “I was hoping you would make it in today, Duke,” she said quietly. Her lips were as pink and as full as they had been on that last day before he left home, when they had exchanged a simple kiss, a kiss that time had not tarnished. “I’m off duty this afternoon.”
Behind him, the Gypsy urchin said, “Uhhh, Duke.”
He sighed. “Charlotte, this is S&S’s cook, Romy Sonnenschein. You remember, Rabbi Hickman’s Jewish Relief Program I told you about.” While it was not a full disclosure, he felt guilty, as if he were actually lying to Charlotte. “Romy’s from . . . well, all over, but – ”