Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(33)
With the film credits rolling and the need to continue to stall for cooling-off time for McClellan, Gideon suggested the soda fountain at Charlie’s Café. “Surely, by then Johnson will have returned to his office.”
The waitress Adelle was still casting calf eyes at the rancher. He gave her a friendly wink but the scornful look he cast Romy, as she slid beside Gideon into the booth, was hardly friendly. Plainly, he was still determined on his course to rid himself of her.
After orders were placed, Gideon said, “This matter of exchanging Romy here for another cook could well land you with someone worse, McClellan.”
Beside Gideon, Romy stiffened and her eyes narrowed at him. The warm air that was burnt-up grease turned suddenly stale and frigid.
“A worse employee,” he amended.
McClellan shifted his tall and rangy frame to lounge against the booth wall, his arm draped casually over Charlotte’s backrest. “Your little con artist, Goldman, could learn a thing or two about honest work from those seven dwarfs with their merry ‘Ho-ho, it’s off to work we go.’”
She beamed, “But Duke, t’was the dwarfs who kept the messy house. And the lovely intruder who straightened it, aye?”
“You call ‘straightening’ house what you do?”
“Besides,” she continued, this time with a pouting ire, “not all dwarfs are merr – ”
Desperate, Gideon cut her off before she could blurt something damaging about Morris Keller’s former operations. “She has a point, McClellan. Give her a second chance, why don’t you?”
“Why should I?”
“Doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance?” Charlotte asked softly.
§ § §
The split leather sofa in Duke’s office, where he slept nights, beckoned him from his rathole of a desk. Of course, tomorrow morning, like most mornings, he would awake with every muscle aching, especially his lower back, where the colliding cushions sagged beneath his weight.
Rubbing his eyelids, he felt even their muscles ached.
Ignoring his exhaustion, he returned his attention to the S&S ledger and its mocking numbers. While it had looked like the swarms of grasshoppers would carry off the ranch and the cows with it, he had held on. When over the last few years of drought and dust, many ranchers and farmers had simply walked away, he had continued to battle tooth and nail to keep the S&S afloat.
Yes, as a kid, he had walked away.
Never again. He would prove he was better than his old man. Yet before the Great War’s violence, with its exploding shell that thereafter mangled his father’s personality, the old man had been, while not lovable, at least, not so mean. Duke often wondered if he could, indeed, claim to be much better than his pa those last few years.
That morning in the pickup, he had let his temper get the best of him with that shrew of a sorceress the good rabbi had saddled him with.
Beyond the desk’s yellow pool of lamp light, something drew his attention. But, of course, it would be she, standing barefoot at the ajar office door. She was worse than a returning plague of grasshoppers. He stifled a groan. “Yeah?”
Hands behind her back, she glided as silent as a nun half way into the small room to stand just beyond the pale of lamp light. She wore only his old shirt and, of course, the kerchief that constrained her crazy curls. “Tis sorry I am about the gate.”
What a fool he was, giving her a second chance at Charlotte and Goldman’s beseeching. “Oh, I’ll take the cost I’m out to replace the gate from your pay.”
She frowned and with one hand rubbed her backside. “Ye already took it out of me hide.”
“Is that what this midnight visitation is about?” Damn’t, she was his supernatural raven’s ‘Nevermore.’ “Well, you can take your complaint to the NYA and yourself with it, for all I care.”
Her other hand came forward to produce a length of material that looked suspiciously like one of the barn’s printed feed sacks. “Tis curtains – curtains I stitched for the kitchen.”
He scrubbed his beard-stubbled jaw. “So, this is a peace offering?” Although no expression of contrition inhibited her lively features.
She looked affronted. “Peace offering? Nay. This is in trade for those reading and writing lessons we agreed upon.”
His hand rubbed his mouth to hide its mustache’s twitch. The Gypsy girl was gutsy in a refreshing way, he’d give her that.
He pushed away from the desk and crossed to the couch’s end table, this one an old cantaloupe crate. Sorting through its stack of library books, he found one Charlotte had recommended for Romy, Charlotte’s Web. Had Charlotte been hoping to make a subtle point?
Slouching down onto the couch, he said, “Let’s get this over with.”
Grinning, Romy padded the intervening distance to plop beside him.
He flipped to the first page. “I’ll read a page. Then you read it back to me, sounding out what words you can.”
Drawing her legs under her and curling up like a kitten against him, she nodded enthusiastically. She smelled subtly of warmed vanilla and cinnamon and honeysuckle.
With deliberated pauses, he read the opening sentence, underscoring each word with callused fingertip. “’Where’s Papa going with that ax? said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.’”