“Make it Saturday!”
Natalie got up and confidently walked down the hillside with her red wheeled suitcase in tow.
And he yelled after her, “Noon!”
She did not go toward the still-disabled See America bus but toward the shade trees, houses, and water tower of a Nebraska farm town half a mile away.
Pierre forlornly looked at the loitering passengers and then at his fiancée, whose suitcase swerved on uneven ground and fell over. She righted it. Pierre shouted, “Super! C’est ce qu’on appelle une aventure?” (Great! Is this what you call an adventure?)
She didn’t turn.
He shouted, “On va rater le bus!” (We’re going to miss the bus!)
She called back, “On prendra le prochain!” (We’ll catch the next one!)
Walking after her with his valise, Pierre yelled, “C’est encore plus bête que de venir ici!” (That is even more stupid than coming here in the first place!)
6
Seldom, Nebraska. Population 395.
Natalie hauled her suitcase inside the Main Street Café in one of those Bus Stop entrances and she was surprised to notice a sudden silence settle on the diners there, to see farmers in their feed caps turn in their pink vinyl booths and stare, and truckers rotate on their pink and chrome counter stools, as if this were a What the hell? moment combined with a Lo and behold.
She was pretty enough that they’d have taken a gander anyway, but there was that hint of the exotic, too, like she hailed from east of Omaha and would brook no questioning about it. Owen Nelson was there, though, and Dick Tupper, naturally, and locals knew they’d appoint themselves as a welcoming party, full of interrogatories and a healthy concern for the lost lady’s welfare.
Natalie felt the café’s interest and with some embarrassment hauled her suitcase toward a booth where she oh so primly sat.
And then Pierre entered and the stares flew to him, the force of them tilting him a little off-balance. No one failed to notice he was holding a tasseled shoe in his hand. They did not consider it much of a weapon.
Carlo Bacon, the cook, called out from the kitchen, “Since when did Seldom become a travel destination?”
Pierre sought out Natalie and sat down across from her in the booth, setting his fancy and ruined Ferragamo loafer between them on the Formica. With fierce accusation, he said in English, “I have torned my favorite shoe.”
She ignored him.
Looking around the café above the hats of the still watching, he saw on the walls of whitewashed oak stuffed pheasants, an antlered rabbit, and old hanging heads of deer and moose that looked distraught and humorless. And next to the kitchen door was a locked gun case. His fears were confirmed. “Regarde,” he whispered.
She did. She was horrified.
The Wednesday installment of The Young and the Restless went to commercial, giving Iona Christiansen an opportunity to get two iced waters and two menus. She carried them to the booth. She was a beauty, a sultry blonde of twenty-three with a disappointed pout to her mouth and those overpowering attributes of the flesh that made men feel helpless, lovelorn, and pitifully adolescent. Pierre smiled oafishly at the waitress, just like so many before him, but Iona was immune to such appraisals and merely read the shoemaker’s name inside the loafer.
Pierre presumed there was a fixed price three-course meal, and said in his unpracticed English, “It is that one would like the prix fixe.”
“The prefix?” Iona asked. “Oh, it’s four oh two.”
Owen helpfully supplied the data that the area code changed to 308 a little farther west.
Pierre slightly turned in Owen’s direction and nodded his thanks.
“You want coffee?” Iona asked.
Pierre agreeably smiled. Iona glanced at Natalie, who put up two fingers. Pierre put up two fingers, too.
“Two then,” Iona said and strolled back to the coffeemaker.
Pierre hunkered forward and said in a hushed voice, “On va prendre racine ici.” (We’ll be stranded here.)
Natalie shrugged.