Isn't It Romantic?

And in the booth north of them, Owen Nelson asked Dick Tupper, “Was that French?”

Dick lifted halfway from his seat, imitated a good stretch and yawn as he turned just so, and interestedly stared at them fuming silently in their booth. Returning to his seat, he told Owen, “Looks like they’re having a tiff.”

Owen tilted out of the booth to watch Iona deliver the coffee, carefully placing the saucers and cups on each side of the tasseled loafer. Sitting up again, he said, “I say the shoe’s involved.” A paper napkin was farmerishly stuffed under his green workshirt collar, and he patted his mouth with it. “You don’t know ’em, do ya?”

“Oh now, don’t go introducing yourself again.”

Owen got up. “That’s how I met Slim Pickens that one time.”

Owen Nelson was in his thirties and a salt-of-the-earth guy whose height and girth were sufficient to make him a third-string offensive tackle for the famous University of Nebraska Cornhuskers, though he never lorded that fact over the locals but was a friend to all and sundry. Owen inherited his dearly departed father’s gas station kitty-corner from the café, and townsfolk all thought the world of him, but he was frankly not much of a mechanic, so those who’d reached the age of reason generally just rented his hoist and tools.

Owen was friendliest with Dick Tupper, a purveyor of cattle whose ranch was three miles north of town and who was just lately wealthy, having sold off four hundred acres of sorghum and soybeans to an agriculture conglomerate. Dick was a fine-looking, hard-bodied, mustached man just past fifty, and the sole misery of his life was that a decade ago his perpetually unpleasant wife ran off to Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains with a wildlife manager named Calvin who wanted to be a fishing guide. Thenceforth Dick lived like a widower, still feeling married and faithful and carrying on like a chilly Lord Byron in spite of the divorce she’d gotten. But his fiftieth birthday was a jolt

to his system, and since then he’d been meeting flirtatious and lonesome husband-seekers in Internet chat groups and driving as far as Lincoln to share rack of lamb and I-and-Thou talk in the halo of glimmering candles. With that history as his guide, and in just a short glimpse, Dick was able to postulate that Natalie was unhappy with her hulking companion, and he too got up to introduce himself.

Pierre gloomily registered the two men’s genial approach and urgently told Natalie, “Ne fais pas de mouvements brusques.” (Don’t make any sudden moves.)

Owen stood aside to free his workshirt of the stained paper napkin and shyly told Dick, “You go.”

“Excuse me,” Dick told them. “We don’t mean to intrude upon your precious time here together, but we haven’t seen you in these parts and I was wondering if you had some problem on the road or you had people here or just where it is you hail from.”

Pierre and Natalie stared at him in silence. Eight, maybe nine seconds passed. The Young and the Restless was the only sound. And then Owen shouted, “Wants to know who you are!”

Dick nodded toward the gas station owner and said, “That’s Owen.” Extending his hand to Natalie, he said, “My name’s Dick Tupper.”

His hand was held out there for a moment before Natalie cautiously took it. “Natalie Clairvaux,” she said.

Dick turned to Il Penseroso for a handshake. “Pleased to meetcha.”

Pierre said with sarcasm, “Hi.”

“Didn’t catch your name.”

Pierre smiled at Dick and said, “Je vous déteste tous.” (I hate you all.)

Owen asked, “Was that French you were speaking?”

Pierre, suffering, held his face in his hands. “Mon Dieu.”

To Owen’s question, Natalie nodded uncertainly, as if they’d committed a crime.

Dick smiled at Natalie and said, “Pretty language.” And to Owen he said, “She could be a sister to that French actress we like.”

“Which?”

“Pretty brunette, bee-stung lips. She was in that sand dune motion picture. And Camille Claudel.”

“Oh yeah,” Owen said. “Isabelle Adjani.”

Dick smiled at Natalie. “Are you kin?”

She shook her head.

Owen invited himself to join the travelers by swiveling a chair around and straddling it at their booth. “Okay,” he told Dick. “We got an intricate situation here. They could be penniless and adrift and far from any kind of help, or they could be viticulturalists just traipsing hither and yon, scouring the vineyards of our fair Nebraska homeland.”

They all gave Owen the look he so often deserved, bless his heart.

Dick helped out by saying, “My friend wants to know if either of you are employed in the wine trade.”