“I DON’T KNOW, BUT HERBERT LOOKS WORRIED,” BOSS SAID. “I love that Herbert. If you ever fire him I’m gonna snap him up, Cyrus. I just thought I’d warn you.”
Cyrus looked puzzled. “Sporting of you, of course,” he said, looking at Herbert as if he were noticing him for the first time.
“I hardly suppose I’ll fire him,” he said, as if the very notion were surprising and droll. “Herbert has always worked for me. I’m surprised anyone’s noticed him. I haven’t in years, now that I think about it. But you’re right, there he is. Bessie will have him in a state, I suppose. Keeps all the servants in a state, actually. Knows what to expect of servants and won’t settle for less.”
We all stood and watched as she shuffled around the beautiful car. When she finished she shuffled into the house, not saying a word to anyone. Herbert remained at attention. He looked as if he were waiting for a firing squad to march out of the house and dispatch him.
“All right,” Cyrus said, slapping his thigh briskly. “Very good morning’s work indeed. Never liked that L-shaped lake. You’ll attend to the details, won’t you, Boss? Draw up the papers and send them along to my people. Then this lucky young man can write his check and that will be that.”
“Fine,” Boss said. “I’ll be in touch with your people. See you later.”
“Months later, unless we’re very lucky indeed,” Cyrus said. “It’s Peck, you know. No head for trade, though I suppose his museums are nice enough. Could have stayed home and been a gentleman, but nothing could persuade him.”
Then he turned and strode into the house I had just bought.
As they strolled past the hunting brake, Boss winked at Herbert.
“I wish I could give him a kiss, but of course Bessie is watching,” she said.
“I don’t have four million dollars,” I pointed out.
“I do,” Boss said. “I had no idea Cyrus was thinking so cheap. Bessie must have him going around in circles.”
“Are you planning to loan me the money?” I asked.
“Yep,” she said. “You’re my decoy. We’ll paint the fences and sell the place for six million. Maybe six and a half.”
That put matters in a different light. “How much do I get?” I asked.
Boss laughed. “You’ll get something,” she said. “I haven’t decided how much, or even what.”
Boss was a very fast driver. A big sale had a good effect on her, just as it did on Kate. The little Virginia roads that border $4-million-dollar horse farms are narrow and windy, but Boss roared over them at a high speed, the windows down and the cool fall air rushing through the car.
Boss had a wonderful complexion. She could look tanned and rosy at the same time. That was how she looked with the cool air rushing through the car.
“Did you really want to kiss Herbert?” I asked, jealously.
“Boy, did I!” she said. “You know why? Innocence. I just can’t keep away from innocent men.”
“That explains Micah,” I said. I had long wondered what explained him.
“Yeah,” she said, giving me a look. “Only Micah never wears striped pants and a little black apron. Neat little innocent men in striped pants are the cat’s meow, so far as I’m concerned.”
“I guess that lets me out,” I said, hoping she would contradict me.
She shot over a little hump in the road and swerved around a man on a tractor as if she’d known he’d be just over that hump. Then she grinned at me.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I might like you better once you’ve been despoiled. Despoiled innocence is kind of cute, too.”
“I don’t understand your criteria very well,” I said.
Boss just shrugged. “I’d like a hamburger,” she said.
She got it in Chantilly, Virginia—basically just a wide space on Route 50, not far from the flea market where I had met Beth Gibbon, the flea marketer’s daughter.
Beth had been sitting on the tailgate of her father’s old pickup when I spotted her, her five young children piled around her like little possums. Beth’s father was a quilt man, although he also sold pocket knives, old bottles, and a smattering of knickknacks, when he could find them. Beth was only twenty-four when I met her and had a wildness in her eyes that was the result of feeling frightened and out of place in what she called “big ol’ towns.” She had a husband somewhere, the one who had given her five kids in five years, but he hung out in Cincinnati when he wasn’t giving her a kid.
The thought of Beth mingled with the smell of cooking hamburgers in the little place Boss had chosen. The hamburgers were excellent, but I was distracted by my memories. I hadn’t seen Beth in almost a year, which probably meant that she had another child.
On the jukebox Tanya Tucker was insisting that, if it came to it, she would prefer Texas to heaven. The song prompted a moment of nostalgia for Coffee, which mingled with the hamburger and mustard in my mouth and my nostalgia for Beth.
Boss was cheerfully munching her hamburger and making eyes at a booth full of truckers, who on the whole were greasier than the hamburgers. The truckers were mildly abashed at being the object of her attention.
“Penny for your thoughts,” she said.
“I have about a million,” I said. “I can’t sort them out.”
Boss swallowed too big a bite and hit herself in the breastbone a time or two, to help it go down.
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you,” she said. “You’re too romantic on the one hand. On the other hand, you don’t know the first thing about romance.”
It seemed to me an arguable point. After all I had two ex-wives and several girl friends and/or potential wives. I must know something about romance.
Boss was wobbling a French fry in some ketchup. For a moment she reminded me of Belinda Arber. She gave me a cool look. Belinda was much like Boss, only forty-nine years younger.
In fact, the women I sometimes inaccurately think of as my women were always reminding me of one another. There were plenty of differences between them, but somehow the correspondences outnumbered the differences.
Boss didn’t say anything for a while. She ate her hamburger and French fries and occasionally let her gaze drift over to the truckers, who continued to be mildly abashed. They were evidently not used to even such light attentions as Boss was paying them.
The waitress kept refilling Boss’ coffee cup, with coffee so hot that a wreath of smoke rose from it. When Boss lifted it to drink she gently blew aside the smoke.
“I don’t think you really know how to get girls,” Boss said, breaking her silence. “It doesn’t matter, though, because any girl would know how to get you.”
She looked hard at the truckers suddenly, causing them to shift nervously in their booth.
“What’s cute about you is that you’re kind of chaste,” she said.
“I’m not chaste,” I said, automatically. She knew enough about me to know that I didn’t exactly avoid carnal relations.
“There’s just two romantic relationships,” Boss said, fingering a strand of her black hair. “All the rest are what my granny used to call common doings.”
“Which are?”
“Sexy friendships and adultery,” Boss said, opening her purse and scattering change on the table. “I got the tip, you can get the ticket.”
Then she got up and headed for the door, walking right past the truckers all of whom fell instantly silent. They almost cringed, in fact, though Boss didn’t give them another look. She got a toothpick and went outside. I paid the ticket. As the door closed behind me the truckers, grown suddenly confident, began to laugh uproariously.