Sunrise in the Main Street Café. Wearing a spare pink waitress dress, Natalie helped Iona serve coffee and farmer’s breakfasts to a crowd of thirty or more fulminating men. She’d found a pair of squarish, dark-framed eyeglasses that made her resemble the singer Nana Mouskouri, so the farmers and truckers were mostly at bay, but still she was a little overwhelmed by the shocking noise of yelled jokes, banging mugs, clacking plates, and the hollered chat of morning larks in overalls who all seemed hard of hearing. Plus, a way-turned-up radio voice was giving farm commodities prices from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
She was surprised by a tip left behind, but folded it into her apron pocket and withdrew with an empty coffeepot to the four-beaker coffee machine behind the counter. The din and commotion had quelled some and Iona took the opportunity for a respite, leaning on the pink Formica countertop and sipping a café au lait as she inspected the various species of maleness in the room. When Natalie rested on her elbows beside her, Iona said, “Look at my choices. Micah’s gotten hitched about twice too often. Orville’s homely and married. And Carlo Bacon is not exactly the sensible image of the Infinite.”
Natalie was taken aback.
“Quote I learned in junior college,” Iona said flatly. She considered a counter stool. “The Reverend’s handsome, but he’s a whatayacallit?”
“Un célibataire?”
“Right, a celebrate.” She sipped some more coffee and panned the room. “Too old. Too fat. Just a kid. Way too ugly. Way too stuck on himself. Blah. Another blah. And him? Maybe if I get drunk enough.” She sighed. “My town, Natalie. Party, party.”
The dull radio voice was saying, “Corn futures down a quarter. Wheat staying even. Soybeans falling fifteen cents . . .” as Owen and Pierre grandly entered.
“Bonjour mes amis!” Owen shouted.
Hearty greetings were exchanged, hands roughly shaken, guffaws forced, and Pierre eyed Natalie in a plum happy way, for he felt spruce and superior in his borrowed motorcycle boots and green mechanic’s coveralls with the name “Harvey” stitched over the pocket. When he noticed Natalie’s forbidding eyeglasses, he gleamed momentarily, then glanced away.
Owen said to Cecil, “Permettez-moi de vous presenter Monsieur Pierre Smith.”
Onlookers were stunned. Cecil asked, “What the hell was that?”
Owen answered, “I could not tell ya. Said it nice though, didn’t I?” Owen slid into a booth and Pierre imitated him just as a good boy might his father. And then Dick nonchalantly sashayed in and the male greeting ritual was repeated until he slid into the booth next to Pierre.
Iona watched her rival watch Dick’s entrance and then she watched the booth as Natalie went over with a handful of hooked cups and a round glass beaker of fresh coffee. Owen and Dick smiled up at the French waitress and seemed to exchange pleasantries, but Pierre stared at the salt and pepper shakers as if they would soon be his food. And Iona found herself transfixed by Pierre, for in those work-man’s clothes the Frenchman did not seem so rich and conceited as he first did to Iona, but like the wrongfully accused fugitive from the jailhouse who in dreams stole into her room at night and smelled of motor oil and sweat as he reclined on the mattress beside her and held his hand to her mouth and whispered, “Don’t scream,” as the sheriff searched the house in vain. And Dick Tupper was the opposite, no outlaw in him, no shame in his past, but upright, respectable, widely admired, a man who would not squander a fortune, lose his head, or fall in love with the little girl who carried Mason jars of lemonade to him way back when he was still married and the September harvest was hot.
She watched Natalie Clairvaux walk into the kitchen.
Carlo hastily hid a Modern Bride magazine under some dish towels and took the breakfast orders Natalie handed him. While perusing them, he said in a nonchalant way, “Quick as weeds are Cupid’s arrows.”
She stalled. “Pardon?”
Carlo swashed corn oil across the griddle with a house-painting brush as he said, “Tender feelings. Infatuation. Some call it love.” The oil sizzled and popped until he poured a ladle of blueberry pancake mix. “We are sooner led by our hearts than our heads.”
“Who?”
His Dick Tracy mustache rocked up on one side in his smirk. “Oh, no one. Empty speculation. And it could be he just wants to make you jealous.”
“Pierre?”
“So you’ve noticed.”
She felt she was being toyed with. “Food for thought,” she said and went out to the dining room, wiping an ice water ring from the Formica counter as she watched a shy and smiling Iona return from Owen’s boisterous booth.
Iona instantly told her, as if she were hiding a secret, “They needed cream,” and then she hurried past Natalie into the kitchen.
Carlo grinned so widely at Iona it seemed insanity was just minutes away.
“Well, I made contact,” she said.
Even as his foot began tapping, Carlo tried to act blithe by flipping a blueberry pancake with his spatula. “Was it like I told you?”
“Well, not really. Dick was a perfect gentleman, and Owen was Owen, but the French guy never said a peep.”
Carlo seemed to ponder that as he flipped another pancake. “And weren’t you just a little more interested in why he wasn’t noticing you?”
She gave it some thought. “I guess.”
“Well, there you go then. The French practically invented seduction; and you, my pretty one, are being seduced.”
“Huh,” Iona said.
Carlo tried to still his jittery leg by holding it firmly against the oven door, but it just made a thumping noise like a happy spaniel’s tail. Iona gave him an inquisitive look. “Tell you what,” he said. “We’ll go out together for fun in the sun. You and me and Owen and him. See if he doesn’t scope you out.”
She was fixing her hair in a toaster’s reflection. “Well, jeez,” she said. “He’s male, isn’t he?”
But Carlo was lost in a prurient stare, confirming her assumptions.
Natalie was wringing out a hand towel in the sink as Iona exited from the kitchen and halted to lean casually on the Formica counter and stare across the dining room. She heard Iona say, “You got yourself a catch, girl.” And though Iona meant Dick Tupper, Natalie presumed she meant Pierre, and she found herself watching her fiancé with other eyes until he and Dick and Owen finally left the café. She was hurt that Pierre ignored her.