concerned. Here you are, using your vacation time to help out-”
“Oh Gideon, I appreciate your taking offense on my behalf, but I really think you’re overreacting. Some of your academic-type friends take some serious getting-used-to too. Audrey, for one, or Norton, or the huge one with the pince-nez-”
“Well yes, that’s true enough-”
“Or if you want to talk about really creepy, what about Harvey-my God!-or Lyle-!”
“But that’s different. They’re-” He laughed. “Okay, point taken. I’ll take Tony as he is.”
For a while they busied themselves with their seriously overloaded tacos, the eating of which required the use of both hands, all of their focus, and the copious application of paper napkins, which were soon piled in a messy clump in the middle of the table.
“Oh, I have a little bit of news,” Julie said, when they paused to wipe their chins and take a couple of breaths. “Annie’s going to be back tomorrow morning. They settled on the divorce agreement in one day. She said, and I’m quoting, ‘El Schmucko didn’t have enough to make it worth fighting about.’ She also said, ‘He sure doesn’t look like Robert Redford anymore.’ That last was said with a certain amount of satisfaction, I should add.”
“Good for Annie, but what does that mean for us? Are we going to be heading home?”
“Well, they said we were welcome to stay as long as we want, of course, but I think we should stick to our original plan-go home at the end of the week.”
“That’s fine with me. So then are you going to be free for the next few days? Can we do some touring?”
“Not altogether, no. I-Oops.” She leaned quickly forward as a strip of salsa-drenched pork disengaged itself from the taco and plopped onto the table. Another napkin was produced from the dispenser to clean it up. “I promised to help Jamie with the quarterly accounts-I guess Annie is hopeless at that kind of thing, even worse than I am-but he says we can probably wrap it up in a couple of mornings, maybe only one. So I’m hoping to be available, yes, but not until tomorrow afternoon, anyway.”
“That works out perfectly,” said Gideon. “I need to write up a report for Marmolejo in the morning, on those bones I was working on today. I know what: maybe we can drop it off personally-I know he’d like to see you-and then continue on into downtown Oaxaca; have lunch out, maybe. There are supposed to be some first-rate restaurants.”
“Maybe,” said Julie, wiping her chin, “but I bet they won’t be as good as Samburguesas.”
“You’re probably right.” He swigged some Coke from the can and got up. “I’m still hungry. I’m going to get another taco. Want one? My treat. You can buy tomorrow.”AFTER dinner they walked contentedly back up to the Hacienda in the dark, their flashlight throwing weird, flitting shadows on the adobe-brick and concrete-block walls that lined the steep alley.
“What did you think of Preciosa?” Julie asked out of nowhere.
“Preciosa? I don’t know, seemed okay to me. A little strange, maybe. And I can understand why Annie calls her Preciosa the Pretentious.”
“How old would you say she is?”
Julie, Gideon had learned, had a bit of an obsession about women who employed face-lifts, dermabrasion, Botox, and the rest of the anti-aging arsenal in their own obsessive, futile pursuit of staying young forever. The idea of it simply irked her; she didn’t like to see them getting away with it when she herself was honestly taking age as it came. It also irked her that Gideon typically couldn’t spot a face-lift when he saw one. So when she asked him that particular question-“How old would you say she is?”-in that particular tone of voice, it was inevitably with the purpose of setting him straight about some artificially enhanced actress or acquaintance that she thought might have him fooled.
“Preciosa?” he said. “Oh… late fifties, maybe sixty or so.”
She was surprised. “I would have thought you’d have said thirties or forties.”
“Are you kidding? No way,” he said, then added: “The hands. You can always tell from the hands.”
FOURTEEN
The next morning Gideon sat out on the patio in the feathery shade of the casuarina tree, typing the report into his laptop, with a mug of Dorotea’s delicious, cinnamon-scented coffee on the little table beside him. It had been plunked down without his requesting it, along with what he liked to think was a grumpy apology for sending him off dinnerless the previous evening. (“As long as you’re sitting there, I suppose you expected me to make you some coffee.”) Grumpy or not, he was keenly appreciative.
He also appreciated the music that was drifting up from below; the village marching band, which seemed to play several times a day: all trumpets and brass. The music this morning was slower than he’d heard before, quite funereal, in fact, something like the bands that play for a New Orleans funeral, but even slower, and with a mariachi lilt instead of a jazzy one. This one was a funeral procession too, he supposed; pretty appropriate background music for the work he was doing.
At a little after ten, he hit the save button, copied the report to a flash drive, and went looking for Julie. When he checked the dining room, he saw Tony and Preciosa breakfasting with a few of the women professors. Tony beckoned him affably over, but Gideon refused stiffly. He hadn’t meant to be rude, but he was still irked at the way Tony had jumped all over Julie at dinner the other night, and he couldn’t help showing it.
Julie was with Jamie, at a table on the front terrace, going over a mess of accounts and receipts spread out in front of them. They were in a secluded corner that looked not out at the town, but down on the dusty corral twenty feet or so below, where Carl and Juanito, his Mexican helper, were saddling up horses for a morning ride for the women’s group. Gideon stood near their table for a moment, leaning on the terrace’s low stone wall, watching Carl and Juanito and savoring the smells of salty horseflesh, old leather, and sweetly fragrant alfalfa feed. Carl glanced up at him and waved. “Gonna ride out along one of the arroyos this morning. Just half an hour, forty-five minutes, to get them comfortable with the horses. Want to come? Take no time to saddle one up for you.”
“Thanks, no, not this morning,” Gideon said. There’s room for only one alpha male on a ride like that, he thought with a smile, and it’s not me.
When Julie caught sight of Gideon her face lit up, producing a lovely, melting glow all through his chest. Was there anything sweeter in his life than seeing her uncontrived pleasure on unexpectedly seeing him? If there was, he couldn’t think of it.
“Hi, honey!” she said. “Come join us.”
“Well, you’re obviously working. Why don’t I-”
“No, no,” Jamie said, beginning to gather the papers to him. “Enough, already. Thank you, Julie, we can finish up this afternoon.”
A quick, wincing exchange of eyebrow-shrugs between Julie and Gideon sent the same message both ways: There went their plan to go into Oaxaca together. “Tomorrow?” Julie mouthed, and Gideon nodded.
“Anyway,” Jamie went on, “Annie’ll be arriving at the airport, and I’m going to have to get going in a minute. Carl”-he gestured at Carl, manfully, gracefully cinching a saddle on a fidgety mare-“is tied up with a guest ride, so it’s up to me.”
“What about your knee, Jamie?” Gideon asked. “Can you drive all right? If not, I’d be glad to pick her up for you.”
“No, it’s not a problem. The vans all have automatic shifts, so I don’t use my left leg. Have a seat, Gideon, will you?”
“Julie, I’m glad I found you!” It was Tony, striding toward them from the dining room, still chewing. “I owe you an apology. I was on you like a ton of bricks there the other night, and I had no business doing it. A few too many beers, I guess.”
Tony rose a couple of notches in Gideon’s estimation.
“I had no business prying,” Julie said. “I had a few too many beers too.”
Tony took a chair from another table, pulled it over, and straddled it wrong-way-round, with his elbows leaning on the back. The denim over his massive thighs was stretched tight with the strain. “You see-”
“Tony, it’s all right, you don’t have to,” Julie said.
“No, I want to.” He looked at his brother. “Or did you fill her in already, Jamie?”
