Retam Sullet - Part Eight

When the men entered the house, Thea and Meggy were on the couch adrift in a sea of photo albums. The baby was clinging to Thea's neck and laughing. The minute she saw Ringo, her hands shot out in sign.

LOOK, SHE'S GIVING ME PICTURES OF YOU. AND THIS THING.

Ringo winced, striding over to her. WHAT THING?

I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS BUT SHE SAYS IT WAS YOUR FAVORITE WHEN YOU WERE SMALL. She reached into the shoe box beside her and brandished a palm-sized blue and white square with a bright yellow knob.

He took it from her hand. IT'S A MUSIC BOX. SEE THIS SIDE? He turned the box around and twisted the dial. Inside, a small disc turned. Thea saw a little ship on the sea, riding on the waves as bright day became starry night. Although the toy was plastic and the technology was crude, she seemed to find it charming.

"You stole that thing off the crib for years." His father shook his head.

"It was mine," Ringo shot back, almost good naturedly.

AND PHOTOGRAPHS. She waved a picture of a painfully small infant in an incubator, tube down his throat, thread-sized IVs attached to his disproportionate head, cotton pads covering his papery eyelids. Shaky handwriting on the back gave the date as July 16, 1969. YOU'RE TWO DAYS OLD AND LOOK HOW SICK YOU ARE, ALL WIRED UP LIKE I WAS.

Ringo took the picture too but said nothing.

"I took that," his father said. "The only reason they let me was that you were so bad off. Your mother wanted a picture." The older man stepped closer.

YOU AND YOUR MOTHER? Thea signed, handing him the picture.

Sure enough, it was, but he didn't remember ever seeing it before. His plain, thin mother, all big eyes and Dumbo ears and streaky white blonde hair. She looked to be on the downhill side of yet another pregnancy, while he would have been about five, wearing his first pair of black glasses. He was either handing her a cup or taking a cup from her. Their eyes met in a way that suggested neither knew what to make of the other.

AND THIS ONE. She handed him another photo. WHEN YOU FINISHED SCHOOL. YOU HAVE A DIFFERENT HAT THAN THE OTHER PEOPLE.

I WAS, UM, V.A.L.E.D.I.C.T.O.R.I.A.N. THE TOP OF MY CLASS. I HAD THE HIGHEST GRADES. DO YOU KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT?

YES, RITCHIE, I WENT TO SCHOOL, YOU KNOW. She rolled her eyes. SOMETIMES YOU ACT LIKE I WAS RAISED IN A SKINNER BOX.

He chose not to bicker. Instead, he looked at the photo. The only long haired boy in the cluster of caps and gowns, he wore the blank look of resistance. He was sweating in his first Ramones shirt underneath the red nylon robe.

When the picture was taken, he realized, he was Thea's age. A girl like her would have killed him back then. He would have had a heart attack before she could get his pants off. Of course, she hadn't been made yet when he graduated from high school.

He blinked. It seemed wrong that his early life could be summed up so completely by a few snap shots. But it looked to him like all that was missing was one with him getting his ass beat for the heinous offense of smarting-off to his father.

Thea stood up holding the baby with one arm. She extended her free hand to her father-in-law as politely as she knew how.

Hank Langly shook it vigorously, giving Thea a long look that made his second son want to sock him.

Hank turned his head to Tom. "I don't know what you got all worked up for. Looks to me like Ringo's child bride here could go bear hunting with a stick. It's pretty clear who got the raw end of this deal."

Ringo had forgotten his father's knack for reducing all human experiences to economic transactions.

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They spent that night on the farm not in his boyhood bunk, but in his parents old bed. His father had, in his own way, insisted, saying he was alone now and every other bed in the house besides Tom and Meg's was meant for one person. Ringo didn't have it in him to admit they spent their nights on a narrow single mattress and box springs set on the floor.

They weren't used to so much room. Ringo spent a long time staring at his mother's vanity, at the thin veneer over particle board and two narrow drawers, at the large octagonal mirror facing the foot of the bed. He knew if he opened the drawers her things would still be there. He didn't want to see them.

The whole set had been a wedding gift to his mom from her in- laws. Everyone talked about it like it was some extravagant gesture, but on cursory inspection, he could see it was just some cheap mass produced job. Well kept, though.

He thought about Mulder for the first time in a while. He wondered what kind of wedding presents his mother had received. Pearls? Real china instead of Melmac? A summer house in Rhode Island so you could retreat in peace when hoi polloi like the Kennedys invaded Martha's Vineyard come summer? Still, when Hank Langly brought MaryBeth Skaarsgard from the next farm over, he had more to give her than Ringo did when he married the daughter of a man with millions of bucks squirreled away in several not-quite-legal hiding places. Hell, langly'd cleaned out all his savings to buy her a ring that didn't look like it came from a cereal box, only to realize too late he couldn't feed his children a ring. He closed his eyes.

When his grandfather was liberating concentration camps and puking his guts out beside the mass graves, Thea's was spiriting away the bastards responsible and adding untold money and power to his already considerable family fortune in the process.

His family was full of true assholes; hers was all comic book- sized heroes and villains. She had Mulder, his face shining and his trench coat flapping behind him like fucking Batman, and Cancerman, her grandfather, whatever-the-fuck-his-real-name-was, subverting anything right and good and sacred.

At least Hank Langly wasn't part of a conspiracy to alter the human genome. At least he wasn't a Nazi sympathizer or collaborator or whatever you called Bill Mulder and CGB Spender and the rest of those sons of bitches who experimented on real live people, like they were nothing, less than nothing.

Ringo recalled the first time Mulder had asked him to identify a Project Paper Clip scientist from a yellowing photograph. It had turned out to be Victor Klemper, smiling, holding a plate full of potato salad at a Mulder family backyard barbeque.

He wondered if it had been Klemper or another in the sea of German and Japanese war criminals he'd identified for the agent over the years who had been responsible for designing his pretty, smart, tough young wife, who stood, unflinching, with six million dead behind her. He could not honestly say if she was just another victim, or his own personal Girl From Brazil. All he knew was that either way, it had not been her choice.

His father's nagging voice suddenly filled the back of his head. "You knocked her up, and you married her," Hank told him. "No matter what else she is, she's yours."

Of course, his father would never take into account that he loved her.

He cracked his knuckles and looked around. He'd never gotten a good look in this room before. When he was growing up, this room had been forbidden, a restricted area. You'd have thought his parents kept plutonium in here.

He was almost one hundred per cent certain he had been conceived in this bed. Laying in it with his wife, he wasn't sure how he felt about that.

THIS IS AMAZING, she signed.

THIS IS NEBRASKA, he replied. I THINK WE HAVE DIFFERENT DICTIONARIES.

MEGGY IS NICE, Thea signed. I LIKE HER.

He knew that meant something. Thea never liked other women. Respect was usually the best they could hope for.

I LIKE HER, TOO, he signed, thinking of how his family had stared when the two of them signed. For about the millionth time, Langly understood why Thea held such a low opinion of people in general and hearing people in particular.

YOU LIKE HER MORE THAN THE REST OF THEM, Thea, never one for tact, observed.

Ringo shrugged, MAYBE BECAUSE SHE'S NOT A BLOOD RELATION.

YOU'RE SO LUCKY TO HAVE A FAMILY.

YEAH, I AM, he signed back. YOU, THE BABIES.

NO, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN. She rolled her eyes. YOU GREW UP IN A HOUSE, THE SAME HOUSE FOR YEARS, WITH BROTHERS AND SISTERS AND A MOTHER AND FATHER. LIKE ON TV, ON THE WALTONS.

I MUST HAVE MISSED ALL THOSE EPISODES WHEN DAD HIT JIM BOB WITH A BELT.

Thea looked down. Ringo realized neither of them was particularly interested in having the bad childhood pissing contest. Beside, they both knew she'd win.

He touched her chin before he signed, trying to gather her attention. IT'S OKAY, MAMA. THE FUCKED UP PART IS MY DAD'S TRYING REALLY HARD. THIS IS THE COOLEST HE'S EVER BEEN WITH ME.

I'M SORRY. HERE ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE AND YOU ALL KNOW EACH OTHER AND YOU HAVE THE SAME GENES AND YOU LOOK LIKE THEM - YOUR NOSE IS EXACTLY LIKE YOUR... She let the sentence go unfinished. I HOPE THEY LOOK LIKE YOU. She touched her belly. THIS IS SO COOL, TO SEE WHERE YOU CAME FROM.

EVERYBODY HAS A FAMILY, T, he signed, then regretted it. IF HE KNEW ABOUT YOU, MULDER WOULD HAVE BEEN THE FIRST ONE ON A PLANE TO COSTA RICA.

Thea frowned. YOU THINK?

WITHOUT A DOUBT. YOU ARE SO LIKE BOTH OF THEM.  THAT THING YOU DO WITH YOUR EYEBROW - THAT SPOCK THING?  SCULLY DOES THAT. AND THE THINGS YOU THINK ARE FUNNY - JUST LIKE MULDER. AND YOU LOOK LIKE THEM, LIKE  MULDER MOSTLY, THOUGH. YOU'RE MORE LIKE YOUR DAD IN A LOT OF WAYS.

IS HE PRETTY?

HE'S NOT MY TYPE, IF THAT'S WHAT YOU MEAN, he signed with a smirk.

She punched him in the arm.

BUT CHICKS REALLY GO FOR HIM, SO I GUESS HE'S NOT QUASIMODO.

She took this as a cue to strip off her shirt. I DON'T LIKE CHICKS, she signed bare-breasted.

Langly's eyes widened. NO, THEA. NO WAY. NOT IN THIS BED.

IT APPEARS TO BE STRUCTURALLY SOUND, she signed, then thumped the mattress.

NO WAY. I WAS PROBABLY CONCEIVED HERE. FORGET IT.

Ringo could see her pupils dilate as she considered the idea. IN THIS BED? IN THIS ROOM?

He nodded. He watched her hands reverently smooth the still made chenille bed spread. He knew the way she thought, knew she was seeing strands of DNA combining like puzzle pieces. He kept seeing his hulking father and skinny birdlike mother naked and felt slightly ill.

I THINK THEY'VE CHANGED THE SHEETS SINCE THEN, THOUGH, he signed, silently wishing she would put her shirt back on.

RITCHIE, I AM SO TURNED ON.

Ringo stepped back. NO WAY, T, NO WAY.

WAY, she signed, leering.

DO I HAVE TO GO SLEEP ON THE COUCH? BECAUSE I WILL IF I HAVE TO. I'M NOT KIDDING.

She stroked the thin skin that stretched over his knuckles.

He looked at her sharply.

I WAS JUST HOLDING YOUR HAND, she signed. I CAN'T EVEN TOUCH YOU NOW?

YEAH RIGHT, FIRST YOU HOLD MY HAND THEN YOU GOT ME PINNED LIKE A BUG AND YOU'RE PULLING DOWN MY ZIPPER WITH YOU TEETH, he signed, only half irritated. BEEN THERE.

MORE LIKE A BUTTERFLY, she corrected him, smiling slyly.

A MOTH, he compromised.

YOU'RE USUALLY A VERY COOPERATIVE VICTIM, she signed.

I MEAN IT. I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS HERE. JUST LAY WITH ME TONIGHT, OKAY? BE MY FRIEND?

ALWAYS, RITCHIE. She nodded with her forehead wrinkled. He promised himself he'd make it up to her at the next cheap motel.

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After breakfast, everyone shook hands and slapped each other on the back, and made promises about visits no one was going to keep. Ringo and Thea left.

There was a much-used paper sack in the driver's seat of the pick up and a note:

YOUR MOTHER WAS SAVING THIS FOR YOU.

A quilt. A field of white with interlocking white rings. Red embroidered birds and flowers. A wedding quilt.

He didn't recognize the handwriting.

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Taos, New Mexico. Passing time and waiting to pick up the deed and the keys for the new house from Jimmy and Yves' lawyer. It took awhile to find the lawyer's office, but Langly noticed one thing right away - Taos wasn't DC.

Every building in town looked the same - squat, square variations on the theme of mud, all looking like they had risen spontaneously from of the ground. The streets were all profoundly twisted and about half as wide as they should have been.

The weirdest thing, though, was the people. Against the bland earth-tone backdrop, it looked like a dozen circuses had all pulled into town at once. A pair of chicks in sports bras and cut-offs with shaved heads were playing a heavy round of tonsil hockey waiting at the cross walk. He could have sworn he saw a guy wearing Fro's furry vest. He saw a Sikh carrying a scimitar, a dude in what looked to him like 18th century knee pants and a tri-corn hat, a person of undetermined gender with Maori facial tattoos, numerous women in saris, and four different guys sporting old fashioned over-the-shoulder-and-wrapped-around-the-waist- a-couple-of-times type kilts, probably from the one and only kilt store he'd ever seen, which seemed to be doing a brisk trade. Obvious tourists wandered the streets, gawking, and wore shorts and fanny packs. They might as well been painted green.

Definitely not DC. No, in Taos he was -- normal. He looked exactly like he'd come from the same *long-haired-white- guy* factory as half the passersby. This was one place he and T and Fro could pass unnoticed. Yves knew what she was doing.

Only, now that he thought about it, in all the ambling herds of humans, he hadn't seen a single suit.

Byers was screwed.

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Ringo hadn't seemed even slightly fazed when the lawyer explained the house was deeded to Thea Torvald only. "Mrs. Bond was very clear," the man said when Thea objected. There was, it seemed, a not inconsiderable cashiers' check to be handed over Mrs. Torvald as well.

Thea was flustered. She never been thrown so far off balance before.

An hour later and thirty minutes to the north, trying to unlock the front door while Ritchie scruffed-up the back of her hair with his fingers, she felt her eyes water. She brushed them dry with the back of her arm. For most of her life she hadn't even owned the clothes on her back. A house?

She looked up. Two stories. Solar panels. The only apparent dependence on the outside world was  a phone line. Her heart beat like a fist trying to pound its way out of her chest.

She pushed open the door. The house was full of stuff. Yves or Lois or whatever she was calling herself hadn't just given her a place where she wasn't a guest or a student or an inmate. She had furnished it.

Thea opened the kitchen cabinets. Dishes. Glasses. Pots. Pans. She stared at the couches and chairs in the cavernous room that took up the whole ground floor, then took the stairs at a run. Four doors and a long hall.

The first three were bedrooms, the last with two dressers instead of one and a ridiculously large bed. Her babies thrashed and wiggled inside her.

She opened door number four carefully. Three little baby...what were they called? Cribs. A changing table. Other things, too, and she wasn't sure what they were. Little toys. Spinning, suspended sculptural things that needed winding. Three little dressers.

She pulled open a drawer. Profoundly tiny clothes nestled inside like small mammals in hibernation. She found herself unrolling what turned out to be a pair of miniscule pastel green socks. She was crying and she had no idea why.

She felt a soft touch to her arm and jumped. She didn't realize Ritchie was in the room. How embarrassing to be caught crying like some idiot girl.

"WHAT'S THE MATTER?" He leaned against the dresser.

Thea felt greedy. She had Ritchie for her own - he'd promised 'til death do us part, and Ritchie's promises meant something, not like hers. She had Byers and Frohike to look out for, too. She was going to have Ritchie's babies. Who was she to have a house on top of all that? Her own house, one nobody was going to move her out of. She also had twelve thousand dollars in her pocket.

Her cheeks flushed and her chest felt cold.

NOTHING, RITCHIE, she signed. YOU KNOW ME, I'M A DUMMY.

He frowned. YOU'RE A GENIUS. WHAT'S WRONG?

RITCHIE? She began, then stopped. She didn't know what she wanted to tell him, so she swallowed hard and shrugged.

Ringo bit the inside of his mouth and put his arms around her.

She rubbed her tears with his hair, seized by the sudden urge to count all the electrical outlets.

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For years, John Byers had blamed the constant bickering on Langly. All it took was being trapped alone with Frohike in a van to jolt Byers into recognition of the fact that Melvin Frohike really was an incredibly frustrating person. And a terrible driver.

The first bone of contention had been 'The Indian.' The motorcycle was huge and took up most of the room inside the new van. Frohike would not leave the vehicle behind, knowing it would be destroyed. He likened it to leaving a puppy and the Mona Lisa in a burning building. Byers secretly wondered if Fro would still be married if he'd shown that much devotion to his ex. Every curve required an eye turned back to the machine. It did not take great intellectual prowess to understand how they had found themselves lost in the West Virginia hills for a half a day.

Frohike though, had had the gall to challenge Byers' ability to read a map.

The stereo was another issue. Frohike's music was both terrible and depressing. Leonard Cohen was a circle of hell unto himself. Byers found himself feeling nostalgic for Langly's miserable singing voice cranking out Motorhead or Ramones songs hour after hour. And what kind of person, he had to wonder, cranked the AC up so he could wear a leather vest while driving through the south in the summer? John Byers' teeth chattered from Georgia to Oklahoma City, where he broke down and hung his head out the open window as Frohike croaked along with the stereo. After twenty minutes, he gave in and rolled up the window. Oklahoma City in June smelled like a giant stockyard.

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In the desert of eastern New Mexico, Byers and Frohike watched two glittering boxes chase each other through the mid-afternoon sky for twenty minutes before they disappeared off the flat horizon with incongruous speed.

It was painful not to follow them. The desire to chase was almost a phantom itch for Byers, and he could tell, for Frohike, too. Their old lives, already a missing limb. But neither spoke. They simply got back in the van and drove.

Hours later, Byers stood in the men's room of the Tucumcari Wendy's and stared in the mirror. The image was disconcerting. In a t-shirt and jeans, his head and face shaved down to bare skin, no trace of John Byers remained. He scrutinized the glass for some hint of himself and found none. Without knowing where he was going, he walked past the familiar form of Melvin Frohike and onto the dusty sweltering concrete of Tucumcari.

Three hours later he returned to the van with the red and blue Holly Sugar trademark tattooed on the tender skin on the left side of his head.

He climbed into the driver's seat without comment. Cigarette butts and beer cans pointed the way to destiny and the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Frohike's snoring comforted him all the way to their new home.

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His first night in New Mexico, while everyone else slept, Melvin Frohike sat at his new kitchen table, gripped with nameless dread. It sat in his gut like cold, greasy cabbage. What if they had hitched their wagon to an imploding star?

The fact that he didn't say any thing negative, or at least more negative than usual, didn't necessarily mean he didn't have any misgivings. He didn't see the point; what was done was done. He knew Thea. He knew Langly. He knew there was no way that particular genie was going back in the bottle.

Still, he wrestled with himself. Over the last couple of years, how many late nights had he trudged past them on his way to bed, leaving those two innocents alone to sit side by side on the red couch, caught up in some Hong Kong action extravaganza or anime blood-and-guts melodrama, with repressed sexual tension, like a sleeping tiger, in the room? How many times had he watched them leaning over the same keyboard, arms tangled, without stopping to see what was looming on the horizon? Could he have done anything about it? Or was sex as inevitable as gravity? Would it be too much to expect a guy to put on a raincoat before he took the fall?

Thea was young, but she was flexible. She learned; she grew. She'd taken everything Langly could teach her about hacking and now stood nearly shoulder to shoulder with him. Frohike had no doubt she would accept the challenges of motherhood as matter-of-factly as she took everything else. It was the Scully in her. He had never seen her fail to cope.

Langly was the one who worried him. 'Mercurial' was not the right word. You never fucking knew with the guy. He might rise to the occasion admirably. Then again, he might crash and burn. He was a study in screwed up. Neuroses, thy name was Ringo.

Most people who knew them both would have said Byers was the repressed one; they couldn't have gotten it more wrong. Frohike knew that, other than being 'Captain Do the Right Thing,' Byer's only real hang up was anger. In his own gentlemanly way, Byers was actually fairly smooth with the opposite sex.

Anger, however, was the only emotion Langly felt entirely at ease with, but scratch the tin foil armor and he was a child. Some part of Langly was younger than Thea had ever been. He'd seen the two of them watching cartoons on Saturday morning after Saturday morning, Langly unabashedly enthralled and Thea analyzing the propaganda content. Her comment? "Gibson liked TV. too."

Not that she was exactly pristine when it came to the lowliest of all media. But in this milieu, her taste and Goldilocks' did not coincide much - although the two of them watched "Junkyard Wars" with the fervor of hockey Fans, Thea's fascination with boxing turned Ringo's stomach.

Langly might deny that Thea had taken virginity as well as lost it last March, but Frohike remembered one particular drunken night all too well.

1998. Russ Meyer marathon. Entirely too much vodka. Conversation had gone from women in general to specific women. Byers pissed and moaned about Susanne. Fro himself had complained about the fact that all the women he hooked up with were inevitably cut from the same bewildering marriage-obsessed cloth. Mulder whined about not having been laid in years, then spent forty minutes wondering aloud if Scully loved him, without managing to say her name once.

Out of the blue, Langly burst bitterly forth with "Yeah, well at least you guys've actually *had* girlfriends." 

Kind of made Mulder's problems seem inconsequential.

Langly didn't come out of his room for three days after that, and when he finally emerged, his response to a heartfelt offer of a hooker was a suggestion that Melvin Frohike do something very uncomfortable with a length of coax cable.

The same traits that at first made Langly knocking-up a chickadee who was less than half his age fairly easy for Mel to swallow were beginning to make him worry. Seriously, what kind of grown woman would want him?

In truth, the guy was immature. When he was twenty, it seemed like he had a chance of growing out of it, but by the time he hit his mid-thirties fundamentally unchanged, the outlook was not so rosy. Melvin wondered if maybe Langly hadn't missed the ship bound for the promised land of adulthood when they started the paper. He wondered if it was something he had done, something about the way he and Byers had treated him all these years that had helped him to turn out this way, rather than some internal malfunction of the growth mechanism. It was hard not to treat him like a kid when he acted like one. And it was hard to stop acting like a kid when you were treated like one, day in and day out.

Frohike was chagrined to realize he credited Thea with more self-possession than he did Langly, but being chagrined wouldn't make him change his opinion. When the shit hit the fan, Thea always, inevitably, did the thing that needed doing, no matter how difficult or distasteful.

She wasn't perfect; Frohike knew she had her blind-spots, namely diplomacy, Richard Langly, and the entire medical profession. But she was grindingly pragmatic and stoic to a fault. Like the father she had never known, being responsible was basic to her nature.

Since Langly and Thea had gotten married, there was something about the whole arrangement that set Frohike's teeth on edge. Goldilocks was always playing with her wedding ring, for one thing. For another, every evening they would snuggle up together on the couch, and the night they had driven nearly across the whole goddamn country had been no exception. Thea sat up fingering that hair, that stupid hair of his, the broad, satisfied smile of a woman spreading itself luxuriously across her face. Langly nuzzled her belly, all dimples and twinkling blue eyes. He looked 14, not less than a month away from 38.

Frohike had felt physically ill at the sight and suppressed the desire to grab Langly by the collar and give him what for. Didn't that moron realize what a serious situation he had gotten them all into? Langly should have been sweating bullets, not grinning like an idiot. Frohike wanted to shake him hard, but it wouldn't have done any good.

Either way, Ringo would show what he was made of when the moment of truth came.

And he might wind up impressing them all. The only thing they could do was wait and see.

That scared the shit out of Melvin Frohike.

The best he could hope for at the moment was a distraction.

It came.

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Melvin Frohike went into the coffee shop for a cup of coffee. He had no idea it would be the day he would really begin to love the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

He ordered in Spanish, because he could, and because he thought it might win him some points with the veritable bevy of Latina waitresses buzzing around the joint like so many lipsticked bees. The Joker beside him felt compelled to comment.

"That's some serious fucked-up Espanol, Cuz."

Melvin Frohike frowned. "I believe I was speaking to the young lady."

"Sheesh, Wanda ain't no young lady. 'sides,Cuz, she's married. So's-" he began to point "-Mary Lou, Delores, Yolanda, Lolo, Barbara ain't married but she ain't single, if you know what I mean."

Frohike gave him a hard look, but said nothing.

"So where you from?" the other man continued. "I know it ain't here, but you don't sound like no Mujado neither, and you sure don't look like a Mujado." He took another sip of coffee.

"Cubano - second generation," Frohike answered. "Melvin Quinones is the name." He offered his hand.

"Gilbert Garcia. They call me GG. That your bike I saw you come up on?" He said referring to the Indian, of course; it always attracted attention from anyone breathing without assistance.

"Yeah," Frohike answered, playing it cool.

"Then you're gonna be seein' a lotta me." GG grinned a sideways little grin. "I own the Harley Shop."

"Maybe I'll see you around town, then, CUZ," Frohike enunciated clearly. "I do all my own work on that girl."

"For reals?" GG looked impressed. "You wanna take me out to get a good close look at her?"

"Sure."

"How long you had her for?" GG asked, pushing his way through the coffee shop door.

"My old man bought her new in '46. He passed to me in '73. She's never been outside the family," Melvin felt compelled to add as they stepped into the parking lot.

They shot the shit for a good twenty minutes, talking engines and horsepower and what was wrong with anything made in the last 20 years. By the time they returned to their cooling cups of coffee, Frohike had the admiration of his new acquaintance and a job as a mechanic at the Harley Shop.

Just as Frohike sat, the sharp cry of "Donuts Donuts Donuts" rent the air. He looked up.

A vision of delight met Melvin's eyes. This vision was plump, mid-to-late forties, and slightly taller than average. A scarf held back long, dark tresses with fine streaks of gray. She was heavily made-up, and had a pair of breasts like cantaloupes fighting to escape from behind her apron. The coup de gras was a tray of chocolate doughnuts in her arms.

"Cindy!" GG enthused, looking up from his coffee. "Just the lady I wanted to see! Gimme two blueberries, Meja."

"Oh GG, you just love me for my doughnuts." She laughed. Her laugh tinkled like a slightly off kilter bell.

"You got that right. You got too many ex's for me, Meja. I don't want no woman whose been around the block more times than I have."

"So what do you do?" she teased, setting the donuts on a plate in front of him. "Go down to Sante Fe and cruise the nunnery?"

"Maybe." GG tipped his head toward Frohike. "Meet my new best friend, Cuba."

"Pleased to meet you." Cindy had a devastating smile.

"The pleasure is mine," Frohike responded. "Say you wouldn't happen to have a couple of those donuts in chocolate for a guy who knows how to treat a beautiful woman, would you?" Mel smiled, feeling good.

"Does Cuba here lay it on thick or what?" GG laughed stuffed a donut in his mouth.

"You bet I do." Cindy batted her eyes at Frohike. "I have eclairs, too"

"You don't say?" Frohike responded. He left the shop 40 minutes later with a job, a new nick name, a date, and a tell-tale trace of custard in the corner of his mouth.

That night, he learned Cindy was 52, adventurous, cheerful, not overly talkative, never went anywhere without lipstick, and had no interest in either matrimony or cohabitation. Her only draw back was a surly teenaged daughter with something resembling a life of her own.

All in all, Melvin 'Cuba' Quinones had found his perfect woman.

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End 08