The Desert Rose Read Free

didn’t pay the remark any attention at the time, but later it came back to her when she was in a low mood anyway because of some things Denny said when he was drunk, and those things plus Pepper thinking her blouses were tacky were too much and she went out and sat under the little lawn umbrella and cried so hard she couldn’t see the peacocks. Although it was silly, Pepper was just sixteen, she didn’t really know everything there was to know about clothes even if Gary did brag on her taste all the time. It was just that the word had been wrong—tacky, it was the word that was hurtful, it was the one thing Harmony had always tried to avoid being and if your own little girl said it about you then it had to arouse some doubts. Though mainly it was just that Pepper alwaysstuck to basic colors, she was very insistent about it, whereas Harmony liked clothes that were a little more unusual, she liked gold blouses or maybe blouses with a little purple in them, something you’d notice.
    After all, wearing those costmes every night, being a feathered beauty as Bonventre used to call her, sort of changed your attitude toward clothes. After the costumes it was sort of hard to know you were there if you didn’t wear clothes with a little color in them. Pepper just didn’t realize that, she was so beautiful she didn’t even need makeup yet.
    Harmony turned off the pavement onto a little dirt road that was the last road there was to turn off on, if you were going east out of Las Vegas. She rolled the window down—it was good to smell the desert in the morning, even in the winter she liked to get some air when she was driving home. After all the smoke in the casino just the clean air and the dry sagey smell made her feel lively. Now the outline over the mountains was gold instead of gray and the stars were beginning to die out in a cloudless sky.
    Seeing the line of sun over the mountains made her hopeful, it just about always did, for another beautiful day was about to get started, which meant to Harmony that things could really be fresh and there could be a lot to hope for if you took the trouble to notice, instead of getting depressed, as Jessie did.
    Harmony kept wishing Jessie had taken her advice and got a little house out closer to the desert, she had an apartment a block off the Strip, which was handy it was true but still didn’t offer the great sights Harmony had to look forward to every day, such as the desert and her peacocks and the streamers of sun creeping over the mountains—though of course Jessie was scared of peacocks along with about everything else, but still, just to get farther from the Strip and see a real morning once in a while might have at leasttaken her mind off bad comments she heard in the dressing room. Genevieve, the French girl, wasn’t that bad really, it was just her little boy had a learning disability and she got upset sometimes and said bitchy things, plus at the moment all Jessie had that might take her mind off her various problems was Monroe, not exactly the world’s greatest prize in the boyfriend department, at least not in Harmony’s opinion.
    When she turned off the pavement onto the bumpy dirt road Harmony looked back at the Strip, eight miles away. It looked so miniature, like a wonderful toy place, with all the lights still on, whereas on her other side there was a bright band of sun behind the mountain, from horizon to horizon. It was one of her favorite things, to turn onto her own road with the air smelling so good and be able to see the Strip, with the Trop up at one end and the Sahara at the other, and besides that have the sun coming up just as she got home. With sights like that to see every day, who could complain?
    Pretty as the sunrise was, though, it wasn’t enough to keep her mind off the fact that Myrtle’s car was acting like it meant to konk out. Harmony had been having to borrow it ever since Denny totaled their Pontiac, three weeks before. Myrtle was generous