The Desert Rose Read Free Page B

would rather buy things than sleep and the steady parade of would-be customers proved her right, although Myrtle actually had nothing left to sell except cheap glassware, cheap costume jewelry, some Reader’s Digest books, and a few bedraggled blouses that hadhung for months on a rack in the garage, long since picked over by every bargain hunter in the area.
    Myrtle had set a bowl of dry Cheerios on the driveway for Maude, but Maude—a little black goat not much bigger than a dog—was sniffing around Myrtle’s old card table as if she would rather nibble the costume jewelry—mostly imitation pearls, Myrtle’s one area of expertise.
    Myrtle was a tiny readhead in her early sixties who had no intention of letting age or anything else get in the way of pleasure. She lived on Cheerios, except on the rare occasions when her boyfriend Wendell could be persuaded to take her to a fast food feast. Wendy’s was her favorite feasting place, but Wendell was not a big spender and would only pop for Wendy’s about once a month, which was, for that matter, about as often as Myrtle had any intention of popping for Wendell.
    “He’s too oldt and anyway he’s got that tricky back,” Myrtle said, in her own defense.
    Wendell was on the pool-maintenance crew at the MGM Grand, which, in Myrtle’s view, contributed to his sexual discontent.
    “Sure, he sees them gals with their floppies hanging out, what else would he come home thinking about?” Myrtle said.
    Harmony’s private opinion was that Myrtle took advantage of Wendell, a sweet gray-haired man with a big belly and sad eyes who had never meant to stay in Las Vegas but had come out and gotten stuck. His son had killed himself because of gayness, at least that was Gary’s angle on it, and Wendell’s wife had divorced him and married a cop. It had left Wendell with such a sad look in his eyes that Harmony could barely stand it.
    The sadness of men, once it got into their eyes, affected her a lot, she sort of couldn’t bear it and would usually try and make it go away if the circumstances permitted her to,often they didn’t but sometimes they did, it was mainly a desire to kiss their sadness away that had caused her to bring so many of them home, a habit she knew Pepper didn’t appreciate but then Pepper wasn’t even old enough to notice the sadness in men or if she noticed she wasn’t too sympathetic.
    Harmony was though, sad-eyed men just got her, she could rarely keep it from happening and might not could even have kept it from happening with Wendell had it not been that Myrtle was usually sitting there in the cool of the garage in her lawn chair, waiting for one last customer to come by and snap up some imitation pearls. Wendell didn’t talk much, he mostly just stood around looking down at his feet unless Myrtle was in such a good mood that she brought out one of the kitchen chairs for him to sit in.
    Harmony would look out her window and see him standing and think oh Wendell, she couldn’t help it, unhappiness just made her feel tender, when she saw a guy looking that way she wanted to maybe just lay her palm against his cheek, or maybe a kiss, something to let him know her heart did sort of go out to him even if she didn’t understand precisely why he looked so sad. Old or young, fat or thin didn’t matter so much although definitely fat rather than thin if she was given a choice, she was not so drawn to the skinny guys, it was just that she sometimes got the sense that she overwhelmed them, after all she was pretty tall and had a good bust and a few of them had sort of seemed to feel that they were being smothered.
    Also her preference for the husky ones might have had something to do with Didier, who had given her her first job, at the Trop, when she was only seventeen but looked a lot more mature. She had always thought Tropicana was a wonderful name, when she was younger just saying it or hearing it mentioned on the radio made her feel romantic, so that when