1 The Gypsy
I turned off the highway around noon. After six hours on the road, I needed some rest and something to eat. A small place with a weathered look caught my attention. Its clapboard facade gave the impression the establishment had been there since the Civil War and Parkersburg had grown up around it. I had high expectations despite the unpretentious exterior.
Inside, the place had a relaxed, homey feel. I would not have been surprised to hear someone call out, “C’mon in and make yerself t’ home.”
A dozen or more oaken tables, mostly unoccupied, populated the main dining area. Four placemats with a coffee cup upside down on a saucer and silverware wrapped in a napkin had been set out on each table. I picked one next to the wall on the left side and near the back of the room, and sat facing the entrance.
In a matter of minutes, a bubbly young woman with a pot of coffee came over to the table and filled my cup. “Welcome to Mah Country Kitchen, would y’all lak a menu, or do y’all know what y’all want?”
How was I supposed to know what I wanted without a menu? “I want breakfast.”
“Yeah suh,” she drawled as if she had grown up in West Virginia. “Eggs, pancakes, waffles, creamed beef, chitlins, grits. Y’all name it. We’ve got it.”
I toyed with some challenges for her but ended up asking for something safe. “Eggs. Sunny-side-up. Sausage. Toast. Whole Wheat.”
“Two eggs or three?”
“Three.”
The waitress nodded. She tipped her head toward the back of the room. “Would y’all lak a paper?”
Newspapers and magazines lay in a haphazard pile on a table near the door to the kitchen. “Do you have the New York Times?” I croaked. My voice hadn’t fully warmed up.
“Ah’m sure we do.”
She set her coffee pot down on the table and sashayed over to fetch a paper. The one she picked up look used. It had been taken apart, read, and re-assembled. The woman, on the other hand, was fresh and well put together.
She held the paper out. It was a repackaged copy of the Times. “Fresh off the press.”
That had to be a joke. I grinned. “Thanks.”
“No problem. Ah’ll be right back with your eggs.”
Newspapers are better than TV news programs. They give you more information. Magazines top newspapers. They provide lengthy, well-written pieces on important issues. All of them – magazines, newspapers, and TV – talk about the same stuff. And they all emphasize the titillating, lurid, gory details.
The front page of my second-hand paper informed me that public transportation employees and teachers were on strike in New York City. Our president had created another international crisis, and a top administration official has been misusing public funds.
I played spy while leafing thru the front section of the Times. I scanned the room while pretending to read. There were three couples eating their meals. It looked like they had ordered from the lunch menu. Two of them looked like locals who had come here from the office. The third was in vacation clothes. The woman wore a straw hat with a wide brim to protect her from the sun. Both of them sported sun glasses. He had shifted his above his hairline.
No sign of the good-looking brunette with my breakfast. A woman in a black sweater seated across the aisle from me looked interesting. She was busy with something on her laptop. The dishes had been removed from her table. Reference materials were spread around her computer, but she never used them.
I turned to the op-ed pages at the back of the paper’s front section. More disappointment. Pedestrian ideas couched in overly formal language appropriate to a bygone era.
My attention returned to the woman across from me. She looked to be about fifty. Her dark skin could be the kind that never aged. A white streak ran down the middle of her coal-black hair. When she leaned back to take a break from her typing, she turned and caught me watching.
Some women complain that men undress them. Women strip men bare to their souls. She held my gaze for a long time before she spoke in a husky voice. “Don’t be a stranger. Come on over and introduce yourself.”
She closed her laptop and pushed it aside. I grimaced as I put my paper down and picked up my coffee to join her.
She extended her hand. “I’m Tereza,” she said with an engaging smile.
“Donald,” I said. “Donald MacGregor.”
“Ah. A Scot and a member of that clan.”
The remark caught me off guard. According to family legend, my ancestry traces back to the Scottish outlaw Rob Roy, but I never thought much about it. “That was a long time ago. Things are different now. We don’t engage in cattle raids these days.”
“Nor am I a true gypsy, but I have inherited their powers.”
“Their powers? Something in your DNA gives you powers?”
“I doubt you’ll find anything in my DNA, but the fact is I have rare abilities.”
“For example?”
“A typical Scot’s reply. You are descended from hard-headed realists. That makes you a good engineer but leaves you spiritually impoverished.”
“Spirituality is for fools who can’t deal with reality.”
“Spirituality is the reality that enables us to live with what you think of as reality.”
“In the end, it’s an empty promise,” I fumed.
“And yet you are on a spiritual journey.”
“I’m going to visit a cousin.”
“Because you are lost and alone?”
“Because I’ve got nothing better to do.”
“Or because your wife left you?” she chided.
“She died!” I snapped.
“She didn’t die. She’s right here.” Tereza nodded toward the chair to my left. “A beautiful woman with a warm smile. She knows you are a fool, but she loves you for your strength and courage.”
That was it. “You’re guessing.” I could barely control my fury. “You have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Most people call you ‘Don.’ She called you ‘Mac’ because, to her, you were a MacGregor.”
That was an oddity I had forgotten about. Anne had called me ‘Donald,’ when we were first going together. Sometimes she called me “Laird,” usually in a tone dripping with sarcasm. For the most part, she referred to me as “Mac.” I closed my eyes and looked down as these memories ran through my mind.
Tereza took my hands. “She didn’t die. She passed on, and your time is at hand. It’s okay. We are not meant to be here forever.”
That hit me like an electric shock. Tereza watched me with a quiet, reassuring smile. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
A vision of Anne popped into my head. She had just stumbled as she crossed the kitchen. She blushed and giggled. “I must be entering my second childhood,” she joked, “I haven’t done that for years.”
Her smile made me smile for a moment. “It was sudden,” I began. “One day she was full of life. The next she was lying unconscious in a hospital bed. She didn’t speak or move. No response when I took her hand. The next day I was making funeral arrangements.”
My companion nodded.
“We buried her. Friends stopped by or called to see if I was okay. I told them I was adjusting.”
My breakfast finally arrived. The pretty young waitress handed me a bill. “Y’all can pay on your way out.”
I thanked her. She smiled appreciatively and walked away, I sipped of my coffee while I gathered my thoughts. “My doctor had asked me to come in to talk about my last physical. Anne got sick before I got around to it. I wanted to put it off for a couple of weeks, but he insisted I had to come in right after her funeral.”
I took another sip of coffee. It was starting to get cold. “It was a long day. Blood tests, urine sample, and a CAT scan. Then I sat down with my doctor. He told me I had a brain tumor and it might not be operable. He was going to have an expert evaluate the data. That would take a few days.” I closed my eyes and shook my head. “I was pretty sure what the expert was going to say.”
The next part was the hardest. I looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath before pushing on. “When I got home, I could tell something was wrong. Rex, our German Shepherd, didn’t come to greet me. The house felt empty. I was looking around and trying to figure out what had happened when my next-door neighbor popped in. She said Rex had gotten loose and run out into the street. A truck hit him. He died quickly. She had called animal control to dispose of the remains.”
“How did you respond?”
“I didn’t know what to do. I was dumbfounded. I could not believe that had happened. At first, I was going to thank her, but then I thought, ‘Who the hell are you to be doing that?’ And I yelled, ‘Was he even dead?’”
Tereza seemed to find that humorous. She smiled but didn’t laugh.
“We went back and forth for a minute or two before she stormed out of the house in tears.”
“Have you apologized to her?”
“No.”
I glared at the gypsy. She smiled enigmatically, “My suspicion about the brain tumor proved correct. It was malignant and inoperable. My doctor told me I had less than six months.”
“Is that when you decided to undertake this Spirit Quest?”
“I’m not on a Spirit Quest,” I growled. “I’m going to meet my cousin before I die.”
“That’s the most important thing you have to do with your last six months on earth? What about your children?”
“They don’t care about me. Haven’t heard from them in years.” I took a sip of coffee. It was cold and nasty. “They’re in my will. That’s all that matters.”
“You are normally intelligent and well organized,” Tereza observed. “But in this case, you get one bad report and decide to dump everything so you can take a quixotic cross-country trip.”
“I got a second opinion. I went to a specialist who confirmed the diagnosis and prescribed some drugs to keep me functioning until the very end.”
“I see.”
“I considered buying a gun and getting it over with. But that would have been messy. I had to liquidate the house. One night I thought about this cousin I had corresponded with from time to time. I decided I should try to hook up with her. While I was making my plans, I decided to drive out there and see parts of the country I’ve never visited.”
“Sounds like a Spirit Quest to me.”
I waved at her in disgust. Tereza packed her things and handed me a business card. “Call me when you are ready to talk some more.”
When she rose from her chair, I could see that she was tall and burly. She took my face in her soft, warm hands and kissed me on the forehead. “I see great success for your undertaking. Eat your breakfast. You have a long journey ahead.”
She scooped up her belongings and paused to regard me. “We will meet again before this is over.”
With that, she turned and walked away.