The tour bus was half full and I had a row of seats to myself. Our guide was Mindy from Nebraska. Mindy said that as was apparent from her skin tone, she had only recently arrived. “I’ve come in from the cold!” she laughed, and hugged herself so that her sunburned breasts surged under a v-neck t-shirt.
We set off from out front of a shell store. Mindy fired up her megaphone and blasted information at her audience. She pointed out Ernest Hemingway’s favorite bars, which seemed to include most every bar we passed.
But I could overhear a conversation between the couple directly in front of me. He was obviously younger, somewhere in his twenties. She was somewhere in her forties, with a halo of blonde hair. She stared out the window, which had no glass, so that sounds and smells of town swam around us in hot blasts and stinky surges unctuously, cloyingly.
I should have been registering Mindy’s description of the court house structure, carved entirely from coral.
“Aunt Muriel,” the man whispered, and turned to her. His green eyes were narrowed and portentous. “I’ve seen three very pretty girls so far.” And he slid one arm across the back of their bench. I watched the arm moving furtively, like a rat snake. It was a youthful arm, with firm biceps of rounded muscles and caramel suntanned skin, and tapering to a square hand and rough blunted fingers. His hand reached the curve of her back. His thumb bounced lightly, falling every so often and resting against the bony ridge of her shoulder blade. The contact was almost imperceptible, like perhaps the jolting of the bus made his hand graze her skin.
When she checked herself in her compact I caught site, in the reflection, of faint lines around gray eyes, and a gorgeous face. He filled up the space beside her with his wide shoulders and a head of wild hair.
Mindy was busy explaining a history of pirates and pink shrimp and sponge divers, only fragments of which I logged. Mindy summarized the caste system of born and bred locals, who call themselves conchs, a symbol of enormous pride, versus the various imports, from the Cubans to the Serbians, the Russians and the Israelis, and of course the disaffected North Americans from their multiplicity of origins. But my attention continually strayed back to the odd couple.
The bus parked out front of the shell store, now closing up. Mindy came around with her ball cap out for tips.
Aunt Muriel was standing up, preparing to vacate the trolley when her nephew, who was already standing, turned to her. Aunt Muriel pressed back against the window, as if perhaps she knew what was about to happen. Sure enough the nephew leaned in on her, crowding her, his face so serious, his long lashed green eyes at half mast. And then he kissed her flush on the mouth.
