Moving Serafina

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13 C H A P T E R 2 On the second floor of the Hotel Solitario, Miss Jovita Seals stepped out of her early morning bath. She stood at the gauze-curtained window of her apartment, looked through it and down on the empty main street as she toweled herself dry. The curtain was unnecessary. Even if someone had looked up from the center of the street with binoculars, Jovita doubted that anyone would be interested in a never married, sixty-one-year old female body, even nude. She chuckled, pushed back the curtain in a moment of brash feminism and held it open, exposing herself to the world. Or at least to Solitario, Texas. Not one of its 1,328 citizens shouted Bravo! No one jeered or called out obscenities. And even if some chance passerby did report this momentary public display of her assets, she doubted that anyone at the front desk would ask her to leave the hotel. After all, the hotel itself was one of her assets. She turned and faced her antique beveled mirror, reflecting a body that still pleased her, despite its age. Then she brushed back the still damp salt-and-pepper hair until it lay sleek against the nape of her neck. There she held the hair in her left fist and moved into her closet where she opened a drawer filled with fresh Bob Cherry 14 silk scarves, each one red. “What color . . .” she teased. “What color today?” She lifted one of the scarves. “Maybe this?” She smiled as she shook the scarf and bound her hair against the back of her neck with this same Ganado red trademark she had worn as long as she could remember. Though everyone in Solitario wondered about it, neither the scarf nor its color signified a thing. It was just a simple way of keeping distractions out of her eyes and away from her concentration as she supervised whatever needed supervision each day at her hotel. And it was easy to shop for, even if she asked someone to do it for her in El Paso. But she also liked the mystery of it, the same color, the same hairdo year after year, and she liked the questioning eyes as other women in the little town glanced up at it and then with envy, surveyed the entirety of Jovita’s still firm body. Surveyed everything except her eyes. Not many dared look directly into Jovita’s eyes, unblinking and confident, set like turquoise stones perfectly matched with the color of the jewels she usually wore. Jovita continued to dress, slipped a cool white blouse with an open V-neck over her head and pulled on a pair of pressed slacks and stepped into comfortable leather loafers. She fingered through the large tray of Native American jewelry at her dresser and finally selected from its velvet bag a hand-wrought necklace of tiny silver squash blossoms, one her father had acquired years ago in some horse trade behind his Hotel Solitario. He brought it into the hotel in a paper bag because the string of the necklace was broken. Its former owner warned her father before the trade that it might not MOVING SERAFINA 15 be complete. “But if it is . . .” the man smiled and whispered the secret into her father’s face, “If it is . . . I got no damned idea what it might be worth.” “Same goes for the mare,” her father whispered back into the man’s grinning face, an expression that slacked a little as the man glanced at the mare but then he frowned as he peered once more into her opened mouth. He inspected her teeth, then finally turned back to shake hands. Her father had dumped the pieces onto the long mahogany table in this same apartment on the top floor of his Hotel Solitario and declared to his teenage daughter that he was not certain if he got the better of the deal, but if Jovita could assemble it, she could have it. “It’s the chase,” he said as he always did after one of his dubious deals, and then he bellowed with laughter. “Not the conquest. Remember that, Jo.” “Sure, Papa.” She tried to sound elated with her new treasure and then echoed his favorite creed because she knew he wanted her to say it. “Never look a gift horse in the mouth...