Isn't It Romantic? by Ron Hansen

Diddly-squat,” “Chateau Sorta-Roth-childish,” “Henrietta’s Grand Vino,” and “Property of the Googler Family.” Pierre blanched, but then Owen was escorting him up to the dais and whispering, “We’d like you to kind of walk us through how a wine tasting oughta go, just in case we haven’t been doing it right.”
    â€œSure.”
    Owen sat. Pierre scanned a skeptical crowd as he poured the first wine into his glass and held it up in front of his face. “We first look at the color.”
    All stared in a surly way.
    â€œWe do not want to see clouds, or sediment, or . . .” He couldn’t think of the word in English.
    â€œGrape skins?” Owen guessed.
    Someone in the food tent protested, “Well, hell! I lost the contest already!”
    Pierre sought a change of subject. He swirled the wine in his glass as he thought. “We can talk about the methyl alcohol. What we call the legs.”
    â€œHubba hubba,” Carlo said.
    Pierre glanced agitatedly at Owen, but Owen simply offered encouraging thumbs-up, you’re-doing-great gestures.
    â€œWe will skip ahead to the bouquet,” Pierre told them, and lifted his glass to his nose to inhale the aroma.
    A would-be connoisseur put his nose completely inside the glass, dunking it into the wine. Watching him, Owen got up. “We might need some hands-on teaching here, Pierre.”
    Owen and Pierre stepped down to the main floor as Pierre instructed, “And then we taste.”
    About half the guys at the folding tables dipped their forefingers into their wine and then slurped it off.
    Owen said, “And as far as what Jerome told us last month, I done some checking and that’s totally wrong.”
    Pierre demonstrated, “Hold the wine in your mouth like so.”
    But Owen jumped the gun, saying, “And then spit it out.”
    A host of them spewed and gushed their mouthfuls. Pierre watched in abhorrence as a burly highway worker named Orville bent with his knees wide apart and spit a jet of wine to the floor like it was tobacco juice.
    Owen happily slapped Pierre on the back, “See the effect you’re having? We’re already better than last time. And we got forty minutes to go.”

21
    T he sole customer in the Main Street Café was a four-hundred-pound wedding photographer who, in the on-the-nose way of Nebraska, was nicknamed Biggy. Scanning the sports page for Cornhusker news, he slurped coffee and went through a half-dozen stale doughnuts as if gaining weight were his full-time job.
    Iona and Natalie stood behind the pink Formica counter blowing up bright balloons for The Revels. With the worm of one deflated balloon in her mouth, Natalie was trying to tie off another. Shrinking throughout her efforts, it was finally knotted when only the size of her fist.
    â€œThis food is lousy!” Biggy shouted and got up from the booth, hardly a smidgen of doughnut left on his plate.
    Natalie was mystified as she watched him storm out.
    Iona just sighed. “I can’t be worrying about his little world.”
    Natalie got his coffee cup, saucer, and doughnut plate and took them into the kitchen. And she was putting them in the dishwasher when Dick stood up from a crouch outside and just appeared there at a screened window beside her.
    â€œHello,” he said. Embarrassed, he looked down. “I’m standing in the pansies here.”
    Alarmed, she leaned forward to see.
    â€œOh, I’m not squashing anything. I just want to talk to ya. Will ya go for a horse ride with me?”
    â€œBut the café is still open . . .”
    â€œYou won’t get anybody. Opal handles the after-lunch on Fridays.”
    Natalie looked back into the café, which was, indeed, vacant. She smiled and took off her apron as Opal trundled in with her ironing board and a basket of clothes. Natalie looked for Iona to say where she was going, but Iona had spied