Missing Rose (9781101603864) by Serdar Ozkan

the bottle of fruit juice he’d taken from the cooler in his jeep. The beggar had warned him the previous evening not to come empty-handed again. He had also told him to wait until the park was less crowded in order not to chase away potential customers.
    â€œWill you receive a guest now that it’s—”
    â€œMy place is always open to anybody who doesn’t want to know too much.”
    â€œOkay, okay, I won’t ask so many questions tonight. But I’d like to know how you knew she’d be taking a walk again today. Did you use your fortune-telling? I don’t have $9 by the way, let me say that from the start.”
    â€œI don’t believe in no fortune-telling,” the beggar said. “People want to hear their future, so I tell them. What am I supposed to do? Tell them, ‘Don’t ask me, if you live, you find out?’”
    â€œSo you mean you actually can’t tell fortunes?”
    â€œBegging your pardon, young man, I’m a man of honor. I respect my job. Fortune, that’s just the name of the game. Ashes, jars, water, they’re just the excuse. You must have some kind of a show for folks, something like they see in the movies. Suppose everything you say comes true, they won’t believe it, not without the hokeypokey. Like I said, fortune-telling is just the name. What I do is read faces. I read faces, all right—everything’s written there.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œLet’s suppose I watch the little lady when you were talking to her. You know what I see? I see on her face she likes your pictures. Ho-cus po-cus, I know sometime soon she comes back. There, that’s fortune-telling for you.”
    â€œYou’re not telling me her walk was an excuse to see me, are you?”
    The beggar shrugged his shoulders. “What do I know about the little lady’s thoughts? I’m not a shrink. Reasons I don’t know, I just know results. But leave that now and tell me about yourself. Okay, the little lady is pretty and all, but tell me who
you
are or aren’t. Where you’re coming from, where you’re going. Some kind of wanderer shows on your face.”
    â€œYeah, something like that. I’ve come from Paranaguá and I’m working my way back there, painting along the beach. The painting you see right there, that’s the first one of my summer project. In fact, according to my plan, I should have finished it yesterday and be thirty miles away at my second pitch by now, but . . . Anyway, you know the rest.”
    â€œThe picture doesn’t want to be finished after you saw the little lady, eh? Oh my, the chase is always the sweetest. It’s when you catch or get caught things kind of go sour, hey? It’s good, son, all good. Let the painting hang around a bit longer.”
    The beggar emptied his takings for the day out of the coin mug onto the mat. Filling the mug with fruit juice, he set it in front of the artist. He himself took a swig from the bottle.
    â€œThat Paranaguá of yours, what’s it like for begging?”
    â€œI have no idea. And I can’t say it is really ‘my’ Paranaguá. I’m from São Paulo, originally. I was at college in the U.S. for a while—Boston, to be precise—until I quit. Then I moved to Paranaguá to live with a friend of mine.”
    â€œWhat do your folks say about you quitting college? I hear college guys make big bucks, eh?”
    â€œMy family never had any financial expectations from me. They’re doing quite okay. But they did expect more of me than that. They thought I might make a good banker or something along those lines. And because it was Harvard I quit, they did make quite a fuss about it. But there was no other way; I just had to paint.”
    â€œHar-vard, huh? My, my! Heard about that place. You told that to the little lady, I bet.”
    â€œNo.”
    The beggar stared strangely at