Read Something Different/Pepper's Way for Free Online

further description of her mother. “Mother is … Mother. She’s hard to describe.”
    “An artist? Would I have heard of her?”
    “Know anything about art?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then you’ve heard of her. Rebecca Thorn.”
    Chase nearly got his thumb with the knife he was chopping onions with. “Good Lord! Of course I’ve heard of her.” Staring at Gypsy, he nearly got his forefinger with the knife. “You come from a very illustrious family.”
    “You haven’t heard the half of it.”
    “Your father too?”
    “Uh-huh. You’d have to be a scientist to recognize his name though. He’s a physicist. Disappears periodically and can’t talk about his work.” She reflected for a moment. “Poppy looks like the typical absentminded professor. He’s soft-spoken, very distinguished, and wouldn’t pick up a sock if it were made of solid gold.”
    She grinned suddenly. “It’s amazing that he and Mother have lived together in perfect harmony for nearly thirty years. If I didn’t know the story behind it, I’d wonder how Poppy ever managed to catch Mother.”
    “What
is
the story?”
    “Never mind.”
    “Unfair! It’ll drive me crazy.”
    “Sorry, but it’s not my story. If they come over to visit, you can ask. They live in Portland.”
    “I thought they traveled?”
    “Used to. Poppy still has to fly off somewhere occasionally,and Mother has her showings from time to time, but they’re pretty settled now.”
    Cutting up ingredients for a salad, Chase glanced at her innocently. “They’re so different, yet they get along perfectly?”
    Gypsy missed the point. “Usually. Although they told me that there was a definite disagreement before I was born. Mother decided to go on tour when she was six months pregnant, and Poppy protested violently. You’d have to know Poppy to realize how astonishing that is. He never gets mad.”
    “What happened?”
    “Well, Poppy said that he’d be damned if he’d have his child born in an elevator or the back room of some gallery— quite likely, given Mother’s vagueness—and that she wasn’t going to exhaust herself by trying to give showings in twelve cities in twelve days, or something equally ridiculous. So he planned a long, leisurely tour lasting three months and went with her, and the government was having kittens.”
    Chase blinked, digested the information for a moment, and then asked the obvious question. “Why?”
    “Why was the government having kittens?” Gypsy looked vague. “Dunno exactly. Poppy was working on something for them, and they got very cranky when he took a sudden vacation. They couldn’t do much about it, really, since genius doesn’t punch a time-clock.”
    After staring at her for a moment, Chase asked politely, “And where were you born?”
    She looked surprised. “In Phoenix. Mother woke up in the middle of the night having labor pains. She got up and called a cab; she knew that she wouldn’t be able to wake Poppy—he sleeps like the dead—so she went on to the hospital alone. The problem was, she forgot to leave poor Poppy a note. He nearly had a heart attack when he woke up hours later and found her gone.”
    Chase had a fascinated expression on his face. “I see. So you were born in a hospital. Somehow that seems an anticlimax.”
    “Actually I was born in the cab. They made it to the hospital, and the cabbie ran inside to get a doctor. The doctor got back to the cab just in time to catch me. The cabbie—his name is Max—still sends me birthday cards every year.”
    Chase leaned back against the counter, crossed his arms over his chest, and shook his bowed head slowly. It took Gypsy a full minute to realize that he was laughing silently.
    “What’s so funny?”
    He ignored the question. “Gypsy,” he said unsteadily, “I have
got
to meet your parents.”
    Puzzled, she said, “They’ll be here on Sunday for a visit; you can come over then.” She had totally forgotten her intention of discouraging Chase’s