The Pickle Queen: A Crossroads Café Novella

by Deborah Smith

  In the years since then, I’d let local nonprofit groups use the space for free. Lest anyone think I’d gone soft, I got a nice tax write-off out of it—and a hard-nosed reputation for rounding up street kids who camped out in the cellar. My trap-and-release program steered them to some of the same groups who used the upstairs for fundraising.

  Some of them weren’t grateful. Like tonight. My blood, from the unfortunate scuffle with a certain headstrong mime, slid down the glittering edge of Delta’s oversized holiday card. Never try to help a mime. Especially not a street performer in Asheville.

  Not even when he was my own cousin. Quincy’s son.

  I ignored the sting and looked at Delta’s words. She didn’t just write to me, she sent homey lectures, set down on paper in her impossibly gravy-flavored scrawl; she grabbed me by my shirtfront and shook me. She’d appreciate my bleeding on her Santa Claus on this night, one eve before Christmas Eve, while waiting for Gabs to arrive in the mist of a cold Appalachian December.

  I still despised Uncle E.W., but I’d learned a lot from the years under his thumb. Wakefields provide the counterpoint to the gauzy, fragile world of wishful thinking. We build infrastructure. We create jobs. We put money into everyone’s banks. We’re the grown-ups in the playground.

  You can’t take care of the helpless if you’re helpless, too.

  You can make things right, Jay. You’ve got to tell Gabby the truth about Free Wheeler. That it should belong to her and her brother and sister. Why you won’t let go of it.

  “I only know parts of the truth,” I said aloud. “And the truth is overrated as a solution to big problems.” Ten years earlier, I’d shared a chunk of my truth with Gabs. Told her I’d had no choice but to fight E.W. Trusting him to keep his word wasn’t an option. But what she heard was this: I’d chosen to protect Free Wheeler instead of her.

  I walked out into the chilly North Carolina night and turned to padlock the building’s weathered door. Decorative street lamps, bow-tied with greenery and red bows, marched up the hill past small ornamental shade trees that had rooted between the old pavers, their bare branches frail in the misty light. A young musician, armed with a guitar, a china-eyed dog on a braided-hemp leash, and a hummock of waxy blond dreads, spit on the aged diamond sidewalk pavers as I walked past. He didn’t miss a beat, strumming O Holy Night, on his six-string.

  I dropped several twenties in the frayed guitar case by his feet. His dog wagged. Dogs trust me. I must not smell dastardly. Got them fooled, always have. Ever since Ralph.

  “Blood money, Capitalist Tyrant,” the dog’s human said in a voice dripping with sarcasm.

  Probably an art major with a minor in Getting Stoned. We had a lot of UNCA students working the city as bartenders, wait staff, sales clerks and street performers, along with runaways and hardened street people from all over the county. They shared two things in common: they loved this mecca of tolerant oddity, and they hated Wakefields.

  “Nice dog,” I said. “Looks tasty.”

  The guitarist’s dreadlocks stood on end. “Meat eater!” he yelled.

  True. My vegetarian days were long gone. I headed up the sidewalk. He didn’t kick my cash down the nearest sewer grate. They never did. No one looked past the suit and my name. That was fine by me. At least for a little while longer. Long enough to hang E.W. the same way he’d ousted George. I knew more about E.W. than E.W. knew these days. And he knew a helluva lot less about me than he had any idea. A few more mistakes in judgment by E.W. would be enough leverage. It had to be enough.

  My gaze rose to the gray-cold night sky, searching for pinpoints of light, comfort. I wasn’t looking for meaning, a sense that a bigger power in the world existed to offer redemption. No. Only looking for Gabby. Greta Garbo MacBride. Forgiveness only mattered if it came from her.

  Gabs’s plane is landing now.

  History was closing in. The past was here. The MacBrides were coming home. First Tal, and now Gabby. She’d finally agreed to see me in person again. She and Tal thought I wanted to gut Free Wheeler of everything except its historical facades, turn the buildings into boutiques and restaurants, build a hotel and golf course, and put up gates everywhere. Plus hire them as chefs. My employees. Wakefield underlings. Under my control. Just like their parents had been. I’d partner with investors, tie up multiple interests in long-term property leases on the buildings and the business management contracts.

  That’s what I wanted them to think. What I wanted everyone in western North Carolina to believe. What E.W. and everyone in his inner circle definitely believed by now. E.W. was convinced I wasn’t bluffing. He saw his chances of carving up that piece of mountain land dwindling in the face of a massive development being perched atop his prized quartz.

  So he was getting more careless. Taking more risks.

  Or, as Delta put it after she went to him with proof that Arlo Claptraddle and Sam Osserman were the same person, and Sam was, indeed, Gabs, Tal and Gus’s grandfather, making them the heir to Free Wheeler—and just how much was E.W. willing to pay her to keep that a secret, because maybe she’d have a change of heart about that mining access one day and not want to share it with a pack of Nettie descendants—“You’d think he’d have heard my bra picking up radio stations with all the FBI wires I was wearing.”

  I was catching him in one fraud at a time, a lie here, a law broken there.

  Like grains of quartz sand, eventually they would form a mountain.

  My hand throbbed, just like the rest of me, my mind blood-red, my body stained with the tactics I’d learned, the things I was willing to do. I was bleeding for Gabby, and she was worth it.

  Gabby

  Look Homeward, Greta Garbo MacBride

  I DROVE a rented sedan from the Asheville airport in heavy shopping traffic, pushing the accelerator too hard in the gloom of early pre-Christmas Eve, thinking about Tal’s acceptance of our childhood home with its sad memories and her happy new life in this part of the mountains people called the Land of the Sky. Tal had come back here and was instantly seduced. Not me. Not Gus. Wouldn’t happen.

  You can never go home again.

  I pulled into the parking lot of a tall hotel within easy walking distance of downtown. My finger hovered over my phone, listening to the Thomas Wolfe audiobook for a few more seconds.

  The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.

  It hit me: I’m going to stand face-to-face with eternal change. Hear Jay’s voice, look up into his eyes, and want to touch him. After our adult reunion in California, I swore this moment would never happen. But every day since then I’d thought about him, and every night.

  I looked over the tops of the bare trees around the lot’s perimeter. A gray night. The mountains were hidden in mists. When I opened the car door, the wind smelled like home, like Mama and Daddy and pickles. Like the hard, cold facts.

  Jay had been broken in the soft places. So had I. I’d hardened into a proud MacBride—no retreat, no surrender.

  He’d turned into a Wakefield. Someone who’d win at all costs. That painful truth sank in thirteen years ago, after our weekend together. Me, eighteen. Him, twenty-one. He’d confessed that he’d let me, Tal and Gus be thrown into that foster care home rather than give up a meaningless piece of land to his uncle. He was just a kid when it happened, sure, under pressure and without many choices. But at least he’d had a choice.

  I told him about mine.

  Relax, Gabby. I like little fat girls.

  Jay

  The piano loft is still a lonely home

  I PACED IN front of a twenty-foot high wall of shelves filled with Dad’s books. Rows of paperbacks, each filled with dog-eared novels I’d preserved inside clear, archival-quality binders th
at let the wild glory of their covers show through. Space monsters and Tarzan, gunslingers and hard-boiled detectives. Bodacious babes, too, of course. In spaceships, or being clutched by swamp monsters, or screaming in the arms of gangsters, but almost always arching their backs as they ran, in slitted skirts and high heels, from the win-the-damsel-in-distress fantasies of boy-men everywhere.

  “She took an earlier connection out of Atlanta, sir. I’m sorry. She escaped me. She’s been at the hotel for an hour already. I found this at the airport. They paged me, and I went to Security. It was . . . embarrassing.”

  George held out a gift box containing a fat glass jar full of Gabs’s homemade pickles. “The note says, ‘Dear George, You still like garlic okra.’ It’s uncanny, sir.”

  The “sir” habit had slipped into place in my early twenties. I didn’t ask Lawyer George to call me that. But I didn’t tell him to stop, either. I kept a distance between myself and even those closest to me. Which was why Gabs wouldn’t come home with me ten years ago. She said home wasn’t home. She said I wasn’t there anymore.

  “Nothing for me?”

  “This, sir.” He pulled another box from his man-purse. Vickie and one of their grandkids had bought it for him on his sixtieth birthday. I kept threatening to buy him matching pumps.

  I pulled a silver ribbon off the box and opened it. Inside a crushed barricade of gold tissue, my jar of pickles shimmered like toxic waste. Red, spikey and angry looking.

  They needed ointment.

  Gabby’s note said, I’ll meet you at Foxgloves Pub, seven P.M.

  I resisted an urge to stroke her handwriting.

  She really is here. In Asheville. Within reach.

  “Sir?” George touched a thick finger to his ear bud. He looked like an oversized dwarf from The Hobbit, listening. Then, “She’s left the hotel. In tonight’s traffic, it could take her fifteen minutes to drive to the pub. Would you like me to call a car for you?”

  So much for my invitation to meet me at my private enclave—Wakefield’s, the restaurant I owned, downstairs.

  All right, dammit. On to the alternate plan. The pub was only two blocks from here. Maybe I could relax her with good beer from Asheville’s many breweries, drop a trail of dill chips, and lure her this way.

  “I’ll walk.”

  “Is that wise? Quincy’s son is not carrying a pretend knife. You need stitches. If Donny attacks you again, you may need more.”

  “I’ll take my chances. If he attacks, I’ll at least know where he is.”

  George nodded at the thick band of tape and gauze around the palm of my left hand. “Are you sure I shouldn’t call the doctor? Or send a bodyguard with you?”

  “I’m going by instinct. Let’s not give E.W. any excuse to pay attention to me. Just keep looking for them.”

  Donny—short for Elladon, yes, the elf from Lord of the Rings—was the brother of Arwen, yes, the elf princess, et cetera. Quincy’s fragile mental state had carried her away on a cloud, and E.W. put her in a nice facility near her favorite place, Disney World, in Orlando. The father of her twins was unknown. Arwen and Donny were supposed to be in a boarding school here in Asheville, but they’d escaped recently, as if sensing that their grandfather was only waiting for an excuse to send them far, far away, just as he tried to send Gabs, Gus and Tal.

  It was my mission to catch them before he did.

  I ditched my pinstriped suit for outdoor gear and wound one of Lucy Parmenter’s beautiful wool scarves around my neck. The scarf fairy, they called her up in the Cove. Fragile, unable to fight back effectively. Her vulnerable sweetness made me think of my father. Not all the Wakefield men were sons of bitches. “Where’s Dustin?”

  “On the prowl. He’s looking for them, too.”

  “Find him.”

  “I know. All hands on deck. We will.”

  Dustin was Cousin Denoto’s boy. She’d battled E.W. in an epic daughter-father war since those teen years when she used me as her surrogate punching bag. In some twisted way she adored him but couldn’t earn his respect, because daughters didn’t belong in the mining business, at least in his view of tradition. Her job was to produce grandsons he could groom as heirs, in case I never succumbed to his brainwashing.

  So Denoto married E.W.’s hand-picked husband, and fell in love with him, unfortunately. He cheated on her constantly and left the day Dustin was born. The battle over Dustin’s future began immediately, with Denoto recognizing that she finally had bartering power with her father, and a way to capture both his attention and his respect, as the perfect mother to his backup heir.

  Then I hit my stride, and George and I unveiled the coup de Wakefield we’d plotted for years: TWSon (Tom Wakefield Son) outbid E.W. on four mines he’d thought were his for the asking price. We also delivered inside information on Wakefield Mining to every regulatory agency, union and watchdog group. E.W. spent the next five years paying hefty fines and settling lawsuits. Dustin became the sole focus of his heirdom, and he shoved Denoto aside. Not just shoved, but destroyed her.

  Suddenly a team of doctors were questioning her mental stability. Everyone knew she was bi-polar, but it was controlled by medication. The more they probed, insinuated, and smeared her, the more she unraveled. E.W.’s tactics broke her. One court order later, and Dustin was under E.W.’s control.

  That’s when Denoto joined the rebel forces up in the Little Finn, where my cousin Will Bonavendier had established a crazy colony of Wakefield-hating doomsday preppers. The fact that they wanted to eliminate mining, fracking, the gas industry, the coal industry, capitalism, industrialism, and about a hundred other “isms” could be summed up in their goal to ruin E.W. Wakefield. I appreciated all of that, except for the fact that some of them included me on the enemies list.

  In the battle between the mining conglomerate and the ragtag rebels with a cause, Dustin wasn’t sure which side to choose. E.W. had played nice with him, in counterpoint to his mother trying to control him in her own way. He didn’t know his grandfather well enough to run like hell, yet. But there was an allure to the off-the-grid world of the Little Finn lifestyle. A young man with rebellion in his DNA could find much to admire in Bonavendier’s agenda.

  E.W., naturally, had a problem with his grandson being courted by Jedi tree huggers, and E.W. was now preparing to ship him off to Straithern for hardcore manly indoctrination.

  Dustin was clueless. Fortunately, I was not going to let that happen. I could feel my teeth grinding as I made for the door.

  George sighed. “Good luck, sir. With the kids. And with Gabby.” He cradled his jar of Gabs’s pickles. “She’s got a knack with sugar and vinegar.”

  I set my pickled peppers on the finely-grained wood of my very large desk. The jar squatted there morosely, its red cayenne innards looking like shriveled hearts.

  Gabby

  ASHEVILLE WAS packed with Christmas spirit, which, to me, was the scent of cinnamon. The whole downtown looked like a shaken Christmas globe of decorated historic-registry buildings and modern gentry under mountain skies. Gothic with a side dish of Bohemian.

  My face prickled with dew. On a six-foot, size-eighteen woman whose inner thighs rub together, personal moisture is not delicate and dewy. My makeup, hair, all the fine-tuned “look” I’d put in place for meeting Jay, all of it was heading south like thin caramel on a hot fudge sundae.

  I let the rented sedan meander toward the wide elegance of Biltmore Avenue—procrastinating, dodging the shoppers in holiday outfits, the happy, happy couples and perfect families coming out of the restaurants—trying to replace the mental slideshow of my 1990-ish memories on its comfortably shabby, historic, bohemian streets with the gentrified Asheville of twenty-two years later.

  I avoided Lexington’s siren call toward the old P, B and S Diner building. I tried not to think of West Asheville. Jay had bo
ught Mama and Daddy’s house, along with sections of the entire community. He’d preserved it. Offered the house to me during our weekend together, along with a deed for the P, B and S building. All I had to do was come home. His love was a trade. Everything was a contract. Strings attached. He couldn’t understand why I didn’t accept.

  Bright lights. No empty storefronts. Pack Square had sprouted a huge abstract fountain, like a giant flat bowl. At the base of the Vance monument were life-sized bronze sculptures of pigs and turkeys, perpetually reminding people that an intersection of drovers’ trails put Asheville on the map in the late 1700s. Someone had tied red bows on the turkeys’ necks.

  I saw fewer tattoo parlors and black-windowed alt-music clubs. I saw lots more luxury cars, lots more luxury people. Correction: lots more people but still plenty of tats, dreads, piercings, with Goths, Emos, Wiccans and Other Alternative Lifestyles among the suburban types. The crowds streamed in happy unison, going with the holiday flow. They took the off ramps into sushi bars, organic coffee shops, boutiques and art galleries. A line had formed outside the tiny Fine Arts Theater, waiting to buy tickets for the latest foreign or indie film.

  The street performers grabbed me by the heart. The kids working tonight weren’t students gathering anecdotes for an essay in class. They needed money. Badly.

  The Rodriquez family, anchored by an L.A. police officer who was a friend of a friend in the network of law officers Sergeant Charlie trusted, had adopted me, Tal and Gus once we fled foster care and went to California. The Rodriquez’s ran a chain of Tex-Mex restaurants. Family business. They worked sixteen-hour days, their children worked, their aunts, uncles and cousins worked. Me, Tal and Gus, the only pale-faced redheads in the Rodriquez clan, bussed tables, washed dishes, prepped food, swept floors . . . and I, being tall, chunky and burrito-shaped, donned the costume the L.A. Times food columnist called, “the kitschy mascot of one of the best indie chains in the city.”

  I spent several of my most formative late-teenage years inside that synthetic burrito suit. I appeared at store openings, Cinco de Mayo celebrations, fundraisers for charities, and promotional events of all kinds. I waved my lettuce-leaf hands at passing traffic, tap-danced in my squishy tomato-wedge shoes, and peered out at the world, sweating and itchy, through a thin gauze of fabric hidden among foam-stuffed black olives and bouncing foam tufts of shredded cheese.