The Book of Peach

by Penelope Stokes J.

  I don’t know what to do—to confess it all and unburden my soul or to live with the guilt as punishment for my sins. I remember Charles once said that the Catholics had it partly right—that there is a purgatory, only it’s in this life, not the next one. Is this my penance, to keep silent and bear the weight of a knowledge that would only hurt the people I care about?

  Or is that the coward’s way—to say nothing and hope no one finds out, so that I won’t have to face the look of utter outrage on Dell Haley’s face?

  God, what a burden it is to live with a secret that could destroy everything you value! These people are my friends, and now that I’m connected to them, they feel like a lifeline, an umbilical cord that ties me to reality and nourishes my soul. They are my family. I don’t want to feel their hurt or anger or disappointment. But I also don’t want to hide from them—even the parts of myself I’m ashamed of.

  I’m pretty sure I know what that old fool of a therapist would tell me: You can never be certain of another person’s love unless you let others see you as you really are.

  But what if I let them see me, and they turn away?

  In the end, Dell Haley saved me the trouble of further navel-gazing.

  The third week in December, after Scratch and Alyssa and Imani had been living out at the river camp for a while, I was in my accustomed booth in the cafe, writing frantically in my journal, as if the very act of putting words on paper might save my life.

  Dell came over with the coffeepot and poured me a refill. “You got a minute, Peach?”

  I slammed the book shut and swallowed, hard. “Sure. Have a seat.”

  She sat. I waited. She had an odd, closed look on her face, as if she’d rather be anywhere on earth than sitting across the table from me.

  “Listen, Peach,” she said, “I need to talk to you about something.”

  “Okay.” I leaned forward, sure that she could hear my heart hammering in my chest. “Is anything wrong?”

  “It’s about—well, about your journal.”

  “What about it?”

  “Remember the day Purdy Overstreet sprained her ankle? You left your journal in the cafe when you went to the hospital and came in to get it the next day?”

  “I remember.”

  “Well—”

  I looked into her eyes, and in that moment I knew. She had read it. She knew everything. I struggled to keep my voice calm and steady. “Did you read it?”

  “I’m sorry, Peach. I shouldn’t have done it.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have. I trusted you.”

  “But the thing is,” she went on with a great deal of effort, “there’s something in there I need to know, and you’re the only one who can tell me.” She tried to take a sip of her coffee, but her hand shook, so she just gripped the cup and forged ahead. “You wrote about my husband, Chase, and the woman he was having an affair with. The river camp. The meeting between the two of them. Who was she, Peach? And how did you know?”

  Oh, my God, I thought. She thinks it’s someone else. The words in my head came out of my mouth, an involuntary groan: “Oh, my God.”

  I couldn’t have lied to her then if my neck had been in the guillotine and a single falsehood would keep the blade from flashing down. I began to cry, to sob, to weep with such force that it felt as if my soul were being ripped up out of my gut. “No,” I heard someone moan. “Please, no.” It was my voice wailing, my heart shattering. I thought I had known heartache before, but the loss of my relationship with Robert was nothing—nothing—compared with the loss of this friend who had accepted me with such grace.

  “Oh, God, Dell, I’m so, so sorry.”

  “Sorry for what? I’m the one who needs to apologize. For violating your privacy. For reading your journal.”

  I stared at her. She didn’t understand. She didn’t know.

  “The man,” I managed to get out, “the river camp. The woman. It was me.”

  “It wasn’t you. It was a tall, thin, blonde woman. It was—”

  In a flash of insight I understood. At Boone’s encouragement, I had written a few of my journal entries as fictional scenes. This one was only a few paragraphs, a brief scene in which I experimented with recasting my relationship with Charles Chase from a third-person point of view. The initial seduction, the first meeting. Not the way it happened in reality, of course, but what else is fiction good for if not for improving on the raw material of one’s personal life?

  Dell would never have recognized the woman I described in that journal entry. I had painted the Other Woman—me—as I used to be, maybe as I wished I still was. At the very least, the way Charles made me feel, for a moment or two: Thin. Beautiful. Desirable.

  “I didn’t know, Dell,” I said. “I didn’t know he was your husband. I didn’t know he was anybody’s husband. He told me he was divorced.”

  I saw the flash of pain across her face, as if someone had stabbed her with a blade.

  “He told me his name was Charles.”

  Dell bit her lip. “His name was Charles. Chase was a nickname. No one ever called him anything else.”

  I mumbled some other sentences, about the river camp and discretion and how no one knew. Meaningless, all of it. None of it mattered—not the pain, not the rationalization.

  The closed expression on her face, the sense of being shut and locked out. It was exactly what I deserved, of course, but still it hurt like hell. I wanted to get away, to run and never show my face inside the Heartbreak Cafe ever again. But there was one more thing that had to be done, one more truth that needed to be spoken.

  “Dell,” I said, “the last time I was with him, he told me he couldn’t see me anymore. He told me he was married and that he had to try to make things right.” I blew out a breath, trying to exhale the stress inside. “He loved you, Dell. He always loved you.”

  Was I hoping for a response, for pardon? I don’t know. What I got was that same blank stare, that closed door.

  I took the high road instead of the coward’s way. So much for integrity and authenticity and all those noble concepts my shrink keeps talking about. I told the truth—the whole truth—and she didn’t believe me. Not a word of it.

  PART THREE

  Reconciliation

  I am a woman

  whose life is built

  on words,

  and yet

  some truths

  resist both voice and pen.

  A touch,

  a kiss,

  a glance,

  a hand reached out—

  these are the languages

  I must learn,

  or else

  die silent

  and alone.

  22

  Somehow Dell Haley found it in her heart to forgive me. I don’t know how it happened. We never talked about Chase’s infidelity again, but on Christmas Eve Boone called me with bad news and good news. First, he said that because of the robbery, Dell didn’t have money for the rent and was going to be evicted. Second, she had decided to go out with a bang, a big Christmas dinner at the Heartbreak Cafe for all her friends. And I was invited.

  I was invited.

  I am Word Woman, and yet I marvel at how a single word can make such a difference.

  Lonely.

  Loved.

  Rejected.

  Invited.

  Of course, getting away from Mama on Christmas Day wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped. She drank some wine and got all maudlin and weepy on me, a conversation I was sure she’d regret when she was sober. All about how everybody loved Daddy more than they did her, including her own children. How no one wanted to be with her on Christmas (what am I, chopped giblets?). In summary, how disappointed she was in all of us and in life in general.

  I’d had about all I could take and was trying to stifle the scream when she said she thought she’d go lie down and rest for a while.

  As soon as I heard her bedroom door click shut, I bolted for the car.

  I once had a long dis
cussion with a counselor about the subject of forgiveness. Not the white-haired old fool who sent me home to Belladonna, but a red-haired younger fool who probably would have hauled me back to Chulahatchie years earlier, if I’d just stuck around long enough.

  Anyway, the therapist du jour (her name was Erin, I think) seemed to have learned her trade at the International College of Counseling and Carnival Acts. I always came out of her sessions feeling like I’d spent fifty minutes with my back up against a bull’s-eye, while she threw knives in my direction, trying to see how close she could get without drawing blood.

  On one such occasion the subject was forgiveness. Erin urged me toward forgiving my mother. By “forgive,” she didn’t mean “condone” or “accept,” but simply acknowledge my mother’s history and limitations, and realize she hadn’t intended the hurt she caused me.

  “You’ll never be free of her control over you until you learn to forgive her,” Erin said.

  “I’ll never be free of her until she’s dead,” I said.

  It was not my most shining moment, but it was honest. Brutally honest.

  Erin smiled and held my gaze. “Are you sure you want to wait that long?” she said.

  Damn. This is why I hate therapists.

  But I digress. I was talking about forgiveness.

  I walked into the Heartbreak Cafe on Christmas Day afternoon with my gut trembling and my whole body weak with anxiety. Dell looked up and smiled.

  That was all. Just smiled.

  I squeezed into a space next to Imani, and the little girl grabbed my hand and pulled me down to whisper a secret in my ear.

  “When I grow up,” she said, “I want to be a beauty queen, just like you.”

  I fumbled in my bag and brought up the rhinestone crown from my Miss Ole Miss days. “Then you shall have your wish,” I said and settled the glittering tiara on her head. “I crown you Queen of Corn Casserole. Duchess of Dressing. Princess of Pumpkin. Monarch of Muffins.”

  Imani began to laugh. Everyone cheered and clapped.

  I looked around, and the anxiety I’d been feeling since my last conversation with Dell drained away, leaving behind a warmth like the finest cognac going down.

  If this is what forgiveness feels like, maybe Erin wasn’t so far off the mark, after all.

  Boxing Day.

  That’s what the British call the day after Christmas. It has something to do with opening gifts, I think. At Belladonna, it meant keeping out of Mama’s way so as to avoid getting boxed.

  She never hit us, of course. Not physically. Mama had much more effective means of bullying us into submission. A word, a look, a gesture of disapproval was enough to send me belly-up, figuratively speaking, like a cowed dog waiting for a reprimand but hoping, always hoping, for a pat of affirmation.

  Once Christmas Day was officially “over” and she had nothing else to look forward to, Mama went into a depression that spilled like battery acid onto all of us. We never knew exactly what brought it on—our failure to purchase exactly the right gift, perhaps; a real or imagined slight; a blot on the picture-perfect Southern Living Christmas; or a vague and undefined sense of being underappreciated. Whatever the cause, she’d take to her bed with exhaustion and a migraine for a couple of days.

  Around the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth she’d reappear, muttering (just loud enough for everyone to hear) about how the clutter was getting to her and how much work she had to do to get the decorations put away for another year. “This house is driving me crazy,” she’d say, so predictably I could set my watch by her. “Doesn’t anybody else care?”

  And so, of course, we’d all get up and dash around, catering to Mama’s need for order, just so we wouldn’t have to listen to the litany of complaints any longer than absolutely necessary.

  This year, while Mama nursed her Boxing Day headache, I decided to cut her off at the pass and go ahead and put away the decorations. There wasn’t nearly as much as usual, given our minimalist two-person Christmas. And besides, it gave me something to do with my hands while I let my thoughts swirl around a cloud bank of unformed ideas building on the horizon of my mind.

  Once upon a time my shrink, the old white-haired fool—and, come to think of it, the young redheaded fool, too—had suggested, none too gently, that I lived as if I were powerless to control the direction of my own destiny.

  My initial reaction to this was, “Duh!”

  Nobody controlled their own destiny. You just took what you had coming and lived with the fallout.

  Now I wasn’t so satisfied with that conviction. By that philosophy, Dell somehow deserved to be evicted and lose everything she’d worked for to build the Heartbreak Cafe. God or fate or the stars had aligned against her, and there was nothing anyone could do.

  Maybe Boone was right. Maybe there were simply rhythms of life, and the power of the individual lay not in controlling outcomes but in generating positive responses in the midst of challenge.

  I took the ornaments off the tree, wrapped them in tissue, and packed them away in their box. Then I wrestled the naked Christmas tree out the door and down the sidewalk to the street. I was just dragging it off the curb into the gutter for pickup, when I heard a sound.

  A faint jingle. Like the sound of the bell over the door of the Heartbreak Cafe.

  I turned the tree over and felt in its branches. And there it was—the inevitable “last ornament,” the one that hides itself until everything is put away. I extricated it from the tangle of limbs and held it up. It was a small crystal angel holding a tiny brass bell that tinkled when it moved.

  I held up the angel and shook it, and I felt an unfamiliar delight flood through me on the pure, clear tone of the little bell. A weak December sun caught the crystal in its light and broke into a prism of colors. And just as suddenly, the clouds broke inside my mind, and a ray of insight came shining through.

  Dell Haley was my hero, my inspiration—a strong, capable woman who had made the best out of a difficult situation, who had forged a new life and a new calling out of the ashes. I had hurt her terribly by my selfishness, and even my ignorance was no excuse. I couldn’t give her back her husband or her marriage or the life she once had, but I had to do something. And I knew what it was.

  Something tangible. Something real.

  It might not work. But I had to try. For Dell’s sake, and for the sake of my own soul.

  Holding the angel aloft like a trophy, I ran back into the house, jerked up the phone, and dialed Boone Atkins’s number.

  He answered on the second ring. “Peach?” he said. “Do I hear bells ringing?”

  I laughed. “Boone, have you ever seen It’s a Wonderful Life?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Every Christmas.”

  “Good. Because a prayer is about to be answered, and an angel is about to get its wings.”

  In the end, we raised over twenty-eight thousand dollars for Dell to put a down payment on the Heartbreak Cafe. No one ever knew that I spearheaded the whole thing—no one except Boone, and I swore him to secrecy. It all came in bits and pieces, fives and tens and twenties, from truck drivers and the guys at Tenn-Tom Plastics and the little old ladies who came in for pie and coffee in the afternoons.

  We all loved Dell. We all believed in her. We just didn’t believe in ourselves, in our ability to change the future, until we all joined forces to do it together.

  Five or ten or twenty dollars means nothing. One candle in a darkened room doesn’t give much light. But you put those dollars together, you bring those candles in and light them off that single flame, and you have enough. Enough resources, enough illumination . . .

  Enough of everything that matters.

  23

  I sat in the rocker on the back verandah and looked down the broad sweep of lawn that stretched from the rear of the house to the river. The forsythia were blooming their heads off, draping their tentacles across the grass and the bricks of the walkway. The azaleas had begun to show little closed fists of col
or, and along the riverbank redbuds popped purple against the yellow-green of dogwoods about to open.

  I took a deep breath, drew that fragrance into my lungs, and turned my attention back to my journal.

  Southern Spring. They ought to bottle it and sell it for a hundred bucks an ounce. There’s not a scent like it anywhere else in the universe.

  Is it possible I’ve actually been here a year? Four seasons, twelve months, almost five hundred pages of journaling—memories and insights and angst and anger?

  The white-haired old fool ought to be proud. I don’t know how much I’ve grown and deepened in this year, but at least I’ve survived without resorting to either murder or suicide.

  One sign of progress: I hadn’t thought about Robert in weeks, until the final divorce papers arrived three days ago. As I signed them and stuffed them back into the return envelope, a wave of recognition flooded over me, an awareness that had been circling around in my brain, buzzing like a June bug looking for a place to land.

  Then it settled down in my consciousness, a full-blown epiphany: Robert’s divorcing me was less a rejection than a liberation. I never would have left him—I wouldn’t have had the courage—but now that it’s done, I’ve become aware of a great weight lifted.

  Maybe I should write him a thank-you note. It’s what a proper Southern Lady would do, after all, to acknowledge receipt of a gift.

  The gift of being open to love, to creativity, to new beginnings. How strange it is, to realize that I was forty-five years old when I came back to Chulahatchie, and yet I didn’t have a clue what love was. Like some starry-eyed adolescent, I thought it was all about romance and roses and raging hormones. And then I walked into the Heartbreak Cafe and discovered a whole new definition.