The Crossroads Cafe

by Deborah Smith

  Workers at Ground Zero last week presented Mitternich with a heartbreaking artifact recovered from the ruins: The mangled form of an antique toy truck he had lovingly placed in his son’s hands that doomed morning.

  Cathy

  ‘The jumpers likely remained conscious during the fall.’

  That one quote kept running through my mind. After I read the online articles about Thomas and his family, I lay flat on my back on the cool tile floor of my curtained balcony, dizzy with information overload. Thomas wasn’t a grandfather, he was only in his late thirties. In grainy news photos that accompanied the articles I saw a tall, lean man with brown hair, solemn eyes, and a haunted expression. A man who was suffering. Yes, he wanted my grandmother’s house, but he wasn’t the kind of man who’d cheat or scheme to get it. And yes, he had saved my life. And he deserved better than the things I’d said to him. Infinitely better.

  Slowly I got to my feet, pacing the shadowed space. The heavy canvas curtains moved slightly in a rare breeze, a dry puff of Southern California’s baked air. Shards of light streaked the floor, then vanished as the panels shifted. I paced through the streamers of light, then in the dark they left behind.

  His wife and son jumped. They were going to burn alive, so they jumped. He couldn’t save them. Sherryl Mitternich took their son in her arms, and jumped. Jumped. And she knew she was jumping, and she had time to think about it all the way down. Holding her terrified son in her arms. If I were Thomas, one thought would never leave my mind. Daddy, why didn’t you save me and Mommy?

  I groaned and put my face in my hands. If I don’t get out of this house, I’m never going to have a life, again. I won’t deserve to have a life. I’ll never prove anything to Thomas. I’ll never deserve his respect. Look what he’s been through.

  I rushed to the curtains. For months I’d never opened them, never stood there in the day light. Now I shoved them aside and grasped the balcony rail. The hot light of an L.A. afternoon washed over me. I looked wildly at the mansions on the hills below me, their manicured gardens peeking from under awnings and security fences. Every shrub might hide a long camera lens attached to a photographer.

  “You don’t scare me,” I said aloud. “Go ahead and take a picture.”

  The voice was willing, but the knees were weak. They wobbled, and I feared I’d pitch over the rail from the unsteady force of my own panicked thoughts. I staggered into my bedroom and sat down at a desk.

  My hands trembling, I typed in “Crossroads, North Carolina” on a satellite map search. No matches. Good. Delta’s beloved mountain cove wasn’t known in the stratosphere. How many places on Earth were that hidden? Sweating, I typed in the café’s address. To the satellites and the post office, the Cove must exist only in the vicinity of greater Turtleville.

  A satellite image filled my laptop’s screen. Yes.

  Forest. Nothing but forest and a few gray splotches where bald rock protruded from the green mountains. Zoom in once. A few tiny clearings appeared, scattered in the wilderness. Zoom in again. There was Turtleville, with its tiny streets, perched on a small river and served by only a few roads. And way over to the right, tucked among a ring of gray balds and blue-green vastness, was a small valley. The Cove!

  I hovered a fingertip over the little houses and barns and fences. “That must be where Delta and Pike live, and that’s got to be Jeb and Becka’s house, and that’s Bubba and Cleo’s place, and way up there, that must be Santa’s place. Delta’s right. He does a good job hiding his marijuana patch.”

  Zoom in a third time.

  A road. One tiny road. It must be the Trace. There. The café. And around it, a cluster of buildings, like wooden sperm snuggling up to an egg. The Crossroads Café. The center of comfort in my life. Delta and the café. The home of my biscuits, spiritual and otherwise. Now, having found the landmarks I needed, I could find Thomas and, next door, my grandmother’s farm.

  I guided the map to the northwest, holding my breath. When I saw two small islands in the sea of woodland, side by side but separated by a swath of green, I zoomed in one last time.

  “Granny,” I said softly. Her barn was clearly visible, but everything else was hooded in trees. The roof of her house could just be glimpsed through the giant oaks around it. Hidden.

  No one could see me there. I could walk outdoors. I could sit under the trees, lay in the grass, dance in the pasture like a wild deer, and no one could take my picture. Not even satellites.

  I moved the map a little and studied Thomas’s clearing. Just the tiniest cabin. No shade trees, no major outbuildings, but ... what was that geometric pattern in his pasture? I squinted. It looked like abstract trees, or maybe a pair of abstract arrows with a third one in the works. I sketched it on a notepad with a pencil I grabbed.

  Whatever it was, it was beautiful. Ethereal. But it seemed to point next door. Toward my grandmother’s house. Toward my heritage. Toward me.

  I turned the laptop off and sat there, hugging myself, rocking.

  You are going to North Carolina. You are going to prove you can take care of yourself without anyone’s help. You’re going to find out what you’re made of, prove that you’ve got more to offer than a face. You are going to live at Granny’s farm. You are going to be strong. You are going to show Thomas you won’t give up on life, either. You are going to make him respect you as much as you secretly respect him. Or you are going to die trying.

  PART THREE

  A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, ‘Who am I, and what do I want out of life?’

  —Betty Friedan

  The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it.

  —Rosanne Barr

  Chapter 13

  Thomas Thanksgiving

  Cathy left Los Angeles without warning, the day after Thanksgiving. There it was seventy-five degrees and sunny. In the Cove it was thirty degrees and snowing. We didn’t get serious snow more than a couple of times each winter, and usually not before January, but that fall the north wind howled down off Ten Sisters and Hog Back with a post-turkey-day vengeance.

  “Her housekeeper will only say Cathy’s ‘moving,’” Delta told me in the café’s kitchen, wringing a dish towel in lieu of her hands. “Cathy ordered her not to tell us where. The housekeeper says Cathy wants to disappear but let the paparazzi think she’s still living in Los Angeles. She’ll get in touch with us as soon as she’s re-settled. What in the world do you think she’s up to, Thomas?”

  “If we can’t find her, all we can do is wait.”

  Delta pointed sadly at a cardboard box on one of the kitchen’s linoleum countertops. “I was just fixing her next box of biscuits. With turkey and dressing and pumpkin pie thrown in for the holidays.”

  “I know.” I nodded at the manila envelope in my hand. “I was planning to send her pictures of the house covered in snow. Even though she thinks I’m a arsonist and a sociopath, I hope she can’t resist the photos.”

  Delta looked away furtively. “Oh, I expect she’s forgiven you. Or changed her opinion for the better, at least.”

  I arched a brow. “What have you done?”

  “I just told her your full name. And suggested she Google you. Does it tickle when somebody Googles somebody? Sounds like it ought to.”

  The weight of a long, cold winter of memories settled on my shoulders. “You know I don’t like—”

  “She needed to see who you really are.”

  I shook my head and walked out on the café’s front porch. Snow fell in large, soft flakes, hiding the mountains, even making it difficult to see the Trace. There wouldn’t be any dinner customers, not tonight. The broad pasture of the Cove was a pure blanket of white. The November afternoon was fading into a silver, snowy white-out. I smelled wood smoke from chimneys, the clean scent of snow, the aroma of food. A cozy night for people and animals to gather together around warm hearths and full tables. A night for eating comfort food and for making love under soft, heavy quil
ts.

  I hunched my shoulders, went to my truck, and drove home to the cabin. I needed to be alone, to study the inside of my own head and come to terms with solitude on a cold night. I’d pushed Cathy too hard, and it didn’t help that Delta had clued her to my history. Cathy had enough on her plate without my hypocritical motivation speeches. Architect, restore thyself, first. She was probably out of the country, hiding in some European ski resort or on a private island, some place tropical. Contemplating killing herself where I couldn’t intervene.

  Cathy

  “Are you certain there’s an intersection somewhere in this valley, Ms. Deen?” my driver asked. “I can’t see anything in this blizzard.”

  “Look for a group of buildings on the right.” My teeth chattered from nerves. No, not nerves, terror. And exhaustion. I’d left my home in Los Angeles at dawn, L.A. time, in a delivery truck. I left California two hours later in a private jet. I left the Asheville airport at two p.m., East Coast time, in a full-sized black Hummer pulling a U-Haul trailer full of high-tech camping gear and accompanied by a second Hummer so my driver and bodyguards could leave the first Hummer at Granny’s farm and return to civilization without me.

  Team Pioneer Cathy, I called my group.

  Pioneer. Right. I was dressed in wool with a GorTex vest over insulated fleece longjohns, my feet encased in heavy wool socks and waterproof hiking boots, my hands covered in wool gloves, and a colorful Aztec-design ski mask hiding my head and face. I looked like an overstuffed piñata, but at least I wouldn’t have to worry about freezing to death in Granny’s unheated house. I planned my journey into the wilds of the Blue Ridge mountains like an Arctic explorer planning a trek to the North Pole.

  The only unpredictable element in the plan was me. After months of seclusion I took my fear of cars, fire, and publicity on an excruciating cross-country tour. I had so many bottles of tranquilizers in my purse it rattled when I reached for a tissue. Yet even with drugs to sustain me I’d suffered periodic panic attacks all day, and I was having one right now. In the old days I’d often joked, “Oh, I’m having a panic attack,” and had assumed people who suffered from them just felt jittery. Now I knew better. It was as if someone shut off reality, oxygen and clear thought. I wanted to run, to escape—from what? To where? My heart raced, and a surreal and sinister kind of disconnect rose inside me, short-circuiting calm thought, putting me on automatic pilot. An attack lasted fifteen minutes on average, evaporating as quickly as it came, leaving me drained.

  “Are you all right, Ms. Deen?”

  “When you s-see the café, the grocery, the other little buildings,” I said between chattering teeth, “that’s the Crossroads. The actual intersection is on the f-far side of the café.”

  “It’s four p.m. here. If we don’t reach your grandmother’s farm soon, it’ll be dark. Are you sure you don’t want to turn back to Asheville for the night, Ms. Deen?”

  For a moment I hesitated. We’d just spent a hair-raising hour on a narrow two-lane climbing up and over the mountains that surrounded the Cove. Think ‘roller coaster with no safety track.’ Almost every curve was framed by sheer drop-offs on one side and craggy, perpendicular mountain rock on the other.

  If you give up now, you’ll never try again.

  “I’m sure.”

  “All right. I’ll radio the lead Hummer and tell them to keep going.”

  As he called the bodyguards at the head of my two-Hummer caravan, I wrapped my trembling hands tighter around the cold metal canister of a small fire extinguisher. It was my security blanket, just as the Hummer reassured me, a little, with its hard-to-roll-over-and-catch-on-fire attributes. If this hulking, high-tech vehicle couldn’t get me up to my grandmother’s farm in this blizzard, I’d call the Pentagon and ask for a refund on my taxes. They’d designed Hummers to climb mountains, ford rivers, and roll across battle fields without losing so much as a lug nut off a wheel. It had better make it to Wild Woman Ridge.

  “There’s your café,” the driver announced. “Looks pretty empty. No customers on a night like this.”

  I pressed close to the back seat’s passenger window and peered through the snow. The café. Oh, yes, it’s adorable, and friendly, and everything I thought it would be. Even in the fading light and whirling snow, with the parking lot empty and only a single light burning on the sign by the gas pumps, the Crossroads Cafe was a reassuring icon in my crazed journey.

  You could stop right here, I told myself. Go inside, surprise Delta, get a hug. She’s a hugger, no doubt. And then she’d give you biscuits and gravy, and invite you to spend the night at her house.

  No. That would be taking the easy way out. I couldn’t ask for help from Delta—or Thomas—I couldn’t go back to Asheville and stay at a nice hotel, I had to make it all the way to my grandmother’s house. If I walked into the café I’d be admitting I couldn’t make it on my own. Even Delta would be embarrassed. City girl shows up in a Hummer with bodyguards, people would whisper. In a blizzard, toting a fire extinguisher.

  I took another anti-anxiety tablet, trying to swallow it with a bone-dry mouth. The pills improved the brain’s serotonin level. I must have enough serotonin to relax a rabid grizzly by now. Were there grizzlies here? No, just black bears. Harmless. All they’d do was raid the house, steal my food, and growl at me. City grrrirl.

  Dread filled me again as the café and its world faded into the snowstorm. “There’s the intersection,” my driver announced. “We’re, uh, turning onto that . . . trail?”

  “Yes!” I craned my head to look between the front seats. “That’s it! Ruby Creek Trail!” Thomas had refreshed my childhood memories with detailed and affectionate descriptions of the wilderness road to Granny’s house, so I was fairly certain I could find the place. “Now all we have to do is follow Ruby Creek for about twenty minutes. When we come to a fork in the trail, take the trail to the left, up the ridge. It winds around and eventually comes out of the forest beside my grandmother’s front pasture. We should be able to see the house from that point.”

  “Ms. Deen,” my driver said, “Are you sure no one’s been eaten by wolves around here, lately?”

  “Not lately.”

  Yet my stomach curdled with fear as my Hummers and U-Haul turned off the civilized Trace onto its wild country cousin. The smooth ride became a bumpy one. The snowy, darkening forest closed around us. On the right, as we descended into a long hollow filled with towering, Christmas-like firs and rhododendrons, Ruby Creek appeared beside us, its shallow currents bubbling between snow-covered boulders.

  I pressed close to the window. Granny Nettie had taken me panning for gemstones there! I’d found some small, gray baubles with just a hint of color peeking through. She polished them for me on her own grinding wheel. Even though they turned out to be little more than purplish pebbles, I had taken them home to Atlanta and kept them in my jewelry box. After she died I asked Daddy to have our jeweler make Granny’s rubies into a bracelet for me. He said he would, but then he lost them. Or said he did.

  I cried into my Aztec-inspired ski mask as the creek followed me to my grandmother’s home, now my home, polishing the magic of things I had lost, or that had lost me.

  Twenty years after I watched my grandmother’s odd and lovely little house disappear through the back window of my father’s Mercedes for the last time, I stepped down into the ankle-deep snow of her front yard and looked up at the house again. It was shrouded in whirling snow, its low-pitched roof and thick, exposed rafters hidden in shadows, its lovely stained-glass-rimmed windows dark and frosted. It wasn’t quite real, more of a mirror vision than actual stone-and-wood.

  Four wide stone steps led up to the deep veranda. Snowflakes eddied beneath the broad shallow stone arch that shouldered the veranda’s rustic eaves. That archway dressed up the bungalow with a kind of Arabian flair. I remembered being very small the first time I visited Granny, feeling awed by the entrance. I thought I had found the cottage of a sorceress in the wild woods. Maybe I ha
d.

  Abracadabra. Granny, I’m here. I’m back.

  “Ms. Deen, do you want us to break the door lock?” one of my bodyguards said, shouting as if snow had volume.

  I shook my head. “Let me look for the key, first.”

  My legs trembling, I held onto a snowy ledge of the thick stone walls that framed the steps. The security people dodged around me, beaming their flashlights along my path, stomping ahead of me to test the veranda’s stone floor for ice. My heart in my throat, I halted before the broad front door. I recalled it being made of dark wood, with a beautiful horizontal rectangle of stained glass near the top. “This door looks like solid cherry,” one of the men said to another.

  “It is,” I told them.

  Aiming a small flashlight at the glass panel, I almost cried with happiness when I saw the intricate scene that had enthralled me as a child: a kaleidoscope of meandering creek, a glass collage of trees, and a background of sparkling green mountains. My grandmother had made this exquisite glass design herself.

  It held the whimsical secret of the door key. Granny had taught me the poem so well I’d never forgotten it.

  Third mountain to the left

  Look due west of its crown

  That’s where the door key

  Can always be found.

  The bungalow’s walls were covered in hand-cut cedar shingles stained dark brown. With the forefinger of my gloved hand I traced an imaginary line from the peak of the third stained glass mountain on the left to the nearest shingle beside the door frame. Holding my breath, I gently put my finger beside the shingle’s bottom corner and nudged it sideways. Just as it had when I was a little girl standing on a milking stool to reach it, the shingle swung to the left.