The Crossroads Cafe

by Deborah Smith

  “Thank you,” I whispered. “I got the message. And so did Thomas.”

  Chapter 26

  Thomas April

  I picked up my mail one April afternoon at the Crossroads post office during a lull in construction at the cottage. As I flipped through catalogs and other junk I came across a letter from a stranger. Some doctor in Florida.

  Dear Mr. Mitternich,

  I’m contacting you on the advice of your brother, John, who handles some investments for me. I understand that you may be able to put me in touch with Cathyrn Deen . . .

  What the hell was John thinking? He knew better than to tell his clients about Cathy. But my surprise and anger faded as I read on. By the time I finished the letter, I understood why John had encouraged the stranger to write me. And I knew what I had to do next.

  I just hoped Cathy understood, too.

  Cathy

  I sat morosely in the café’s kitchen. Delta patted my arm each time she hustled past with a platter in hand. A busy lunchtime on a Saturday was no place for brooding. I’d come to watch Delta make biscuits. Mine still refused to cooperate. But she was too busy cooking to humor me.

  “Ms. Deen?” I looked up warily from beneath a floppy felt hat over a silk scarf tied low around my forehead like a biker’s do-rag. A slender, graying man in a windbreaker and corduroys stepped through the doorway. “Thomas Mitternich told me I’d find you here. I’ve spoken to him several times by phone and we met here in person yesterday. He’s checked out all my credentials and he’ll vouch for me if you want to call him right now. I just need a minute of your time.”

  I stood quickly. Thomas didn’t send strangers to meet me, especially not without warning. The man probably had a miniature camera hidden in his jacket. I backed gracefully toward the kitchen door. “Just let me check on something outside for a moment, then I’ll be right back—”

  “Ms. Deen, please, don’t panic.”

  “Oh, I’m not. I have to check on a delivery of . . . tomatoes. You see, I’m in charge of . . . tomatoes.”

  He held up his left hand. It was grotesquely disfigured, missing two fingers. “I’m a burn survivor, like you.”

  I studied him for a long minute, finally gesturing for him to follow. We walked outside in the cool sunshine. He nodded his thanks. “I’m Dr. Richard Bartholomew. I’m from Jacksonville, Florida.” He indicated his ruined hand with a nod. “Backyard grilling accident. About five years ago. I used to be a surgeon.”

  “You can’t perform operations anymore?”

  He nodded. “But I can teach, I can consult, and I serve on the board of directors for SEBSA.”

  “SEBSA?”

  “The Southeastern Burn Survivors Association. We have about two thousand members, from all over the region.”

  “I had no idea there was a . . . a club for people like us.”

  “Indeed. We offer advice, fellowship, sharing. We direct burn survivors and their families to local support groups. We have a newsletter about new treatments, new therapies, et cetera. And ... we have an annual conference. It’ll be held in Asheville this year. In the fall.” He looked at me kindly but intensely. “Would you consider being one of our speakers?”

  I inhaled sharply. Thomas intended to push me farther out of my comfort zone than I’d ever fallen before. “I’m really not able, I mean . . . not in front of the public, no. I’m sorry if Thomas gave you the impression I’d be able to do that.”

  “Oh, he was very frank about your concerns, and he made it clear you worry about being exploited.” Dr. Bartholomew paused. “He made it abundantly clear my motives had best be pure.”

  “So he didn’t scare you off.”

  “No. Please, just think about speaking at our conference this fall. Take your time.” He handed me a business card. “Whatever you could share with others would be appreciated. Burn survivors need all the inspiration they can get. You could draw attention to the needs of victims, make the public more aware of safety issues, and motivate survivors to believe in themselves, again.”

  I stifled a grim laugh. Me? A poster girl for self-confidence? “I’m nobody’s role model. Trust me. But I’ll be happy to donate money to the organization.”

  “I’m not asking for money, Ms. Deen. I’m asking for something more important. You.”

  “I don’t think I have as positive a message to share as you assume.”

  “Please, just keep the conference in mind.”

  He nodded his good-bye and left. My chest constricted and a prickly flood of new panic slid through my skin.

  Speak? In public?

  No way. Never.

  “You can give that speech. You can do it.” Thomas said quietly. “Just tell Bartholomew you’ll try. It’s that simple. You’ve got months to get ready. Look, I’m sorry I blindsided you, but I knew I’d never get you to talk to him any other way.” We sat on the veranda, watching the sunset over Hog Back. I was furious with Thomas. We’d sent Ivy and Cora to visit Delta’s grandkids at the café so we could argue all we wanted without them hearing.

  I shook my head. “Your ambush wasn’t fair.”

  “Would you have met with him willingly?”

  “No. Why should I? I don’t know what to say to an audience of burn victims.”

  “You’re kidding me. How are they different from you?”

  “They weren’t known as Vanity Fair magazine’s ‘Sexiest Superstar of the Silver Screen’ before they were scarred for life, I’m guessing.”

  “So?”

  “They’ve made peace with their scars. I haven’t. What can I tell them? ‘Get over it?’ Just like I have? That’s pretty much what a burned person has to do, isn’t it? Just get over it. To coin Ivy’s favorite word: Bullshit.”

  “Alberta warned me not long ago that I need to push you harder. I didn’t believe her at the time, but now I do. You’ve got to get out in public. This speech would be the perfect start. I’m telling you, you have to do it.”

  I stared at him. “You’re taking advice from Alberta about me? You’re telling me what to do? You’re ordering me? Nobody orders me around. I’m not some little nobody of a girlfriend you can lord it over. I’m ...” My voice trailed off. Oh, God. I suddenly realized how arrogant I sounded. This was Thomas I was talking to. Thomas.

  His jaw tightened. “Yeah, I get it. You’re Cathryn Deen. You’re special. So the rest of the world can go fuck itself while you do exactly as you please? While you continue to build a life as the recluse of Wild Woman Ridge? Even if you hurt and disappoint everyone who loves you? Me, included?”

  He got up and went inside, slamming the door so hard my grandmother’s stained-glass mountains rattled. I put my head in my hands.

  I could not give a speech in public, even if he never forgave me.

  Thomas

  I was pushing Cathy too hard. I knew it. We made up, made love; we claimed we didn’t mean what we’d said. By late April we were able to pretend we’d never argued over the SEBSA invitation, but I found Dr. Bartholomew’s business card in the trash beside my drafting board, where Cathy had thrown it conspicuously. She wanted to make sure I understood the subject was closed. Okay, I’d play along. I chewed my tongue and kept quiet—a bad habit from my marriage to Sherryl. The tension remained, and festered.

  Hog Back and the Ten Sisters shimmered with a dozen shades of green. Rows of baby vegetable plants filled the big gardens Delta cultivated near the café. The spring shrubs were all in bloom. The season’s first bees buzzed lecherously around all the pollen-dusted stamens. The café bustled with warm-weather visitors, and on Saturday nights Alberta, Macy, and other local musicians held jam sessions in the blossom-scented darkness of the front porch. Campers and locals brought chairs and coolers to the small concert. Late one Saturday, after all the visitors had gone for the night, Cathy, the girls and I lounged in the shadows of the yard beside Delta, Pike, Dolores and the Judge. Cathy climbed onto the porch, borrowed Macy’s electric violin, and played a haunting bluegrass
rendition of Blue Moon Of Kentucky.

  We listened in surprise. “Why, girl, you’re a fiddler!” Pike said when she finished. Alberta looked flabbergasted. Macy smiled and applauded. So did the rest of us. Cathy gave a sardonic little bow then walked back to her lawn chair and sat down. “As a child I took a few lessons in the stringed instruments,” she said, giving me a dark look. “See? I’m happy to perform in public, as long as I’m with people I know and trust.”

  I kept my mouth shut and merely nodded.

  I stayed busy with construction issues at the house and its growing collection of farm buildings. I drew plans for a heated, air-conditioned, Craftsman-style chicken house and upgraded the barn to make a comfortable palace of goat-loving proportions for Banger and his future harem. Sometimes Cathy and I made love there, sometimes we simply fucked. It’s amazing how two people can love each other so much, be so good for each other, yet build a wall between themselves so quickly.

  I recognized the raw wound inside me that needed to control situations, to build protective walls around the people I loved. Even if Cathy and I still had problems to work out, wasn’t it time to make a decision about Cora and Ivy’s future? There was no doubt the girls wanted to stay with us, although Ivy was often morose and Cora still assured imaginary friends that we weren’t going to desert them.

  Sure, they still had trust issues, but Cathy and I could overcome all that just as we settled the burn-speech issue—by ignoring the problem. I was ready to accept formal, signed-on-the-dotted-line responsibility for Cathy and the girls; to prove I’d never let terrorists get near them, never let a skyscraper collapse beneath them, that I’d guarantee them utter and total security. What better way to do that, in my mind, than asking Cathy to marry me?

  The day seemed perfect for a proposal.

  Cathy

  The Proposal

  I should have known Thomas was going to ask me to marry him that day. Delta looked far too innocent when she invited Cora and Ivy to go for a Dairy Queen dinner and a Disney double feature at the one-screen Turtleville Cinema with her and her grandkids. But I just thought she was giving Thomas and me a chance to christen the first officially finished part of the house addition. Granny Nettie’s little kitchen, with its wonderful constellation floor and handmade tile counters, was now the grand entrance to the new kitchen and its dining nook. The constellation floor led to a wider floor of polished slate, and light fixtures of copper and geometric stained glass—a classic Craftsman style—filled the kitchen with warm glows at night. Granny’s big, deep metal sink had a place of honor beneath a modern faucet on a new wall with a broad window and a wide sill for potted herbs over the backsplash.

  I loved Granny’s aged sink. If spirits live on in the wood and stone and metal of a home, Granny’s flowed in that deep basin. I honored it like a shrine. Electrical lines had been run. A hot water heater had been installed. Thomas, the girls and I held a ceremony to turn on the kitchen faucet the first time, and we all solemnly put our hands under the warming water.

  In contrast, I’d secluded the big, scary stove in a stone nook with cherry-and-glass cabinets around it, next to a huge refrigerator and freezer. Cold trumps hot, I thought. Nearby was a long, antique-primitive table of oak slabs from trees so old each board measured nearly two-feet across. We’d surrounded the long table with handsome dining chairs of cherry with upholstered seats. The kitchen was sumptuous, an architectural meal, the comforting yet elegant equivalent of a biscuit covered in rich honey.

  As I waited for Thomas to arrive for our first private dinner there, I opened the stove’s oven door, pulled my latest pan of biscuits out and stared at their crusty, blackened tops. Damn.

  I still don’t have the magic touch. This kitchen knows I’m not worthy. It knows I’m scared of the stove, scared of the future, scared of the outside world. Just like Thomas knows.

  I grimly threw the biscuits away, sipped a glass of wine, stirred a pot of gooey potato-leek soup, fluffed a bowl of salad, straightened the new silverware on the new placemats on the old table, then looked out a broad panorama of big windows that faced Hog Back. Even Thomas admitted the house was better for that lovely scene and all the sunshine that came with it.

  I heard the rumble of Thomas’s truck. The puppies wagged their tales and ran for the front door. I hurriedly smoothed my hair and patted everything else—breasts, stomach, butt—draped in a slender, long-sleeved white sweater and flowing white-on-white lace peasant skirt. My pulse increased, my pelvis softened, my body anticipated him. No matter what our problems, I couldn’t imagine my life without him.

  I heard the front door open and shut, then his footsteps on the hall and the scampering of the puppies as they circled his legs. I posed artfully by the table, as if I’d just happened to pause there in a decorous way. “I’m back here cooking for you,” I sang out.

  “I smell the wonderful aroma of your biscuits,” he called.

  “Only because I forgot to turn on the new ceiling fan and spray air freshener to hide the charcoal scent.”

  He rounded the corner and stopped in the doorway. He carried a huge bouquet of spring flowers in one hand and one of Granny’s two-gallon milk jars in the other. He was dressed in faded jeans, a good belt, and a white dress shirt, open at the collar. He looked me up and down, slowly, and didn’t stop looking at me as he walked to the counter. He put the flowers in the milk jar, filled the jar with water at the sink, then set the arrangement on the table between our place settings. All that time, looking at me. And me looking at him, with my hands by my side and my chin up, my body angled just-so, my heart racing.

  He stepped close to me, parallel to me, fitting his body to mine yet not touching me, leaving a very fluid, very intense space between us. I raised my face, turning the scarred side away, trying to forget it, as always. I took his hand. “We’re going to make love in a real bedroom. In my real bed.”

  His fingers closed snugly around mine. “That,” he said as he pulled me to him, “would be wicked.”

  Good sex always makes life seem so simple. That’s the danger of it. We lay together, naked, in my rumpled bed. Thomas was one of those rare men who liked to talk after sex. I loved that about him in general, but not lately. Too risky. Distractions were safer. I reached under the bed, fetched my vibrator, and trailed its bulbous plastic tip over Thomas’s bare stomach. “I want to show you,” I said, clicking the switch, “the miracle uses of modern electricity.”

  He put a hand over mine and stopped me. “Let’s get dressed and go down to Ruby Creek. I want to show you something.”

  “It had better be as exciting as this,” I intoned, waving the vibrator at him with a coy wink while dread formed in my stomach.

  “Even more so,” he said grimly.

  We knelt by the creek in the soft shadows of the spring evening, holding the shallow tin mining pans Thomas had brought. “Slide your pan into that sandy spot right there,” he directed. “Scoop up the sand along with a little water, swirl it around, let it drain out one side of the pan. Do it gently, and the sand will wash off, leaving the good stuff behind.”

  “You’re sure we can find rubies or sapphires in this spot? Why here?”

  “The physics are perfect. I’ve calculated the curve of the currents, the percentage of water volume, the force of fluid transporting sand into these sub-surface inclusions right here, the hydraulic lift versus the metric tonnage.”

  “Even I know technical b.s. when I hear it.”

  “Trust me, just scoop, all right?”

  I scooped some sand, swished, dumped it, prodded a few gray pebbles in the pan, tossed them, sighed, and scooped again. Something substantial weighted my pan. “Hey! I found a boulder or something.” I swished. The sand washed away from a small black box. A jeweler’s box. I stared at it. “Thomas, what have you—”

  “Open it,” he said gruffly.

  My hands shaking, I set the pan down, held the box on my palm—the unscarred left one, of course—and opened the lid.
Inside, there gleamed a gold and white-platinum ring in a pattern of exquisitely delicate, interlocking rectangles, topped with several small rubies around one large diamond. It was beautiful, it was unique, and he had, no doubt, designed it himself.

  Thomas knew I wouldn’t accept it the moment I looked at him. He blew out a long breath. The expression in his eyes broke my heart. “I’ll wait as long as it takes,” he said. “Just tell me what the hell is happening to us.”

  I slumped. “What happens when you finish ‘restoring’ me? And then you realize—” I pointed to my face—“that, no matter what you do, this won’t ever look like the original?” I looked away from him, fighting for control.

  He bent his head close to mine. “Do you really think I sit around wishing your face weren’t scarred? You really think that’s what defines how I see you? How I see our future?”

  I looked up at him tearfully. “It’s not just my face. It’s me. Inside and out. You want me to be a strong, confident woman who can stand up in front of people without flinching. I can’t do it, Thomas. Maybe I’m always going to be a recluse. Maybe I’m going to turn into the crazy recluse of Wild Woman Ridge.”

  “You’re not. I refuse to give up—”

  “You refuse to give up. Exactly. But what if I give up? What happens if I can’t change, and you can’t change me, and one day you begin to feel even more disappointed in me than you do, now, and you decide my limitations are stifling your choices, your life, your dreams? Thomas, I don’t want to be a disappointment to you, or to Cora and Ivy.”

  “I love you. You’re making our simple problems into a big deal.”