Much Ado About Muffin

by Victoria Hamilton

  “Pattycakes, huh?” The daughter of a former tenant of mine, “Pattycakes” was Patricia Schwartz, a fifty-three-year-old woman who had a deft hand with cakes and cupcakes.

  “Come on, Mabel, her muffins aren’t as good as Merry’s.” Janice was a staunch friend and defender. “No one’s are. So what was going on in here yesterday? I heard you had quite the commotion. Virgil even showed up, siren blaring.”

  Mabel’s frostiness thawed, and she sat down with us and signaled her waitress to bring coffee and some of the muffins. Once I tasted one I was happy to note it was not as good as mine.

  “It’s Minnie again,” she griped, naming Minnie Urquhart, the local manager of the postal station. “Isadore was doing her job—”

  “Her job?” I squawked.

  Just then I saw Isadore Openshaw, Autumn Vale hermit and bad-tempered library helper, hairnet in place, slump out from behind the lunch counter with a bus tub. She cleared the tables near the back wall of breakfast dishes and coffee cups, then turned and saw me. Her eyes widened, but she made no other signal that she noticed. She retreated past swinging doors behind the counter into the kitchen.

  “Her job,” Mable said firmly. “She’s the best dishwasher I’ve ever had. She doesn’t socialize, doesn’t smoke, and I can practically feed her her wages. She takes home whatever is left at the end of the day.”

  I was happy for Isadore. She was a perpetual outsider, mostly because of her personality disorder, which I can only call Hates-the-World-itis. But I did hope she was getting paid at least minimum wage. One never knew with Mabel, who was tight-fisted, if rigidly upright: had the skinflint side won out, or the rigid code of ethics?

  “Anyway?” Janice prompted, glaring over at me, then returning her gaze to Mabel.

  “Isadore was doing her job when Minnie Urquhart came barging in and bumped into her,” Mabel said, her gruff voice tinged with annoyance. “She knocked poor Isadore flying, then stormed over to Crystal’s table and began yelling at her about something Crystal was getting Brianna to do.”

  I was mystified. Crystal, Brianna? But Janice seemed to know who these people all were. I had been gone only two and a half months, but felt like I had fallen back out of the rabbit hole and now did not know who was who in Wonderland.

  Chapter Two

  “Oh, come on, Merry,” Janice said, when I complained of being out of the loop. “Crystal Rouse is the crazy dame who runs Consciousness Calling, that new age mumbo jumbo crap that Emerald is involved in.”

  I felt a tingle of uneasiness. “But Em is doing so well with them! She’s straightened out her life, gotten Lizzie settled down, and . . .” I caught a glance between Janice and Mabel and the tingle buzzed up the scale into wholesale anxiety. “What’s going on?”

  “You’ll figure it out soon enough,” Mabel said, with a throaty chuckle. “I need a cigarette. You fill her in on the rest of that crew, Janice.” The manageress disappeared through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

  “‘Rest of that crew’? What does that mean? Is Emerald okay? There’s some trouble between Minnie and . . . what was the name? . . . Crystal?”

  “Shush, let me drink some coffee.” Janice cleared her throat, took a long slurp. “Okay, so last time, on How the Stomach Turns—”

  I chuckled and eyed her affectionately as she took another slurp of coffee, appreciating her humorous asides. Janice is two hundred fifty dashiki-covered pounds of forthright laughter. She and Simon, her banker husband, are big people, and Janice favors a Bohemian-on-crack appearance: colorful muumuus, big earrings, hair done up in an extravagantly curled bun that gradually comes loose through the day until it resembles a bird’s nest once the chicks have learned to fly. She once told me she was never going to disappear in a crowd, so she may as well stand out. “Be serious for a few minutes. You’re the only one who will tell me all the gossip in Autumn Vale. Doc will tell me exaggerated stories and Gogi will tell me what she thinks I ought to hear. Pish has been too taken up with Roma, and Shilo . . . well, she’s not speaking to me, I think.”

  “She’s always been such a ray of sunshine, but lately she’s a ghost of herself,” Janice said, with a frown. “Jack is worried, I know that.”

  “I’ll look into it. So what is going on with Minnie and this Crystal person?”

  “I know you don’t like Minnie. She can be a proper pain in the posterior. But she’s got her good points. She rents rooms out, you know.”

  “Is that the limit of her good points?”

  “Seriously, she does have good points,” Janice insisted, her chins wobbling in sincerity. “She rents rooms out for reasonable rates to folks who couldn’t afford anything else. She makes meals for her ‘kids,’ as she calls her boarders. It’s her own dysfunctional family.”

  I was silent for a moment, not sure how to respond. Minnie had made it her mission in life to make me miserable, as had other members of her real dysfunctional family.

  “Aha, those are two of the current boarders right now,” Janice said, lowering her voice as two young fellows slouched in and took seats across from each other at a table along the wall. “Karl Mencken and Logan Katsaros; I don’t know which is which. Cripes, boys are such pains at that age. My own boys looked like that: greasy, unkempt, like they didn’t have a home or family.”

  I eyed the two guys. Both were medium height and skinny, but that’s where their looks diverged. One had blue eyes, light brown hair, and acne, with the beginnings of a weedy beard or goatee on his chin and multiple piercings, both lobes stretched with so-called flesh tunnels. The other guy had stooped shoulders, greasy black wavy hair, brown eyes, olive complexion, and no visible piercings, though he did have a neck tattoo of a peace dove on his right side.

  They seemed shifty to me. If this were a bank and they were acting as they were, talking in whispers and looking around at each individual, I’d have hugged my purse and gotten out of there quickly. But all they did was get coffee and drink it, while still muttering to each other.

  “Lovely pair.”

  “I know. There’s one more, a girl, Brianna something or other.”

  “Does Minnie have any kids of her own?”

  “I don’t know. She could, for all I know. She’s lived here for a long time, since getting the job taking care of the post office, but originally she’s from Ridley Ridge, like all the Urquharts.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.” I call Ridley Ridge, a town slightly larger than Autumn Vale that is up the ridge and down the highway a few miles, the Town That Hope Fled, or The Saddest Place on Earth.

  Janice gobbled down the muffin, then mumbled, “It’s not bad, I guess, but your muffins are better. Anyway, as I said, Minnie’s current boarders are those two jokers and Brianna something or other.”

  “They look shifty. What do you know about them?”

  “Not much. Both from out of town.”

  I don’t get “vibes,” as some people call it, but there seemed something off about those two.

  “Anyway, back to Crystal Rouse,” Janice said. “With Emerald’s help she has gathered quite the bunch of dummies who go to her meetings, which are supposed to be all about motivation and self-fulfillment. You know the shtick: if you put your desires out into the universe, you will receive what you need. Load of crap. Sure, some of what you get from life is from what you put out there, but no one deserves cancer, or divorce, or a crippling accident.”

  “It’s a scam made to make people who aren’t successful or healthy feel guilty,” I agreed. “So that’s what Consciousness Calling is all about? Have you been to a meeting?”

  “I did go out of curiosity,” Janice admitted. “But the relentless cheeriness got me down!”

  I smiled and chuckled. “Couldn’t the world use a little more cheerfulness?”

  “Not the idiotic variety that spouts platitudes like it’s philosophy!” A few people aro
und us had heard our conversation, and one nodded, her eyes wide.

  “You got it, Janice!” the woman said, leaning across her table toward us. “I went and asked Crystal what to do about my lousy cheating almost-ex. She said I clearly had let myself go, and that’s probably why he cheated!”

  I eyed her and saw a middle-aged woman who was pretty normal: some spreading across the middle and the bottom, graying hair, and a few crow’s-feet tracking around her sparkling eyes. “Any guy I’ve known who cheated did it for their own reasons, something lacking inside themselves.”

  She nodded. “I’m not taking the blame for getting old when he’s the one who looks like a pregnant sumo. I didn’t complain about his sorry butt, and he thinks I’ve let myself go?”

  “Anyway . . . Crystal Rouse?” I said to Janice as the other woman got up to pay and leave. “I’m concerned Emerald has been roped into a scam.”

  “She’s a big girl; she can figure it out on her own,” Janice said. “I like Emerald, but if she’s going to keep spouting this crap I’ll avoid her until she’s recovered.”

  “I guess I’m more worried about Lizzie,” I said. “I’d better get going. I have a few more people to see today, now that I’m back.” I paused. “You know, Janice, I am sorry I didn’t come back for so long.” I told her about Maria’s passing. “Time there helped me figure things out. As much as I loved Miguel, he was used to me doing whatever he wanted. I think he and I would have had to renegotiate our marriage as we got older.”

  “There is not a marriage around that doesn’t require renegotiation as the years go by, honey,” she said, and patted my hand.

  Reminded about Roma by my mention of Miguel, I told her in brief how I knew the woman, and Janice rolled her eyes. Mabel came back and crouched down near our table, the smell of tobacco smoke on her breath. It’s not an odor I find offensive, oddly enough. Lots of models smoke, and sometimes they did so while I was styling them, a profession I picked up after my brief plus-size modeling career.

  “I s’pose Janice has brought you up to speed. Anyway, Minnie came in yesterday afternoon, sent poor Isadore flying, then stomped over to Crystal and Em’s table—whole damn luncheonette shook; you know Minnie—and shrieked at her that Crystal was trying to turn Brianna over to the devil, that she was brainwashing a kid who didn’t know any better, and she’d better be careful, or there’d be hell to pay.”

  “What did Crystal say?” Janice asked.

  “It was Emerald who jumped up and told Minnie to keep her fat trap shut, and that she’d better not threaten Crystal, or she’d get what she had coming to her,” Mabel said.

  “I thought this Consciousness Calling stuff was making Em calmer,” I said.

  “Hah!” Mabel brushed some ash from her sweater sleeve, poked an errant sunset curl back into place on her forehead, and continued. “Anyway, Crystal gave Emerald this look—chilled me to the bone—and the girl quieted down right away. It was like hypnotism or something. Crystal stood and faced Minnie. You haven’t met her yet, right, Crystal Rouse?”

  “Not yet,” I replied.

  “She’s one of those people who always has a self-satisfied smirk on their faces, the kind you want to smack off. She told Minnie that she was clearly a deeply unhappy woman. She said if she’d just give Consciousness Calling a chance, it might help with her weight problem, she said, and her anger issues. I tell you, if Crystal says one word to me about smoking I’ll dump an ashtray on her head.” Mabel growled in the back of her throat. Her employees call the lunch counter manageress “the dragon lady,” mostly for how smoke so often curls out of her mouth after a deep drag, but also because of that growl. “Anyway, Crystal said Brianna showed a lot of promise and was on her way to finding peace and happiness.”

  Standard self-help group fare. “Peace and happiness are good, right?”

  Mabel’s mouth twisted in a sour look. “Minnie gave Crystal a shove, and that’s when someone called the cops, giving them a play-by-play. Emerald jumped up and bopped Minnie on the nose, made it bleed.”

  I rolled my eyes skyward.

  “All the while, Crystal was chanting, this too shall pass, it is what it is, we must agree to disagree, and let’s put a pin in this and talk later! I tell you, I felt like bopping her in the nose after a few minutes of that mindless drivel.”

  Janice snickered and so did a couple of others. Some clapped. “Way to go, Mabel!” one called out, while a few patrons called her Bruiser and Mabel Dempsey, asking when the fight was scheduled. The two young fellows exchanged looks and got up, shambling out of the café.

  Mabel watched them go, then said, “Virgil came, but it was all over by then except for the blood on the floor. No one is pressing charges. But then this morning Brianna came waltzing in asking people for money for that Consciousness Calling crap! Trying to gather followers, for the cause!” Mabel stood, towering over our table as she eased the kinks out of her knees. “I won’t have that. Told her to can it unless she was collecting for veterans, and then she said, maybe I valued dogs and cats over humans but I shouldn’t.”

  I bit my lip. “Did you clarify veterans versus veterinarians?”

  “Nope. Told her to hustle her butt out of here and that’s it. And I told her to tell Crystal not to send her lackeys in to collect dough from my customers.”

  “Are you sure the money was for Consciousness Calling?” Janice said. “Could have been a handy excuse to make some pocket change.”

  “Maybe,” the manageress said. “Anyway, as much as I’m not fond of Minnie, that Crystal character gets on my last shaky nerve and shreds it like a cat on terry cloth. I’m choosing sides in this one, and I stand with Minnie. Rouse is not welcome here, and neither are her followers.”

  Janice and I left soon after. She had her shop to run, and I had a lot I wanted to accomplish. It felt good to get back in the swing of Autumn Vale happenings. The Villa Paradiso torpor was drifting away like mist on the wind, and I felt alive again.

  We stood outside the variety store and luncheonette for a moment, then walked toward her store. Zeke and Gordy slouched out of the door that led to their apartment over Binny’s bakery. It warmed my heart that both fellows’ eyes lit up when they saw me. They eagerly told me what was going on in their lives. Gordy was headed out to his uncle’s farm, where he was working fairly steadily.

  “Gordy’s giving me a ride to work,” Zeke said. “I got a job in Ridley Ridge in the sheriff’s department, doing custodial.”

  Getting a steady job in a depressed area was a big deal. I congratulated him sincerely. Gordy pointed out his “new” car parked at the curb. His uncle had given it to him so he could get to work and back. It was a real beater, with damage on the front end and lots of Bondo and duct tape holding it together, but if it got him from A to B, then he was better off than he had been.

  As they chugged away from the curb, I asked Janice to wait for a moment while I skipped into the bakery. Binny’s Bakery was the first place I entered in Autumn Vale, and as such it holds a special place in my heart. The walls are lined with shelves of teapots, and the place always smells wonderfully of Binny’s fabulous baked goods: focaccia, Portuguese rolls, cream puffs, Napoleons, and lots of other goodies. I stepped up and in, the little bells chiming over the door. This time it wasn’t dour Binny at the counter, but a smiling Pattycakes.

  “Merry!” she cried, raising the pass-through and sidling through the opening. She hugged me tightly; it was like being hugged by a fragrant pillow, soft and squishy. “I heard you were back. Roma called me last night. She was afraid she’d made a bad impression on you, but I reassured her you were probably just worn-out from your flight.”

  I felt the subtle criticism. “You and Roma are friends?”

  A voice from the bakery intoned, “More like freaking mother and daughter if you ask me!”

  “Binny!” I cried. “Come on out here. I came in to
see you.”

  Binny Turner strode out from behind, her tunic covered in flour, her dark hair tucked up into a hairnet. She regarded me seriously, then looked over at Pattycakes, or Patricia, as she was properly called. I sensed some tension.

  “It’s good to see you, Binny. How is your dad doing?”

  She gave me a rare smile. Her father, Rusty, had been missing for a long time, almost a year. When she got him back a year ago, after tragically losing her brother, she had worried about his health for a while, as well as his legal bills, given the tangle he was in from his involvement with a con artist’s web of deceit. “He’s doing a lot better. In fact, he’s got Turner Construction up and running again. There’s lots of work. They’re going to be moving a house off a lot near the sheriff’s department, which has bought some land to expand. Dad’s not doing much himself, yet, but he hired a few guys to work, plus Junior Bradley to manage the construction office and job sites.”

  “Really? That’s great, Binny.” Junior was an underqualified zoning commissioner who had messed up often during his tenure and who was facing some legal woes of his own. It was a bit of a surprise that he’d gotten work in the construction business, but he had been Binny’s brother Tom Turner’s best friend, almost like another son to Rusty, and he did need a job.

  Patricia smiled and wriggled her eyebrows. “He’s hired some out-of-towners, good-looking guys,” she said. “Hubba hubba.”

  “I’m surprised you’ve had time to notice, with Roma calling you with her latest tale of woe every time you turn around,” Binny said, her tone dark.

  My gaze volleyed between the two women. The sense of trouble brewing between them was clearly on point.

  “She’s an uneasy soul,” Patricia said mildly. “You need to cut her some slack.”

  Binny turned and headed back to the work area. “I’ll give her enough slack to hang herself,” she tossed over her shoulder. “Nice to have you back, Merry. Maybe you can start baking muffins again. Patricia is too busy for muffins most of the time.”