The Social Climber of Davenport Heights

by Pamela Morsi

  “You’re the job-talking lady who grew up in Sunnyside,” she said.

  I hadn’t really thought of myself that way, but I supposed it was true. She closed the door to unlatch the chain. Then I was inside handing the fruit to her.

  “I just wasn’t thinking,” I explained about the purchase. “The peaches looked so good and I bought a whole bushel before I remembered I’m living by myself now.”

  Shanekwa nodded, understanding. “That happens to me sometimes, too,” she said. “I bought barbecue potato chips once and got them here before I remembered that I don’t like them and the baby won’t eat them. My man, Ellis, he’d eat a big bag of them by himself just watching a cop show.”

  I followed her through the house to the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry I was so nervous about letting you in,” she said. “I get a little scared when I’m here by myself.”

  “You’re here all alone?”

  “Yeah, everybody’s at work or in school,” she said. “I can’t go to my job. Ellis found me there, now I can’t go back.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged. “I’ve got to find me another job. I was doing short-order at the lunch counter in the bus station. Ellis found me there. He found me at my apartment too. That’s why we’re moved back in here. It’s like having a bloodhound on your trail. I can’t go anyplace that man don’t find me.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Apparently nothing was required.

  “You want some coffee?” she asked me. “I got some made.”

  “Yes, that would be very nice.”

  Shanekwa didn’t like being alone in the house. And I had no place to be. It was a small thing, but I could be there for her, I decided.

  She got a couple of cups from the cabinet and we sat down at the table. We were a little uncomfortable at first. I wouldn’t say that we immediately discovered we had a lot in common. But we managed a few minutes of polite dialogue.

  “I could make these peaches into some fine pies,” she told me. “My mama used to say that I was the best pie baker in town. Maybe that’s what I’ll do this afternoon.”

  “I could help,” I said. “I could peel.”

  It’s surprising how close two strangers can get while working together in a kitchen. Within an hour, I learned all about Shanekwa’s young son, Jarone, and the boy’s vicious, abusive father. She had loved Ellis for a while, but those feelings had long ago been eclipsed by pure fear. The fact that she continued to live her life, to get out of bed every morning and get on with it every day, drew my utmost respect.

  Conversation, of course, is a two-way street, and before I knew it, I was confessing my own troubles, which Shanekwa took as seriously as her own.

  “Your daughter and I are the same age,” she told me. “So I think I know how she feels. We’re grown-up women on our own now. We don’t need Mama telling us what to do.”

  “So you think I should keep out of it?”

  “No, you can’t do that either,” she said. “When you love somebody and you see them messing up, you gotta speak out.”

  “So which is it?” I asked. “Give advice or keep my thoughts to myself.”

  Shanekwa laughed. “I think you’ve got to do both.”

  “Oh, that ought to be easy,” I said sarcastically.

  “I don’t think anything about being a parent is easy,” she said. “What you got to find is a balance. You’ve got wisdom that ought to be shared, but you can’t be shoveling it at her night and day. You’ve got to trust her to find her own way in the world.”

  “I want to trust her,” I said. “Why is it so scary?”

  “Because plenty of things can go wrong,” Shanekwa answered. “And believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Sometimes we can make a wrong turn,” I said.

  Sighing heavily, she shook her head. “I sure did,” she admitted. “And I should have known better. Mama warned me. She told me to stay away from Ellis. She said he had a mean streak. She said if he ever raised his hand to me, I should run like hell and never look back.”

  “That’s just what you’ve done,” I said.

  “Finally!” she said. “The first time Ellis slapped me, I knew he was just like my mama told me. Oh, he said he was sorry. He said it wouldn’t happen again. I knew he was lying. I stayed with him though, taking it, for years before I got smart enough to do just like Mama’d told me.”

  “But you have done it,” I said. “And if your mama knows, I’d bet she is very proud.”

  Shanekwa smiled at me. A big, broad smile that belied all the sorrow that had been hard earned with this wisdom.

  She rolled out enough pie dough to cover four-and-twenty blackbirds.

  “Do you know what the secret is to a great peach pie?” she asked me.

  “What?”

  She laughed, teasing. “There is no secret at all to peach pie. Everybody makes a good one,” she said.

  Ten hours later, dressed in my pink cotton cow-jumped-over-the-moon nightshirt, watching late-night reruns of “Big Cats” on Animal Planet, I took my first bite of her pie and knew the woman was a liar. Nobody, anywhere, in the whole wide world, had ever made such a pie. For a moment I couldn’t quite believe it. The crust was so delicate and light it almost dissolved in my mouth. The peaches were sweet and still firm, the filling was a complement to them, not just a syrup for them. It was, in fact, a perfectly unforgettable pie.

  I sighed with pleasure, made rapturous noises and licked my lips. It was unbelievable. I cut my bites in half and then quarters, trying to savor each little bit.

  “Shanekwa,” I announced to the empty room, “you are a creative genius.”

  It was really amazing when I thought about it. Here was this young woman, who’d lived a very difficult and often unhappy life. She hadn’t finished high school. She was raising a child alone. And she had this terrible criminal following her around trying to mess up everything that ever went right.

  But none of that made the slightest difference in the taste of her pie. She had a special knack, a God-given talent or she’d perfected a skill. Whatever the origin, the result was exceptional.

  I scraped the last of pie up with my fork, tempted to lick the plate. This was, without doubt, the best pie I’d eaten anywhere, the best dessert I’d eaten anywhere.

  “They’d charge fifteen dollars a slice for it at Le Parapluie,” I said aloud.

  My own words couldn’t have been more portentous if they had been spoken by the Oracle of Delphi. Like a flash I was out of bed.

  I glanced at the clock—it was a quarter to eleven.

  “They should still be there,” I said to myself. “If you hurry, they’ll still be there.”

  I could not explain then, nor can I now, the urgency that I felt. I raced to the closet and grabbed up the first thing I saw, a pair of Brynn’s old blue jeans that were sitting on the top of a pile of clothes destined for the Salvation Army Thrift Store. I pulled them on over the tail of my nightshirt and stepped into a pair of slides.

  In the kitchen I covered the pie with aluminum foil, and headed out the door. At the last second I grabbed a jacket. It wasn’t cold enough to actually need it, but at least it would disguise the fact that I was braless and wearing my pj’s.

  I carefully set the pie on the floorboard of the Z3 before roaring out into the street. At the traffic light at the cross-street, I got a quick glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror. My hair was wild.

  The light turned green and I turned left while digging through my purse. I came up with a scrunchy and used the next intersection to pull my hair back into a ponytail.

  Two minutes later I was pounding on the metal door at the back of Le Parapluie. The front of the restaurant was already locked up and dark. But, by the number of cars still parked behind the building, I was pretty sure there were still employees inside.

  A huge man, who looked more like a bouncer than a restaurant employee, answered my knock.

  “Sor
ry, lady, we’re closed.”

  “Is Frederic still here?” I asked him.

  He looked me over, a bit surprised.

  “Yeah, sure…ah…come on in.”

  He held the door open and I stepped inside.

  Activity was everywhere. A few surreptitious glances were cast in my direction. But basically these guys, and from what I could see it was all guys, were trying to get the place cleaned up and go home.

  “Frederic’s in the front. I’ll get him for you,” the big man told me. “Just stay here and…and don’t let anyone run into you.”

  I decided that the phrasing “Don’t let anyone run into you” was the more polite version of Stay out of the way! I followed that directive.

  The place gleamed with stainless steel, the floors were spotless and the residual odors of the best food in town were masked with the scent of cleaning products. It was noisy. The dishwasher was operating, as was the trash compactor. The guys had to holler at each other over the din.

  Standing just inside the doorway, wearing my cow-jumped-over-the-moon nightshirt and holding my aluminum foil-covered pie tin, I felt like an idiot. This certainly could have waited until tomorrow. But some-how, it couldn’t have.

  A minute later Frederic came around the corner. The instant he spotted me, his expression darkened with concern.

  “My God, Jane,” he yelled out. “Are you all right? Have you been in an accident?”

  I realized I must look worse than I thought. Or perhaps, he, like most of the world, had simply never seen me in designer-free duds, ponytailed and without makeup.

  “I’ve brought a pie I want you to sample,” I said.

  “What?”

  I tried again, this time louder. “I’ve brought you a pie!”

  The dishwasher finished its cycle just before the last word, which came out excessively loud in the contrasting silence. Several of the fellows turned to look. I ignored them.

  “Taste this,” I said simply, pulling back the foil that covered the pie.

  He looked momentarily puzzled and then amused. “Jane, please don’t tell me you’ve taken up baking?”

  “Not likely,” I answered. “Just taste it.”

  Frederic gave me a rather long-suffering look, but pulled a fork from a nearby drawer and used it to cut off a small sliver of the peach pie. He put it in his mouth with all the hopeful enthusiasm that one might have displayed for taking poison.

  As soon as the pie hit his palate, he closed his eyes and moaned. First it was in pleasure and then immediately followed by dismay.

  “Oh damn,” he complained. “Did you get this at Newman’s? Is this something his new pastry chef has come up with?”

  “I never go to Newman’s,” I assured him. “They overcook the vegetables.”

  “So who does this baker work for?”

  “The woman who made this pie doesn’t have a job,” I told him. “And she could sure use one.”

  “She’s not a professional chef?”

  “She’s been working as a cook,” I told him, deciding it might be better not to mention either the term short-order or the phrase lunch counter at the bus station.

  “So what happened?” he asked. “Anyone with this much talent wouldn’t be let go unless she was very undependable, or hit the chef over the head with something.”

  “Oh, she wasn’t fired. She left on her own.”

  “Did she not like the place? Or was she looking for more money?”

  “Neither.” I hesitated and then decided that I had to trust Frederic with the truth. “Her ex-boyfriend is abusive. If he finds her at work he causes trouble for her.”

  Frederic raised a speculative eyebrow. He took another bite of the peach pie, savoring it.

  “Well, Jane,” he said, “I think this woman’s troubles are over.”

  My mouth actually dropped open. I couldn’t imagine that it would be this easy.

  “Mario!” Frederic called out.

  The huge man who’d let me in appeared from an inner office.

  “You need something?” he asked Frederic.

  “Taste this pie,” Frederic said.

  The big man looked at Frederic, then me. With a shrug, he enthusiastically cut himself a more generous slice than his boss’s. He held it in his hand and took a bite out of the narrow end.

  “This is really good,” Mario announced with his mouth still full.

  “The woman who baked this is coming to work for us tomorrow,” Frederic said.

  “That’s great!” The big man was nodding.

  “Her name’s…” He turned to look at me.

  “Shanekwa,” I answered. “I…I don’t know her last name.”

  “Her name’s Shanekwa,” he said to Mario. “We’ll find out her last name tomorrow. She has a problem with a jerk that follows her around and causes her to lose jobs. I don’t want her to lose this one.”

  The big man nodded as he swallowed a bite and was poised to take another one. “Don’t worry,” he told both of us. “I’ll keep an eye out for her.”

  “Thank you,” I said to him. “And thank you, Frederic. I promise to keep coming here for the rest of my life, and I’ll always order dessert.”

  “I’m counting on that,” he told me.

  When I got back to my car, I called Loretta on my mobile. She was ecstatic with the news.

  “This will be great for her,” Loretta said. “She’s a really good worker and they’ve liked her every place she’s worked.”

  “She’ll be back in the kitchen,” I said. “So it won’t be like the bus station where anybody might spot her.”

  Loretta laughed. “I sincerely doubt that Ellis and his cronies frequent that side of town.”

  “I know she needs a place to live,” I told her. “I’ve got small guest quarters over my garage that are empty. It’s not much, just three rooms, but it has a separate entrance and it’s somewhere for her and her son to stay until she gets on her feet.”

  “The place she gave up was tiny,” Loretta said. “And she can get everything she owns in a duffel bag and a couple of boxes.”

  “We can get some secondhand furnishings,” I said. “We can fix it up really nice.”

  “Jane, you are a wonder,” Loretta said. “I can hardly believe that you managed this.”

  “Believe me, it was easy,” I assured her. “As soon as Frederic tasted that pie, he would have crawled over hot coals to get her to come to work for him.”

  “You have to tell her yourself,” Loretta insisted.

  Shanekwa was upstairs. I stayed on the line while someone went up to get her.

  “Hi!” She greeted me like I was a friend. “Did you talk to Brynn? What did she say?”

  “I got her voice mail,” I answered. “I’m going to try again tomorrow. But that’s not what I’m calling about.”

  I made it brief, but I covered everything.

  She was a little bit stunned at the news. “They just want me to make pies?” she asked.

  “I think you’ll have to work that out with Frederic,” I said. “But he hired you just on the basis of that peach pie.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. I began telling her about the restaurant.

  “It is absolutely my favorite. Some people say Newman’s is the best in town, but I’ve always liked Le Parapluie best.”

  I talked about Frederic and working at the citywide Thanksgiving dinner.

  “He’s a fair, generous man who doesn’t suffer from any of that excessive ego chefs are famous for. He says you’ve got talent and he appreciates that.”

  I explained about the little guest quarters over my garage.

  “It’s small, but it’s really all brand-new. I’ve never even furnished it, the space has just been used for storage.”

  When I ran out of things to say, I began to realize that she was just too quiet on the other end.

  “Shanekwa, is something wrong?”

  She made some kind of noise. Some kind of unex
pected noise. “Are you crying?” I realized it just before I said it.

  I was astounded and appalled. Was this another one of my doing-good attempts that wasn’t good at all? Was my unwanted help just another intrusion.

  “Shanekwa, I’m sorry. Don’t cry. You don’t have to take this job if you don’t want it.”

  Her reply was a hiccup.

  “It’s not the kind of work you’ve done before, if you don’t want to do it, then you shouldn’t.”

  She couldn’t speak.

  “I know it’s a different part of town than you’re familiar with, but I think you’d like it. I’m sure we could get a great preschool situation for your son. Close to both your home and your job.”

  Still she said nothing.

  “Or if the guest quarters are too small for you and your little boy, you can stay in the house with me,” I said. “I thought that after being in the safe house, you’d want the privacy of your own place.”

  “You…you…” she managed to choke out.

  “What?”

  “You are so…so nice to me.”

  I answered without thinking. “Shanekwa, you were nice to me.”

  “I gave you a pie,” she said. Her words brought on a fresh flood of tears.

  “It was a wonderful pie,” I told her when she regained some composure. “And you gave me some great advice about my daughter.”

  “That was nothing.”

  “It was something to me,” I said. “Anyway, I didn’t talk to Frederic to pay you back. I talked to him because your mama used to say you were the best pie baker in town. You deserve a chance to prove it.”

  Chapter 17

  I WAS SO EXCITED, so wound up after I got off the phone I just couldn’t see myself going home and getting into bed. I thought about trying to call Brynn once more, but it was one-thirty in the morning in Boston. If she wasn’t in bed, I didn’t want to know about it.

  The back parking lot was clearing out and I decided I couldn’t just sit there. I began driving aimlessly up and down the streets. I felt the same sense of triumph, flush of success, that I used to feel when closing on a big money deal.

  And just like on those days, I sort of naturally directed my car to the Yesteryear Emporium. Of course, the store would be closed and of course I would drive right by. But it didn’t exactly happen that way.