Heartbreak Cafe

by Penelope Stokes J.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  • 1 •

  • 2 •

  • 3 •

  • 4 •

  • 5 •

  • 6 •

  • 7 •

  • 8 •

  • 9 •

  • 10 •

  • 11 •

  • 12 •

  • 13 •

  • 14 •

  • 15 •

  • 16 •

  • 17 •

  • 18 •

  • 19 •

  • 20 •

  • 21 •

  • 22 •

  • 23 •

  • 24 •

  • 25 •

  • 26 •

  • 27 •

  • 28 •

  • 29 •

  • 30 •

  • 31 •

  • 32 •

  • 33 •

  • 34 •

  • 35 •

  • 36 •

  Epilogue

  Heartbreak Cookbook

  Good Lovin’ Cornbread Dressing

  A Final Word from Dell

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2009 by Penelope J. Stokes.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / August 2009

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stokes, Penelope J.

  Heartbreak cafe / by Penelope J. Stokes.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-10867-3

  1. Widows—Fiction. 2. Restaurants—Fiction. 3. Female friendship—Fiction.

  4. Mississippi—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.T6219H43 2009

  813’.54—dc22 2009004052

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Acknowledgments

  To the following people, I owe a debt of gratitude for their faith in me and their belief in this novel:

  To Claudia Cross, my agent, and Wendy McCurdy, my editor.

  To Dorri, Deb, Jim, Jerene, Joyce, Sandi, Carlene, Joe, and Letha—and the memory of dear, loving Bob—for their unfailing support, encouragement, and love.

  To Pam, whose presence makes all the difference.

  To Stewart Cubley, founder of The Painting Experience, who graciously gave me permission to incorporate my own process painting workshops into this novel. I highly recommend the experience to anyone who wishes to go deeper in the spiritual and emotional journey. For more information, visit the website at www.processarts.com.

  And finally, a special note of thanks to Annie Danberg, who shared her time and heart with me, and whose penetrating questions helped me face what was hidden in darkness. Better than therapy, Annie, and a heck of a lot more fun.

  Prologue

  “There’s two things in life a man can’t get enough of,” my mama told me. “Good cookin’ and good lovin’.”

  By good lovin’ she meant sex, of course. But since she had never in all her born days used the S word, she wasn’t about to start saying it right out in public in front of God and everybody, on the steps of the Chulahatchie Baptist Church the day I married Chase Haley.

  Ironically, it was the combination of good cookin’ and good lovin’ that kept my daddy from walking me down the aisle that bright June morning. Four years before, the night of my junior prom while I was out experimenting with another kind of Southern Comfort in the back of Juice McPherson’s pickup truck, Daddy had a heart attack on the living room floor, right in the middle of Mama’s blue braided rug.

  Daddy was a big man, tall and broad and padded with years of Mama’s Southern cooking—fried chicken and sweet potatoes, biscuits and cornbread and crowder peas cooked with ham hock, fried okra and fried green tomatoes and fried summer squash. Mama was a bitty little thing, thin and scrawny as a baby bird, hardly any meat at all on her bony frame.

  As I imagine it—because Mama’d never say so, not in a million years—it took quite a bit of effort to wedge herself out from under his bulk. Then she had to jerk him into some clothes—which was some kind of challenge on a man as big as Daddy—and open the blinds, and take down the old bed sheet tacked over the glass in the living room door.

  With one thing and the other, by the time she got him and herself decent enough to call emergency, he was gone.

  The paramedics from the volunteer fire department had known Mama and Daddy all their lives. They learned everything they knew about Jesus in Mama’s second-grade Sunday school class, and everything they knew about throwing a curve ball from Daddy’s Little League team. So they didn’t mention the buttons on his shirt done up all cattywampus, or the fact that he wasn’t wearing any boxer shorts.

  They knew how to keep their mouths shut, all right. It was a sign of respect. But I imagine. I imagine.

  And so I married Chase Haley without my daddy there to give me away. Now, thirty years later, Mama’s gone too, and most of the people I grew up with in Chulahatchie have buried their own parents and married off their kids.

  Lots of things change. But what Mama told me still holds true: No matter how old a man gets, he still wants good cookin’ and good lovin’.

  The good cookin’ is what I do best.

  I got a suspicion Chase is getting the good lovin’ someplace else.

  • 1 •

  In a town where everybody knows your name, everybody knows your business, too. Y
ou think you got secrets, you’re living in Fantasyland.

  Everybody in Chulahatchie, Mississippi, talked—men and women alike. Gossip flowed around us like the Tennessee-Tombigbee at flood stage. And there was no such thing as whispering. Any hint of scandal, and you might as well blow the noon whistle over at the Tenn-Tom plant or ring the big bell in the steeple of the Methodist church. The only time people hushed was when the subject of the gossip was within earshot.

  That’s how I knew, or came to suspect, that my husband, Chase, was on the prowl.

  It was on a Friday morning at the Curl Up and Dye. I had an appointment with DeeDee Sturgis to get a haircut, and the minute I walked in the door I knew something was up. The bell over the door jingled, everybody turned to look, and the whole place went silent.

  “What?” I said, staring around the room. Stella Knox ducked back under the hair dryer and buried her face in a copy of some ridiculous tabloid. All I could see was her eyebrows—which needed a good plucking—and a headline about Britney Spears being pregnant with an alien’s baby.

  Rita Yearwood, who was halfway through a trim, swiveled back toward the mirror and examined her fingernails. DeeDee had stopped mid-snip and stood with the comb raised in one hand and the scissors in the other as if somebody had pulled a gun on her.

  “What?” I repeated.

  “Nothin’, honey,” DeeDee said, but her eyes cut to the left, a sure sign she was lying. “Rita was just telling us this hilarious story about her youngest grandbaby, and . . .” She fizzled to a halt and shrugged. “Guess you had to be there.”

  In the mirror beyond DeeDee’s shoulder, I saw the reflection of a woman I barely recognized—short and dumpy in ill-fitting black pants and a pale blue knit top, her graying hair a mess of grown-out layers, her cheeks flushed with two feverish spots of red. Lord help me, I looked every day of fifty and a whole lot more. Maybe I should get a facial, too. And a manicure.

  I sat down on the wicker loveseat and waited. Conversation resumed, the normal beauty-shop buzz, but for some reason it didn’t sound normal. The laughter seemed forced, the smiles false and deliberate. Every now and then I caught a glance that carried weight and significance, but it obviously wasn’t meant for me.

  “DeeDee,” I finally said, “I’m going to take a rain check on this haircut. I can wait another week, and I just remembered there’s something I’ve got to do.”

  I left with my gut churning and my hands trembling. For ten minutes I sat behind the wheel of the car, staring at a dead moth smeared across the windshield. They had been talking about me, that much was clear.

  But why was I so certain it was also about Chase?

  I cranked the car and was just starting to back out of the parking place when Hoot Everett came barreling through the square in his old Chevy pickup. He hadn’t looked where he was going, of course, but even if he had, Hoot was eighty-three and blind as a bat with cataracts, and everybody knew just to keep out of his way.

  I waited until my heart rate slowed, then made my way around the courthouse and out onto Old Tupelo Road toward Tenn-Tom Plastics, Inc.

  The plastics company had been up and running for about three years now, turning out parts for car interiors—dashboards, center consoles, door handles. It was boring work, but it paid pretty well, and most everybody, Chase included, considered it a godsend. Nobody could earn a living farming anymore, and when the feed plant had shut down, six hundred people from three counties had lost their jobs on a single day. Tenn-Tom Plastics saved Chulahatchie from oblivion.

  Still, I could never approach the plant without cringing. The CEOs might be richer than God, but they hadn’t spent a dime of it on aesthetics. No trees, no grass, no landscaping of any kind. Huge and sprawling and ugly, the monstrous building looked as if it might have been constructed of giant Lego blocks, slapped down on fifty acres of asphalt and surrounded, like a prison, with a twelve-foot chain-link fence.

  I paused at the gate, and Fart Unger came out from the guardhouse to lean against the car. Fart’s real name was Theo dore, but he’d gotten stuck with the nickname in elementary school, so long ago that nobody gave a second thought to its origin or meaning anymore.

  He was a tall, skinny man, bald as a chicken’s egg, with a ruddy complexion. I remembered him as a third-grader, short and porky with beady eyes and bright red hair. The perfect target for school bullies, a little boy custom-made for nasty nicknames. By the time he was in high school, however, Fart had shot up to six four and become the best basketball player in northeast Mississippi.

  He was a hero—the local boy made good. North Carolina State gave him a full athletic scholarship, but when he blew out his knee his sophomore year, he came home to Chulahatchie to do what everybody else did: settle down, get a job, raise a family, try to make ends meet. And do your best to abandon your dreams before they destroyed you.

  “Hey, Fart,” I said. “How’s Brenda and the kids? You got a new grandbaby, isn’t that right?”

  He grinned down at me, fished his wallet out of his back pocket, and handed over a picture of a round, pinkish blob. “Bertie came home last weekend and brought her to see us. Cutest little thing you ever laid eyes on. Her name’s Diana. We call her Piglet.”

  I shook my head and returned the photo. “You of all people oughta have more sense than to saddle a child with that kind of nickname.”

  Fart laughed. “Didn’t hurt me none.” He patted the window ledge. “You here to see Chase?” A shadow passed behind his eyes, something furtive, almost frightened.

  “Yeah. He forgot his lunch.”

  Fart’s gaze darted around the empty car, and I knew I hadn’t fooled him. I scrambled for an excuse. “He’s got a bunch of comp time from last month; I thought maybe I’d surprise him and take him out to Barney’s. Friday’s catfish day.”

  I’ve never been a quick thinker or a particularly good liar. Chase raved about my cooking; he’d take my leftovers over Barney’s catfish any day of the week. Besides, Barney had quit serving lunch two years ago.

  Fart gave me a sympathetic look, one of those glances men can never seem to cover up.

  “Tell Brenda I’ll call her. We’ll have dinner soon,” I said as he waved me through the gate.

  It was only eleven-thirty. I drove through the parking lot, up and down the rows, but Chase’s truck wasn’t there. At ten ’til twelve, I pulled up in a visitor’s space and went into the office.

  Tansie Orr, the office manager at Tenn-Tom, sat with her head down at the computer, typing furiously. “Be with you in a sec,” she said without looking up.

  I waited, watching the top of Tansie’s head. Her roots were showing, two inches of glossy brown shot through with gray, and then, abruptly, bushing out into a brassy blonde, overtreated and fried to a frizz. She’d look better natural, I thought; the salt-and-pepper suited her coloring. Besides, no fifty-year-old woman should even think about platinum blonde unless she’s consciously going for the cheap hooker look.

  At last Tansie raised her head, and I saw that expression again—that fleeting glimpse of pity quickly covered by a smile. The kind of look you give a cancer patient when the doctor starts talking about quality time.

  “Hey, Dell,” she said, too brightly. “What are you doing here?”

  “I thought maybe I could get my husband to buy me lunch,” I said, reprising the lie I had concocted for Fart Unger.

  Tansie bit her lip. “Gimme a minute.” She clanged through a steel door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and left me standing there with a knot in my stomach the size of Stone Mountain.

  I kept my eyes on the clock over the door. Two minutes ticked by. Three. Four. The noon whistle blew. I’d heard it often enough in town, the faintly mournful sound of a train in the distance, headed off to exotic places. Up close, it blasted with a force that left my eardrums ringing. It had to be loud, I supposed, to be heard above the noise in the plant.

  At five after twelve the door opened again. Beyond it I could hear indistinct voices and
shuffling movement, a stampede of steel-toed work boots headed for the lunch-room. Tansie shut the door behind her and stood shifting from one foot to the other.

  “Um,” she said, “seems like Chase isn’t here. His supervisor said he left around eleven, took the afternoon off.” Her eyes darted to the coffeemaker in the corner, to the fluorescent light above her head, looking anywhere except into my eyes. “Guess he had some overtime coming,” she finished lamely, as if this explained everything. “He, ah, didn’t tell you?”

  I forced a laugh. “Come to think of it, he might have said something about going fishing. I just forgot.”

  I ran for the door before I had to face that pity again.

  For the next two hours I drove aimlessly around town—through the square, twice, to the Piggly Wiggly, down every street in every neighborhood, even out past the river camp where Chase went fishing, just in case. But his truck was nowhere to be found.

  There was nothing else to do but go home.

  I cooked all afternoon: cornbread, turnip greens, creamed corn, squash casserole, chicken with homemade dumplings—everything Chase liked best. Even a chocolate chip cake with double fudge frosting.

  Five o’clock came and went. At six I went out onto the front porch and watched the sun set. At seven I stood on the back deck and looked at the lights shimmering on the river.

  At eight o’clock I put the food away.

  At nine I sliced the cake and ate three pieces without tasting it.

  At ten I went to bed.

  At eleven-fifteen the telephone rang.

  It was the sheriff. Chase was dead.