Heartbreak Cafe

by Penelope Stokes J.

  “Come on,” Toni murmured. She led me into the bedroom and helped me onto the bed, then took my shoes off and covered me up with the quilt Mama had made me for my wedding day.

  Through the open doorway I could hear shuffling and muttering. “She’ll be all right,” Toni said to somebody. “She just needs to rest.”

  Then she shut the door behind her and left me alone with my pain.

  Open caskets are, in my opinion, vulgar and tacky and totally unnecessary, but in a town like Chulahatchie, everybody expects to have the opportunity to view the deceased and show their ignorance by saying things like, “Don’t he look natural?”

  When I die, I hope somebody has the good sense to cremate my remains and use the ashes to feed the azalea bushes. The last thing I want is to be laid out in full view of God and everybody wearing too much rouge and Kiss Me Pink lipstick.

  Besides, Chase didn’t look one bit natural. He looked dead.

  My husband was, in life, a man of many passions. Good cookin’ and good lovin’, certainly, but other things, too, like storytelling and laughing and high school football and funnel cakes at the county fair. He’d been an all-state wide receiver once upon a time, and a second-stringer at Mississippi State, and when we married he still had rock-hard muscles and that charming, crooked little smile with a dimple in his right jaw.

  Over the years the muscles went flabby, but he kept the smile. That man could charm the pants off—

  Well, off of someone. That much was clear.

  And now he was dead, squeezed into a mahogany casket with his head on an ivory satin pillow, looking about as natural as a waxwork of Elvis in Madame Tussauds.

  “He’s dressed real nice,” DeeDee Sturgis whispered in my ear. “But his hair could use a trim.” She didn’t say a blessed word about my hair. Still, that I-told-you-so look was in her eye.

  At that moment it took a lot to keep from laughing right in her face. DeeDee didn’t know what I knew. Nobody else knew, except for Toni. It was our secret, a brief moment of sweet revenge: Chase was getting buried in the clothes he died in. Or, more precisely, died out of.

  The pale blue windowpane-checked oxford. The khakis, all freshly washed and ironed, with the belt loop sewn neatly back on. The navy socks and cordovan dress shoes.

  Right down to the black silk bikini briefs.

  If my husband was going to die being unfaithful to me, the least he could do was be ashamed of his underwear in the afterlife.

  • 4 •

  I didn’t cry at the visitation. I didn’t cry at the funeral, either. I didn’t cry at graveside, when I saw Toni staring off over the hill toward her son’s tombstone. I didn’t even cry the night after, alone in the eerie sleepless silence of a world without my husband’s grunting snores.

  I cried, of all places, in the glass-walled cubicle of the Chulahatchie Savings and Loan, at ten minutes ’til noon on a Monday morning when nine-tenths of the population was lined up depositing their paychecks from the previous Friday.

  I never liked Marvin Beckstrom. In school he had been a geeky, defensive little boy who grew up to be a geeky, defensive little man. Maybe it was all the teasing he got as a child, I don’t know, but education didn’t improve him one bit, and becoming manager of the bank supplied him with just enough power to swell his head. He was short and scrawny and intellectual looking, with acne scars and oversized horn-rimmed glasses. A brittle, large-eyed insect in a custom-tailored suit. Behind his back everybody called him the Bug, and that was the nicest of his nicknames.

  He had a habit of jingling his keys in his pocket, as if to remind everybody exactly who was in charge here, and the smirk on his face told you that he never forgot one iota of what people said about him in junior high. If you’d ever in your life offended Marvin Beckstrom, there’d be a sleet storm in hell before he’d even think about approving your loan.

  My appointment was at eleven-fifteen. He kept me waiting until quarter to twelve, just because he could. I sat in the straight-backed chair outside his glass-walled box, twisting my hands in my lap and feeling like I’d been called to the principal’s office for acting up in class. Meanwhile people came and went, watching me with somber expressions and occasionally saying “hey” but not meeting my eyes.

  Once the rituals were over and done with, nobody knew what to do with the newest widow in town.

  Finally the door opened.

  “Come on in, Miz Haley,” he said, ushering me into the inner sanctum.

  Miz Haley? He’d known me since second grade and never in his life called me Miz anything.

  “So am I supposed to call you Mr. Beckstrom now?” I blurted out. “Since when did we get so formal?”

  He quirked an eyebrow and smirked at me. “Just trying to be professional, Dell. This is, after all, a difficult time for all of us.” He leaned forward across his polished mahogany desk. “How are we doing?”

  The condescension in his voice ran under my skin like a whole colony of invisible fire ants. “Well, let’s see,” I said, making no attempt to conceal the sarcasm. “I’m fifty-one years old, I just buried my husband, and I got a call from your secretary this morning telling me I urgently needed to come down here and discuss my finances. How do you think we’re doing?”

  It was a mistake, backing him in a corner like that, but I couldn’t help myself. His eyes narrowed and a muscle in his jaw tensed, and in that moment he reminded me of a Chihuahua baring its teeth to a rottweiler. He leaned back in his chair and slid a green file folder to the center of his desk blotter.

  “Fine,” he said. “Setting the niceties aside, here’s your situation. As you may know, Chulahatchie Savings and Loan holds the mortgage on your house—”

  “Mortgage,” I repeated. I sounded like a mentally deficient parrot.

  “Yes, mortgage. The loan secured by your property.”

  “I know what a mortgage is,” I said. “We’ve lived in that house for thirty years. Surely it’s paid off by now.”

  The smirk returned, and with it the condescending tone. “Dell, I’m aware that many women of a certain age—” He paused and looked up.

  I bit my tongue until I tasted blood but managed to say nothing. Apparently satisfied, he nodded and resumed his little speech.

  “Many women of a certain age, like yourself, have always depended upon their husbands to provide for them, and to take care of financial affairs. Unfortunately, this does not always serve them well when their spouses die, ah, unexpectedly.”

  He was right, although I wasn’t about to admit it. I had always let Chase handle the finances. I kept the household checkbook, paid the monthly bills, bought groceries, but as long as there was money in the account, I didn’t question it.

  I glared at him. “Spare me the lecture and cut to the chase, Marv.”

  A flicker of amusement ran across his face at the unintentional pun. “Cut to the chase,” he repeated, just in case I hadn’t caught it. “All right, here’s the bottom line.” He paused dramatically. “The house is mortgaged to the hilt. Chase refinanced it to buy the river camp and the boat. And his new truck, of course.” He withdrew a sheet of paper from the file and handed it across the desk. “There’s the summary. All told, you have thirty-five hundred and change in checking and debts totaling about a hundred and thirty-two thousand.”

  I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. I was sinking, sure as if Marvin Beckstrom had tied a rock around my leg and tossed me in the Tombigbee.

  I lunged for a lifeline, a floating branch, anything. “What about a pension? Life insurance?” My voice cracked and shook, and I stared at my hands. When I looked up, the smarmy little cockroach replaced his smug expression with an attitude of concern, but not fast enough. I caught it.

  “Everybody lost their pensions when the feed plant closed down and Ray Kaiser skipped town with the cash,” Bug said. “Chase was only vested at Tenn-Tom two years ago, so don’t expect his pension to amount to much. And apparently he opted for the minimum life insurance�
�twenty thousand.”

  Twenty thousand. Plus thirty-five hundred. I’ve never been any good at math, but it didn’t take some kind of Mensa genius to figure out what this meant.

  “You might be able to sell the river property,” Marv said as if reading my mind, “although I wouldn’t count on it in this market. The truck’s worth five or six thousand, I’d guess.”

  “And he paid what? Twenty-four, twenty-five?”

  “Depreciation.” Marvin shrugged. “If you’re careful, you could probably live for a year on the cash from the life insurance,” he said. “But if you want my advice—”

  I didn’t. Didn’t want his advice, and sure as fire didn’t want to spend another minute of this life looking at his goggle-eyed, self-righteous face. I didn’t want to cry, either, but the tears were already choking me, and I was going to be sick, right here, right now, right in the middle of his plush green carpet.

  I ran for it. Pushed my way out the door, broke through the line snaking its way around Pansy Threadgood’s counter, bolted into the ladies’ room, and locked myself in the handicapped stall.

  For a full five minutes I stood there hanging over the toilet, salivating like one of Pavlov’s dogs while my stomach decided it didn’t have anything to throw up. When I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to retch, I closed the lid, sat down on top of the toilet, and wept.

  Damn him.

  Damn him for leaving me like this. Damn him for buying that godforsaken river camp, for mortgaging the house, for not considering for a single minute what might happen to me when he was gone. Damn him for his selfishness, for his infidelity, for all the times he came home late and wormed his way out of an argument by being cute and charming and flattering.

  “Damn you, Chase Haley!” I yelled. “Damn you for living, for dying.” I slammed a clenched fist against the bathroom wall.

  It hurt—hurt bad—but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. “I hope you rot in hell. I hope you burn to a crisp. I hope—”

  “Dell?” Someone was tapping gently on the stall door. “Dell, honey, are you all right?”

  I peered through the crack and caught a glimpse of frizzy blonde hair. It was Tansie Orr, probably here on her lunch hour from Tenn-Tom. “You need some help, hon? Let me in.”

  Against my better judgment I opened the stall door. She stood there for a minute, looking down at me, then took charge, unrolling about six yards of toilet paper and pressing it into my hand. “Blow your nose, honey, you’re all snotty,” she said.

  I got up, went to the mirror, and squinted at my reflection. She was right; I was all snotty. My nose and eyes were red, and there were black tracks running down my cheeks. Right then and there I vowed that, even if my eyes disappeared completely between my crow’s-feet and the folds of my eyelids, I’d never wear mascara again.

  Tansie was standing behind me, watching me in the mirror. “Guess you got some bad news from Squeaky, huh?”

  In spite of myself, I smiled. It was another of Marvin’s childhood nicknames, along with Mouseturd, Roach, and Chickenhead. I nodded.

  “He’s a pure-D sumbitch, that’s for sure,” Tansie said amiably. “What’d he do to you?”

  “He told me the truth.”

  “God, I hate it when that happens.” Tansie shook her head sympathetically and pulled me into a hug. She was five or six inches taller than me, which placed my face right at bosom level. The fumes of Estée Lauder made my eyes burn, and I nearly suffocated in her cleavage before she let me go.

  She leaned against the sink and flossed between her two front teeth with a long red fingernail. How she typed with those claws was a mystery even Agatha Christie couldn’t solve. “Listen, honey,” she said. “You’re in some kind of a spot. God knows there’s a whole bunch of us who’d be in real deep doo-doo if our husbands went and died on us. But if you want my advice—”

  She waited for her cue to continue. I shrugged and repressed a sigh. “Go on.”

  “Well, look. I been thinking. Tank took me to Asheville last year at Christmastime, remember? We stayed at this gorgeous Victorian B&B—that’s a bed-and-breakfast, you know. Real nice place, run by a widow lady.”

  She met my eyes expectantly. I had no clue what she was getting at.

  “So?”

  “So you could do that, Dell. You could. You got a Victorian house and an extra bedroom. You could open up your own B&B right here in Chulahatchie.”

  The woman was insane. Certifiable. For one thing, my house wasn’t Victorian. It was just old. It only had one bathroom, unless you counted the half-bath that was so cramped Chase couldn’t get into it without getting stuck. The small extra bedroom had always been used for storage, since we had neither attic nor basement. It was currently stacked with cardboard boxes full of Christmas decorations, and dead geraniums that got caught in the first freeze, and a bunch of Chase’s old fishing gear that he brought home from the river camp to fix and never got around to it.

  Besides that, Chulahatchie wasn’t exactly a hotbed of tourism. Nobody came here unless they had to, or got lost and took the wrong exit off the highway, or were desperate for gas, since the Pump ’n Run was the last chance between here and the Alabama line.

  A B&B in Chulahatchie? It was ludicrous.

  But I didn’t say any of this to Tansie. She meant well, bless her heart, and she looked so happy to finally be able to come up with such a great idea. Like she’d been waiting her whole life to say something smart and important, something nobody else had ever thought of.

  As it turned out, Tansie wasn’t the only one willing to give me the benefit of their infinite wisdom. I might’ve appreciated it, too, if any of it had applied to me—if I’d had a college degree or secretarial training or a brain for numbers. If I could lift sixty pounds or haul boxes or load trucks. If I hadn’t been a fifty-one-year-old woman with no training, no experience, no money, and no prospects.

  “Free advice,” Mama used to say, “is worth every cent you pay for it.”

  All I could do was cook. And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how that was gonna help.

  • 5 •

  Two weeks after the funeral, I was in the kitchen taking the last batch of fried apple pies out of the skillet when the doorbell rang.

  I couldn’t quite get the hang of this cooking for one. Every horizontal surface in the kitchen was covered with fried pies—pies on cooling racks, pies on paper towels, pies in a long flat Tupperware for freezing. Chase loved them, couldn’t get enough of them. And even though he wasn’t here to enjoy them anymore, I cooked them anyway. It just wasn’t in my nature to stand by and see all those apples go to waste.

  I fished the last of the pies out of the grease, turned off the gas, and went to the door to find Boone Atkins standing on my front porch.

  I had spoken to Boone at the visitation and funeral, of course—he was there, just like everybody else in town, but we hadn’t really talked. When other people were present, Boone tended to keep his distance, like he had a plastic bubble around him nobody else could see. It shielded him from the ugliness folks manifested toward him, but it kept him from getting close to anybody, too.

  Except for me. I was Boone’s best and only friend, because everybody else in town thought Boone was gay.

  In this day and time, that might not seem like such a big deal, at least not in New York or San Francisco, or even in Memphis or Birmingham. But in Chulahatchie folks tended to be suspicious of anything out of the ordinary, and here ordinary meant straight, white, and Baptist. Or maybe Episcopalian, if you had money and good taste.

  Boone was the librarian at the Chulahatchie Public Library. He’d lived more than forty years in the house he was born in, except for the time he went to Oxford to get his library science degree. When his father died, Boone stayed on and took care of his mother, and when she passed, he inherited the house.

  He was a quiet, gentle soul who had three loves in life: music, books, and art. That made it worse, of course, since it meant he fulfill
ed just about every stereotype on God’s green earth.

  What finally sent everybody over the edge, though, was after his mama died, when he redecorated, and painted that nice little white house a color called Marvelous Mauve with the trim all done up in Plum Passion. It was more subdued than it sounds, and really gorgeous, if you ask me, but it didn’t set too well with folks who already had their suspicions about him.

  Chase couldn’t abide Boone—called him the “little fairy faggot” behind his back. I know because he said it in front of me, once.

  Only once. I swore if I ever heard it again I’d kill him first, and then divorce him. He kept quiet after that, but he didn’t have to say it out loud to communicate his displeasure about my friendship with Boone.

  And Boone wasn’t stupid. He never came to the house. We’d have lunch every week or two, always when Chase was at work, and usually in Starkville or Tupelo or sometimes even over in Tuscaloosa, where we weren’t likely to be recognized. It was kinda like carrying on a love affair without the love.

  Except that there was love, of a different sort. Boone understood parts of me that nobody else had ever seen, not even Toni. We talked about novels and ideas and creativity. He recommended books to me, and asked my opinion about things, and made me feel smart even though I wasn’t nearly as educated as he was.

  Boone was my lifeline to a world beyond Chulahatchie. But a secret lifeline. Always a secret.

  Now Chase was gone, and I reckoned I could have anybody I damn well pleased inside my house. It was an odd feeling, and a liberating one.

  “Hey, Boone,” I said. “Come on in.”

  He hesitated for a second or two, stared down at the doormat, then glanced around the deserted street as if to make sure no one was watching. At last he stepped over the threshold and gathered me into his arms.