I just stood there, stiff and frozen as a side of beef, unable to move or speak.
“What would Chase say?” Marvin repeated, and his voice was an echo off in the distance, someplace far away.
I didn’t want to think about Chase. Yes, he was my husband, and yes, I had loved him, but sometimes I didn’t like him much at all. Sometimes he drove me crazy with his backward attitude toward blacks, toward women, toward people like Boone. Sometimes it was all I could do not to slap him silly and tell him to grow up and come into the twenty-first century like the rest of the world.
But here I was, harboring the same attitudes and feeling the same prejudice. I just wasn’t as honest about it. I just wanted to look better on the outside.
What would Chase say? He’d say I’d lost my ever-loving mind, and that I ought to hightail it back to my own house and my own kitchen, where I belonged. He’d say I had no business opening the Heartbreak Cafe in the first place, and that I damn well oughta know better than to let somebody like Scratch get within spitting distance.
But Chase was dead, and he had left me with no choice but to figure out how to make ends meet without him. For the first time in my life, I was entirely on my own, and at the moment I was feeling more vulnerable than I’d ever felt in my life.
Take a risk, Toni and Boone had told me. Well, I had taken one. I had jumped in with both feet before I even bothered to test the waters. And now the fear, which I had pushed down, or ignored, or denied, came rushing to the surface like some prehistoric sea monster. I remembered something Boone had told me once, about the place where the oceans fell off the edge of the world: There be dragons here.
“I’m only looking out for your best interests, Dell,” Marvin said. He put two crisp new dollar bills on the table to pay for the coffee, got up, and headed out the door.
I glanced back toward the kitchen. Behind the counter Scratch was making fresh coffee like nothing unusual had happened. Boone and Toni had gone back to looking at the wild things. Fart Unger and two of his Tenn-Tom buddies were waiting at the register to settle up.
Everything was back to normal. Everything except for me.
Because in that moment, when I coulda told Marvin Beckstrom off and didn’t have the courage, I found out something about myself that I didn’t like one bit. Not just the fear, although that was bad enough. But something else, layered over the fear, like scum on a pond.
Something I didn’t have a name for. A shadow, a darkness I never knew was there.
I always thought I was a pretty good person.
Now I wasn’t so sure.
• 11 •
In the old house, Mama always had what she called a “possible drawer,” full of string and glue and screwdrivers and batteries and such. Most folks would call it the junk drawer, but Mama liked to put a positive spin on things. “It’s possible you might find just about anything you need,” she said, “if you stir long enough.”
I figure my guest room coulda been called the “possible room,” but we had to stir real hard to find what we needed. And although it was just Boone and Scratch in there stirring with me, I couldn’t help being embarrassed at the state of things, and hoped they’d both have the grace to keep their mouths shut about my dirty little secret.
Scratch had stayed, and worked hard, and gave me no reason not to have faith in him. But I watched him like a hawk anyway, as if I was just looking for an excuse to send him packing.
I’ve always been a trusting soul, trying to think the best of folks until they give me cause to do otherwise, and I gotta admit I didn’t like this suspicious turn of mind one little bit. I tried to convince myself that if Scratch had been white, I woulda felt the very same way. But the rationalization didn’t stick very well, and even when I believed it, the thought didn’t comfort me much.
I reckon being a coward was better than being a racist; still, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of wearing either one of those labels.
I went on with the original plan, helping Scratch set up housekeeping in the little apartment over the Heartbreak Cafe. With Boone’s assistance, we shoveled out the guest room and came up with a bed, a rug, a three-drawer chest, a side table and lamp, and an easy chair Chase had been saving for twenty years, saying he was gonna reupholster it when he got around to it.
Boone brought Chase’s truck back from the river camp, and we loaded up the furniture. I scared up sheets and blankets and pillows and an old Dove in the Window quilt, and pulled some clothes out of Chase’s closet. Once we got everything up to the apartment and all set up, it looked right nice—not the lap of luxury, by any stretch of the imagination, but livable enough, considering that Scratch had spit-shined the place until it just about glowed.
Over and over again, he kept saying “Thank you, Miz Dell,” “This is so nice, Miz Dell,” “I sure do appreciate it, Miz Dell,” until I wanted to tell him to shut up about it. Truth was, I was ashamed of what I was feeling and didn’t know how to stop, and being thanked half to death didn’t do nothing to make me feel any better about myself.
After we were done, Boone came back to the house with me for meatloaf sandwiches and potato salad, and that’s when the trouble really started.
“What’s going on with you, Dell?” he said before I’d gotten down the first bite of my sandwich.
I should have expected it. Boone and I had always been pretty direct with one another, and when I wasn’t being totally honest with him, he’d spot it and nail me to the wall in a heartbeat. It was one of the things I loved most about him, and about our relationship.
Except for today.
I swallowed hard and finally got the meatloaf down. “What do you mean?”
He laid aside his fork and looked at me. “Something’s bothering you. I can tell. You’re not yourself lately.”
I tried to laugh it off. “Who have I been, then? Somebody gorgeous and sexy, I hope. Like Marilyn Monroe.”
Boone shook his head. “Don’t try to joke your way out of this. Just tell me. Be honest.”
I gave up. “All right. I’ll tell you. The truth is I don’t like myself very much right now.” I poured it all out—my gut-level response to Marvin Beckstrom in the cafe, and the fact that I couldn’t bring myself to tell him off. How I felt like a coward and a racist, and my ambivalence about trusting Scratch, even though he had been a model of trustworthiness so far. “God help me, Boone, it galls me to think that Beckstrom might be right for once in his sorry life, but I can’t help wondering. Why, all of a sudden, am I feeling like this? I’ve never been the suspicious type. I always take people as they are—leastwise, I think I do—but here I am feeling nervous and anxious and afraid, and even worse, looking in the mirror and seeing this person I don’t recognize half the time.”
He sat back in his chair. “Makes perfect sense to me.”
I gaped at him. “What?”
“Well, just think about it for a minute.”
He ate his sandwich and finished his potato salad, watching me. The clock over the stove tick-tocked loudly in the silence, like a dripping faucet that gets on your nerves so bad it makes you want to scream.
I tried to ignore it, but it seemed to get louder with every passing second. And then the lightbulb clicked on. I’d been trying to ignore something else, too, something that kept nagging at me in the back of my mind, and even though I had tried to distract myself with busyness, it hadn’t gone away. And wouldn’t, until I fixed the drip.
“Chase,” I said at last. “This isn’t about Scratch at all. It’s about Chase.”
“Bingo.” Boone grinned. “Go on.”
“It’s about living a whole lifetime with a man I trusted, and then finding out he wasn’t worth the trust. He betrayed me. And somebody else betrayed me, too, although I don’t know who she is. Maybe it’s somebody I see every day, somebody I’ve known forever. Somebody who comes into the cafe, or passes me on the street and says hey, or sits next to me in the pew on Sunday. Maybe it’s somebody I think of as a fri
end.”
Boone nodded. “And if you can’t trust a friend, how can you trust someone who shows up out of nowhere in the middle of the night?”
I wouldn’t exactly call it an epiphany—maybe more like an epiphanette. It did help me feel a little less guilty about being suspicious of Scratch. But it didn’t address the deeper problem, the shadow side of my own self that had reared its ugly head.
I still didn’t know who Chase had been with that day. Didn’t know who I could trust—who was a friend, and who might be an enemy.
And I realized that on another level, I didn’t really trust myself, either. If I could be such a bad judge of character as to live with a man for thirty years and not understand his true nature, then how could I think I understood anything at all? On my bad days I felt worthless, rejected, duped, and generally stupid. On my good days I felt as emotionally wrung out as a damp dishrag.
The epiphanette was worth something, I suppose. But there’s a big difference between identifying the drip and fixing the leak.
• 12 •
Once word got out about the Heartbreak Cafe, the days started taking on an order of their own. Boone and I once had a long and very interesting discussion about the body’s internal clock, based on something called circadian rhythms, and although I don’t recollect all the details about the evolution of that biological clock and which part of the brain controls it all, I could see it working in the folks who came into the cafe.
The truckers and Fart’s buddies from Tenn-Tom Plastics showed up when I opened at six-thirty and usually stayed until seven-thirty or quarter to eight. Boone came in for breakfast just about the time the truckers were heading out. There was a lull from about nine-thirty to eleven, and then the old folks started wandering in for lunch. The place would be full until early afternoon, when ladies doing their shopping would come in for coffee and pie. A handful of folks would regularly show up for a late lunch and hang around until I ran them out at two-thirty.
It got to where I could just about guess, when the bell over the door rang, who was gonna be standing there and where they’d sit and what they were likely to order. We’re all creatures of habit, and if you don’t believe it, look around at church on a Sunday morning. Chances are you sit in the same spot so often that your buttprint is permanently embedded in the pew.
But I wouldn’t have predicted that on a Friday morning early in September Purdy Overstreet would make the first of her visits to the Heartbreak Cafe.
Purdy was a girlhood friend of Mama’s, eighty years old and living at the St. Agnes nursing home. I hadn’t seen her since Mama’s funeral nearly five years ago, but I knew she had Alzheimer’s and kinda floated in and out of her right mind. I remembered her as tiny and frail, with a heart-shaped face framed by a halo of wispy white hair. A sweet soul with no children of her own, she used to invite me over to make sugar tea cakes when I was a little girl.
It was quarter to eleven, the slow time between breakfast and lunch. I was in the kitchen stirring up gravy to go with the roast beef. Scratch was clearing tables and serving coffee. The only customers left from breakfast were Hoot Everett, who was sitting in the first booth by the door mopping up fried eggs with a crust of his toast, and a couple of women from Alabama who’d stopped for gas on their way through to Tupelo.
The bell jingled and the door opened. I looked up. For a minute I didn’t know who it was, but I had the fleeting sensation that I’d been caught up by the nape of the neck and set down in the middle of a circus.
It was Purdy Overstreet, all right, but not the Purdy I remembered. Not the Purdy with the sweet wrinkled face and the cotton-candy hair. This Purdy had flaming orange locks and a big red mouth painted on way past her ordinary lip line. She was wearing a black leather miniskirt, which showed legs that went practically up to her neck, with fishnet stockings and three-inch heels, a spangled electric-blue tank top, and a yellow feather boa.
Everybody stared. Purdy seemed to take this as her cue, and she began to sing: “Her name was Lo-la, she was a show-girl . . .” She cha-cha’ed her way into the restaurant, slapped a brightly manicured hand to her stomach, and began a series of tottering twirls.
I pulled my gravy off the stove and hightailed it toward the door. But I was too late. Purdy slipped and began a slow-motion fall, still singing at the top of her lungs.
Scratch lurched toward her and caught her just as her feet went out from under her. I held my breath. In Purdy’s day, a black man never touched a white woman. Never. But here she was, leaning back in Scratch’s burly arms.
She looked up into his face, and then, remarkably, she laughed. “Dip me, baby!” she shouted, throwing her boa around his neck.
He smiled, and dipped her, and set her gently back on her feet.
By that time I was across the restaurant and at her side. “Thanks,” I murmured under my breath to Scratch, and to Purdy I said, “Are you all right?”
She steadied herself, narrowed her eyes, and glared at me. “Who the hell are you?”
I guided her over to a booth and helped her slide in. “I’m Dell Haley, Purdy. Don’t you remember? I’m Lillian’s daughter.”
“Lillian’s daid!” she yelled. “Lillian’s daid, and I don’t know you!”
“It’s all right, Purdy,” I soothed, patting her hand. She jerked it back as if she’d been snake-bit. I sat down across the booth from her. “Do you want me to call somebody, Purdy? Somebody at St. Agnes?”
“What I want is for you to get me a drink!” She smacked her hand down flat on the tabletop. “Can’t a girl get a drink around here?”
Scratch eased over, set a glass of sweet tea in front of her, and replaced the feather boa around her neck. She beamed up at him. “Thank you, baby.”
“You’re welcome,” he said.
She winked at him. “I get off at five. Why don’t you meet me at the stage door? We’ll go out on the town and have ourselves some fun.”
I looked past Purdy to the next booth, where Hoot Everett was gaping at us, egg yolk dribbling down his stubbly chin. “What are you staring at?” I said.
He came to his senses, blinked his rheumy eyes, and shook his head. “Hot damn,” he said. “That’s one fine mama.”
“Keep your shirt on, Hoot. This is Purdy Overstreet, and she’s eighty years old.”
“What the hell difference does that make?” he demanded. “I’m eighty-three, and I ain’t dead yet.” He let out a wheezing little guffaw. “And you’re right, Dell. She is purdy. ’Bout the purdiest thing I seen in a coon’s age.”
Purdy twisted in the booth and looked over her shoulder at Hoot, contorting her painted lips into a grotesque and exaggerated smile. “Sorry, honey, I’ve already got me a date. But you’re right cute.” She cut her eyes toward Scratch. “Not as cute as him, but you’ll do in a pinch.”
She turned back in my direction and twisted the boa in her clawlike fingers. “You still here?”
“I’m still here,” I said. “You stay put and I’ll get somebody from St. Agnes to come get you.”
“Agnes?” she yelled. “Agnes was my mama, and she sure as hell weren’t no saint!” She slurped at her tea. “Besides, she’s daid, too.”
Purdy was right. Her mama’s name was Agnes, and she had died when I was in junior high. From all accounts around town, Agnes Overstreet was about as far from sainthood as you could get without actually doing a deal with the Devil.
Behind her, Hoot Everett had shifted to the other side of his booth and was now craning his neck to get a better look. “Lemme buy you lunch, Purdy,” he crooned.
She snapped around. “Ain’t I told you, I already got a date? Besides, I got money.” She jerked open a small beaded evening bag and pawed through it, coming up with lipstick, a gold compact, various bits of string and balls of lint, a wad of rubber bands, a handful of assorted pills, and a twenty-dollar bill. “See there? Just like I said.” She waved the twenty in my face. “So, is this a restaurant, or not? You gonna sit there like a
stump, or you gonna get me something to eat?”
Scratch appeared again, this time with a pad and pen in hand. “What would you like, Miss Purdy?” he asked in a tone befitting a tuxedoed maitre d’. “Would you like to hear our specials?”
Her demeanor changed instantly. Her face went all soft, and her eyes fixed on Scratch’s face as if she’d never seen anything quite so beautiful. “Yes, please.”
“For the soup we have chicken corn chowder. Our entrees are roast beef with mashed potatoes, or baked chicken with dressing. You also get your choice of three vegetables from the list on the board, and either biscuits or cornbread.”
“Better give me the chicken and dressing,” Purdy said. “Roast beef gives me gas.”
While Purdy was eating her lunch under the watchful gaze of Hoot Everett, I made a quick call to Jane Lee Custer, the head honcho out at St. Agnes.
“Thank heavens,” said Jane Lee with obvious relief. “We were about to call out the National Guard. Couldn’t figure where she might have wandered off to.”
“Well, I got her. I’ll keep her here for the time being.” I hesitated. “She’s eating lunch. That’s okay, isn’t it? I mean, she’s not on a special diet or anything?”
“Lord, no, she’s healthy as a horse,” Jane Lee said. “To tell the truth, she wouldn’t have to be here at all if she had anybody to take care of her. She’s not a danger to herself, she just drifts from time to time, that’s all.”
Hoot Everett seemed right disappointed when Jane Lee showed up to take Purdy home. “I coulda done it,” he said. “Got my truck right outside.”
I gave him one of my looks. “Hoot, anybody who’d get in a car with you would have to be off their rocker.”
He shrugged and handed over a five spot for his breakfast. “Well then, I reckon maybe she’s just about the perfect woman.”
Purdy paid for her lunch and tucked everything back into her evening bag. “Thank you, Dell,” she said, and reached up to pat my cheek. “You’ve grown into a fine young woman. You tell your mama I said hey.”
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