Heartbreak Cafe

by Penelope Stokes J.

  I looked into her eyes, bright and blue and clear. She was still in there somewhere, rising to the surface now and again. The sweet old Purdy with her soft-spoken ways and her sugar tea cakes, never mind the orange hair and the fishnet hose.

  “I’ll tell her, Purdy.”

  When she reached the threshold, she turned and raised a hand, like Miss America waving to the crowds. “You be waiting for me backstage,” she called to Scratch. “I’ll be back in time for the second show.”

  I headed toward the kitchen, but apparently she wasn’t done. Not quite yet. She slung the yellow feather boa across her shoulder and pointed a crooked, twiggy finger in my direction. “Dell!” she said. “We ought to have us a talk about Chase.” She gave a quick nod and fixed me with a sharp, beady eye. “I know. I know it all.”

  The bottom dropped out of my stomach. And then she turned and left, clutching Jane Lee’s arm, still waving, still dragging the feather boa behind her.

  • 13 •

  After that, Purdy showed up at the Heartbreak Cafe most every afternoon, but when she seemed to be in her right senses, I didn’t get a chance to talk to her, and the other ninety percent of the time, it was no use.

  Half the day every day, Hoot Everett laid claim to the second booth on the left, watching for her. Hoot had it bad, that much was clear. He mighta been half blind, but his vision took on some kind of miraculous recovery when she came through the door. Faith healing, maybe. Or the power of love. Whatever it was, he had that cocker-spaniel-puppy look on his face, which on a sappy seventeen-year-old boy is bad enough, but on a crusty eighty-year-old man is downright creepy.

  Purdy, unfortunately, had eyes only for Scratch. She flirted shamelessly with him and tried to get him to dance with her so often that I finally got in the habit of turning the radio off as soon as I saw her coming.

  But Scratch treated her with a gentle kindness that amazed me, because on her bad days Purdy could be downright nasty. I had to keep reminding myself of the other Purdy, the one who was Mama’s good friend for all those years. Once, when she smashed her chicken and dumplings into the floor, I had to excuse myself and take refuge in the kitchen to keep from losing my composure completely.

  “She’s just old,” Scratch reminded me. “Old and confused and probably scared, too. She don’t mean no harm. It’s just when people get old, they lose their ability to sort things out and know how to act. She’s like a little child throwin’ a temper tantrum right now. You’ll see, she’ll forget all about it in ten minutes.”

  “How do you do it, Scratch?” I asked, searching his dark eyes for an answer. “You’re so good with her. It’s like you see inside and know what’s going on in that addled brain of hers.”

  He shrugged. “I had me a mama once. Had me a baby girl, too. Reckon I learned a few things along the way.”

  It was the closest Scratch had ever come to revealing anything personal about himself. But it got me thinking. Not about the mama part; everybody’s got a mama. But about the little girl, and the wife, maybe, who hovered like a ghost in the background even if he didn’t mention her. A whole life I knew nothing about.

  I reckon everybody’s got their shadows.

  It was a Tuesday afternoon the last week of September; Purdy Overstreet had come and gone, and Hoot had left shortly after. Scratch was in the back room checking inventory, and there was only one customer in the place when Boone came in.

  “I didn’t expect to see you here,” I said. “Late lunch?”

  “No, the library business was kind of slow today, and I just decided to take half a day off. Jill’s a good assistant; she can handle things.”

  I brought him coffee and pie and sat with him, glad for a chance to talk. I told him about Purdy’s mysterious declaration—her claim that she “knew it all” about Chase.

  “I wouldn’t put too much credence in what Purdy says,” Boone warned. “You know how she is.”

  “I know she’s not there most of the time, if that’s what you mean,” I said. “But Boone, every now and then she comes back, and I get the feeling she really does know something.”

  “Look,” he said, pushing aside his pie and taking my hand across the table, “I’m aware that Purdy was a good friend of your mama’s, and I know you spent a lot of time with her when you were little—”

  “You didn’t know her, Boone,” I interrupted. “Not the way I knew her. I remember listening to her talk. She knew everything that went on in this town. And she wasn’t a gossip, either, she just . . . well, she understood. She saw things other people didn’t see. Looking back, I guess I’d say she was wise. Maybe the wisest woman I ever knew.”

  “But most of that’s gone,” Boone said. “Besides, this isn’t about what Purdy knows or doesn’t know. It’s about—”

  I finished his sentence for him. “It’s about my obsession with finding out who Chase was fooling around with.” God knows I’d heard it often enough—from him, from Toni. Both of them were at me all the time to let it go, to get on with life as it was.

  But letting it go was easier said than done. Maybe the two of them understood me better than anybody else, but there was a lot inside of me that they didn’t understand, that no one else could even get close to. The dreams I had about Chase and the faceless bimbo, both of them laughing at me. The sense of feeling less-than, inferior, unworthy of love and faithfulness.

  I’d already had me a talk with Chyna Lovett down at the sheriff’s office, the one who took the 911 call the night Chase died. Chyna shrugged her shoulders and fiddled with her nose ring and told me that nobody was on the line—nobody at all.

  Standard procedure, she said, when an emergency call came in: If no one responded, run a trace and send a team. Happened all the time. Usually it was a false alarm, but they couldn’t take that risk. Once, Chyna told me, an elderly woman fell in the bathtub, and her Pomeranian dialed the phone and barked until the EMTs arrived.

  Most likely Chase made the call himself, she said. Had the heart attack, called emergency, and then passed out and died before help could arrive.

  Logical as that might be, I wasn’t buying it. Someone else was there—I was sure of it. No matter what anyone said, I couldn’t get past the suspicions. I even wondered briefly, during my last haircut, if it might be DeeDee Sturgis. I knew for a fact Chase loathed DeeDee and thought she was an idiot. But that didn’t matter. Every woman in town seemed to be fair game, and my stomach stayed in knots most of the time.

  Boone was right, I’d be better off if I let it go. I’d sleep better, for sure, and I reckoned my digestion would improve if my gut wasn’t all tied up with anxiety. But sometimes what you know you oughta do, and what you can do, are two different things.

  I was just about to change the subject when Boone changed it for me.

  “I think I recognize that woman in the back booth,” he said. “Who is she?”

  I craned my neck and looked. She’d been coming in for a couple of days now, always at the same time and sitting in the same place, but I’d been so busy I hadn’t really had a chance to talk to her. Besides, she sent out signals that she didn’t want to be disturbed—really big signals, like emergency flares or Fourth of July fireworks. Head down, writing in a brown leather notebook, some kind of a journal, looking up only to signal for more coffee.

  “I believe that’s Peach Rondell,” Boone whispered.

  “You gotta be kidding.”

  “No, I really do think it’s her. I heard she came back to town a few months ago, but I hadn’t seen her.”

  “I wouldn’t have recognized her. She’s—”

  “Changed,” Boone said quietly.

  I woulda said fat. Boone’s answer was kinder.

  She had changed, all right. Peach Rondell, in her day, had been Chulahatchie’s golden child—wealthy, privileged, beautiful. Miss Ole Miss, Soybean Queen at the county fair. Second runner-up for Miss Mississippi.

  But that had been years ago. After high school she went to Mississippi
University for Women, which shocked the heck out of just about everybody. Two years later she transferred up to Ole Miss. She didn’t come home very often after that, and didn’t stay long when she did. Soon as she graduated, she moved away and got married and nobody had seen hide nor hair of her in more than twenty years.

  Her mama, Donna, still lived in the big mansion down at the end of Third Avenue, but since Donna ran with the antebellum/country club herd, I rarely laid eyes on her unless we passed on the street. She’d certainly never set foot in a place like the Heartbreak Cafe, where she might have to rub elbows with the working riff-raff.

  Peach was younger than me—she’d be in her forties now—but I remembered her with long blonde hair and a perfect complexion, exactly the kind of Barbie clone who could win beauty pageants and marry a jock and go on to be a model or a game show hostess like Vanna White.

  This, I thought, was definitely a peach gone bad. I wasn’t proud of thinking it, but I couldn’t help myself. Her face was round and puffy-looking, and if she was wearing makeup, it wasn’t doing a very good job of covering up the blotchy, uneven skin tone. Her hair was still long and blonde, but I could see an inch or two of dark roots, and she had it pulled back in a ponytail at the nape of her neck. She was wearing jeans and an old blue sweatshirt with raggedy cutoff sleeves and a faded Colonel Rebel on the front.

  “Dang,” I said. “Wonder if her mama knows she’s out in public looking like that.”

  Boone gave me the look—the reprimanding one that indicated I was being overly critical and borderline bitchy.

  “Well, what?” I said. “You know as well as I do what Donna Rondell would say about that hair and that outfit.”

  I was right, and he knew it. Shoot, everybody in Chulahatchie knew it. That woman had raised her little girl to be Miss America, and anything less was pretty much gonna be a disappointment—even being the Bean Queen and Miss Ole Miss. From the time she could walk, that child had been primped and prodded, primed and painted until it was hard to tell whether she was a little girl or a big old china-faced baby doll.

  And now here she sat in full view of the whole town, looking like something the cat dragged in, looking like Hulga-Joy Hopewell in that Flannery O’Connor story Boone had read me once. I reckoned Donna hadn’t seen her, or we’d have heard the ambulance sirens on their way to get her after her coronary.

  “We went to school together,” Boone said. “I asked her out once, to the junior prom.”

  I gaped at him. “Peach Rondell was your date to the junior prom?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t say she was my date. I said I asked her. As I recall, she ended up going with Cade Young.”

  “The football jock,” I said. “Figures. There’s a stereotype for you. The homecoming queen and the quarterback.”

  “He was a wide receiver,” Boone corrected. Now and again he’d come up with something that shot the gay theory all to pieces.

  “Doesn’t matter. It was still Ken and Barbie.”

  “She wasn’t really like that, you know. Looks can be deceiving. She was very smart, very creative.”

  I grinned at him. “Sounds like somebody’s burning a torch.”

  He gave me the look again. “That’d set this whole town talking, now wouldn’t it?”

  I got up, retrieved a fresh pot of coffee, and went back to the booth where Peach sat, still writing furiously in her journal.

  “Want a refill, Peach?”

  Her head snapped up, and in the same motion she shut the book with a slap. “What?”

  You didn’t have to be a genius to know she didn’t want anybody looking over her shoulder at what she was writing. She might as well have slung a chain around that book and padlocked it. I got the message loud and clear, and I took a step back.

  “I asked if you’d like more coffee.”

  “Oh. Yes, thanks.” She frowned up at me. “Do we know each other?”

  I poured. “I’m Dell Haley. I own this place. And it’s been a lotta years, but yes, we did know each other once. Not well—I was married by the time you started high school. But I reckon you remember Boone Atkins.” I pointed toward Boone, who waved.

  Peach waved back at him, and, apparently encouraged, he slid out of the booth and came to stand beside her table.

  “Hey, Peach,” he said. “Welcome home.”

  She was staring at him—people often did, when they hadn’t yet gotten used to how handsome he was. After a minute she came to and shook his hand. “You’ve got a Dorian Gray portrait hidden in your closet,” she said to him. “I can’t believe it—you look exactly the same.”

  “So do you, Peach,” he lied. “I’m really glad to see you.”

  “So what brings you back to Chulahatchie?” I asked. “Just visiting?”

  She exhaled a heavy sigh. “Actually, I’m going to be here awhile. Just some personal stuff. Since Daddy’s death, Mama needs me to help out more.”

  To my way of thinking, Donna Rondell wasn’t the type of woman who needed help of any kind, or would welcome it if it was offered. She might be seventy-something, but she was independent as an armadillo and twice as tough. Still, I didn’t say so. And although I was mighty curious about the “personal stuff” that brought Peach home, I didn’t ask that question either.

  Instead, I said, “I’m sorry about your daddy’s passing. I’m sure you’ll be a comfort to your mama.”

  “Thanks,” Peach said. “It’s been a difficult year.” Her eyes went a little watery, and I was sure there was something else going on back there, something that didn’t have to do with her daddy’s death. But I knew from hard experience that people have to work out their grief in their own way, and they don’t always appreciate being pushed to open a vein in public.

  Suddenly I felt ashamed of my catty remarks, that shadow side of me that kept rearing up when I least expected it. I oughta know by now that there’s more to people than meets the eye. Every living soul’s got something to hide, something to wrestle with.

  Peach ran a hand over the brown leather cover of her writing book. “I hope you don’t mind me taking up space in your booth,” she said. “I know I’ve been here awhile.”

  “You’re welcome to stay as long as you want. I quit serving at two, but I’ll be cleaning up and prepping for tomorrow until two-thirty or three.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I just need a place to—” She paused, as if unwilling to finish the thought.

  “To get away?” I nodded. “Well honey, you can get away to the Heartbreak Cafe any time you like. If you want to talk, I’ll be here, and if you want to be left alone, we can do that, too.”

  An expression of relief came over her face, almost like wonder—like it had been a coon’s age since anybody cared about what she felt or what she needed.

  Boone chatted with her for a few minutes and then left, promising to take me out to dinner on Sunday. Tomorrow’s entree was ham and scalloped potatoes, and I had a lot of peeling to do, but as I worked I kept an eye on Peach. She wrote in her book, cried a little, wrote some more.

  Scratch came out of the storeroom with the inventory list and looked at her across the restaurant. “Pretty lady,” he said.

  Why was it, I wondered, that everybody else was quicker than me to see below the surface? “Yes she is,” I said. “Very pretty.”

  “Friend of yours?”

  I pondered this for a minute. “I hope so, Scratch. I truly do hope so.”

  I watched her awhile longer, and couldn’t help wondering what she was writing—and why, when she left, she was clutching that book to her heart as if it was a lifeline, and without it she might sink and drown.

  • 14 •

  When you’re grieving, or in pain, or betrayed by life, folks always try to comfort you by saying that time heals all wounds. Nonsense. Time heals nothing. It’s what you do with the time that counts.

  The problem was, I had no clue what I ought to have been doing with the time. It had been six months since Chase died, a
nd except for Purdy Overstreet’s declaration that she knew something—something that was buried pretty dang deep inside that addled brain of hers—I was no closer to finding out who the woman was who had betrayed me with my husband.

  Once in a while I’d go a whole day without thinking about it, without consciously wondering. But at night, when I was too exhausted to push it down anymore, it would rise up in my dreams—odd dreams like mixed-up puzzle pieces. Sometimes it was pretty clear: Chase flashing his dimples at some faceless woman, a glimpse of his butt cheeks in those black silk bikini briefs. But other nights I wandered through a maze of hallways that looked like the corridors at the hospital, or through damp and dripping caverns that reminded me of the time we went to the Ozarks on vacation and toured the caves at Blanchard Springs. Either way, I couldn’t get out; I just kept wandering around in circles, trapped. I’d hear a voice whispering, “This way, come this way,” but when I followed it, I always came to a dead end.

  One bright autumn morning when business was a little slow, I was puttering in the kitchen, debating about going to all the work of making fried apple pies, when Scratch came and stood in the doorway.

  “There’s a man out here asking after you,” he said. “None too reputable-looking, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  I almost laughed. When I found Scratch, he was squatting in the apartment upstairs and eating out of my Dumpster. Seemed to me he didn’t have much ground to stand on when it came to being reputable.

  But I didn’t say so. Instead, I wiped my hands and went out into the restaurant.

  Scratch might not have known him, but everybody else in Chulahatchie did. It was Jape Hanahan, standing just inside the door, looking scruffier than ever with a week’s growth of dirty gray beard and wearing oily work pants and a ripped pullover hoodie with a skull and snake on the front.

  “Mornin’, Dell,” he said. That was all. Just “mornin’.”