Heartbreak Cafe

by Penelope Stokes J.

  I looked him over. Jape was what Mama used to call “no-count,” and Mama wouldn’t speak ill of the Devil unless you forced her to give an opinion point-blank. The man was sixty, maybe, thin and twisted as a string of barbed wire, and almost as dangerous if he’d been drinking. This morning his eyes were bleared and bloodshot, and he reeked to high heaven, but far as I could tell, he was more or less sober.

  “What can I do for you, Jape?” I blocked the entrance with my body, tensed for fight or flight. No point in taking chances.

  “Wondered if you might be able to help me out, Dell,” he said. He craned his neck and peered over my shoulder, where Scratch towered like the not-so-Jolly Black Giant, fists clenched and hands on his hips.

  Jape jerked his gaze back to me. “Had me some tough times of late,” he said. “Got to have a operation—” He pulled up his pants leg to reveal a large lumpy tumor on his calf, full of greenish pus and oozing.

  I’m not the squeamish type, but I turned my eyes away anyhow.

  “So I’s wondering if you might be able to lend me a twenty till my next gover’ment check comes in.”

  In the old days, when Mississippi was a dry state, Jape earned a substantial living running a bootleg operation out of his shack down on the river. Everybody knew about it—heck, the smell of corn liquor hung so strong in the air that it made the birds drunk just to fly over. The sheriff at the time, Mose Braden, didn’t just turn a blind eye; he was down there almost every Saturday night, loading up the trunk of the squad car with moonshine in mason jars.

  With the repeal of the liquor laws in the late sixties, Jape’s income had dried up, but unfortunately he hadn’t. For the last thirty years or so, he’d been begging and odd jobbing and (some thought) stealing his way through a hand-to-mouth existence while the liquor store at the county line happily cashed his disability check on the first of every month.

  I glanced back to make sure Scratch was still standing guard. He was. “I don’t have any money, Jape,” I said. “But if you’ll wait a minute, I’ll get you a plate of food.”

  Mama believed that compassion was never wasted, even on the wasted. I’d grown up watching her fix up a plate for some poor migrant worker sitting on the back stoop, or a day laborer with an empty pail. And although it didn’t come so natural to me, I reckoned I could follow Mama’s example.

  Scratch kept an eye on him while I went back to the kitchen and filled a to-go box with yesterday’s leftover fried chicken and cornbread.

  “Thanks,” he muttered, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye, and it was pretty obvious he’d rather have the twenty to spend on a day’s ration of Thunderbird.

  When Jape took off to hit up some other sucker for money, I left Scratch to tend to things at the Heartbreak Cafe and went to the Curl Up and Dye to get my hair done. I reckoned I’d have to introduce myself to DeeDee Sturgis, it had been so long since I’d had a good cut.

  DeeDee’s beauty parlor was the kind of place where time seems to stand still, no matter how fast the hands of the clock keep on moving. This particular morning Stella Knox was there, and Rita Yearwood, and Brenda Unger. Something inside me lurched and staggered, and suddenly I was flung back into last spring, into a rerun of the day I found out Chase was cheating on me.

  “How you doing, honey?” DeeDee asked as she ran her fingers through my hair and scowled at me in the mirror.

  “All right, I suppose,” I said. “Hanging in there.”

  “Restaurant business is going like a house afire, from what I hear,” Rita yelled above the noise of the hair dryer.

  I turned my head toward her just as DeeDee snipped, and I heard a muttered curse behind my head. I looked down to see a huge chunk of hair—my hair, brown laced with gray—on the floor to one side of the swivel chair.

  “Dang, DeeDee,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “Well, you moved. Hold still; I gotta even it up. And don’t jerk like that again less you want a notch taken out of your ear.”

  I forced myself to face the mirror and resumed my conversation with Rita. “We’re doing pretty good,” I said. “Making ends meet, anyway.”

  It wasn’t the whole truth—not even half. Every single day I walked the razor’s edge between solvency and bankruptcy, but I wasn’t inclined to flaunt my financial dirty laundry at the Curl Up and Dye.

  Stella Knox was sitting under the dryer hood next to Rita, still reading the tabloids and looking like she’d never moved an inch since the day Chase died. “Got yourself a new helper, too,” she said. “I been told Purdy Overstreet’s right sweet on him.” She raised an eyebrow. “Course, Purdy can’t be faulted; she’s not playing with all her marbles.”

  “Purdy’s just old,” I said. “She forgets things.”

  “Forgotten where she left her mind, most likely,” Stella said. “She ain’t right.”

  “I’d have to agree with Stella.” DeeDee flourished the scissors in midair. “If Purdy had all her faculties, she wouldn’t be flouncing around in those miniskirts and dyeing her hair and throwing herself at a black man.”

  “Black or not, he’s right easy on the eyes,” Rita shouted.

  “Rita, keep your voice down; you want the whole town to hear?” Stella picked up a copy of Soap Opera Digest and swatted Rita with it.

  “I don’t care who hears,” Rita said. “He is good-looking. Like that Denzel Washington.”

  I bit my tongue and kept quiet. Scratch looked nothing in the world like Denzel Washington except that he was black.

  “What’s he like, Dell?” Rita said.

  “Yeah, tell us,” Stella said. “If I was a widow, I’d never in my life have the courage to hire somebody like that, right off the street. I’d be scared out of my wits. I’d never know if I could trust him not to bash my head in and steal my diamonds.”

  “Dell doesn’t have any diamonds,” DeeDee said, and smiled at my reflection as if she’d just uttered a helpful and supportive comment.

  Rita waved a hand. “That’s beside the point. The point is, Dell’s sitting here getting a new haircut while he’s over there at the cafe running things.”

  I hate it when people talk about me like I’m the Invisible Woman.

  “Is he running things when you’re not there?” Stella asked. “You trust him with the cash?”

  “Yes, I trust him,” I said. “He’s a hard worker, and a very kind man, and he’s never given me any reason to suspect him.”

  Even to my own ears this sounded like a canned speech, a pat defense. No matter what I said in public, I was still aware of a momentary hesitation inside me whenever I thought about Scratch, the kind of jerk that sends you off balance, like missing the last step on the staircase. Not enough to land you flat on your face, but enough to make you gasp a little and think about it twice the next time.

  “Well, I’d keep an eye on him if I were you,” Rita said. “Whatever else he is, he’s still a man.”

  “You saying men can’t be trusted?” DeeDee said.

  Rita laughed. “Sure, you can trust ’em. About as far as you can throw ’em.”

  Everybody got real quiet, and nobody looked me in the eye. We were back to Chase, to the unfaithful husband, to the dead cheater who left his wife with no money and no answers.

  And through it all, Brenda Unger sat leafing through a copy of People magazine with Denzel’s picture on the cover, not saying a word.

  DeeDee ran a hand through my hair. “All done, hon. Tell me what you think.”

  For the first time I looked in the mirror—really looked. The woman who stared back at me wasn’t anybody I recognized. Her hair was cut short and chunky and spiked up all over the top. She looked like an aging punk rocker, minus the purple highlights. Goth meets AARP.

  “Good Lord a-mercy, DeeDee, what have you done?”

  “It’s the style.”

  “It’s insane. I’m fifty years old, DeeDee.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t have to look fifty. Besides, once that big chunk was out
of it, I had to do something. And consider it this way: You haven’t changed your hairstyle in twenty years. It was about damn time for a new look. This will be so easy, perfect for working at the cafe. You get out of the shower, run a little spiking gel in there, mess it up, and bingo! You’re finished.”

  “I look like I just got out of bed.”

  “Right,” DeeDee said.

  “I think it’s cute,” Rita said. “Maybe if you’d looked like that before—”

  Stella punched her in the ribs to shut her up, but not in time. The rest of the sentence hovered low and threatening, like a storm cloud, like the ghost of unfinished business:

  If you’d looked that cute before Chase died, maybe he wouldn’t have cheated.

  • 15 •

  That afternoon I managed to corner Purdy and tried to talk to her about what she knew, but it wasn’t easy, between Hoot hanging over her shoulder like a vulture and Purdy turning on the charm every time Scratch got within spitting distance. The most I got out of her was a cryptic message that sounded like it came from a crystal ball session at Madame Celestine’s Fortune-Telling Salon: “Look to your friends, Dell Haley. Look to those you trust.”

  Then she grinned at me, clacked her false teeth, and said, “I like your haircut, Dell. Reminds me of a dead porcupine I found once when I was a little girl.”

  I did my best to ignore the comment about the hair, but try as I might, I couldn’t fathom how to interpret her words concerning trust. Did she mean I shouldn’t trust the people I thought were trustworthy? Or that I needed to trust them more than I did?

  Besides that, I had no idea who I could trust. In six months my life had gone from simple and predictable, even boring, to impossibly complicated. I felt like I was crossing a ravine on a bridge paved with eggs, some of them hard-boiled and some of them raw, and not knowing from one second to the next when or where I was gonna break through. Or whether the breakthrough would turn out to be a blessing or a curse.

  Fall sneaked up on Chulahatchie slowly, hesitantly, as it usually does in the South, like a cat stalking a bird and knowing it’s got to stay invisible or it’ll give itself away. Warm days, then a hint of a chill, and back up to the seventies again. Step, pause, step.

  Some of my neighbors had already set out carved jack-o’ lanterns on the porch for Halloween, but in my experience those things were gonna stink to high heaven long before the trick-or-treaters arrived. You could almost see them rotting in the sun, caving in on their gruesome grins like toothless old men.

  Most folks thought of fall as heavy and spicy and smelling of pumpkin and cinnamon, but this time of year always put me in mind of a soufflé, so delicate and fragile, rising high and yellow and fragrant. Somehow I wanted to tread softly, not peek too often, not shake things up, delaying the moment when autumn would collapse inward upon itself into a gray and rainy winter.

  The collapse, of course, couldn’t be avoided. I could keep quiet and hold my breath, hoping to delay the inevitable, but still I expected it, braced myself for it.

  What I didn’t expect was that the collapse would be an emotional one, or that it would come through Fart Unger.

  The Heartbreak Cafe was empty. Hoot and Purdy had done their little ritual dance of advance and rejection and gone their separate ways; Peach Rondell had closed her secret journal and returned to her mama’s house. Scratch was cleaning the kitchen. I’d already turned the sign on the door to read CLOSED, but hadn’t yet locked it. When the bell jingled, I looked up to see Fart standing in the doorway, his bald head almost touching the lintel.

  My inner circadian clock gave a jerky little spasm. Fart didn’t come in the afternoon; he came early in the morning for breakfast with the other guys from Tenn-Tom Plastics. He was supposed to be at work, standing in the guardhouse at the front gate in his dark blue uniform with the plastic name badge clipped on the front. But here he was, in jeans and a blue sweatshirt that said World’s Greatest Dad across the front, so tall and lanky and bowlegged that he looked like a pair of pliers sheathed in denim.

  “Dell,” he said. “I know you’re supposed to be closed, but—”

  “Come on in.” I motioned him over, put down my wiping rag, and came out from behind the counter. “You want some coffee? There’s still half a pot left.”

  “Yeah, that’d be great.”

  He dragged himself over to a booth, slid in, and waited while I retrieved two mugs and the last slice of pumpkin pie. Even with Hoot Everett’s cataracts I coulda seen something was wrong. Shoot, I coulda seen it blindfolded at midnight.

  I sat down opposite him and waited. I didn’t have to wait long.

  “I gotta talk to somebody, Dell, and you’re the only person I could think of who might understand.” Fart ran a hand over his shiny head, the way bald men often do. “It’s Brenda.”

  A sudden fear clenched at my insides. I hadn’t spent much time with Brenda since Chase died, even though as couples we’d always been close. But I’d been so tied up getting this restaurant off the ground, and besides that, things change when you suddenly become a widow. Even under the best of situations, married friends tend to drift away, not knowing what to do with half a couple, what to say, how to act. And God knows the circumstances of Chase’s death didn’t make anybody more comfortable.

  Still, the four of us had been friends for years, and I loved them both. I reached across the table and touched Fart’s hand. “What is it, Fart? Is she sick?”

  He shook his head, and I could see his Adam’s apple working in his neck as he tried to swallow. “She wants a divorce.”

  “What?”

  This was the last thing I expected. Cancer, maybe. A lump in the breast. A shadow on the ultrasound, something borderline abnormal in the blood work that needed to be investigated further. All the things women our age dreaded whenever we went for an annual physical or a mammogram.

  But not a divorce. And especially not Fart and Brenda.

  They were the perfect couple, made for each other. She was outgoing and a tad flamboyant; he was solid and stable and absolutely adored her. They had two boys and a girl, all married and on their own now. A new grandbaby. Fart’s sweatshirt told it all. World’s Greatest Dad. World’s Greatest Mom. World’s Greatest Marriage.

  He answered my first question before I had a chance to ask it.

  “She had an affair, Dell,” he said miserably. Right before my eyes his face aged with the pain of it, crumpled in on itself like a wad of paper. “She admitted it, only she wouldn’t tell me details, who it was, or when, or even why. She just said she wasn’t happy, and needed something. Something else.”

  “Well, good Lord,” I blurted out. “Whatever happened to chocolate, or a new pair of shoes?”

  That broke the tension a little bit, and he laughed, but the laughter quickly turned to a stifled sob, and his hand was shaking so bad that he sloshed coffee onto the table. He mopped it up with his napkin and avoided looking at me.

  “Did you have any clue? Any signs?”

  I could see a muscle working in his jaw. His Adam’s apple bobbed again—once, twice. “Maybe I shoulda known. She ain’t been the same for months now, maybe almost a year, since she started going through the change. Real grouchy, you know, always picking a fight about nothing. But I just thought that was . . . well, normal.” He shrugged. “Then she just up and springs it on me that she wants a divorce, that she’s realized how short life is, and the idea of living with me for the rest of it—”

  He couldn’t go on. Instead he attacked the pie, downed half of it in three bites, and struggled to swallow. “Good pie, Dell,” he grunted.

  I make a really excellent pumpkin pie—not the bland orange kind, but my grandmother’s recipe, rich and firm and brown, spiced with cinnamon and cloves and nutmeg and ginger. It was one of Fart’s favorites, but I was pretty sure his compliment was automatic; he hadn’t tasted a bite. I sympathized. I could barely get the coffee down, and I was only drinking it to give myself something to do.
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br />   Fart was right. I did understand. I knew exactly what it felt like to be betrayed, to live with unanswered questions, to feel your whole world crash in around your head and come out of it dazed, like the survivor of a tornado when your house has been reduced to rubble. You can see the swath where the storm went through, but nothing you thought you knew looks even remotely familiar anymore. You can’t think what to do or where to go or what your next step should be. All you can do is stand in the ruins and stare.

  I knew all this, knew it intimately, like looking in the mirror, and yet I couldn’t help the next question that came out of my mouth. “So what now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It was the only answer he could give, and I didn’t expect anything else. I also knew—or suspected—that this couldn’t be fixed, but something inside me made me want to try anyway.

  “Fart, we’ve been friends for a very long time. I’d like to go talk to Brenda. Would that be okay with you?”

  His jaw dropped, and he gaped at me, flabbergasted that I’d ask him such a question. “You don’t need my permission to talk to anybody.”

  “Yeah, I do,” I said. “You’ve told me this in confidence. If you want it to stay here, between the two of us, that’s what I’ll do. If I go talk to Brenda, she’s going to know where it came from.”

  “You think she’ll listen to you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m gonna say. I might make it worse by meddling in it.”

  “Can’t get much worse, can it?” He gave a sarcastic little grunt of a laugh. “Go on, Dell. Meddle away. You’re a woman. Maybe you can talk some sense into her.”

  He got up and fished in his back pocket for his wallet. I waved him off. “It’s on the house.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “And thanks for listening. Something tells me I’m gonna be in here a lot more often. No matter how bad things get, a man’s gotta eat.”

  I left Scratch to close up the restaurant and went straight out to the Ungers’ little brick bungalow on the south side of town. I had to ring the doorbell five times before Brenda finally opened up.