My mind drifted back again, to the years with Chase and the memories that stuck out. The time he took me hunting—once. I shot a deer and then made the mistake of watching it die. Its eyes, liquid brown like melted chocolate or strong coffee, looked up at me as if to ask why, and then its head sank to the ground and the life drained out of its gaze. I went into the bushes and threw up my breakfast, and after that I couldn’t stop crying, sobbing as if I’d murdered my own child.
Chase, of course, didn’t have a clue. He acted like I ought to be proud of myself, like I ought to stuff the head and hang it on the wall. He field dressed the deer and took me home. I stayed in the shower scrubbing the guilt off until the water went cold, and never ate venison again.
Other adventures—the few we shared in thirty years of marriage—turned out a little better, at least for Chase. He planned our twentieth anniversary cruise all by himself, and I give him credit for trying. He just couldn’t keep his eyes off the bikini-clad beauties on the beach at Cozumel. I wasn’t much interested in being a substitute for his fantasy, and the trip back was pretty icy, despite the warmth of the Caribbean sunshine.
Had I been a good wife? I couldn’t help wondering. Maybe I was guilty of the same accusation I made against Chase. Maybe I just went my own way, lived in my own world, did my duty, and maintained the status quo.
But I wish it had been different. I wish I had been valued and appreciated. I wish I had spent more effort in loving the man I claimed to be in love with. I wish I had felt more loved.
I was so caught up in my own thoughts that it was a miracle I didn’t run the car into a ditch or end up in Podunk, Arkansas. When I pulled off at the exit to Chulahatchie and saw the Pump ’n Run, it was like swimming up to consciousness out of a deep dream.
Lord, it felt like I’d been gone for years, and like the last thing I ever intended to do was come back. But Chulahatchie looked just the same, the streets deserted on a Sunday afternoon. Christmas lights had gone up around the square in the week I’d been in Asheville; they looked pale and faded and sorry rather than festive. Somebody had put a Santa hat on the statue of the Confederate soldier and stuck a plastic poinsettia in the muzzle of his rifle.
I swung on around the circle and headed down toward the cafe. I oughta tell Scratch I was back, and see what kind of supplies we needed for breakfast tomorrow morning. Just thinking about it turned my heart to a lead weight in my chest.
And then, something I’d never expected.
The Heartbreak Cafe—my cafe—surrounded by yellow crime tape. The glass busted in, the door hanging off its hinges. The sheriff’s squad car parked out in front with its red and blue lights flashing.
In the doorway stood the sheriff himself, with both hands on his hips.
• 26 •
“Where the hell have you been?” the sheriff said.
I got out of the car and moved in a daze across the sidewalk to the doorway. “What happened?”
“Ain’t it obvious? There’s been a break-in.”
“A break-in?” I looked up at him, all grown up and big and bulky, nothing like the skinny little kid everybody called Runt in elementary school. His real name was Warren—Warren Potts—but when he’d become a law enforcement officer, he’d left that name behind. Now he was a bully with a badge, and everybody just called him Sheriff.
I entertained a brief, slightly hysterical image of his wife calling out, “Sheriff! Oh yes, Sheriff!” in the throes of passion, and couldn’t suppress a giggle.
He stared at me as if I’d lost my ever-lovin’ mind. “Answer me, Dell. Where you been?”
The question rankled me. “I went out of town for a few days, if it’s any of your business.”
“Well, you ought to have told somebody,” the sheriff said. “You just up and leave without a word, folks are gonna get upset. You coulda been kidnapped.”
Lord, I’d never heard anything so absurd. “Kidnapped? Who’d want to kidnap a middle-aged woman with nothing to her name but the Heartbreak Cafe? Look around, Sheriff. I’m not exactly ransom material. And if I want to pick up and go out of town without telling anyone, it’s nobody’s concern but my own. Besides that, Scratch knew I was gone. I gave him the keys to the place in case of emergency.”
“Scratch? The, uh, fella who works for you?”
“Yeah. He lives in the apartment upstairs.” I got a sinking feeling in my gut. “Where is he?” I said. “Have you talked to him?”
“Well now, that’s the other thing,” the sheriff said. “He’s gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“No sign of him. Apartment upstairs is empty. I reckon he took the money and ran.” He gave me a condescending, pitying look.
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. “I’m sure he’d never steal from me.”
But the truth was, I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure of anything anymore. How well did I know Scratch, anyway? How well did I know anybody—Toni, Boone, Chase, anyone?
Purdy Overstreet’s words echoed ominously in the back of my mind. “Look to your friends, Dell Haley. Look to those you trust.”
“I trust him,” I repeated, willing myself to believe it. Yet even as I said the words, I felt my stomach cave in, felt the emptiness, the aloneness, overtake me.
“Doesn’t matter. We’re pretty sure he’s our perp, and we’ll get him collared sooner or later.”
Under ordinary circumstances I would have laughed in his face. He sounded like a bad stereotype from a B-grade detective movie. Redneck Gumshoe.
I scrambled for a foothold, something to believe in. “Scratch had the keys,” I said. “Why would he break the door down when he’s got a key? And for that matter, why would anybody come through the front door, in full view of the square, when they could be totally secluded if they broke in from the back alley?”
“We figure he did it that way deliberately, to throw off suspicion. But we didn’t just fall off the turnip truck.”
I mighta taken issue with that, but something else was nagging at me. “Sheriff, why do you keep saying ‘we’?”
A movement just past the broken doorway caught my eye. “Somebody’s in there!” I said.
“Yeah.” He turned slightly. “Come on out. Miz Dell wants to talk to you.”
A large buggy head appeared behind the shattered windowpane. Marvin Beckstrom.
“What’s he doing in my restaurant?” I said. “What’s he got to do with this?”
Marvin stuck his hands in his pockets and jingled his keys. He took a breath and thrust out his chest. “In case you’ve forgotten, Dell, you’re a renter, not the owner of this building.”
“So?”
“So what happens here is my business, too. A crime has been committed on my property.”
“Your property? Don’t you mean the property of Chulahatchie Savings and Loan?”
““Not for long,” he said. “The property’s going up for sale the first of the year, and I plan to buy it. I’ll be your landlord then. Me, personally.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got a lease,” I said.
He smirked. “So you do. For the time being.”
“Dell,” the sheriff interrupted, “you need to cooperate here. Where would Scratch have gone?”
“How should I know?” I said. “I’m not his mama. Besides, you’re treeing the wrong possum. Scratch didn’t . . . wouldn’t—”
“You don’t sound so sure,” the sheriff said. “How much do you really know about this man, Dell? Did you know his real name is John Michael Greer? Or that he has an outstanding warrant against him?”
“A warrant?”
The sheriff nodded. “Parole violation. He was convicted of assault. Served five years. This parole violation sends him back to lockup.”
Marvin gave a smug grin and jingled his pockets again.
“He’s run once,” the sheriff went on. “Now looks like he’s on the lam again.”
I couldn’t take it all in, couldn’
t think. I still felt like I was in a bad B-movie, but the urge to laugh at it all had vanished. Assault. An arrest. A prison record. A whole secret life I knew nothing about.
And then in the midst of my shock, the truth about my own situation sank in. Cash register empty. Money gone. I had left in such a hurry on Saturday morning that I hadn’t gotten around to making the deposit from Thanksgiving week. No big deal, I thought. It would wait until I got back.
But it was more than a big deal. It was a disaster. I ran the cafe on a margin about as thin as a potato peeling, always right on the edge where a couple hundred dollars would make the difference between red ink or black. If the big deposit from last week was gone, I’d be digging those peelings out of the Dumpster.
“I’m gonna go now,” the sheriff said. “You hear from Greer, you need to call me, understand?”
“I understand.”
“Rent’s due next week; don’t forget.” Marvin gave me a superior twitch of his eyebrows. “And you better get that door replaced right away.”
I shot daggers at him but didn’t say all the rude things I was thinking. “I’m gonna call Fart Unger. He’ll fix it.”
They left, and I went inside. The lights were off, and the room was dim and chilly in the weak November light.
I slid into the booth at the back, the one where Peach Rondell always sat, and put my head in my hands. I thought about Peach, and about the forbidden journal entry I had read. I thought about Chase, and how he had betrayed me after thirty years. I thought about Toni and Boone, my best friends, who had deceived me. I thought about Fart and Brenda and their perfect marriage gone to pot. I thought about Scratch, and how gentle and good he had seemed, and I wondered where he was, and how a man like that could be a convicted criminal.
None of it seemed real. None of it seemed consistent with the people I thought I knew.
But none of that mattered right now.
I got up, went to the kitchen, and dialed the phone. But I didn’t call Fart Unger. The door could wait. I dialed Toni’s number, and held my breath.
• 27 •
Toni came through the door at a run, a hard, blazing expression on her face. She caught me up in a fierce hug, and held on for a long, long time. She didn’t seem to notice I wasn’t hugging back.
Over her shoulder I could see other faces—Boone, and Peach Rondell. Both looked worried and wounded.
“Are you okay?” Boone said when Toni released me.
“I think so.”
Toni smacked me on the shoulder. “God, woman, we were so worried about you. Why’d you go off like that, without telling anybody?”
“I needed to get away. To think.”
“Well, think about this: We’re your friends. We care about you. Don’t do it again, all right?”
“What happened here?” Boone said.
“Just what it looks like. Somebody broke in, took all the cash in the drawer, and maybe the whole till from last week, I don’t know yet.” I shut my eyes and gritted my teeth. “Scratch is missing. The sheriff thinks he’s the one who did it. And to top it all off, Marvin Beckstrom—himself, personally—is gonna be my landlord. He’s buying the place.”
Toni started muttering curses under her breath, but Boone ignored her. “What do we need to do, Dell?” he asked.
Think, I told myself. Think. But my brain wasn’t working. I hated the feeling of being helpless, some simpering Southern girl with an attack of the vapors. I was a fifty-year-old woman, for God’s sake, and ought to be able to take care of myself.
Peach Rondell rescued me from the spiral into despair. “Maybe the first thing we should do is try to find Scratch.”
“The police are looking for Scratch,” I said. “What makes you think we could find him first?”
“I don’t know, but we have to try,” she said. “Come on, Boone.”
And without further explanation, she grabbed Boone by the hand and hauled him out the door.
The door closed behind Peach and Boone—or rather, tried to close, because it was still hanging off its hinges like a broken bone—and suddenly I was left alone with Toni.
My best friend.
My betrayer.
She put an arm around me and led me to a booth. “I’ll make us some coffee. Do you want anything to eat?” She looked around. “There’s no pie, since you’ve been gone for a week, but I could probably scrounge up something from the pantry.”
I shook my head. “Couldn’t stomach a thing.”
What I couldn’t stomach was having to face her alone, not knowing what to say after a lifetime of telling her all my secrets. Acid roiled in my gut, and a terrifying sense of loss and loneliness overwhelmed me until I could barely breathe.
I was back there, in that dark and bottomless cavern, with no way to get out. Silence pressed in on me, a claustrophobic blackness from all my old nightmares.
I sat with my head in my hands until Toni slid in opposite me and pushed a mug of coffee in my direction.
“This must be awful for you,” she said. “A break-in is such a violation—”
Something inside me snapped, that internal censor that keeps you from saying something you’ll regret later. I couldn’t help myself. “Well, it’s sure not the worst violation I’ve ever endured.”
Toni stared at me. She seemed to be considering whether or not to speak what was really on her mind. The struggle was etched in the lines of her face, a pain that ordinarily would have elicited compassion from me.
But I didn’t care. I didn’t give a damn about anything she had to say to me.
And yet I had called her. When crisis struck, her face was the first one that rose to mind.
“We have some things to talk about,” she said at last.
“No, we don’t.”
“We sure as hell do,” she said, and her cheeks flushed with anger. “We’re stuck here, you and me, just like we’ve been stuck together since we were kids. We’re not going to sit here and glare at each other.”
“You don’t like it, there’s the door.” I pointed.
She looked around at the broken glass and the door hanging from a single hinge. “So to speak,” she muttered. “But not much of one anymore.”
Against my will, I laughed. It shattered the tension the way somebody’s fist or hammer or wrench had shattered the glass.
“That’s better.” Toni leaned forward and cradled her coffee mug in both hands. “Talk to me, Dell. Why are you doing this? Why, all of a sudden, are you shutting me out?”
I couldn’t believe she had the nerve to ask the question. “You know why. I know the truth.”
“I was going to tell you, Dell. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.” She cleared her throat and took a drink of her coffee. “How’d you find out?”
I was too full of righteous indignation to admit that I had violated Peach Rondell’s privacy and read her journal. “Never mind. Just tell me what happened.”
She shrugged. “You don’t want to hear this.”
“Damn!” I shouted. I pounded my fist on the table until half my coffee had sloshed onto the Formica. I came out with every blessed cuss word I could think of, and some that had never passed my lips in my fifty long years of life. Words my mama woulda scrubbed off my tongue with lye soap. “Shit, Toni. How can you be so . . . so . . . casual about it? You betrayed me with Chase. You slept with my husband!”
I railed on at her for a while until I ran out of words, and then I became aware of the fact that she wasn’t saying anything back. I looked up. She was smiling.
“Is that what you think? That I slept with Chase? That I was the one he was having an affair with?” Toni began to laugh—a low chuckle at first, and then a belly laugh so intense that tears streamed down her cheeks. “Oh my God, Dell,” she said when she could catch her breath enough to speak. “We were talking about Chase, right, and you said you were sure Brenda Unger was the one.”
“Yeah. And you said Brenda wasn’t having an affair with Chase. You kn
ew it for certain.”
Toni leaned forward and looked me straight in the eye. “Yes, I knew it for certain. But not because I had an affair with Chase.”
Like a flashbulb popping, the light went on. “You?” I said. “You and—”
“Yeah.” She ducked her head. “Me and Brenda.”
Unforgiveness is like hugging a cactus and wondering why you can’t quit bleeding.
I still had a few nettles sticking here and there, but that didn’t matter so much now that I had my best friend back.
The table between us was littered with the remains of sandwiches—Scratch’s famous comfort food of peanut butter, jelly, and Spam. We’d eaten a sandwich apiece and most of a bag of ripple chips, and now we were starting on some leftover chocolate pie Toni found in the freezer.
“So tell me more,” I said. I felt wickedly scandalous, being privy to the juicy details. “How did it happen?”
“It was nuts,” Toni said. “I ran into Brenda one evening at the Pump ’n Run. She seemed upset, and so naturally I tried to comfort her. We ended up driving over to Tuscaloosa, and drinking a whole bottle of wine while she spilled her guts about the feelings she was having and how as much as she loved Fart, she couldn’t stand the idea of going on with this charade. That was her word, charade. Seems she’d always felt like this—being attracted to women, I mean, but of course when we were growing up it was totally taboo.”
“No kidding,” I said. “All we ever heard were stupid fag jokes and preachers railing about how people ‘like that’ were going to hell.”
“Well, anyway,” Toni went on, “we’d had too much to drink to drive back to Chulahatchie, so we got a motel room, and . . .” She raised her eyebrows.
“So what was it like?” I said. “Details. Give me all the details.”
“Let’s just say things got real interesting real fast.”
“And you enjoyed it? But you’re not a . . . a—”
“A lesbian?” Toni laughed. “It’s okay to say the word, Dell. You don’t get cooties by saying the word.”
Heartbreak Cafe Page 16
