Heartbreak Cafe

by Penelope Stokes J.

  “Well, are you?”

  “No. But Brenda is. She told me she has felt this way all her life, and even though she loved Fart—still does—she married him because in our generation, that’s what you did. It didn’t ever seem natural to her.”

  “Then why—”

  “Why did it happen—Brenda and me? I don’t know. I care about her, of course. I was lonely. It felt good to have someone touch me. None of them very healthy reasons.”

  She shrugged. “Brenda and I talked about it, and she understands. She actually thanked me for giving her a safe place to find herself.”

  I looked at Toni and felt like I was seeing her for the first time. For one thing, I didn’t think my best friend capable of something like this, but it wasn’t judgment or disappointment in her. The way she explained it, it actually seemed like an act of friendship, a kindness. I was just amazed that you can know somebody so long and so well, and they’ll still surprise you now and again.

  “Besides,” Toni said, “I don’t think it’s all that cut and dried. I think most of us, given the right circumstances, could be attracted to a person of the same gender.”

  I lodged a protest at this, but it was a halfhearted argument, and I felt strangely and unexpectedly titillated.

  “Brenda made me promise I’d keep her secret,” Toni said. “I think for a while she was a little bit in love with me—or at least had an enormous crush. So I didn’t tell anybody, not even you, until I absolutely had to.”

  “Except Boone.”

  “Well, yes. I knew he’d understand. And I knew he’d keep his mouth shut.”

  “You know I will, too,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Toni grinned. “You haven’t spoken to me in weeks.”

  I remember once when I went to the doctor for X-rays, they made me wear a lead cape to protect the other organs from the radiation. It didn’t feel that heavy at first, but as I carried it around for a while, it seemed to weigh me down until I could barely stand.

  I’d borne this burden far too long, and it felt a pure relief to set it aside and go back to being friends with Toni. I’d missed her, and I was glad in that moment that she wasn’t the kind to hold a grudge or dangle forgiveness over my head like a guillotine.

  I’d almost forgotten about the break-in and the theft until I heard the honk of a car horn. I looked through the window and saw Peach’s little blue Honda pull up to the curb.

  Toni and I went to the doorway and waited. Peach and Boone got out and came in our direction.

  “No luck,” I said.

  “Don’t be so sure.” Toni pointed.

  A black-and-white pulled up behind the Honda, its red and blue lights flashing. It slowed down, honked again, and then headed toward the square. In the back seat, staring at me through the window, was a big muscular black man.

  Scratch had been found.

  • 28 •

  “I didn’t do it, Dell,” he said. He dropped into a chair and put his head in his hands.

  We stared at each other. His face was a scruff of coarse black stubble, and his eyes were bloodshot and weary. The pain and disappointment in his expression cut me to the quick, but I couldn’t bring myself to utter a single word of reassurance. Part of me wanted to reach out and comfort him, and another part of me recoiled, sensing danger and wanting to flee.

  “Why are they arresting you, then?”

  Silence stretched between us, broken only by the scrape of chair legs on the floor as the others drew up around the table in the interrogation room of the jail.

  The sheriff had allowed me and Boone and Toni to talk to Scratch, even though, as he reminded us twice, it was “against protocol.” I reckon he thought we’d have a better chance of getting a confession out of him, which would make the process of locking him up and throwing away the key that much easier.

  To my relief, Boone took over the conversation, because I had gone blank, and could think of nothing except the pain on Scratch’s face, the defeated angle of his shoulders, and my own suspicion, which ate at my insides like drain cleaner.

  “You got any idea what happened at the cafe?” Boone asked.

  Scratch shook his head.

  I gritted my teeth. “Then why’d you run away?”

  “I didn’t run. I was just away. Thinking.”

  I turned to the sheriff. “Where’d you find him?”

  “Why don’t you ask me?” he said, his voice full of reproach. “I hitched a ride out to the river camp. I didn’t think you’d mind. I didn’t go in the house, didn’t steal anything, if that’s what you’re worried about.” His eyes cut away. “I just sat on the dock.”

  “That’s where we caught up with him.” The sheriff nodded.

  “I wasn’t exactly trying to escape,” Scratch said. “And you didn’t find any money on me, did you?”

  At the mention of the money, my gut twisted. “Did you, by any chance, deposit last week’s till?” I asked.

  Scratch shook his head. “No, ma’am. I thought you’d done it before you left town.”

  I took in a deep breath and exhaled slowly, trying to fend off panic. At the Heartbreak Cafe, a week’s income could make the difference between staying afloat and sinking.

  “The sheriff said you had outstanding warrants,” Boone said, trying to get us back on track. “Something about a parole violation?”

  “No,” he said. “I mean, yes, I was on parole, but I’m done with it. There’s no violation, and the sheriff ought to damn well know that.” He blinked and looked around. “ ’ Scuse my language.”

  The apology was so incongruous that everybody laughed. The sheriff cleared his throat as if to say, Get on with it.

  “I think maybe we ought to know what this parole violation thing is about,” Boone said. “I don’t want to pry into your life, Scratch, but we’ve got to be prepared if we’re going to help you.”

  As Scratch gathered his thoughts, my mind cast back to other conversations I’d had with him, particularly the one where we talked about forgiveness, and how to go on after your life has fallen apart. I wondered how he had come to learn those lessons, but I hadn’t taken the time to ask, to find out.

  I had a feeling I was about to get the missing pieces of the puzzle.

  “I was married, once,” Scratch began quietly. “Had a baby girl. But I also had a controlling and manipulative father-in-law who didn’t think I was good enough for his daughter.

  “We didn’t come from much,” he went on. “Daddy was a sharecropper on a peanut farm in south Georgia. We always had enough to eat because we had the land, and Mama kept a big garden. But there was never much money. Not money for college, anyway. I played football, but I wasn’t good enough to get a scholarship, and in those days there weren’t many options.

  “Anyway, I joined the Navy right out of high school, and when my time was up, they paid for my tuition to Morehouse. Then during my senior year, I met Alyssa. She was a junior at Spelman. Prelaw.”

  He gave me a sidelong look. “Morehouse and Spelman are both historically black colleges in the Atlanta area. Morehouse is all male; Spelman’s female.”

  I nodded as if I already knew this, and he continued.

  “I was in premed and had been accepted at Emory medical school—”

  “Medical school?” The sheriff said with a sneer.

  “Yeah, med school. But plans got changed when Alyssa turned up pregnant.”

  A child, I thought. The little girl he’d referred to.

  “Alyssa was ready to get married right away. And I wanted to marry her; I had known it since the day we met. But her parents were dead set against it. Especially her father.”

  I couldn’t keep my mouth shut any longer. “Why?” I said. “If the two of you were in love—”

  “He was a high-powered lawyer in Atlanta. A high-powered black lawyer with a gorgeous blonde wife. He didn’t reckon I was good enough for his baby girl.”

  “But surely a doctor�
�”

  Scratch waved the objection away as if he was swatting at gnats. “He never believed I’d make it. I was a sharecropper’s son, that’s all he could see. All I’d ever be. And, well, I guess I proved him right.”

  He let out a long sigh. “We eloped, took up residence in a cheap one-bedroom apartment. Not what Alyssa was accustomed to, that’s for sure. I went to work nights so I could finish my senior year and graduate, but med school was pretty much out of the question. Alyssa tried, she really did, but in the end she couldn’t handle the pressure. Once the baby was born it got worse, and then one night I came home from work and she was gone.”

  He ran a hand over his hair. “I did everything in my power, but her father’s hold on her was just too strong. She couldn’t stand up to him.”

  Scratch clenched his fist on the table. “He was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted, and he rarely settled for less than everything. He was determined to split us up, and he put so much pressure on my wife that in the end she caved in and went back home with our baby.”

  Scratch paused and looked around. Even the sheriff was listening intently, although the expression of derision and disbelief hadn’t left his face.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I mighta been raised poor, but I was raised proud, and I wasn’t about to lay down and roll over like a dog under his command. I went to the house, demanded to see her. The police were called. I was arrested for disturbing the peace and aggravated assault.”

  “Holy shit,” Toni said, and didn’t bother apologizing to anybody.

  “Yeah,” Scratch agreed. “Alyssa’s father had a lot of influence. It only took a word from him to ensure a slam-dunk conviction. I went to prison. My life as I knew it was over. Not much call for a young black surgeon with a felony conviction.”

  “Do you really believe this load of bullcrap?” the sheriff interrupted. “This boy, in medical school? Married to a lawyer’s daughter?”

  A glance ricocheted around the table, but no one commented.

  “You got no reason to hold him,” Boone told the sheriff. “No evidence.”

  “Yeah, and since when did you become a defense attorney?” The sheriff said. “He stays right here till we sort this parole thing out and find where he’s hidden the money.”

  Everybody looked at me like they were expecting me to protest, to say I wasn’t pressing charges about the robbery, that I believed in Scratch’s innocence . . . something. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I still had a potful of questions swirling in my mind like Wednesday’s stew, and didn’t know how to ask any of them. And I sure as heck didn’t have any answers.

  “Get your boy a lawyer,” the sheriff said when he escorted us out. “He’s gonna need one.”

  The coffeepot was empty and we were all still sitting around a table in the cafe. We’d been over it and over it, and hadn’t gotten anywhere. And they were all staring at me, trying to figure out what had got into me, and why I wasn’t participating in the plans to save Scratch’s hide.

  I couldn’t explain, even to myself. My whole head was full of what-ifs. I’d trust him, and then I’d get nervous and suspicious again. Advance, withdraw. Advance, withdraw. I didn’t like myself one bit for doing it, but I couldn’t seem to stop.

  At last Peach spoke up. “What’d the sheriff say Scratch’s full name was?”

  “John Michael Greer,” I said.

  “And his wife?”

  “Alyssa, I think.”

  She fished a pen out of her pocket and wrote it down on a paper napkin.

  Odd, I thought. But I didn’t have the energy to ask her why.

  • 29 •

  The sheriff kept Scratch on ice for three days.

  Three very long and stressful days.

  On Monday morning, Fart Unger showed up with a new front door in the bed of his pickup. As he puttered around, removing the old door and resetting the new one, I watched him. Those long skinny blue-jeaned legs, the sloped crown of his bald head, the look of resignation in his eyes.

  I was glad he was there. For some reason I couldn’t put my finger on, he brought a calming presence into the place. A deep cleansing breath of sanity amid all this craziness.

  Boone, Toni, and Peach came and went at various times, discussing how they were going to help Scratch, and who might have committed the break-in, who they could find to represent him, and what was likely to happen next. The same unanswered questions they’d been batting around for days, with no answers in sight.

  For my part, I couldn’t seem to break the downward spiral of confusion. On the one hand, I wanted to believe that Scratch was innocent. On the other hand, he was a convicted criminal, and how much did I really know about him, anyway? The story of his past—a rich lawyer wife, a future as a surgeon—seemed about as likely as me finding Ed Mc-Mahon on my doorstep with a bouquet of balloons and a giant check for ten million dollars. And yet I remembered, with a good deal of uneasiness, the way he tended to Purdy Overstreet when she sprained her ankle.

  But if Scratch hadn’t done it, then who did?

  And then the other question, the one that twisted my gut into a knot: How on earth was I going to make up that stolen till?

  Seemed like folks in Chulahatchie musta missed my cooking, or else they were just caught up in the pre-Christmas rush of planning and shopping, because Wednesday lunch went nonstop from eleven to one-thirty. The place was packed, every table full and people waiting three deep at the doorway, craning their necks like vultures, trying to hurry the stragglers along.

  Scratch’s absence throbbed at me like a toothache. I worried it with half my mind, the way you’ll absently probe your tongue into that broken molar, never mind the pain.

  I was running my tail off trying to keep up. I missed him on that count, the way I had come to depend on him for cooking and serving and keeping the kitchen going. But it was more than that. I didn’t just miss what he did; I missed who he was. His sense of humor and funny quips. His gentleness and tolerance with folks like Hoot Everett and Purdy Overstreet. The way he had of making me feel safe, and not quite so alone.

  I oughta trust him. I oughta be able to make myself turn off the doubts and believe. But I couldn’t. And the conflict was ripping me right down the middle.

  Finally the last of the lunch crowd cleared out, and I bussed the final table and went back into the kitchen. Fart Unger stood at the dish-washing station in one of Scratch’s white aprons, running the sprayer over a full rack of glasses.

  “You don’t have to do that, Fart.”

  He shrugged his bony shoulders. “Just helping out.” He said it real casual, but I heard something else in his voice.

  “You want to talk?”

  He looked down at me and his huge Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his long skinny neck. “Yeah,” he said after a minute. “I reckon I do, if you don’t mind.”

  The cafe was empty and quiet, with a watery December sun shining through the streaky glass of the new door. I made a mental note that I needed to clean it, and get the name painted back on. I forced my attention back to Fart.

  He sat down across from me and clenched his long fingers together until the knuckles turned white. “I figure you know pretty much everything about me and Brenda and . . . and all,” he said.

  It was on the tip of my tongue to say, Yes, Toni told me everything, but something stopped me. I don’t know what—the look in his eyes, maybe, or the way he was chewing on his right thumbnail, or the way the sun picked out the silver hairs in a day’s growth of stubble. Instead, I said, “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “When Brenda said she wanted a divorce, I never saw it coming,” he said. “I thought we were happy. I thought I was being a good husband. I thought—” He hesitated. “Well, I thought a lotta things. But what I didn’t think was that the woman I’d loved and married and had kids with and shared my life with could turn out to be somebody I didn’t recognize.”

  A muscle worked against his jawbone, and he exhaled heavily. �
�I still don’t really understand it, this thing of hers, this—well, you know. But I gotta accept it. It’s like you can’t make somebody be something they’re just not. What’s that old saying? A bird may love a fish, but where do they make their home?” He attempted a pathetic little smile. “I just gotta accept it, that’s all. But, Dell—”

  His eyes met mine, and the expression of raw agony almost took my breath away. “She says she still loves me, and every time she says it, she gives me hope. But how can she love me, and do this?”

  He lapsed into silence, and I waited until I knew he was finished.

  “Fart, I’m not claiming to understand it any better than you,” I said. “But I believe Brenda does still love you, and always will. It’s just a different kind of love, that’s all. Like the love I have for Boone, or Toni. Or—” I hesitated for just a beat, then forged ahead. “Or you.”

  He looked up, startled.

  “We’re friends,” I hastened to add. “We care about each other. We stand by each other. We’re family.”

  He nodded miserably, as if this was cold comfort on a winter’s night.

  “Anyway,” I said, “Brenda’s come to an awareness about herself that has nothing to do with you, or how good a husband you’ve been, or what your character is like.” Without thinking, I put my hand over his clenched fists. He flinched a little, but I held on.

  “I feel . . . I don’t know. Rejected,” he whispered. “Like something inside me isn’t good enough.”

  I squeezed his hands. “Trust me, I know the feeling.”

  “So what do we do?” he asked. His eyes scanned my face like he thought he’d see the answer written there. But if he did, it was in a language he’d never learned.

  I thought about Boone, and Toni, and Peach—and even Scratch—that line of ghostly figures stretching themselves into the darkness so I could have a bridge into the light. Friends. People who loved you, no matter what stupid thing you said or thought or did. People who wouldn’t turn their backs, even when you deserved it. People who would lay themselves down for the sake of that friendship.