The Book of Peach

by Penelope Stokes J.

  I left without telling Mama where I was going and got to the Heartbreak Cafe just as Boone and Toni arrived.

  “What happened?”

  Boone pointed toward the front door, which hung crazily from one hinge. “You know as much as we do. Come on.”

  Toni was already inside, clutching Dell in a bone-crushing hug. I wondered if I was the only one who noticed Dell wasn’t hugging back. What is going on between the two of them? I wondered. But I didn’t have time to find out.

  Dell sat down and put her face in her hands. “Whoever did it took everything in the cash register and maybe last week’s till as well. Sheriff is dead set that Scratch did it. They’re out looking for him right now.”

  I looked from her to Toni and back again. “Then we need to find him first.”

  “The sheriff hasn’t found him yet,” Dell said. “What makes you think we can?”

  “I don’t know, but we have to try.” I hauled Boone up by one hand. “Come on.”

  I hustled Boone out the door and thrust the keys into his hand. “You drive,” I said. “I need to think.”

  We circled around the courthouse and headed out of town toward the river, driving aimlessly, watching the side roads. “Where are we going?” Boone asked.

  “I don’t know. We just needed to get out of the cafe and give Dell and Toni some privacy.”

  He shot me a confused look. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s obvious something is going on between those two, and they need to talk about it.”

  “How on earth could you possibly know that?”

  I shrugged. “I watch people. I pay attention.”

  “If you decide to do something besides being a writer, try psychology,” he said. “You’d be really good at it.”

  I laughed, but it came out more like a sarcastic bark. “Right. All those dysfunctional relationships in my life might disagree with you.”

  “We’ve all got skeletons,” he said, “and we’ve all got baggage. But you’ve got a lot of insight. You’ll come out just fine.”

  “Before I’m dead, I hope. And in the meantime just think how much material I’ll have for the Great American Novel.”

  Boone was silent for several minutes, and when he spoke again, his voice held a touch of nostalgia. “You know, I remember when we were friends all those years ago,” he said. “Your mother didn’t like me much, as I recall. My family wasn’t in the same league as yours—you know, country club, Jaycees, all that.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “All that.”

  He chuckled. “When we get older, we begin to realize how foolish such distinctions can be. How they separate us from people who truly might be our soul mates.”

  “Mama’s seventy-nine years old, and she has yet to learn that lesson,” I said. “Besides, it’s hard to know your soul mates if you don’t recognize your own soul.”

  “You remember that dance, when I took you home after your date got his nose broken?”

  I smiled at him. “It was his jaw, actually. Poor Robbie. He was no match for Marshall Threadgood.”

  “Actually, as it turns out, they were a pretty good match,” Boone said. “They’ve been together for almost twenty years.”

  “You mean, like, business partners?”

  “I mean, like, life partners,” Boone said. “Yep. Marsh and Robbie. They live in Tuscaloosa. Robbie’s a tenured professor at Alabama, teaching medieval history. Marsh is assistant football coach at one of the high schools.”

  I felt my jaw drop. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. Cross my heart.” Boone grinned over at me. “I have dinner with them every now and then,” he said. “Marsh went over to the W and took some classes at its culinary school. He’s quite a good chef.”

  He made a right turn onto a gravel road. “I don’t know how long you’re staying in Chulahatchie, but maybe you could go with me sometime.”

  “I’d like that.”

  I turned and gazed out the window. It was early December; the trees were bare, and where underbrush would flourish knee-high in the spring and summer, the ground was now thickly padded with leaves and pine needles. Still, there was something familiar about this road.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I had a thought,” Boone said. “An idea of where Scratch might have gone. Probably a wild-goose chase, but—”

  The road curved, and, despite how different the woods looked, the house was still there, still the same. A box on stilts, with a wide screened porch facing the river and a walkway leading down to a dock over the brown waters of the Tennessee-Tombigbee.

  Charles Chase’s river camp.

  Coincidence. It had to be. I held my breath and averted my eyes, waiting for us to pass by.

  But Boone was pulling into the driveway. At the front of the cabin sat the sheriff’s car with lights flashing.

  “What are we doing here?” I said. I hoped he wouldn’t answer, hoped I wouldn’t have to hear a truth I didn’t want to face.

  “This is Dell’s place,” Boone said absentmindedly.

  He wasn’t paying attention to me. Instead, he was watching the drama playing out down on the dock. Like a silent film, the scene spun out: the sheriff striding down the planks with his hand on the butt of his pistol; Scratch getting up and facing him; the handcuffs, the long walk back to the car . . .

  “What do you mean, Dell’s place?” I said.

  He frowned. “Well, it’s a fishing camp. Belonged to Dell’s husband, Chase, before he died. Now it’s hers. But it hasn’t been used in months.”

  “How’d you know Scratch would be here?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  He got out of the car and walked toward Scratch and the sheriff. I could see him gesturing, arguing, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch. All I could see, on the screen in the back of my mind, was an image of myself climbing those stairs, or sitting on the end of that dock in the moonlight or—

  I opened the car door, ran for the trees, and retched into the leaves at the edge of the woods.

  No one noticed.

  20

  I didn’t have any choice but to go back to the cafe with Boone. To do otherwise would have raised far too many questions, questions I didn’t even want to consider myself, much less have to answer for anyone else.

  My years on the pageant circuit had taught me how to smile when I wanted to cry, to interact when I wanted to scream, and above all, to keep a tight rein on my emotions and not let them interfere with business at hand. That afternoon I gave the performance of a lifetime.

  Not that anyone would have known any difference. They were all too focused on Scratch, on his arrest.

  Something had happened in the time we’d been gone. Dell and Toni had reconciled and were best friends again. Writer’s curiosity always prodded me toward details, and I wondered, just briefly, what the source of their conflict might be. But the thought passed quickly, absorbed in the weightier matters of the moment.

  Boone, Toni, and Dell went to the sheriff’s office to try to see Scratch. I stayed at the cafe, although leaving someone there to protect things seemed a bit futile.

  As soon as they were out the door, my protective wall crumbled. I cried, I paced, I walked in circles. I considered packing up my car and leaving town without a word. I wanted to be as far away from Chulahatchie as I could get—away from Dell Haley and the Heartbreak Cafe and everyone there I had ever dared to call my friend.

  Finally I made a pot of coffee, settled into my booth, and opened my journal.

  Can it possibly be true? Charles Chase was Dell’s husband? That sweet teddy bear of a man who laughed with his entire body and juggled fruit in the produce aisle of the Piggly Wiggly? Unfaithful to Dell, with me?

  I want to convince myself otherwise, say, “It can’t be. It’s a mistake. A dreadful, horrible mistake.” But we were there. At the river camp where he and I made love. Had sex. Whatever term applies. Some very nasty metaphors come to mind.

  The th
ought of it makes me want to throw up again.

  Boone said it: “Dell’s husband, Chase.” I’m snagged up on the names: Charles Chase, Chase Haley. But who else could it be?

  Who else?

  It was his cabin. His porch. His dock. It was the place I knew so well, the place that could spill all the intimate details about me, if the walls had eyes and ears to watch and listen, and a tongue to tell the tale.

  And I believed him. I believed him. Believed that he was divorced, or almost so; that his wife was unreasonable and indifferent and didn’t understand him. Believed all the lies. Or if I didn’t believe them, I wanted to. Because I wanted to be wanted. I wanted it so much I didn’t even think about who else I might be hurting, who might be devastated by his infidelity, whose soul might be scarred for all time because of my indiscretion.

  Indiscretion? What kind of sappy, self-justifying word is that? It wasn’t an “indiscretion.” It didn’t “just happen.” It wasn’t a “mistake”—oops, I spelled the word wrong and have to scratch it out and correct it.

  There’s no eraser for something like this.

  For me, or for the woman I call my friend.

  And what about Chase, or Charles, or whatever his name was? Mama told me that Dell’s husband had died. A heart attack? I don’t remember—it just went right over my head (since, of course, it didn’t concern me directly).

  I feel as if I’m floating above myself, seeing myself through someone else’s eyes. And what I see is a self-centered, childish, over-the-hill beauty queen desperately trying to hang on to her image of herself as attractive and desirable and worthy of love and attention. I want to say, “This is not who I am,” but even as I think the words, I feel myself stomping my foot and planting my hands on my hips like a spoiled five-year-old.

  God, release me from this captivity.

  Was that a prayer? I don’t know. I’m desperate enough to pray, no matter that I haven’t done it in years. But if there is a god or a goddess out there listening, some universal benevolence capable of intervening in human life (and willing to do so)—even then, what would I ask? She is no genie who can grant three wishes, and besides, I’ve read enough books to know you have to be very careful what you wish for.

  I sat there staring at the page, its rounded corners and faint blue lines, its darker blue ink. The handwriting not neat and precise, as it usually was, but shaky and uneven, exactly the way I felt on the inside.

  I had to do something. Had to change something.

  And yet there was nothing that could be changed. Charles was Dell Haley’s husband, and he was dead. The logical part of my mind kept telling me that I wasn’t responsible for his death, and still I felt like I had killed him.

  I had killed something, anyway. A friendship, certainly. A connection. Perhaps the last faint vestige of my own self-worth.

  I turned back to the page and wrote two words:

  Adulterer. Murderer.

  The admission did not relieve the guilt that clung to me. I was suffocating under its weight, pushed beneath the water and held there to drown.

  Then I heard the bell jingle as the broken door was shoved open on its single hinge.

  Dell and the others had returned.

  Boone and Toni filled me in. Dell sat with her head in her hands, letting her coffee get cold while the talk swirled around her. I put on my best poker face and listened intently, and fortunately I didn’t have to look Dell in the eye.

  “The sheriff’s just assuming Scratch did it,” Toni said, “even though it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Why on earth would he break down the front door when he’s got keys to the place? And if he did steal the money, where is it? And why would he be still hanging around town, lolling on the dock at Chase’s fishing camp, just waiting for somebody to come and arrest him?”

  I flinched at the mention of the river camp but kept my eyes fixed on Toni Champion. She was older than I was, by ten years or so, but she had the kind of classic beauty that only improved with age. She reminded me of Katharine Hepburn—long and lean and self-assured, with an elegant neck and piercing eyes. She carried herself with the grace of a wild animal, fiercely independent, ready to defend to the death those she loved. I wondered what she would do if she knew I had betrayed Dell by sleeping with Charles.

  I hoped I’d never find out.

  “Anyway,” Boone said, picking up where Toni had left off, “we found out a lot about Scratch that nobody knew. He was married once, to a woman named Alyssa, and had a baby girl. He was premed, and his wife was prelaw.”

  “Scratch? A doctor?” I recalled the fictional sketches that filled my journal, my characterization of him first as a failed artist and then as a physician with a mysterious barrier to fulfilling his life’s calling. Guess I wasn’t too far off. And his wife, a lawyer? “Sounds like a match made in heaven,” I said.

  “You’d think so,” Toni said. “But his father-in-law—who was also a lawyer, and a very successful, high-powered one—disapproved of the marriage.”

  “Disapproved so much,” Boone said, “that he managed to have him arrested on charges of breaking and entering—”

  “No,” Toni interrupted. “Aggravated assault. A felony.”

  “Right,” Boone said. “Five years in prison, I think. That’s how the sheriff managed to hold him without evidence on the robbery charge. Said he’d violated parole and couldn’t be released until the paperwork got straightened out.”

  I thought of Scratch in that jail cell, and the image came to mind of a sleek, muscular panther pacing back and forth in the cramped cage of a zoo. “So what happens now?” I said.

  “We have to get a lawyer,” Toni said.

  All this time, Dell had said not a word. She still sat there staring at her coffee cup, tracing a design with one finger across the Formica tabletop.

  “What did you say Scratch’s full name is?” I asked.

  Dell answered without looking up. “John Michael Greer.”

  “And his wife?”

  “Alyssa, I think.”

  I pulled a paper napkin out of the dispenser and wrote the names down.

  I couldn’t do anything to help Dell or her dead husband or myself. The least I could do was try to help Scratch.

  21

  I found her—and it wasn’t hard, given the information I’d gleaned. An attractive black female lawyer in Atlanta with a high-powered father? I wagered everyone would know Alyssa Greer, and I was right. All it took was one call to Lydia, my old suitemate at the W.

  I met Lydia when I was eighteen and a freshman. Our sophomore year we shared a suite, and when I transferred to Ole Miss my junior year, Lydia stayed on at the W. But by the time I was a senior and about to be crowned Miss Ole Miss, she had already finished her bachelor’s degree, entered law school, and was well on her way to becoming the youngest woman judge ever to sit on the Georgia State Supreme Court. From being shy as wallpaper during her first two years in college, the woman had morphed into a legal genius.

  “Dang, Peach,” she said when she heard my voice, “I figured you were off on tour as Miss Middle-Aged America by now.”

  “Very funny. You know everybody in the Georgia court system, right?”

  “Pretty much,” she said. “You planning to commit a felony?”

  “I’m looking for someone. A lawyer, I think. Woman named Alyssa Greer.”

  There was a pause, a chuckle. “You really know how to pick ’em, girl.”

  Once I met Alyssa Greer, I understood what Lydia meant. For one thing, she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen—and being on the pageant circuit, I had met a lot of beauties up close, personal, and nearly naked. But Alyssa had something more than physical attractiveness. She had a strength about her, a centeredness that both drew me to her and confounded me.

  It took her about five minutes to do what none of us had been able to accomplish—to bully down the sheriff and get Scratch released. Their reunion in the Heartbreak Cafe was a sight to behold, one of tho
se moments when time suspends and the love crackles like static electricity in the air. I couldn’t have imagined a better scene if I had written it myself.

  Oh, yes, I liked Alyssa. Liked her and respected her and wished I could be more like her. Here was a woman who had gone through some very hard times and come out stronger. A woman of deep character, who didn’t let one mistake early in her life define her.

  Alyssa Greer was a velvet brick.

  And besides all that, she brought faith into my world.

  I gravitated to the little girl the moment I saw her. “Hello,” I said.

  The child ducked her head, tentative as a butterfly, but she had been taught how to shake hands, and her grip was firm. Then she looked up at me with wide doe eyes, Hershey’s chocolate eyes, and smiled.

  I melted into a puddle and never recovered.

  Her name was Imani—“Faith” in Swahili, and she was eight years old. We became best friends. We colored together, told stories, laughed, and generally kept ourselves occupied while Alyssa and Scratch were sorting out the legalities of his situation and getting to know one another again and trying to help Dell figure out who robbed the cafe.

  Mama would have been scandalized—her precious daughter, her golden child, joined at the hip with a little black girl. But I was happier than I had been in ages. For the first time in years, my mind and heart were occupied with something besides myself. While I wasn’t looking, joy—always elusive when I chased it—tiptoed up behind me and settled over me like a benediction.

  I was happy. So happy that I almost forgot about Charles and Dell and the fishing camp and the affair and my own burning shame.

  Almost.

  Until Dell offered Scratch and Alyssa and Imani use of the house on the river.

  I might be able to let it go, if I didn’t have to think about Imani out there every blessed day.

  Now I can’t get it out of my mind—those rustic rooms, lit by candlelight; the image of my flabby middle-aged self and Charles Chase making utter fools of ourselves like hormonal teenagers; the fear that some evidence has been left behind, something that would tie me to the river camp and Charles and my guilt.