From Herring to Eternity

by Delia Rosen

  Occasionally, someone takes a job to radically change their life. To transfer to another country, put their shoulder against a new challenge. A subset of that is to flee an old life, to palate cleanse, which was my reason. Not that choosing to be an accountant had been driven by anything profound; it was an interesting enough field with plenty of opportunity, a glass ceiling that had enough cracks for me to rise, and a chance to meet what my grandmother called “a fella.” I was lucky. At the time when my life was in shambles, when Wall Street became so scandal-ridden that it was less embarrassing to admit to porn semi-stardom, the opportunity to take over Uncle Murray’s deli came along. I grabbed it like it was the last chocolate creme–filled donut on the shelf.

  Now, a year later, came the self-analysis: While it was the right move, did I want it to be a permanent move? Was I happier than I was a dozen months ago? Yes. Lonelier? About the same. More optimistic? I’m a Jew. That doesn’t apply.

  Every time I went into the office to place orders for supplies, it was a weird collision of careers, a mix of deli needs and financial savvy. It was the time I liked the least, since it took me back mentally and emotionally to the other time. And yet— Today was different. With Grant giving me the cold beef shoulder and the Wiccans probably casting spells and the school about to chop up my home and my anchor Thom lost in a psychological Mariana Trench, not to mention the lingering weirdness of the Barron-Candy run-in, plus a message from Yutu thanking me for a great going-away present, which it wasn’t, it was more like an I’ve-got-nothing-to-do-right-now-so-this-will-fill-the- time-nicely—I felt emotionally and physically exposed and was beginning to yearn for the comforting anonymity of New York, where even the sexually “out” folks were comfortably casual about their lifestyle instead of in your face. New York, where I hadn’t known my father had a long-time love affair with a crazy lady. New York, where my ex had the good manners to just fade away. New York, where I had never found a dead body in my backyard or accidentally fed an acquaintance a fatal dose of poison or had a man fall through the ceiling into dinner.

  Was it time to get the hell out of Nashville? Or was I missing the point of everything that had happened? Should I embrace it and never let go? Because, whatever else could be said about my one-year anniversary, I had learned more about myself and faced more growth-inducing challenges than I had in the first three-plus decades of my life combined.

  And yet, I thought, there was probably a limit to how many tidal forces a person could endure.

  I wasn’t sure I was designed for this kind of exponential growth. Or if it was necessary or even healthy. There was something to be said for sameness, for limitations. Everyone who spoke of Lippy, for example, mentioned that he seemed to be secure in his own world. I could have been, in New York, with a small accounting practice.

  I think.

  That was the problem. One could never know and, in any event, nothing was ever perfect. And here I was.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked myself. A desk full of papers and folders, a drawer full of tchochkes, a dining room full of strange people, and a life full of people I wished were somewhere else.

  I had no answer. But here I was, and I wasn’t one to cry about things I could change if I chose to.

  Even though Lippy’s trumpet case had only been there a few minutes, the office felt naked and spacious without it. That poor, flimsy thing had history; it had weight. And it probably had a message for whoever was clever enough to figure it out.

  I looked at the scan I had made of the bit of paste, blew up the image, rotated it, and saw nothing new in it. I e-mailed the image to myself so I could look at it later and turned to the daily inventory. I went to the kitchen, counted. We were low on carrots and cabbage for the coleslaw, low on onions—which made me think of Grant’s dopey comment—low on Diet Coke and low on coffee. That was probably my fault. I was drinking enough to float a horseshoe, as I once overhead someone say down here.

  Lunch came and went in a blur. When it was over, I did something I’d been putting off: I called K-Two to see how things were going. To my surprise, they weren’t.

  “No one from the university showed,” she said.

  “Did anyone call?”

  “Not a soul. I’ve been sitting here tailgate-watching videos on YouTube—oh, I used some of your outside juice. I hope you don’t mind.”

  It took me a moment to figure out that she meant electricity. If you work in a restaurant long enough, words like “juice” and “fried” only have one meaning.

  “That’s fine,” I told her. “So no one’s been there all day?”

  “Just a Cherokee lady on a motorcycle,” K-Two said. “Said her name was Sally. She had a cat with her, in a basket. She let the cat out—it ran off and I haven’t seen it since—and then she put something in your mailbox.”

  My stomach gurgled. “Was it a letter?”

  “I guess,” K-Two said. “What else?”

  “Something dead,” I said. “Would you mind taking a look?”

  “Glad to. Don’t really feel like I earned my pay today.”

  K-Two hummed as she walked to the curb. I’d heard the melody before.

  “What’s that you’re humming?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. A song.”

  “Did you hear it on YouTube?”

  “Maybe,” she said. I heard the mailbox door squeak. “It’s a business envelope. Typed. Just your name on it. Return address is—Trial of Tears Law Offices, PO Box 602206B, Nashville. Want me to open it?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Hold on.” She hummed again as she slit the envelope. “It says—oh, this is interesting.”

  “What is?” K-Two was exasperating. It was both a testament to our culture, and fortunate for our citizens, that there was a place in the world for this woman.

  “It’s not addressed to you but to Andrew A. Dickson III, Esquire,” she said. “This is a cc.”

  K-Two proceeded to read what I pretty much expected to hear: that my house was now a temple and that no “desecrating hands, feet, or souls” would be permitted access to the grounds for any purpose other than “prayer and the worship of the mother,” which I took to mean the earth. The one who was not happy. It further stated that a representative of the Cherokee people, Mrs. Sally Biglake, would be camping on the property when her familiar—Little Pie—had disbursed any rats and evil spirits.

  “It’s signed Joseph M. Bushyhead,” K-Two concluded.

  I once read about a pig, in Medieval France, that was arrested and put on trial for murder. So I’m not sure that this situation was unprecedented in the history of jurisprudence. But it was definitely like nothing I’d ever encountered. And it also meant—apparently—that I was not just going to be relocated because of a yearlong dig, I was about to be displaced permanently.

  “So—does this letter say that the biker chick owns your home?”

  “That seems to be the claim,” I told her.

  “Wow. At least you can sleep at your deli, right?”

  “Yeah. Right there on the counter. I’ll use the paper towel dispenser for a pillow.”

  “Why don’t you just bring one from here?” K-Two asked.

  I smiled at the phone. Sometimes, God sends humor at just the right moment.

  And sometimes, God sends that loch in kop.

  Nicolette Hopkins came back after finishing her mail route and asked to see me alone. I invited her back to the office. The little room no longer seemed empty. Nicolette was a smallish woman, the classic five-foot-two, eyes-of-blue, albeit with some miles on the chassis. The longest conversation we’d ever had was at Christmas when I gave her twenty bucks. She told me she was a single mother, that her job was in jeopardy due to USPS downsizing, and that her union was worthless. The only thing I hadn’t known was about the kid, an eight-year-old boy who was a hell raiser.

  “I just wanted to tell you, I think Detective Daniels is angry,” she said. “At you.”

  Nic
olette was now three-for-four telling me things I already knew.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “He asked if anything was loose in the case when I found it. I told him I didn’t think so.”

  “Oh,” I said. Oops, I thought.

  “Did you open it?” she asked.

  I said evasively, “Why would I?”

  She nodded. “That’s what I told him. He didn’t seem to buy that.”

  “Well, something could have jogged loose when I moved it from the counter,” I said. “Hey, neither of us asked for this to drop in our laps—or in our mail bag, right?”

  She nodded, though she was obviously unhappy to be part of a criminal investigation. Like many of the people I’d met down here, Nicolette seemed to be a sort of down-home type who was happy to go through her day—her life—without any kind of high drama. Or homicide.

  “You were here that morning,” I went on. “Did you see anything unusual?”

  “Besides Mad?”

  “Do you know Mad?” I asked. I had felt compelled to ask that; I didn’t like snap judgments about people based solely on the way they looked or dressed. We were all a little strange to someone.

  As it turns out, Nicolette had every reason to judge Mad.

  “I know her,” the fortysomething woman told me. “My ex-husband Samson owned the tattoo parlor where she and the other witches did their body art. One of the women wanted eyes on her eyelids. Sammy did it—but some ink dripped in the corner of one eye. It got infected and she lost her sight.”

  “Ginnifer,” I said.

  Nicolette nodded. “It was kind of a hobby for Sammy. I was the breadwinner and he was not a very good businessman. He hadn’t paid the insurance. It cost us everything to settle the debt and pay our lawyer. Sammy was so ashamed he ran off. I never got to tell him I was pregnant.”

  “Jesus!”

  Nicolette was suddenly embarrassed. She turned away. “I shouldn’t be troubling you with all this—”

  “It’s no trouble,” I assured her. “A fire in a saucepan—that’s trouble.”

  “Thanks,” she smiled. She was tearing up and I fished the tissue box from under my inventory clipboard. I extended it toward her. She yanked one out and blew her nose. “Jesus,” the woman said bitterly. “Sammy was MIA. But Mad was not. The other morning, when I saw her here? I almost left. But I didn’t want to let her impact my life—again.”

  “What happened between you?”

  “Sammy swore he warned Ginnifer that tattooing her eyelids wasn’t the best idea in the world,” Nicolette said. “Mad was there when he told her—but when we had her deposition, she said he never told them anything.”

  “Were you there?”

  “I was on my route,” Nicolette said. “But Sammy talked about it over dinner the night he did it, told me he told them how nuts it was.”

  “Then why did he do it?” I asked.

  “Because Sammy liked a challenge. He was an artist, not a brain surgeon.”

  Or an ophthalmologist, I thought. “I assume you’ve tried to contact him.”

  “I tried hard,” she said. “As soon as I had some money, I hired a private detective. He traced Sammy as far as Bristol, then lost him in the Appalachians. I figure he must be up there, somewhere, living a life without lawyers, without witches, without electricity. He’s probably holed up in a cave somewhere, making his own paints and doing, like, prehistoric art.” I was still holding the tissue box. She took another. “I just wish he could see his son and his son could see him. How’s that for a life’s ambition?”

  “Sounds pretty good, actually.” I was thinking of my own father blowing out of New York and making minimal effort to see me for the rest of his days. I palmed a tissue as I put the box back on my desk.

  “I should go,” Nicolette said. “I’m glad I came back. I hope none of that stuff with the trumpet case gives you any trouble.”

  “It won’t,” I assured her. “We were just being good citizens.”

  I felt a little bad lying to her, but the trumpet case was a passing thing. I would see Nicolette every day. I didn’t want her to think I was a pushy New Yorker who would insert herself where she didn’t belong—even though I sort of was. It’s something most Nashvillians wouldn’t understand.

  I dried my own eyes and ignored the private line when I saw that it was Grant calling. If he had a professional beef, he could take it up with me officially, in person. I wasn’t going to give him a convenient opportunity to transfer his frustration with me to whatever he thought I did with the case. I had this perverse fantasy that Grant and Reynold Sterne would show up at the same time and beat each other’s brains out in an effort to get to me.

  I left the office and went to see how Thom was. As I walked toward the counter, I heard something that surprised me.

  A lot.

  Chapter 17

  The bathroom was off the wall opposite my office. As I walked toward the dining room, Luke was walking the other way. He was an aspiring musician who played local gigs with his band, the Gutter Crickets, whenever he could get them.

  As he passed, he was singing a song I recognized.

  “Whoa,” I said, turning as he passed.

  “Huh?”

  That exchange was crudely monosyllabic, even by Luke’s and my standards.

  “That song—what is it?”

  “‘More Coffee,’” he said.

  “That’s the name of it?”

  He nodded. “It starts out slow and then gets wild.”

  “I see. This is the third time I heard it recently,” I told him. “Where did you hear it?” “On the radio,” Luke said. “It’s the new one by Ximene, the Spanish electric harpist. It’s gonna be a big, big hit.”

  That would explain it, then. Why everyone seemed to know it but me. When I listened to music, it was usually sugary, romantic-era piano—Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Beethoven. That was also what I had played, in truncated dumbed-down form, during the three years I endured piano lessons. “Für Elise.” “The Spring Song.” “The Minute Waltz.” I wasn’t a snob, I just didn’t like breaking in new stuff . . . or listening to lyrics. I heard enough words during the course of the day. Still, a harp didn’t sound so bad. So far, today, I had a new tune and new porn added to my mental Netflix-iTunes repository.

  I thanked Luke for the information and continued on my way.

  I could tell that Thom’s engine was running down. Usually, if there was no one to seat or no bill being paid, she would refill the toothpick dispenser, add mints to the bowl beside the cash register—the one with the little spoon no one ever used; for some unholy reason, people just dug in with their fingers—or make sure the laminate menus were free of ketchup, coffee, or pickle-juice stains.

  She was just standing there, looking vacantly into the dining room. Granted, she had been here since early morning and had hit the tiles running. But this look was something different. It spoke of an inner exhaustion. I’d seen that in my mother toward the end of her life, and that concerned me. Mom wasn’t that much older than Thom when she died. Granted, my mother had packed a lot of disappointment into a steady decline. She’d managed the women’s outerwear department for Gimbels in Herald Square. Mom had loved the retailer so much that she actually collected postcards of the area that showed the big blue and yellow store sign. Some of my own earliest memories were of running in and out of the circular clothes racks with my childhood friend Alice. My mother wept for days when the chain went broke in 1987. When her marriage went bust, she bootstrapped herself into survival mode and held a variety of jobs in retail. But she was never the same not exactly happy but content woman I remembered. She grew thin, the lines in her face deepened with more than age, her eye sockets blackened in a way that sleep couldn’t erase. It was almost as if she carefully, methodically laid the groundwork for the heart attack that took her in her sleep at age fifty-nine.

  Thom wasn’t much younger than that. She didn’t have the kinds of stresses
that my mother had allowed to pile on and Thom, at least, could push some of them off onto Jesus. But I recognized the thousand yard stare. An explosion of violence, a release of pent-up rage, followed by an arrest—that could be as traumatic to a God-fearing Southern Baptist churchgoer as a retail store closing was to a New York Jewish woman.

  “Hey,” I said, approaching the checkout counter. “No daydreaming on the job.”

  Thom rolled her eyes toward me like a Kewpie doll. “I’m not daydreaming. I’m thinking.”

  I said in a conspiratorial whisper, “You’re setting a bad example for employees who don’t think. If I let Newt stare into space, fries will crisp. If I let A.J. or Dani stare into space, the Cozy Foxes will go unfed.”

  Thom’s eyes shifted to the group of women sitting in the corner. She lifted and lowered her broad shoulders.

  “So? They take up a big table for hours while they talk about their mysteries, only ordering free coffee refills.”

  “It’s good community relations,” I pointed out. “And it’s good for passersby to see people at the tables. Folks don’t like to eat alone, or think the food is drek.”

  The big eyes shifted back to me. “You’re right. I know. I’ll get to work.”

  “No, what you’ll do,” I said, “is work on getting over what happened. Standing there thinking about it isn’t going to do you any good.”

  “I was praying,” she said.

  “You weren’t,” I said. “Your lips move when you pray.”

  “They do?”

  “Just a little,” I smiled. I leaned in a little closer. “You did it. It happened. You learned. If you hold onto anything but the last part, you’ll keep reliving the misery. Isn’t that what hell is? Do you really think you, of all people, deserve to be there?”

  She looked at me with surprise. “Gwen Katz, that was practically—”

  “Rabbinical?” I asked.

  “I was going to say pontifical, but yes, that would be more appropriate.”

  I smiled. “I took a philosophy course in college and one of the few things that made an impression was the idea that the door to hell is locked from the inside. I’m not going to let you stay there. Get the Windex.”