Flamingo Diner

by Sherryl Woods

  “None of this is fair,” Kim agreed.

  A part of Emma knew that Kim was right, but the part of her that was terrified more tragedy would strike if she didn’t step in won out. “No matter what you think, I have to do this,” she told her friend. “Believe me, I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but I’ve thought it over. It’s the only choice. I’ll be back in Washington as soon as things here are in order. If Marcel doesn’t have a job for me then, I’ll find something else. I’m not giving up on my dream, just postponing it.”

  Kim sighed. “I know that tone,” she said, sounding resigned. “You’re not going to change your mind. I guess I’ll just have to start flying down there every few weeks so we can have our Sunday breakfast chats.”

  Emma’s chuckle was only slightly forced. “Only if you can pitch in and cook while we’re talking.”

  “God forbid!” Kim replied. “You’d never recover from the lawsuits.”

  Overnight, Emma made peace with her decision. Everything she’d said to Kim and Marcel had been true. This morning before leaving to open the diner, Emma had stopped in her mother’s room and told Rosa she intended to stay, at least until the business was on solid ground again. Because she hated the decision she was being forced to make, because she knew she couldn’t defend it for long, she had cut off her mother’s halfhearted protests. Staying was the only choice. For now.

  That was what she kept clinging to, the fact that this was only a temporary solution. Kim was wrong about one thing. She wouldn’t let this drag on forever. Her life was on hold for a few months, a year max. Wasn’t that a small sacrifice to assure that her family regained its footing after this tragedy?

  Besides, she was worried sick about her mother. Even this morning, Rosa had spoken mostly in mono-syllables, a sharp contrast to the woman who’d always chattered about anything and everything. And not once in the seven days since Emma’s dad’s death had Rosa even mentioned Don, at least not in Emma’s presence. If Emma or her brothers mentioned him, Rosa immediately left the room, her expression shuttered. The reaction had only gotten worse since their meeting with the lawyer.

  “Emma, dear,” Jolie Vincent said, catching her attention. “How is your mother?” She shook her head. “What a silly question. How could she be anything other than devastated? This has been a terrible shock to all of us. I wish she’d let us help.”

  Not trusting herself to speak, Emma nodded. She knew the woman was trying to be kind, but it was still too soon. She was afraid of kindness, afraid she would burst into tears and never stop. More than that, she was angry, furious with her father for leaving them with so many unanswered questions, furious with him for leaving them at all. What had he been thinking? What kind of pain or pressure had driven him to take such a drastic step? She couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop herself from laying out all sorts of scenarios that might drive a strong, decent man to suicide.

  Despite Emma’s silence, Mrs. Vincent didn’t take the hint. Her expression sympathetic, she said, “You don’t have to say a thing. It’s too soon. But I hope you know that everyone who comes in here loved your father like family. We love all of you. If you need anything, all you have to do is ask. We all feel that way. And I have no intention of giving up on your mother, either. Sooner or later, she’ll be ready to accept our support.”

  Emma blinked back the tears that threatened. “Thank you,” she managed to reply, her voice thick, her hand suddenly unsteady.

  Before she realized what was happening, the spatula was taken from her, the bacon flipped onto a waiting plate. She looked up into Matt’s concerned face.

  “Take a break,” he ordered.

  “I can’t,” she protested, gesturing toward the order tickets that lined the overhead spinner.

  “Of course you can. I’ll hold down the fort. I’ve probably scrambled more eggs in here than you have.”

  A flash of memory made her smile. There had been a weeklong period years ago when her father had been trying to teach Matt to cook. Everyone’s eggs had been scrambled. He couldn’t flip a fried egg without breaking it to save his soul.

  “Yes, I remember,” she said. “But can you fry one?”

  He grinned. “I guess we’ll find out. Now go for a walk, get some air.”

  “Don’t you think people will wonder why the chief of police is moonlighting as a short-order cook?”

  “Maybe they’ll conclude they don’t pay me enough and give me a raise.”

  “I should have known you had an ulterior motive,” she teased, surprised that she could still find something to laugh about. It didn’t surprise her that Matt had been the one to remind her. He’d always had a wicked sense of humor.

  He’d also had a penchant for getting into trouble, at least until her father had stepped in. She wondered just how much of the devil-may-care kid was left in the respectable chief of police. Last night’s unexpected dip in the pool suggested he still had a sense of mischief. Maybe one of these days when she had five spare minutes to consider anything except the family’s dire straits she’d check out how deep that mischievous streak ran. Maybe she’d try to figure out what the changes between them really meant, whether this simmering attraction held any real possibilities.

  Relieved to have a break, however brief, she went outside and sat on the bench that had been installed for customers who were waiting for a table inside. She’d been there only a few minutes when Jeff came out to sit beside her. Emma studied her brother intently. At twenty he looked a lot like their father with thick brown hair, brown eyes and a killer smile. He also looked as if he’d like to start breaking things. The tension emanating from him was palpable.

  Emma reached for his hand, but he jerked away.

  “I hate this place,” he muttered, his tone fierce. “And it’s worse than ever now. I’ll never get away from it.”

  “Of course, you will,” she told him. “You’ll go back to college in another month.”

  “How? There’s no money. Dad blew any chance of me graduating when he drove into the lake. For all I know he did it on purpose.”

  Even though she’d suspected as much herself, Emma didn’t like hearing it from her brother. “Jeffrey David Killian, don’t you dare talk like that. We don’t know what happened.”

  “We know he’s dead, don’t we?” he said defiantly. “I hate him for dying. Look at you. You’re trapped here, too. We can’t go off and leave Mom and Andy. Mom’s a basket case. And Andy’s going to stress out completely from trying to step in and fill Dad’s shoes. You heard him yourself. He’s already talking about not playing football this fall, so he can help out more. A football scholarship was going to be his ticket to college.”

  “I won’t let him quit the team,” Emma reassured Jeff. “It will all work out. I promise.” But even as she uttered the words, she wondered if it was a promise she could keep.

  “How?” Jeff asked, his tone filled with disdain. “You counting on winning the lottery? That’s what it’s going to take to get us out of this mess. After I got home last night, I went over the books myself. I thought the attorney had to be lying. Dad was always good with money. Sometimes he was so tight with a dollar, he could make it squeal.”

  Emma almost smiled at that, but the rest of Jeff’s words wiped out her amusement. “I looked all over for those books myself,” she said. “Where did you find them?”

  “Dad had everything locked away in his desk, but I broke the lock.” His tone was defiant as if he expected her to criticize him. When she didn’t, he went on. “I don’t know what the hell was going on with him, but he was bleeding this place of every penny. If anything, it’s worse than what the attorney said.”

  Emma stared at him in shock. “You have to be wrong. Dad wouldn’t do that, not to Mom and the rest of us.”

  “Stop defending him. I may not have my business degree yet, but even I can read the numbers, and they don’t lie. We’d be better off selling what little bit’s left. This location’s worth a lot, pro
bably enough to pay off the mortgage and leave some left over. Mom and Andy could sell the house and move into a smaller place. If you and I worked, we could help them out.”

  “No,” Emma said flatly.

  “No what? You won’t help out?”

  “No to all of it.” She tried to imagine her mother’s life without Flamingo Diner. She couldn’t. Despite Rosa’s refusal to set foot in the place this morning, the restaurant and its customers were as essential to Rosa as breathing.

  And it worked both ways. For a lot of their customers, the diner was where they came to socialize with their neighbors, to catch up on local gossip, to share family news with people who cared. And though everyone had been subdued this morning, most avoiding the topic of her father’s passing, usually not a birth or a death in the tight-knit community went unremarked. Celebrations were to be shared. There had been more impromptu birthday parties and baby showers than Emma could count. Tragedies brought quick and heartfelt sympathy.

  “We can’t sell,” Emma said emphatically. “It’s going to be difficult enough for Mama to go on without Dad. She’s going to need the diner.”

  “If it’s so important to her, then why isn’t she here this morning?” Jeff asked. “She knows what’s at stake.”

  “Because it’s too soon. Sweetie, we lost our dad, and that’s a terrible thing, but you and I have been away for a while now. We’ve made lives for ourselves separate from theirs. It’s going to be harder for Mom and Andy. They saw Dad every single day. They counted on him.”

  “And he let them down. He let all of us down,” Jeff said, his bitterness back. He stood up suddenly. “I’ve got to get away from here.”

  Emma felt a sudden tingle of alarm at the urgency in his voice. She wanted to hang on to him, but settled for asking him where he was going.

  “Anywhere. Just away from here.”

  He was gone before she could think of anything to stop him. Filled with worry, she stared after him. Jeff had always been a good kid, but she couldn’t help thinking about Matt’s warning that there was no telling what he might do in his current mood. Emma sighed. Her family was coming unraveled and she had absolutely no idea what to do about it. Her mere presence wasn’t going to be enough. She needed expertise that she didn’t have.

  For a fleeting moment, she thought of seeing a grief counselor, but that wasn’t her way. Matt had been right about her tendency to look for solutions—solid, practical solutions—not the touchy-feely comfort a counselor would offer.

  Jack Lawrence had suggested a financial planner, but Emma didn’t want to expose their financial circumstances to an outsider, not even to one in Orlando or Tampa, who’d never heard of the Killians. Maybe she could get Jeff to sit down with her and explain what he’d discovered in the financial records. Maybe that would also help him to focus his energies on something positive.

  First, though, she had to keep him from running off every time things got uncomfortable. Not that she could blame him, she thought with a sigh. Truthfully, there had been a lot of moments in the last week when running away had struck her as a damn fine idea.

  But if that wasn’t an option, she concluded with a sigh, then she would concentrate on getting to the bottom of this whole, entire mess. She would poke and prod until she knew exactly what was going on in her father’s life, if not in his mind, on that night that his car had ended up in the lake.

  8

  The delegation of women marched into Rosa’s room on an obvious mission. These were her friends, people she had known for years, people with whom she had shared some of the most intimate secrets of her life. Today she rolled over and turned her back on them.

  “Go away,” she said, her voice muffled as she buried her face in her pillow. “I don’t want to see anyone.”

  “Rosa, you have to get up and out of that bed,” Helen insisted. “What you’re doing is not healthy.”

  “When did you get your degree in psychiatry?” Rosa grumbled.

  “It doesn’t take a degree in psychiatry to know that you’re hurting and that you’re trying to hide from your friends. We want to help you,” Jolie added, backing Helen up as she always did. For all of her flamboyance when it came to her attire, she was a traditional woman who tended to follow everyone else’s lead.

  “No one can help me,” Rosa said bleakly.

  “Not if you won’t help yourself,” Helen agreed, her tone brisk. “Tell me one thing, do you feel one bit better with your head buried in that pillow?”

  “How would she know?” Jolie asked. “She hasn’t taken her head out of it long enough to know the difference.”

  “Maybe we should just leave her be,” Sylvia countered sympathetically. Sylvia was the sort of good-hearted, generous woman who could smother a person with kindness without meaning to. She was always trying to make things right, trying to smooth over the ruffled feathers among them. “It’s only been two weeks since Don died. Everyone has to adjust to a loss like that at their own pace.”

  Rosa felt the salty sting of tears and fought it. She would not cry over a man who’d deliberately abandoned her. He didn’t deserve her tears. If Don had died a sudden death, like from a heart attack, she didn’t think she’d feel like this, as if she were drowning in a sea of unanswered questions, as if she couldn’t show her face, not even to her best friends. If there had been anything ordinary about his passing, she could have accepted the outpouring of sympathy, shed her tears and moved on, knowing that what had happened was God’s will.

  But this, this hadn’t had anything to do with God. It had been a sin, a sin committed by a man who’d always been devout, a man who had to have understood that the choice he was making was unacceptable in God’s eyes.

  “Please, Rosa, talk to us,” Helen pleaded. “We love you. We can help, if you’ll just let us in.”

  “No one can help,” she said flatly. How could anyone relieve her of this twisted mess of anger, guilt and despair? Add to that the effort it was taking to protect her children from her suspicions. The strain of it was beginning to tell.

  “We could send Father Gregory to talk to you,” Jolie offered.

  “No!” Rosa said vehemently. She would have to confess the truth to him, and then what? How could she bear to listen to her priest go on and on about Don’s unnatural act? Maybe the church was more liberal about such things these days, but Father Gregory was not. And until this had happened, Rosa would have agreed with him, but when it was her husband who’d committed suicide, she realized that the issue wasn’t as black-and-white as the priest would have everyone believe.

  Don Killian had been a good man his entire life, right up until the moment he had killed himself. She was ready to admit that now. One instance of despair or insanity didn’t change the past. It didn’t negate it. The past merely made that one out-of-character act almost impossible to understand.

  She sighed. She still didn’t understand. She doubted she ever would.

  That’s why she was holed up in her room all alone. She wasn’t in hiding, not exactly. She was methodically going over every day, every minute of the weeks leading up to Don’s suicide, trying to find an answer. But even now, after hours and hours of self-examination and recriminations, she had nothing, not a single clue that would explain his unnecessary death. Worse, she couldn’t talk about it, not even to these women who’d been her friends for so many years. It was bad enough that she’d told Helen what she thought had happened that night.

  “What can we do?” Sylvia asked. “Would you like us to fix you some lunch? I could make that chicken salad you love.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Rosa said, then added politely, “but thank you. I just want to be left alone.”

  “Then we’ll go,” Sylvia said determinedly. “Won’t we, girls?”

  “Of course,” Jolie agreed, giving up the fight.

  Helen was not so easily swayed. “I don’t think you should be alone.”

  “It’s not about what you think,” Jolie told her firmly. “We�
�ll come back another day.”

  “Fine,” Helen said with obvious reluctance. “But we’ll be back tomorrow. And the day after that.”

  Rosa almost smiled at her friend’s fierce tone. “I know,” she said, reaching for Helen’s hand and giving it a squeeze, as she accepted Jolie’s and Sylvia’s hugs.

  Despite the lack of welcome she’d shown them, despite the way she kept putting them off, she trusted that they wouldn’t desert her. They would be there when she was ready, and in the meantime, they would keep prodding her, reminding her that she was alive and that she had obligations. They wouldn’t let up until she was back on her feet. She might not totally appreciate that today, but she knew the day would come when she would thank them.

  After her friends had gone, Rosa lay back against the pillows and let her mind drift. She wanted to go back to a happier time, but recent memories kept intruding. Images of Don chatting with the customers plagued her. It wasn’t the daily visits with the men that bothered her, but the time he spent with the women.

  Had one of them been more than a friend? Had he showered extra attention on Maureen Polk after her divorce? Had he laughed a little too hard at Jayne Dixon’s corny jokes? On the days when he’d lingered at Flamingo Diner, ostensibly to give the stove a more thorough cleaning or to arrange the supplies in the storeroom, had one of those women or someone she hadn’t even thought of stayed behind to help? Had his natural tendency to be supportive to everyone taken a romantic twist that, in the end, had tormented him? Rosa didn’t want to believe it, but it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Men Don’s age strayed. It happened all the time.

  If Don had been unfaithful, he would have suffered unbearable guilt. She knew that, too. And that could have explained his short-tempered outbursts. She couldn’t even bear to think about the humiliation of coming face-to-face with someone who might have slept with her husband. Had that already happened? Had someone been secretly laughing behind Rosa’s back? Or had the woman—if she even existed—had the good grace to avoid Rosa and the rest of Don’s family?