Queenie's Cafe

by SUE FINEMAN

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Blurb

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Author’s Note:

  Backlist

  Author Bio

  QUEENIE’S CAFÉ

  by

  Sue Fineman

  Queenie’s Cafe

  Copyright © 2012 Sue Fineman

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from Sue Fineman.

  Published by Amazon KDP

  Seattle, WA

  Electronic KDP Edition: June, 2012

  This book is a work of fiction and all characters exist solely in the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Any references to places, events or locales are used in a fictitious manner.

  When Queenie dies, Laura inherits the family businesses in a small Florida town. She’s broke, the café is a filthy mess, the town banker tries to force her to sell, and a well-known businessman attacks her, but Laura’s biggest struggle is with the words Queenie left in her head. Queenie called her lazy. Laura is determined to make the café successful, something Queenie was never able to do.

  Laura falls in love with Luke, but she nearly throws it all away because of her obsession with the café.

  Chapter One

  Laura Whitfield huddled with her father under the big black umbrella in the pouring rain, waiting for the minister to finish the funeral service. If Queenie had ever had a sense of humor, she might have laughed at the irony of being buried on April Fool’s Day. Laura didn’t laugh, but she couldn’t summon any tears for the mother who’d never really been a mother.

  The rain eased some, leaving the air thick and heavy.

  She smelled a whiff of skunk. They were always getting squashed on the highway. Disgusting smell, but not an unfamiliar one. Even the skunk couldn’t overpower the strong fragrance of the creamy white gardenias on Queenie’s coffin, her father’s final gift to the wife he despised.

  Queenie hated gardenias.

  The service finally ended, the rain stopped, and the sun broke through the clouds. Laura handed the dripping umbrella to the man from the funeral home. “Thank you.”

  Bruce Whitfield pulled his tie loose. “Laura, we need to talk.”

  “Not here, Dad.” She didn’t want to talk in the cemetery. Not today.

  After a last glance at the coffin sitting over the open grave, she walked out to the car with her father. She sat quietly as he drove down the highway, through the little town of Kingston, the only place she’d ever lived until nine months ago, when Queenie threw her out of the café.

  Not much had changed since she left home. Part of the fence shielding the collection of rusty old cars behind the Texaco station had blown down and several signs hung askew from winter storms. The town’s only traffic light was covered with rust. Everything rusted in this part of Florida.

  The whole town looked old and faded and rundown, but no place looked as shabby as Queenie’s Café and the King of the Road Motel. Home.

  Dad didn’t speak again until he parked in front of the motel office. “I bought a life insurance policy on Queenie the year you were born. It’s enough for me to pay off all the bills and start over somewhere else.”

  “You don’t want to stay here?”

  “I never wanted to live here, but Queenie insisted, and then... well... it doesn’t matter now. Queenie owned everything here, and she left it all to you.”

  “To me?” There must be some mistake. “Why would she leave anything to me?”

  Without answering, he walked inside, and Laura followed.

  “I found a little place near Ocala and put a deposit on it. It’s a fishing camp. Florence and I are going to run it together.”

  “Florence the Floozy?”

  “Don’t call her that,” he snapped.

  “Sorry. It’s just such a surprise.” Shock was more like it. Her father kept a room in back for Florence, but she wasn’t there much. She’d come for a day or two, maybe three, and then they wouldn’t see her for months. Laura didn’t know her well, but she knew Florence had worked as a prostitute at one time. Maybe she still did.

  He leaned on the counter. “It’s all yours now, the café, the motel, and the land.”

  It was hard enough to believe Queenie was dead. Laura couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the fact that she owned the motel and café. “I can’t believe she left it all to me. She hated me.”

  “Not as much as she hated me.”

  “Isn’t the motel considered community property?”

  “No. Queenie inherited the property from her parents, and I didn’t have a claim on it. I bought the life insurance policy on her after you were born. She had a bad heart, so I knew I’d outlive her, and I knew she wouldn’t leave me anything, even though I put the best years of my life into this dump.”

  Why hadn’t he told her Queenie had a bad heart? What else had Dad been keeping from her?

  She watched him sort through the drawers behind the counter. The motel had been his home since before she was born. Surely Queenie meant for him to have it. “I’ll put the motel in your name, Dad.”

  “Don’t do that, Laura. I just want to get the hell out of here.”

  A heavy silence sucked all the air out of the room. Her mother was dead, and all Dad could think about was getting away.

  He walked into the apartment behind the office and she tagged along.

  “The fishing camp is in real good shape and the fishing’s good, so Florence should be happy there. She loves to fish.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “More than I ever loved Queenie.”

  “Even with the things she’s done to earn a living? Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “Don’t judge her, Laura. We all do what we have to do to get by.”

  A big truck roared past on the highway and Laura stared out the window. She felt like crying, and it wasn’t because they’d buried her mother today. She couldn’t believe he was leaving her here alone. He didn’t care what happened to her as long as he didn’t get stuck here himself. At twenty, she was old enough to be on her own, but she couldn’t run two businesses by herself.

  “I don’t have any rooms booked except for the regulars and you know more about running that café than I ever did.” He was all business, as usual.

  Laura watched her father pull off his coat and tie, the only coat and tie he owned, and hang them in the closet. He looked different all dressed up. His standard uniform was a stained white T-shirt and baggy pants, and he usually had a cigar clamped between his teeth.

  Where was his cigar? “Dad, did you quit smoking?”

  “I’m trying. Florence doesn’t like the smell.”

  “She’s reforming you?”

  “She says she’s going to throw out all my T-shirts and buy me some decent clothes.”

  “Good for her. I’m glad you have someone, Dad.”

  Whatever love her parents shared in the beginning of their marriage had disappeared many years ago. Laura
couldn’t remember ever living with her mother. She’d always lived with her father in the manager’s apartment at the motel, while her mother lived in the motel room directly behind the café. She didn’t even know Queenie was her mother until she started school. It had always been just her and Dad.

  They wandered into the tiny kitchen and Laura sat at the table in the corner. He pulled two soft drinks from the refrigerator and handed one to her. “I propped the door to Queenie’s room open and left it as it was. As far as I’m concerned, you can throw everything away, including the bed. There’s nothing there anybody would want.”

  “How am I going to run this place by myself?” Neither business brought in enough to hire someone to help.

  “I’d start with the café, get it cleaned up and in working order.” He sat down and popped the can open. “When it starts bringing in money, you can hire someone to run it while you work on the motel. The rooms need to be renovated, but you can do it one room at a time. If you’d paint and add some flowers and shrubs outside, it might make it look a whole lot better. Maybe you could attract a better clientele.”

  “With what, Dad?” She didn’t have the money to do any of that. She had enough to get by for maybe a month and then she’d either have to open the café or find a job. The three regulars at the motel barely brought in enough to cover the expense of keeping the motel open, and Morris and Rusty often ran out of money before they paid their motel bill.

  “If you want to stay, apply for a small business loan. Get enough to fix things up and get started. If you don’t want to keep it, then find a buyer. Sell the whole thing off and start over somewhere else. You know more about running a business than I did when I took over the motel. You’ll do fine.”

  He made it sound easy, but he wasn’t the one being left behind.

  While Dad drove to the liquor store for boxes, Laura wandered around outside. There were so many things to do, she wouldn’t know where to start. Cracked windows. Patched roof. Faded, chipped paint. Corroded hinges. Noisy air-conditioners that dripped rusty water on the sidewalk. The parking lot was in terrible shape, the asphalt so badly cracked the weeds grew through it. And that was just the outside. It was a constant struggle to take care of property in this warm, damp climate. Anything not rusted or mildewed was faded from the strong sun.

  The door to her mother’s room stood open and Laura walked inside. She felt a deep sense of sadness for what might have been. Although she’d worked with Queenie in the café from the time she was eight until she turned nineteen, she and Queenie had never had a real mother-daughter relationship.

  Queenie didn’t have much except a few clothes, television set, worn recliner, and two old cats, Sleepy and Doc. Sleepy, a huge gray tabby, was just like her name. She went from window sill to sunbeam to bed to chair, always stretching, yawning and napping. Doc was an ornery little stinker who lived most of his life outside. Queenie put his food out on the old picnic table and let him fight the raccoons for it. The cat usually won.

  When she was in high school, Laura worried about getting fat and surly like Queenie, but she resembled her father. They both had dark hair, almost black, and hazel eyes. Laura kept her hair cut short and easy to manage. Her hair had a little natural wave, and the humidity made it curl around her face. Queenie had straight, limp, mousy brown hair, cold blue eyes, and a pallid complexion. Her once pretty features had been lost in her fleshy face. If Laura hadn’t resembled her father so much, she would have thought she’d been adopted.

  She glanced around at Queenie’s shabby room and sighed. If her parents had been able to get along, things might have been different. A divorce couldn’t have been worse than living like they had, with Queenie growing fatter and more surly as the years passed and Dad nursing his bitterness until it became a living thing. Unhappiness had aged them both. Queenie was only forty-two when she died, but she looked twenty years older.

  Grabbing her mother’s key off the hook by the door, Laura went to inspect the café. She opened the door and groaned. The café looked and smelled like it hadn’t been cleaned since the day she left home. The place was absolutely filthy, dirtier than she’d ever seen it, and it smelled like smoke and stale grease. Queenie, five-foot-nothing and nearly as wide as she was tall, couldn’t do much cleaning, so Laura had always done it.

  Ants crawled over the spilled sugar on the storeroom floor. The toilet in the men’s room was stopped up. Water streaks and mold stains from the ceiling to the floor in the corner of the room told her the roof had been leaking again. That last patch must have blown loose.

  It would take at least a week or two to clean everything, then she’d have to restock before she could open. If she decided to open it again. If she decided to sell, it would still have to be cleaned to attract a buyer.

  The café needed paint, new carpet, and decent furniture. Queenie had spent most of her life in this dump, and except for raising the prices on the menu, she’d never changed a thing. The dirt-streaked flamingo paint outside had been on there forever, and no amount of scrubbing would get it clean.

  A tap on the window drew her attention to a man in a suit and tie. He wasn’t from Kingston. Except for weddings and funerals, nobody in this little town dressed like that.

  She unlocked the door and poked her head out. “We’re closed today.”

  “I’m here to see Queenie.”

  “We buried her this morning.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Laura stepped back and let him in. “Did you know my mother?”

  “We met. I’m Greg Totino.” He reached out to shake her hand.

  “Laura Whitfield. I’d offer you something to eat or drink, but this place is so dirty, I’m afraid it might make you sick.”

  “That’s why I’m here. I’m with the King County Health Department. Your mother was given notice to clean this place by today or close it down. She had multiple code violations.”

  That wasn’t hard to believe. “If I can get it clean, can I re-open?”

  “It needs more than cleaning. It needs a new exhaust system over the stove and probably a new stove. It’s a fire hazard with that much grease caked on it. The plumbing needs work and there’s a leak in the roof over the men’s room. Roaches. Mice. There’s a whole list of code violations.”

  “Do you have a copy of the notice you gave Queenie?”

  “Right here.” He pulled a copy off his clipboard and handed it to her. “All these conditions must be met before you can re-open. I’ll give you a three-week extension, but we’ll have to inspect it again before you can open for business. I wish you luck, Miss Whitfield. You’ve got a lot of work to do here.”

  After the man left, Laura scanned the report. Queenie’d had three grease fires in the past four months. The vents were all clogged with grease, dirt and dust clung to the ceiling and hung off the air vents in the dining area, and everything in the kitchen felt slimy.

  Laura felt like crying. Every one of these problems was caused by her mother’s neglect. If Queenie was too sick to keep it clean, she should have closed the café herself. “Maybe one more of those grease fires would solve the problem for good.”

  “Maybe it would,” said a voice behind her.

  Startled, Laura jumped. “Florence, I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

  “I don’t know if this place will ever be clean again.”

  Florence looked around. “Charley Fenderman said it was in bad shape, but I didn’t know it was this bad. I’m surprised the Health Department let her stay open.”

  “They didn’t. I have three weeks to fix the plumbing, a leaky roof, get rid of the mice and bugs, and scrub off the grease and grime. They also want me to buy a new exhaust system, and if I can’t get the stove clean, I’ll have to replace it. Where am I going to get that kind of money?”

  “I don’t know ’bout money, but I know how to clean. How ’bout some help?”

  Lau
ra nodded. “Thanks. I’d appreciate it.”

  Florence was an attractive woman with a trim figure and hazel eyes. She changed her hair color often, but she didn’t look or act like a prostitute, at least not like Cindy, the only other prostitute Laura had ever known. Cindy wore a ton of makeup and so much perfume you could smell her coming. Laura often wondered if her customers went home to their wives smelling like that.

  Although Florence had never been more than a frequent motel guest, a casual acquaintance Laura had barely spoken to before today, things had changed. Dad loved her.

  “I’m glad he has you, Florence.”

  Her face beamed with a big smile. “Well, thank you, honey. That’s a right nice thing to say.”

  “I want him to be happy.”

  “So do I, honey,” Florence said softly. “So do I.”

  They must love each other. Why else would Dad give up his cigars and move halfway across the state? Laura couldn’t figure out why he’d wasted years in a marriage that was no kind of marriage at all. He should have divorced Queenie and found another woman when Laura was a child. When she needed a mother.

  When she was a little girl, Laura used to dream about having a real mother, someone who’d love her unconditionally. Other kids had mothers who took them shopping and to the beach, mothers who tucked them in at night and acted like their kids were the most important people on the planet.

  And she had Queenie.

  The last time she’d seen her mother alive, she’d worked at the motel from dawn until ten-thirty, cleaning rooms, scrubbing bathrooms and doing the laundry. She’d already done a full day’s work before she went to the café to work the lunch shift. Around three that afternoon, she sat down with a glass of iced tea. There were no customers, so it should have been a good time to take a short rest before the dinner shift began.