The Crossroads Cafe

by Deborah Smith

  Good point. I blinked slowly, eager to concentrate but a little woozy. I’d just come back from a day at the doctor’s. Plastic surgeons were still working on my hand, where scar tissue had to be snipped and stretched so I could move all my fingers smoothly. I balanced the letter on a gauze mitt big enough to catch a baseball.

  Remember the pictures I sent of Kaye Nursery? Thomas wrote. Your property is just up the way from there. Four pretty acres with a house, a small yard, beautiful woods, and a branch of Ruby Creek. My half of that check you sent covered everything, including closing costs. Can’t beat mountain prices. Enclosed are pictures.

  I prowled through the latest care package from him and Delta, found a big envelope, and slid the photos onto the lap of my robe. The top one showed a delicate little house with white-board siding, old-fashioned red-and-white metal awnings, and red shutters. It was shadowed by large sourwoods whose leaves had turned a deep red and a maple that had gone a bright, sunny yellow. It was adorable. Thomas, sweet, grandfatherly Thomas, had picked a house girls and elves would love. I approved.

  The cottage has a history. I like that about it. And the history is tied to your grandmother. Her grandfather, Parker Nettie, built it for his second wife’s brother, Samuel Barkley, (according to Delta, who knows every family tree in the entire Crossroads orchard.) Samuel used it as a mining cabin back in the late 1800’s, when there was a small gem-mining frenzy around the Cove. The frenzy fizzled out in a few years, but there were (and still are) plenty of semi-precious gemstones in the creeks, and a few rare finds of jeweler-quality rubies and sapphires. They’re all composed of the same mineral—corundrum—but the color is the telling point. Rubies are red corundrum and sapphires are blue, green, yellow, lavender and you-name-it. Color and clarity define the quality. Do you know what gives corundrum its color? The impurities in the mix. Think about that, Cathy: The most beautiful gems aren’t the purebreds, but the mutts.

  Mutts. Rubies. Me. Maybe I just needed more impurities in my minerals. Thomas always found odd, endearing ways to say I wasn’t ugly now, no matter what. But he hadn’t seen me.

  Delta says your grandmother—and your mother—were expert gem panners. They had an eye for the raw stones—it’s a talent, since gems in the rough look like ordinary gray rocks. Delta says they were both ‘gem dowsers,’ meaning they could sense where the best stones could be found in a creek, much like a water dowser claims to ‘feel’ the presence of an underground stream. I understand your mother died in childbirth when you were just two years old. Delta has some great pictures of her from their girlhood friendship here in the Cove. You should see her and Delta in overalls, panning in the very same creek you now own. They couldn’t have been more than ten years old. I’ll make copies and send you some.

  Mother, in overalls, up to her knees in a mountain creek? I had only seen pictures of her in ball gowns and slim Chanel suits, looking like Jackie Kennedy on Daddy’s swank, older-man arm. Shuffling Thomas’s photos of the cottage I’d just bought, I halted suddenly. Two little girls looked back at me.

  Here are Laney Cranshaw’s nieces. Ivy is twelve, Cora is seven. They have different fathers, and their mother died a few years ago. Their aunt’s had some problems and life hasn’t been easy for the three of them. Even so, Cora’s a hopeful little angel. Ivy is smart but very suspicious. Pike checked into some background. The girls spent time in foster care a couple of years ago, after one of the aunt’s boyfriends molested Ivy. To Laney Cranshaw’s credit, she called the police on him herself. But the damage was done.

  I have to be very careful around Ivy. She spooks easily and doesn’t trust men—who can blame her? And she’s very protective of Cora. Last week she punched a kid’s lights out when he teased Cora for believing in fairytales.

  I read and re-read that last part, feeling more depressed and angrier on their behalf each time. I’d had a privileged childhood, but not a particularly happy one. Daddy was doting but distant; my aunts were crusty socialites who exhibited me as if I were a piece of heirloom silver. Maybe I’d inherited my aunts’ cold-blooded attitudes. Daddy’s sisters—who were all older than he, and done with childbearing by the time I came along—clearly liked golf and their lap dogs far better than their own offspring.

  “Any fool can breed—it requires not one lick of common sense, elegance, wisdom or good fortune,” my Aunt Emiline once told me over her martini and cigarette. “But smart females protect their physical assets, choose their mates for practical partnership, and only breed when it suits them. Then they raise their brood unsentimentally and shoo the ungrateful little darlings out into the world the moment they turn eighteen. If you plan correctly, Cathryn, you can be done with children—and husbands—while you’re still young enough to do whatever you please.”

  Sometimes I wondered if my aunts weren’t glad, secretly, that my mother had died young. They got Daddy, their handsome baby brother, to themselves again, (his society girlfriends were no threat,) and they could raise me like a pretty doll, without motherly interference and sans all serious maternal responsibility.

  At any rate, I grew up with no avid desire to produce children. When I was twenty-two-or-three, drinking wine on a movie set with a raucous bunch of women on the crew, I listened in relief as a sizable cross-section of the sisterhood confessed to not desperately wanting babies. Ah hah. The secret society of happily childless women was not so secret.

  Now I held up Thomas’s photo and studied Cora and Ivy more closely. I didn’t want children, and yet, here they were . . . my children. At least by virtue of living in a house I now owned. Ivy stared back at me with a solemn frown, her eyes sharp and blue, her complexion mocha, her hair a reddish-brown cloud around her face and shoulders. She was a little chubby, her features not quite symmetrical and not quite either/or, white or black. Grim self-defense radiated from her smart, steely eyes.

  I’d give her straight hair like Beyoncé, with some gold highlights, I thought, and put her in a brown velvet jumper with a short-waisted burgundy jacket, with some fun turquoise jewelry to pick up the blue in her eyes. And I’d find some way to make her smile. I’d promise her she’d never have to live in a tent, again. And that no one would ever again lay an unwanted hand on her, ever.

  As for Cora . . . she beamed sunshine into the world. That smile, that innocence. A miniature Jennifer Lopez with straight black hair so fine it floated around her happy face as if electrified by her energy. I’d feather-cut that hair, put some rhinestone barrettes in it, dress her in a pale gold dress with cream piping and rows of tiny pleats across the bodice. And I’d do everything in my power to keep that innocent shine in her eyes.

  Dolls. I’d dress my two living dolls in charming finery—just as Daddy and my aunts had done to me—and tell them how pretty they were ... no, I’d tell them it wasn’t important to be pretty, not to take that too seriously, to be happy with their bodies and their faces and to enjoy life’s biscuits.

  I groaned. What should anyone tell little girls? To ignore the pressures, the commercials, the sexy billboards, the magazines? To not idolize the latest stick-sized teen pop singer with implants and an eating disorder? To ignore an entire culture devoted to making them feel bad about their looks so they’d shop obsessively for the perfect makeup and clothing to transform them into a beer-commercial image of femininity?

  I thumped the picture with my bandaged hand. “No thong panties until you’re eighteen,” I told Ivy and Cora. “If skanky underwear is so wholesome and cute, then why don’t we see little boys in bikini briefs with ‘Hot Stuff’ on the front? We don’t sexualize little boys for entertainment, that’s why! But girls are fair game.

  “You don’t have to buy into that hype, you know. You don’t have to turn yourselves into pint-sized beauty queens and miniature hoochies! You can . . . you can play softball, if you want to! I wanted to play softball, you know, when I was thirteen I tried out for the team at my private school, and I made it! But my father wouldn’t give permission. He said I might
get hurt—ruin my precious looks with a few scars, you know—or have a tooth knocked out. Well, so what if I took a few stitches or needed a new tooth or two? I loved that game. I loved the feel of the ball hitting my glove, and I loved whacking the ball with a bat. I even loved chasing line drives by Tiffany Moskowitz. The toughest batter in the history of girls’ slow-pitch.” I bounced the photo on my gauzy mitt. I was nearly yelling, now. “You girls play softball if you want to! And ice hockey and basketball and . . .” my voice trailed off.

  I was yelling at two small strangers on a piece of photo paper.

  I slumped, then laid the photo aside. Who was I to give advice on not caring about pleasing people, about following your heart? If a magic genie popped out of the empty Perrier bottle beside my bed and offered me three wishes, my first one would be: Make me beautiful, again. I sank back on my pillows. After a while, I wearily raised Thomas’s letter and finished reading.

  Here’s Ivy’s drawing of a water sluice similar to the kind Samuel once built on Ruby Creek. She found an old schematic in a pamphlet on local mining history. Ivy has a natural eye for form and structure. She loves to read and sketch, and she’s a math whiz. Her suspicious nature is a tough nut to crack, but the girl’s got a lot of potential if she just gets half a chance. As for Cora, well, Cora loves animals, and has always wanted pets. The Log Splitter Girls run an unofficial animal shelter at their farm, so they gave Cora her choice of cats. See the next picture.

  I lifted one more photo from the stack. There stood Cora on the cottage’s front porch, smiling a huge smile as she hugged a placid-looking kitten. But I wasn’t prepared for what perched on the porch rail next to Cora’s right shoulder.

  A rooster. A ratty-feathered, one-eyed rooster.

  The half-grown calico in the picture is her pride and joy. Cora’s named her in your honor, Princess Arianna. Which is also the name of Cora’s invisible owl. Speaking of birds, some redneck threw out a half-dead rooster on the road. Delta says he’s a fighting breed, and it looks like he went down for the count one time too many. He’s missing one eye and quite a few feathers. But he’s good-natured and tame, which may explain the end of his career in the ring. Cora has decided he’s a magic owl in disguise, and she’s named him Herman, in my honor. Don’t ask why. It’s a long story.

  Herman the pacifist rooster. And a cat named after the character who made me famous in my first movie. A cat named after me. And an owl, too. Lest we forget, I was already the namesake for a Guernsey calf.

  By the way, Thomas finished, Cora sent you a ruby she found in the creek. Look in the box.

  I rummaged until I found a glittering little cloth bag with a ribbon tie. I opened it and tenderly deposited the contents on the palm of my good hand. A rock. It was a small, garden-variety rock. Even I could recognize a plain yard rock. I looked back at Thomas’s letter.

  It may look like an ordinary piece of quartz from the driveway. But to Cora, it’s a ruby. If you could see how Cora sees the world, you’d know that, by God, that little hunk of quartz must be a ruby at heart.

  I curled my good hand shut around the stone. Scattered around me on the bed were wads of torn paper. My finalized divorce papers. Gerald had sent another pretty, shark-eyed woman attorney to deliver them, as if demonstrating how he needed beauty around him in all aspects of his life. She’d been waiting when I came home from hand surgery. The doctors couldn’t do anything else for my face, but at least my fingers could close smoothly around Gerald’s throat. I didn’t have two good hands to use at the moment, so I’d ripped the papers apart with my teeth.

  Never piss off an actress who still has uncapped incisors.

  My dreams were in pieces. I no longer trusted magic, good luck, the kindness of strangers, the adoration of men, or God’s grace. But thanks to Thomas, I could still wield a princess wand. I could turn a tent into a real house and give two little girls—and a cat, and a one-eyed rooster—a sanctuary. I could give Cora and Ivy something I’d taken for granted as a child. Security.

  I laid Cora’s ruby by my pill bottle. A photo of Gerald and his new girlfriend stood nearby.

  Thomas

  Ms. Deen is asking the two of you to manage a trust fund for Cora and Ivy, including full college scholarships for both girls. She wants to leave a legacy far more positive than the current media portrayal of her as a reclusive failure.

  Delta threw the lawyer’s letter down on the café’s sunny table. “Thomas, I’m fifty years old, and you’re going to drink yourself to death in a year or two, but Cathy acts like we’ll just naturally outlive her. She’s planning things as if she’s not going to be here to supervise them herself.”

  Frowning, I skimmed the letter again. “Maybe she just likes to cover all the possibilities.”

  “Maybe she just intends to lay down and die,” Delta insisted. “Look at these headlines.” Delta spread several grocery-store tabloids on the table. “‘Friends Worried About Star’s Mental Health.’ ‘Neighbors Glimpse Frail Cathryn Only At Night.’ ‘Star’s Divorce Now Final; Could Be Last Straw.’ What can we do, Thomas? Oh, sure, when I call her she says not to pay attention to the gossip, but could all of these magazines be lying?” She pounded a tabloid with one flour-speckled forefinger, leaving white fingerprints on Brad and Angelina.

  I pushed the gossip rags aside. I wanted to take Cathy by the shoulders and look into her eyes and say, Fight back. The evil can’t get you, if you don’t let it. Except I wasn’t much of a role model for that advice. “I’m not sure what else we can do to help her.”

  Delta sighed. “I’ve offered to visit, and I’ve invited her to come here and live at my house until she’s ready to be on her own. Why don’t you talk to her again? Just let her keep thinking you’re a sweet old man calling her to chat.”

  “I could share my philosophy,” I said grimly. “Advise her to move to the Crossroads and stay drunk for a few years.”

  “Maybe she should. Look at the progress you’ve made, Thomas. You only sleep drunk in your truck once a week or so, now, and the local betting pool has lowered the odds on you killing yourself to one in a hundred. I shouldn’t tell you this, but it used to be one in five.”

  “I’m honored.”

  “If you could talk to the old you, the one who barely made it through each day, what would you say? What kept you going?”

  “I have a rule. If my hand trembles when I pick up the pistol I keep at my cabin, I’m not sure enough. Doubts will mess up even the most carefully planned suicide. It’s hard to shoot straight if your hand shakes. I don’t want to screw it up.”

  Delta slowly sat back in her chair, her mouth open in horror. “Dear Lord,” she whispered.

  I nodded. “You asked.”

  Her shoulders sagged. “Well, thank goodness, women don’t shoot themselves.”

  “No, they swallow pills.”

  My tongue froze on the last word. Delta and I stared at each other. Delta said in a chilled voice, “Cathy’s planning to kill herself.”

  I pulled a new cell phone out of my jeans’ pocket. John had laminated a tiny picture of a goat’s head on the back, inside a red circle with a slash across the goat’s face.

  I made a call.

  Chapter 11

  Cathy Decision Time

  It was after midnight. I came in from sitting by the pool. There’s nothing like swilling a two-hundred-dollar chardonnay straight from the bottle. I had a pint of the finest aged bourbon waiting for me, next. Bourbon is the drink of morbid Southerners everywhere. The julep in the mint julep. The rebel in the yell. The moonlight in the magnolia. I was ready to go, and bourbon—along with the pain pills—would take me home.

  My hair was nicely moussed and fluffed. It had finally grown out enough to hide my deformed ear, and I’d lacquered its dark curves into place. I’d done my makeup, at least on the unburned part of my face. My famous eyes looked big and sultry, though bloodshot. I was dressed in flowing silk pajamas—deep red, like a ruby. Over them I wore a gorgeous, kim
ono-like red robe. When the medical examiner’s office leaked details of my suicide, they’d have to mention how elegant I looked. Gerald and his new girlfriend wouldn’t be able to upstage me at my funeral.

  “Cobarde!” Bonita yelled at me. Coward.

  My trusted housekeeper stood in the middle of my bedroom suite, crying but furious. She shook my bottle of pills at me. “I found these hidden in your nightstand. My daughter died of an overdose! You know that! How could you consider doing such a thing to yourself! Have you not thought of how it would hurt the people who care about you? How dare you!”

  In all the years she and Antonio had worked for me, Bonita had never pried into my personal belongings before. Who’d alerted her to the pills? No one knew about my stash. “Those are prescription,” I insisted.

  “Oh? The doctors stopped giving you these months ago.” She tapped a fingernail on the bottle. “I see the date on this. You’ve been saving these up for . . . you know! Ah, querita! A million nuns could say prayers for you but it won’t save you if you take your own life!”

  “Episcopalians don’t go to hell. We go to the country club.”

  “You admit it, then. You were going to kill yourself!”

  “I kept the pills in case I had a headache.”

  “A headache? Oh, don’t lie to me. My daughter used to lie to me. I should have seen the signs. And I should have done this for my daughter.” She ran into my bathroom.

  I followed her as fast as I could, weaving a little and holding onto furniture. When I heard the rush of water being flushed down the commode I yelled again, “They’re prescription!”

  Too late. I staggered into the commode room and watched my suicide dose swirl toward the Pacific. Bonita slammed the commode lid and faced me. “I know you can buy more,” she said grimly. “The drug pushers in this neighborhood drive Mercedes and call themselves ‘friends,’ and hand out pretty pills in nice containers, but they’re no better than the lowest street dealers. If you do business with them, Antonio and I will quit working for you. We’ll leave.”