The Crossroads Cafe

by Deborah Smith

  Apparently, Thomas had left me on my own, for my own good. Just as I’d asked him to. Damn.

  Thomas

  I missed Cathy, I missed our small haven in North Carolina, and I dreaded seeing my brother’s three boys, who I’d avoided for the past few years because all three reminded me of Ethan. Like him, they had eyes the gold-brown color of some ancient Viking’s wooden cudgel, square jaws, wavy brown hair and the female-luring divet of a dimple in one cheek. We Mitternich men all looked Anglo-Euro-Slavic in a ruddy, lanky, swarthy, Dutch-tulip-farmer way, as if Don Quixote had fathered children with a Flemish milkmaid. The old man had been lean and compact, built for the steerage cabin of an immigrant ship, but our mother had been elegantly plush and six inches taller than him, according to family photos and memoirs of a distantly Russian heritage. The old man said her people had been expert horsemen in the czar’s service, which might mean Cossacks or might mean nothing but wishful debates around a beer cooler at a family reunion.

  But when I stepped out of a taxi in front of John’s six-bedroom mini-mansion in a gated community with its own private stables and riding trails, the first thing I saw among the manicured hedges of the snow-dappled front yard were all three of my nephews atop their expensive hunter-jumper ponies. Mother’s Cossack heritage must be true. Here were our family horsemen, riding the sodded-lawn tundra of affluent suburbia.

  Jeremy, Bryan and David all stared back at me in descending orders of age and recognition. My nephews were dressed in protective riding helmets, jodhpurs, knee-high black riding books and neon-orange vests over their quilted coats. If they fell off the ponies, they’d bounce. David, six, and Bryan, nine, craned their helmeted heads and began backing their ponies away from me. “Mom!” David yelled into the wireless cell-phone remote attached to his ear. “A stranger is here! A real hairy stranger!”

  “Dad!” Bryan called via his remote. “Some guy with no car is in the driveway!”

  But Jeremy, the oldest at twelve, remembered me. “Chill out,” he told his younger brothers. Then, into his remote, “Mom, Dad? Uncle Thomas must have caught an earlier plane. He’s here already.”

  “At ease, guys,” I said as I started up the driveway. One of Cathy’s scarves fell from my coat pocket. I’d swiped it that day at the Privy. She always carried extras. The ponies snorted. David and Bryan stared as I bent and scooped the mystery cloth back into my pocket. Even Jeremy backed his pony up.

  “My hand warmer,” I lied.

  The mini-mansion’s double-front doors sprang open. A tall, portly, thirty-five-year old suburban dad with a receding brown hairline and a penchant for expensive ski sweaters loped out, followed by a plump, beaming soccer mom with salon-blonde hair, diamond-bedazzled fingers, and a Happy Hanukah apron over her Christmas sweater. They both wore natty wireless cell phone earpieces. The John Mitternich family was always outfitted like an Uhura fan club at a Star Trek convention.

  “I don’t believe it,” John shouted as he grabbed me in a hug. “You trimmed your beard and you came to visit! It’s a holiday miracle!”

  “Our very own non-Confederate rebel has returned to civilization,” Monica noted, alternately hugging me and curiously prodding a Possum, The Other White Meat patch Bubba and Jeb had super-glued to the shoulder of my coat one night while I was passed out in the bed of my pick-up. They still guffawed over it.

  John wiped tears from his eyes and hugged me again, rocking me back and forth and patting my back. “Good to see you, good to see you,” he said hoarsely. “I knew if I kept sending you phones I’d finally get through to you.”

  “Well, you know what they say in the Christmas movie,” I deadpanned over the emotion in my throat. “Every time a hillbilly hears his cell phone ring, an angel gets a beer.”

  Cathy

  Behind every inoffensively sweet woman there’s an iron-willed enforcer—usually a husband or boyfriend, but it could be a sister, mother, or girlfriend—who does most of her dirty work. What would Glenda the Good Witch be without the Wicked Witch of the West? What would Melanie be without Scarlett? Just a pair of perky Pollyanna’s whose angelic do-gooding hinted that they secretly felt superior to the Munchkins and the Rebels. In order to be noble, a good girl needs an enemy, a cause, a rallying cry. Her goodness has to stand strong against true villainy. Joan of Arc wouldn’t be much of a legend if she’d said at trial, “Oh, never mind that vision thing I mentioned,” and the English had just threatened to singe her eyebrows and revoke her passport.

  I’d never had to play the wicked witch before, because I hired people—mostly men—to be the Wicked Witch for me. Thus, I could reign supreme among my people as The Lovable, Nice and Beautiful Star of Oz. If you’re beautiful and famous you’re expected to be one extreme or the other—a bitch or a saint. Now that I wasn’t beautiful, maybe I could choose a middle ground. Alberta was belittling but effective. Macy was motherly and completely non-threatening. Delta was both lovable and commanding. I wanted to be like her.

  Okay, I still had some kinks in my self-empowerment themes. But I knew that what happened between me and the Crossroad’s ultimate female tough guys, The Log Splitter Girls, would be a test of my ability to fit in with the reality of my new life, to find out if I was more than just a pretty face.

  I needed a chair and a whip.

  My relationship with Alberta rolled farther down the ravine of crankiness every day. She clearly didn’t respect me, didn’t expect much backbone from me, and, no doubt, saw me as a main competitor for Thomas’s valuable sperm. Our tense working environment wasn’t helped when I overheard her referring to me as “Little Red Hiding Hood,” when I wore a red scarf over my head. A lapsed Catholic, she openly joked to Macy and their crew that the Pope ought to name me, “Sister Cathryn of the Mental Disorder,” after I diligently placed fire extinguishers near Macy’s portable camping stove and after I insisted that the crew move my new electric generator, with its propane-guzzling combustion engine, an extra thirty feet from the house.

  “I’ve never known a generator to sneak across a yard and burst into flame,” Alberta told the crew loudly. “But we’re not getting paid to use common sense, so move it.” Turning to me, she delivered the final coup de grace. “By the way, I know you’re so rich you don’t care about the cost, but nobody in her right mind powers a house on a generator fueled by propane. It costs a fortune and you’ll have to get the tank refilled about once a week. You should at least have ordered diesel. And I just want you to know that when you fire up that generator, it’s going to sound like a cement truck idling in your yard, day and night. You’ll never have another quiet minute here.” She sniffed. “But I guess, being used to the background noise of a city, it doesn’t bother you to make an unholy racket.”

  I stared her down, indulging in a quick imaginary laser attack with my eyes. When I finished burning a large, neat hole in the center of her forehead, I said between gritted teeth, “Get me a diesel generator and build a shed around it to muffle the sound of its engine.”

  She arched a red brow. “My crew doesn’t have time to ‘build’ you a shed for your new generator this week. But I’ll have Turtleville Mini-Barns deliver a pre-fab shed tomorrow, and I’ll have the diesel generator installed inside it, then my crew will line the walls with insulation.” Her short, ruddy curls bounced with evil delight as she nodded at her own brilliance. “That way, the generator will be trapped inside a cage made of sound-proof and fire-proof walls. It won’t be able to hop across the yard and attack you.”

  At that point I thought about shooting her, but didn’t want to spend the holidays in jail.

  Over the next few days I had to admit Alberta was a born leader, or at least a born drill sergeant. She ran a tight, efficient crew and supervised every detail to a perfectionistic fare-thee-well. By midweek my rutted farm road had been scraped and graveled all the way down the ridge to the creek trail. A sturdy metal gate hung discreetly between two handsome beech trees where the farmroad meandered along a rocky incline.
No unwelcome visitor could get around that natural barricade of rocks and trees if I padlocked my gate.

  A new water pipe protruded neatly over my kitchen sink. Its gravity-fed spigot released a hearty stream of sweet, clear, ice-cold water from a hundred-gallon drum outside. The drum sat atop a tall wooden platform, a cute miniature of that Petticoat Junction water tank I mentioned. An in-flow pipe sprouted high on the drum’s side, nosedived to the ground, disappeared at a right angle beneath the raw earth of a newly filled trench, then made a bee-line to a cute little well house the Rainbow women built of weathered wood and old tin roofing salvaged from one of the farm’s collapsed tool sheds. Inside the well house, a small electric pump vacuumed water up the deep, narrow pipe of my newly-bored well.

  “You got great underground water up here on this ridge,” the well driller proclaimed. “Easy to tap into, got real good flow, plenty to irrigate with.”

  “Enough to give me excellent water pressure for a sprinkler system?” I asked.

  “Well, sure, ma’am, like I said, plenty for irrigation.”

  “No, no. I mean an indoor sprinkler system. I plan to install one this spring.”

  “You planning on watering plants indoors, ma’am? You mean, like a greenhouse?”

  “Safety sprinklers. In the ceiling. In case of fire.”

  “Like they have in department stores and motels?”

  “Yes, a commercial type of sprinkler system.”

  “You’re gonna put sprinklers in the ceiling of your house?”

  “Yes.”

  He pointed to the cottage. “That nice little one-story house with lots of windows to jump out of.”

  “Yes.”

  He tugged the brim of a “Get ‘er Done” tractor cap lower on his forehead, shuffled his work boots, and hunched his shoulders in a camo hunting jacket. “Ma’am, don’t take this the wrong way, but . . . why don’t you just buy extra fire insurance and put in some smoke alarms?”

  “Oh, I’ll have smoke alarms and other back-up systems in addition to the sprinklers.”

  At that point, Alberta, who’d been listening with her hands on her hips and her eyes set on permanent roll, slithered up to my well driller and fake-whispered to him, “She’s also planning to build a moat around the house. With a fire-proof drawbridge made of steel.”

  My gullible well driller went wide-eyed. “Well, ma’am,” he said to me, “when you go to filling your moat? Your new well sure will get a workout.”

  As he headed for his truck I lasered another imaginary hole between Alberta’s eyes. “That wasn’t funny. He believed you. He’ll tell people I’m building a moat.”

  An evil little smile crooked her mouth. She nodded at my ever-present scarf-hood, at my ever-present gloves, and at the fire extinguisher I was just about to place inside the new well house. “Yeah, we wouldn’t want folks to think you’re peculiar.” Chuckling, she walked off.

  “Smug, fearless bee-atch,” I muttered.

  Don’t ever assume lesbians are endowed with a special brand of wisdom, compassion, or sensitive insights into the suffering of their fellow travelers on the path to an alternate reality. They’re just real people, after all.

  Behind my house, the orchard emerged from among the stumps of chainsawed pine trees, and an old walking trail to the family cemetery was cleared of overgrowth. But best of all, a big, diesel-powered generator hummed gently inside a pretty mini-barn at the edge of the backyard. Beside it, looking like a large silver suppository on metal legs, stood a tank of diesel fuel. Alberta’s crew ran a cable from the generator to an outlet box on the cottage’s back porch; then they fired up the generator, plugged several orange extension cords to the outlet box, and snaked them through the house.

  This wasn’t the cheapest or most efficient way to power a home, but it meant I didn’t have to install wiring and have the power company ruin the scenery with lines. They’d have had to put in power poles or underground lines all the way from the Trace up the creek trail and then up the ridge to my house. This way, except for a network of extension cords taped along my chestnut baseboards, the ridge’s non-electrified integrity remained unspoiled. A thick, orange, outdoor extension cord curled across my back yard and slithered under a wall of the new well house. Electricity brought water to my kitchen sink. Water so cold it made me wince every time I splashed some on my face, but still, I had water and I hadn’t yet ruined Thomas’s precious house.

  I hope you’re happy, I told him. I tried not to think of him being so far away, in Chicago. I had to take a pill whenever I did.

  Delta drove up one afternoon for the farm’s official lighting ceremony. She and I hadn’t been furniture shopping yet, but she’d already orchestrated the delivery of a small fridge, a microwave and a queen-sized mattress and box springs with a utilitarian metal bed frame. As a housewarming gift she and Pike brought me pillows, flannel sheets, a comforter, and a beautiful quilt in a log-cabin pattern, made by the Saturday-night quilting club at the café, which included Alberta and Macy. I tried to picture Alberta doing something as delicate as needlework, but couldn’t. We put the bed in the front bedroom of my three-bedroom house. “I remember sleeping in this room when I visited,” I told Delta. “I remember that it had been my mother’s room.” It seemed so big when I was little, but the queen bed left barely enough space to walk around it and fluff the covers. “How did people sleep comfortably on cots or double beds in bedrooms this small, especially without central heat and air conditioning?” I made the mistake of saying that aloud in Alberta’s presence.

  Alberta snorted. “They had other priorities. Like putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their children’s heads.”

  She strolled out. I looked at Delta. “Never ask a rhetorical sissy-girl question around the queen of the Amazons.”

  “Aw, Alberta’s all right. She’s just had a hard life, that’s all, and she doesn’t trust anybody who hasn’t.”

  I gestured grimly toward my hooded face. “I need to be even more maimed to qualify for her respect?”

  “Oh, hon.” Delta hugged me. “It’s not what hurts you that makes you respectable. It’s how you get over it.”

  “So I still have a lot to prove. At least to Alberta.”

  Delta shrugged. I reached for the boxy metal bar of a multi-unit power strip attached to one of the orange extension cords. Delta set a small silver office lamp on a plastic crate by my new bed. A loaner until we went shopping. I plugged its cord to the extension cord then slowly put my hand on the lamp’s switch. I looked at Delta. “This is going to be the first time ever that this house has been lit by an electric lamp.”

  She looked heavenward. “What’s that, Mary Eve? Oh, okay, I’ll tell her.” Delta smiled at me. “Your granny says, ‘It’s your house now, so let there be modern light.’”

  I pushed the switch. The white, pragmatic glow of the lamp pooled in the bedroom’s dark spaces. For the first time in the history of the house, in the history of the farm, in the history of the Smoky Mountains, in the entire geologic timeline of the earth, the glow of an electric light softened the wilderness of Wild Woman Ridge. It didn’t waver and it wasn’t unpredictable, like a flame. Steady and safe, it reflected dependably off the soft reds and browns of the chestnut walls and glinted in the stained-glass window across from the bed. The room might be small and sparsely furnished, but the bed looked comfortable and colorful, and the lamp made me happy. Light is a happy thing.

  I plugged a CD player into the power strip, and a clock. On the floor I set a small, tolerable electric heater. It had sisters in the living room and kitchen. They gushed warm air across the maple floor as they swiveled back and forth like summer fans. I left one outlet free on my bedroom power strip. “You can put another lamp in here,” Delta noted.

  I gave a dull chuckle. “No, this outlet’s for my vibrator.”

  She laughed so hard she clamped a hand over the front of her jeans. “I think I wet myself. The curse of middle-age.”

 
; “My porta-shitter is through the hall door, across the sleeping porch, out the screened door, down the steps, then past the first oak on the left.”

  She laughed harder and hurried outdoors.

  I stood there alone, gazing at the lamp, the bed and the outlet for my vibrator. I don’t need Thomas to keep me warm and satisfied. I have impersonal electricity instead.

  All right, I admitted it. I missed him.

  Chapter 19

  Thomas Chicago

  My brother’s house was full of electronics. His darkly paneled study included a high-definition flatscreen TV, two computers, a Play Station, CD players, DVD players, several iPods, a Blackberry, TiVo, and a wall full of software and manuals. It was like sitting in the command station for a space shuttle, only with more controls. The Best of Steely Dan rocked softly from an iPod speaker berth, and digital fish swam across the computers’ screen savers. The study’s mantel brimmed with blue Hanukah candles, Christmas garland, and robotic toys. The only non-electronic, organic elements in the room were John, me, and the flames on his gas fireplace logs.

  “Dad,” Jeremy called over the house’s intercom-slash-security system. “Mom says we can go skateboarding at the rink tomorrow if you and Uncle Thomas promise to keep us off the Super Slalom of Death.”

  “Sure.”

  “She’s standing right here. She says you have to say it out loud so it’s a promise.”

  “No wiggle room for semantics, this time,” we heard Monica say in the background.

  John laughed. “I solemnly promise that Thomas and I will do our best to prevent all three Mitternich boys from attempting the Super Slalom of Death.”

  “I hear loopholes,” Monica said. “If anyone comes back with broken bones, I’m making all of you play dreidel every night this week, and for matchsticks, not chocolate.”