The Crossroads Cafe

by Deborah Smith

  “She’ll be happy, here,” I told the puppies, as if I could make promises for the dead, as if they understood. They wagged their fluffy tails at my voice, I knew that much. I waved a hand at the Nettie tombstones among the deep gloaming. “Lots of people who liked dogs are here. And their dogs along with them. And cats. And a goat. Y’all can visit here anytime you feel like it. That path we walked from the house? Just follow it.”

  More tail wagging.

  I knelt beside the small, sad form of their mother’s body, still wrapped in a black trash bag. The puppies huddled on either side of me. I put a hand on each of their delicate little bodies. Tears rose in my eyes, and my throat ached. I was so worried about Thomas. I tried to think of something hopeful from the Episcopal funeral liturgy to comfort me and the puppies, but couldn’t. Daddy didn’t go to funerals and my aunts preferred cremation or stuffing. For their pets, that is. I shivered at the memory of small vases in one aunt’s china cabinet and a stuffed tabby alongside the golf trophies of another. No, I’d have to wing this service.

  I stood and cleared my throat. “Little Miss Sheltie was a good mother,” I began. “She died trying to protect her babies.” I looked down at the puppies. “I’m so sorry y’all won’t have her here in the flesh anymore, because it’s hard to grow up without a mother, I know, and there’ll be so many days when you’ll wish you could hear her voice again, just once; you’ll wish she could tell you what you thinks of how you’re doing, if she’s proud of you, and those small, important moments, like when you get your period the first time, or your first date, or your first kiss, or your first, your ‘first,’ you know, and you’ll wish you could ask her advice, but you’ll have to just hope, just have faith that somehow, some way, she’s listening and she’s speaking to you in quiet little ways you aren’t aware of. Sometimes she may speak through other people, and sometimes she may speak through your dreams, and sometimes, like now—” my voice broke, and the puppies licked my shoes and whined—“sometimes, she may speak to you through someone else’s mother, through that mother’s sacrifices or victories.”

  Tears slid down my face. I knelt again, gathering the puppies in my arms. They licked my cheeks. “Parents are not perfect,” I whispered. “But the best ones really do have good intentions. My father tried to keep me away from this farm, away from my Granny Nettie, because he thought she was a bad influence. He was wrong about that, but he didn’t mean to hurt her, or me. In his own way I suppose he thought he was honoring my mother’s memory, doing what she would have wanted. My mother left this farm and made a new life for herself in Atlanta. Maybe she rejected Granny’s way of life, maybe she broke Granny’s heart without realizing it. I can’t say. I don’t know, and it breaks my heart to not know what she and Granny really went through. All I can say now is, ‘I’m here. I’m back, Granny. I’m back, Mother. You and Granny have to work out the past for yourselves. Just help me work out the future, all right? Help me take care of these babies, these puppies. And please, please, help me take care of Thomas. He’s suffered so much already. Please help me understand how to help him. Please.’”

  I nuzzled the puppies. “Sometimes you just have to bury your mother and go on with your life and try to be a good mother yourself.” I kissed the puppies on their heads, gently set them aside, and laid the body of their mother into the grave. “Goodbye, sweet little dog,” I whispered as I sprinkled the first handful of dirt. “Goodbye from me.” Another handful. “Goodbye from my mother and grandmother.” A handful. “And most of all, goodbye from your two loving daughters.” Two handfuls. I stood again, shivering in the falling temperature of a January night. I shoveled the rest of the dirt into the grave, tamped it with my feet, found some rocks to pile on it, then stepped back. The puppies leaned against my legs.

  “I’ll get her a marker,” I promised them. “But I don’t know her name. Toots couldn’t say, none of the neighbors knew, and I’m not asking Frank Hunnell. We’ll think of a name to put on the gravestone, all right? Something better than ‘Little Miss Sheltie.’ And I don’t know your names, either. I’m Cathy. Cathy Deen. And you are?”

  Of course, they just looked up at me and said nothing.

  “If I were Alberta, I’d name you ‘Thelma and Louise.’” No response. “If I were Delta, I’d name you ‘Biscuit and Gravy.’” No response. “If I were the old me, I’d name you ‘Vera Wang and Coco Chanel.’” No response. “But I’m not sure who I am, anymore.” I shut my eyes. “Mother? Granny Nettie? Mother of These Puppies? Could the three of you help me name these girls? Tell me who I am, and who they are.”

  No response.

  I opened my eyes wearily. “Okay, we’ll work on the names later. Maybe we have to figure this out for ourselves, girls.” I put the shovel on one shoulder and looked at the grave one more time. The puppies circled the stones, sniffing at them, touching them with curious paws. I clucked at them, and they came to me. “We’re on our own tonight. Let’s go home.” They wagged their tails. A good sign. We were a family.

  Watching out for the shadows, picking our way through the woods, we went back to the house. I kept thinking of Thomas, and death.

  Thomas

  Liquor, like most mind-altering substances, including food and sex, is a multi-layered temptation, a seductive genie corralled in the bottle of our common sense. Let the genie out carefully, persuade it to grant your more benign wishes, and you’ll be okay. But turn your back on it, let go of the leash, and the genie will drag you inside the bottle and chain you to its floor. And there, my friend, you’ll find a hell of your own making.

  I prided myself on controlling the vodka genie. I knew how to set it on ‘stun’ for hours on end, keeping the effect just below ‘stupor’ and just above ‘pain.’ Even that night, after my decision to leave the Crossroads and die, I kept the genie on a leash. I packed my big canvas tote neatly and slowly, pausing to drink and read Sherry’s email to Ravel again every hour or so. I built a fire as the cold night settled in, and I turned my bed down, and I ate canned meat with crackers. I was calm, I was deliberate, I was numb. I didn’t want to think about the letter—in between reading it—and I didn’t want to think about the death wish I’d put on Ethan and his never-born sibling—and I didn’t want to think about Cathy.

  If I got out of her way now, she’d be able to tell people I was just someone she’d needed in transition, while she was getting her life back together, not someone she regretted ever meeting. And Delta. Delta would never forgive me, but Delta was good at putting sorrows in perspective, and she’d be all right.

  My brother. John. He’d never forgive me either, but John had seen this coming a long time. He wouldn’t be surprised. I’d leave the email. John would read it and understand. He’d get over my death. He had a loving wife and children to live for. He was a family man. Clearly, I wasn’t.

  I set the tote on the seat of my truck. I laid my pistol on top of it. An Enfield No. 2 Mk 1, a workhorse of a revolver, .38 caliber, British, their standard sidearm during World War II. I’d bought it from an old Japanese businessman in New York years earlier. He would only say, “It came to me through a family connection who cherished the bravery endowed in it,” leaving me to wonder what soldier in his family fought the soldier who died holding it.

  This gun had seen too much honorable war to be shocked by my peacetime despair. This gun considered me an afterthought in its legacy. Good. I walked back inside, coatless, not shivering in the below-freezing temp. A white, crisp moon rose over Hog Back, silvering the high pasture, my unfinished vineyard homage to Frank Lloyd Wright, and me.

  Cathy Midnight

  I couldn’t sleep. The puppies wisely grieved for their mother only in their dreams, so they were curled up, sound asleep, in the jumbled quilts of my bed. I wandered through my house from one waggling-headed electric heater to the next, still dressed in jeans, a heavy sweater, and wrapped in one of my grandmother’s quilts. I carried my cell phone with me in case Thomas called. He didn’t. The darkness
beyond my windows was only leavened by the stark, white moon.

  I stood in my empty living room, among the boxes and cot and ad-lib curtains, feeling my thoughts echo off the smooth, empty chestnut boards of the walls. This house needs furniture. I have puppies now. They need a couch to chew. I’ll go back and buy Toots’ furniture. I’ll get Thomas to go look at it with me. See if he thinks it fits the mood of this place.

  I pulled the quilt tighter around my shoulders. Even with space heaters, the house was cold. Tea. I’d brew a cup of hot Earl Grey in the microwave, with sourwood honey Macy had given me, made by lesbian bees. That would soothe me. In the kitchen, squinting in the shadowy pool of light from a small lamp on the counter, I scuffed my socked feet over the red-clay constellations, fetched a plain ceramic mug from a cabinet, and twisted the handle on the primitive faucet of my sink. Ice-cold water trickled into my mug. I dropped a tea bag into the water and idly bounced it. Lost in thought, I gazed out the uncurtained window over the sink.

  I wonder if Ivy and Cora are still enjoying their Christmas gifts? I should call Thomas and ask if he’s seen them lately. It’s only midnight. I should call him.

  Suddenly, I saw him in the window. His reflection, over my own. No, not his face. His hand. Like a close-up in a film. I simply understood it was his hand. And his hand was . . . dead. It sprawled in the window pane, palm up, flecked with red.

  Flecked with blood. His blood.

  I dropped the mug. It hit the hard sky of the constellations and burst into ceramic chunks. Cold, tea-stained water splashed my socks.

  I didn’t bother changing them. I shoved my feet into loafers and fumbled in my purse for the keys to the Hummer. “Sleep tight, I’ll be back,” I told the puppies. I, who had not driven a vehicle more demanding than a garden tractor in ten long months, I, who had panic attacks just sitting in my own Hummer’s passenger seat, I went outside in the moonlight and climbed up into that big, hulking Fear on Wheels, and I cranked the engine.

  And, shaking, I headed for Thomas’s cabin.

  Praying I wasn’t too late.

  Thomas

  The rumble of an engine woke me from a dazed sleep by my fireplace. I staggered from the chair Cathy had moved by the hearth, knocked over the half-empty bottle by my feet, and shoved the stained letter away from an ember on the hearth’s stone ledge. By the time I looked out a window I saw Cathy, carrying a flashlight, walking toward my truck in the moonlight. I’d left the driver’s door open. She looked in, leaned in, and I knew what she was seeing: The revolver, my wallet, my keys, and a wad of cash laying atop the duffle bag.

  My plan couldn’t have been more obvious.

  Dull anger crowded the despair in my mind. I’d told her not to come here. I slammed the cabin door open and strode outside in the cold moonlight. She jumped, looked at me wildly, dropped the flashlight, but then turned back inside the truck’s cab. When she pivoted to face me, she held the revolver in both hands, held it out from her on her palms as if afraid it might explode. But then she flipped the chamber open with surprising expertise and began methodically shaking the bullets out. I reached her as the last one hit the ground. With one quick swipe I pulled the empty revolver from her hands.

  “Give that back,” she ordered. “Goddammit, you give that gun back to me.”

  “I can’t do that.” We were carved in shadows; I heard her hoarse sound of rage before I saw the flash of her hand. She drew back her scarred right hand in a fist.

  And punched me in the mouth.

  It barely hurt, though I was dimly aware of tasting blood. I was too numb, too drunk, to care, though she hit me hard enough to make me take a step back. She grabbed for the empty gun, and I lifted it away from her reach, while bracing one hand on her shoulder. I held her at bay. She uttered another sound, deep and feminine and furious. Twisting away from me, she shoved my arm aside and got free.

  We faced each other like boxers in a ring. “How could you?” she yelled. “How could you sneak away and blow your brains out? Was that the plan? You care so little about yourself, about me, about all the people who need you, that this is how you do it?” She slung her hands at me and gave a fierce, broken laugh. “You think I couldn’t stand to find you laying out here with your brains spattered across your grape trellises? So instead you’d run off to somewhere safe, someplace among strangers? How dare you!” She fell to her knees, searched the ground, then leapt to her feet with something clenched in her fist. “Here, go ahead, let me watch, now that I know what to expect!” A small, sharp weight hit my arm. Bullets. She threw another one. The tip caught my cheekbone. “How could you do this to yourself!”

  I hadn’t flinched, hadn’t moved. “Go home,” I said in a low voice. I couldn’t think; the liquor and depression controlled me, there were no eloquent words left. I loved her, I didn’t want her to know I’d wished my own children dead.

  She groaned, a sobbing, feverish sound, and shook her fists at me. “You can either drag me into your truck and drive me home, or you can shoot me. Those are the only ways I’ll leave. Give the gun to me.”

  “You remember what you said to me in the Privy that day? ‘I never asked you to care.’”

  “I was a fool. We can’t decide who cares about us and who doesn’t! The only reason I’m alive today is because you and Delta decided to care about me. Now I care about you and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t pretend your choices don’t hurt other people when you hurt yourself!”

  “I live with my choices every day. I know who I’ve hurt.”

  “Really? No. You don’t know a damn thing about your choices! You’re letting liquor and depression and your manipulative psycho-bitch of a sister-in-law make all your choices for you! You let them control you. How about giving me the privilege of controlling your life, instead?”

  I let the gun drop to the ground. “I’m taking you home. Stop asking so many questions.”

  “You’re too drunk to catch me, and if you do, you won’t get me into the truck without hurting me, and without me hurting you. I know you, Thomas. You’re not going to hurt me. You haven’t got it in you. And you’re sure as hell not going to catch me.” She turned and ran a dozen yards or so, stopping atop a knoll, silhouetted in the white moonlight, against the starry sky.

  I walked slowly up the knoll towards her. She balled her hands into fists by her sides and braced her legs apart. “I thought I could trust you,” she yelled hoarsely. “You weren’t a photographer trying to screw me, you weren’t Gerald trying to make money off me, you weren’t all the men who’ve loved me only for my looks, you weren’t the world. I thought you’d always be here for me. Don’t tell me I was wrong!”

  I halted, looking up at her. “I can’t be what you want me to be. You don’t know me.”

  “You already are what I want you to be. And I know you better than I’ve ever known any man before in my entire life!” She pummeled the air with her fists. “Why don’t you just admit that you don’t want me? That the thought of . . . of fucking me really is repulsive to you. The kindness and the flirting and friendship has all been some kind of sick game to you, hasn’t it? You don’t really want to touch me. You don’t want to see me naked. Admit it!” She jabbed a hand at me. “You’d rather kill yourself than touch me.”

  “This is insane.”

  “Is it?” Her voice rose. “Is it?” She shrugged her coat off, slung it aside, grabbed the hem of her sweater and pulled the sweater off over her head. Her furious breath puffed white in the moonlight. She threw the sweater down the knoll at me. “Touch me, then! If you’re going to kill yourself soon, you won’t have to stand the memory of my naked ugliness very long, so go for it!”

  “I’m warning you for the last time, Cathy. Go home.”

  “Liar. You never wanted me.You were just being kind to me. Pitying me. Hoping to wheedle the Nettie farm out of me. Me, the grotesque and pathetic and lonely Cathy Deen. Was that it?”

  “You know that’s not true.”


  “All I know is you’d rather die than be with me.” She unzipped her jeans, shoved them down, kicked off her shoes, then the jeans, then stood there in her bra and panties. I couldn’t see the scars down the right side of her body, I only saw the incredible silhouette of her, against the sky, the moonlight. Nothing could make me want her less. Nothing could stop me from wanting her, always.

  “I’m right,” she said through gritted teeth. “I’m right. You won’t even try to touch me.” She shoved her panties down, kicked them aside, unfastened her bra, threw it aside. “It doesn’t get anymore humiliating than this, Thomas. And all I’m asking you to do is have the guts to admit I’m ugly. Admit you can’t make yourself touch me.”

  I knew what she was doing to me, I knew she was playing me, but there was no way back. I was frozen in place, my life revolving around this single moment in time, everything hinging on who she demanded I be for her, for now, for then, for the rest of my life. She sobbed and turned her back to me. Put her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook. This was no acting job, this was real misery on her part. She was the essence of loneliness, of despair. My mirror. My life.

  I ran to her. I ran. I put my arms around her from behind and dragged her up and against me and stroked my hands over her from chin to thigh and back again in rough, urgent exploration. Cathy gasped and held onto my forearms. “Not there, not that side,” she said, trying to twist her head. I sank one hand into the thick, dark hair along her temple, held her still, and kissed the ruined flesh along her neck and face. She could play me, but I could play her, too.