by Delia Rosen
I got back to the deli at 7:30. I microwaved a potato knish, homemade, using my uncle’s personal recipe. They were one of the few menu items I made myself. It hit the spot, not just hunger-wise but comfort-wise. I felt like a kid again, at that Coney Island I was missing. I washed it down with burnt, reheated coffee—another taste of New York—just in time for the arrival of Scott Ferguson.
Dani was right: even under the shadowy light of a streetlamp, he did look like Bill Roche. Enough to be his brother. I made him out to be early to midtwenties. He was a little over six feet, big shoulders, slightly bowed legs.
I snatched my keys from where I’d plunked them beside the cash register, unlocked the door, and held out my hand.
He went to shake it.
“Uh-uh,” I said. I held it out more insistently.
He seemed puzzled. Then he remembered. He reached into what I now saw was a Nashville High football jacket and retrieved my phone. It was dead.
“What would you have done if it hadn’t been fully charged?” I asked him.
He reached into his other pocket and gave me the charger. The kid was thorough.
“Come in,” I said.
“Thanks.”
We didn’t introduce ourselves. We knew who we were, and I didn’t feel like it.
I put the keys and cell phone by the cash register. I didn’t lock the door, in case the kid was crazy or a killer. Given the way things had been going, I wasn’t willing to rule anything out. Were those traces of dog hair on his jacket?
Now that I had a better look at him, he seemed less photogenic than Bill Roche. He had a two-day growth of stubble, there were charcoal-colored patches under his eyes, and his longish hair looked a little greasy. He also smelled of seasoning.
“Which of my competitors do you work for?” I asked as I motioned to a table. “The Blue Elephant?”
His dull eyes showed signs of life. “How do you know that? Did you go to my Facebook page?”
Lord, what is it with kids and social networking? “No. I’ve got a good nose. Your boss, Singh, is up for the same Best Mid-Range Restaurant in Nashville Award.”
“Oh, yes,” the kid said as he sat heavily, gracelessly, like he was in his own kitchen. “He said something about that.”
“Really? How bad does he want to win it?”
“What?”
Bad enough to try and pin a murder on me? Does he have a dog?
I was confusing the young man, who already looked a little out of it, so I didn’t ask those questions but got back on topic. “Tell me something. Does Stacie know about me?”
“She does.”
“Would she be stalking me?”
He seemed surprised. “She’s not like that.”
“Then why did I see her—at least, I’m pretty sure it was her—outside the nail salon before?”
“Stacie?”
I described her.
He nodded. “That sounds like her.”
“So I repeat. Would she have been stalking me?”
“I might have mentioned you were going out. I guess she was curious. Was it about four?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s when she gets off work. She works at a day-care center, watching kids. Her shift’s from seven a.m. to four.”
The irony of that was rich and sad.
“So she got off work and stood somewhere outside and watched for me to go. And followed me. That’s what stalking is.”
“That may be, but I’m not sure she was dead set on meeting you, and I’m also saying that’s not who she is. She’s not crazy.”
“Scott, everyone’s crazy. It’s just that what brings it out is different for everyone. Like you, for instance.”
He looked at me, hurt and puzzled.
“Why the secrecy about your name, about this whole process? Stealing my phone when you could’ve just asked to talk to me. Wasn’t that a little crazy?”
“No. I thought about that. I was concerned because I knew what Lydia was planning on doing, and I wasn’t sure how to handle it. I wasn’t sure how you’d react. I thought if I had some control over the situation—”
“All right. Never mind,” I said. I didn’t have time for mea culpas. “Let’s agree that she was curious. What’s so important? Why does Stacie need two kinds of help?”
“Lydia wants to get her away from here, and I want to help her to stay.”
“Because . . . ?”
The kid didn’t look like my father. My guess was he was her half brother by some other guy or he was in love with her. I was leaning toward the latter. Lydia would have had to be pretty busy to birth two kids the same age by different men.
“She’s my fiancée,” he said.
Ah, another burst of love in bloom. God save me from my own cynicism.
“Go on,” I said. “Can I get you warmed-over coffee? I’m going to get a refill.”
“No, I’m good,” he said. He folded his hands in front of him, seemed to be praying as I poured more black coffee in my I’M THE BOSS mug.
“You were saying?” I stated, pressing.
He sighed. “She and I have been together for two years now. I proposed to her six months ago outside the Life and Casualty Tower on Church Street.”
“Congratulations.” I think I meant it.
“Thanks.”
“Does Lydia approve?”
He nodded. I wasn’t expecting that. I sat across from him. “Okay, back up the truck. I thought you and Lydia were at odds.”
“We are,” he said. “About what to do about it.”
“About what to do about what it?”
He took a long, tremulous breath. He was slumping forward now, actually leaning on his elbows. “Say, you have anything to drink?”
“I’m guessing you don’t mean ice water.”
“A beer?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
I went behind the counter to the fridge. We didn’t have a liquor license, but it was after hours and he wasn’t a paying customer. I twisted the cap off an Amstel Light and set it in front of him. He put his hand around it, held it for a second, then took a swallow. He aahed and set it back down.
“You were saying?”
He didn’t look at me as he said, “I believe Stacie’s having an affair.”
I stared at his forehead, trying to pull his eyes to mine. He couldn’t look at me, couldn’t look up, couldn’t do anything but take another swig of beer and then go back to his walking dead state.
“What makes you think that?” I asked.
“We live together in a one-bedroom apartment in Antioch,” he said. “Starting a couple months back, she disappears for hours at a time. Says she’s got babysitting gigs and comes back smelling like cologne.”
“Yeah. Not a lot of babies use the stuff.”
“I know.”
Note to self: no sense of humor. Either that, or the kid was really, really morose.
“After about four months of this I followed her to a house,” he said. “A real good house in Hendersonville. You know the area?”
“I know it.” Please don’t say what I don’t want to hear, I thought.
“Nice, right?”
“Very. And?” More teeth pulling. Is everyone in my life suddenly becoming incapable of speaking in complete, informative sentences?
“I checked the mail in the mailbox. A single dude owns it.”
“His name?” My stomach was twisting.
“Stephen R. Hatfield.”
Relief. “You’re sure he doesn’t have family living with him? Or visiting?”
“I followed her the next two times she went. There wasn’t no car pulling out, nobody going out for a night on the town. The owner stayed in, and she stayed in.”
“Okay, fine.”
“No, it isn’t,” he said.
“Right. I agree. What do you know about him?”
“He owns the building, the whole strip of buildings, where Stacie works. That’s probably how they met.”
> “Okay.” I was going to have to coax him along. This was clearly a topic he had no interest visiting. But I had a soft spot for jealousy today, since I was feeling it about my dad’s time with Lydia. I decided to be patient. “What else do you know about this guy?”
“He’s a powerful man from a wealthy family.”
“Powerful how?”
“Doesn’t the name mean anything to you?”
“Not off the top.”
“You’re not from around here.”
“No. I’m from New York City.”
He lit up a little. “Really?”
“Really.”
“I’ve always wanted to go there, ever since I saw all the news coverage from the World Trade Center. I was a kid, but I remember all those people serving food to the firefighters and first responders. I wished I was up there helping.”
I sipped coffee and sat back. Just shows, again, how you can misjudge someone.
“Is that what got you into the food business?” I asked.
He shook his head. “My mom’s datin’ Mr. Singh.”
“Ah. Well, then, back to Hatfield—” I came to a hard stop on the d. “Hold on. Hatfield? As in the Hatfields and the McCoys?”
“Yeah. See? I figured you heard of ’em.”
The whole world and all those L Word connections seemed to just get infinitely more complicated. “Everybody’s heard of them. You’re saying that these Hatfields and the dead man’s bakery are the feuding families?”
“They are. I did a book report about them senior year, so’s I know a lot about them. I have a pretty good memory.”
“Me too. I remember all the crap I shouldn’t.”
He looked at me quizzically. I indicated for him to continue.
“The whole thing started in the seventeen hundreds,” he said. “There were the Hatfields of West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky. Over the years the Hatfields did better than the McCoys financially. Devil Anse Hatfield’s lumber operation was a big hit. Some McCoys worked for him. Anyway, come the Civil War, an uncle of Devil got mad at a McCoy because he joined up with the Yanks. He got a busted leg and was sent home and got himself shot by a Hatfield. It never got proved, though. Things got worse a couple years later, when the families got into a fight over a pig.”
How many men would still be alive if they’d kept kosher? I couldn’t help but wonder.
“That got another Hatfield shot,” he went on. “The hate kept rolling into the eighteen eighties with more killings and came to a head in the eighteen eighty-eight New Year’s Night Massacre, when armed Hatfields surrounded a McCoy house and blew it all to hell. Eventually, one guy was hanged, and the whole thing sorta petered out at the turn of the century.”
“Do you think it’s still going?”
“I don’t rightly know,” he admitted. “What I do know is that Lydia is afraid of Stephen and wants to get Stacie out of Nashville. I want to get her to stay and stop seeing this guy.”
I drank more coffee, thought about what he’d told me.
“What if she did?” I asked. “Would you still want to marry her?”
“With all my heart,” he said. “Do you believe in love at first sight?”
“I’d like to,” I admitted.
“We met when she was a high school cheerleader and I was a center,” he said with his first real smile, “and I’ve loved her ever since. Because of the way she grew up, with two parents who couldn’t seem to hold on to a dime between them, she’s always wanted financial security. You can understand that.”
“Certainly.”
“I understand that and I forgive her, however much what she’s doing is like hooking,” he said. “In fact, that makes it easier. Knowing she’s seeing this guy because he can provide for her, not because she loves him.”
An enlightened cuckold. I was even more impressed. “I’m glad to hear that, Scott. We all make mistakes, and maybe this is her big one.”
“It really heartens me for you to say that. Because you know what? I want her for my wife, and now I want you for my sister-in-law.”
That thought was so unexpected, so oddly chilling, I didn’t even react. I was frozen.
“I guess the question is, Scott, what can I do? Didn’t you just say she may not be so eager to meet me?”
“Yeah, but that’s . . . I dunno. Pride, I guess. You own a place, and she works for an hourly wage watching kids. You’ve been to college and had a white-collar job, and she was all about ten-person formations and barely made it outta high school. You had an official last name, and she didn’t.”
“How do you know about my education and job?”
“SearchBug,” he said. “You know. People finder.”
I didn’t know. Goddamn Internet.
“Well, it sounds to me like we’ve got a recipe for disaster,” I said. “Because I can’t apologize for who I am and what I’ve done.”
“I’m not saying you have to. I wouldn’t say that. And I’m not saying you should feel sorry for her, either. She don’t.”
“Then I repeat, what can I do?”
“Talk to her, woman to woman. Sister to sister.”
I wished he would stop that. I wished both of them would. “What am I supposed to do, Scott? Say, ‘Hi. I’m your half sister. Nice to meet you. Stop seeing that rich guy’?”
“No, that wouldn’t do it,” Scott said. “But if you talk to her like you just talked to me, making me feel at ease and all, she’d respond. I know it. She wants someone she can talk to. I think that’s half the reason she goes to see Hatfield. She thinks he listens to her.”
“You don’t?”
He looked at me with the glummest expression I’d seen since intermission at Starlight Express on Broadway. “He’s forty-three. Newspaper archive says he’s been married twice. What’s a poor kid gonna say that he hasn’t heard before or could give a spit about?”
“Even if that’s true, what makes you think she’d listen to a stranger just because she’s got some common ancestry?”
“Because she’s never had a woman in her life she really respects, other than the one who works for you.”
Perfect! I thought. “Get Thomasina to talk to her.”
“That wouldn’t help. Your lady would lecture her, like she did when she was a girl. Stacie wouldn’t take to that.” He drained half the bottle of beer. “She needs someone she can respect, who maybe has had some experiences she can relate to.”
“Scott, I’ve never had a relationship with a guy just because he’s rich.” In fact, I seem to have a particular problem landing one who is. “I’ve never even known a man as long as you two have known each other. And I don’t like her mother.”
“Neither does she,” Scott said. “As mean as it sounds, I was hoping you’d say that. It’s something else you would have in common.”
I considered that. “Is there some reason, other than your basic abandonment and born-out-of-wedlock issues, that Stacie doesn’t get along with Lydia?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Not too many months back, she had the misfortune to find out that after she was born, her mom tried to sell her for thirty grand through an adoption agency.”
Chapter 14
Well, bombshell number whatever was not the biggest of them all, but it was sure the stiletto-in-the-heart knif-iest of them. What was worse was that Scott’s little confessional had given me a very, very bad thought—one I did not want to entertain but couldn’t get out of my head.
I rinsed my mug, put the beer bottle in the recycling bin, and closed the deli. My head felt like a balloon full of wet sand, something I’d once achieved on the Coney Island beach, thinking it would make a great flotation device. It might have, too, if I hadn’t accidentally put a piece of shell in there, which popped it when I went in the water. To this day, really, wet beach sand makes me sad.
I had turned off the dining room lights but had left the kitchen area lights on, as was customary—police bulletin, to help them watch for intruders. Then I p
ut on my tan retro Members Only jacket and went out the front door. There were no gawkers, but I felt that I was another day older and deeper in dreck.
I began my block-and-a-half walk to the parking garage. I was soothed by the sound of my cowboy boots hitting the sidewalk. That was one experience I never would have had in New York, even if I’d worn cowboy boots then. The tall lip of the starchy boot hitting me mid-shin reminded me of the few youthful times I’d gone skiing in Connecticut. Ski boots weren’t the easiest way to travel unless they were tucked in skis. The serious heel-toe action and the very little ankle movement in the boots were awkward, but the extra effort was worth it. Worth it knowing no one else could fill these boots quite like me. There was a worthwhile metaphor in that. I was bearing up under a lot. Good for me. And I found myself walking with that same distinctiveness that cowboys were known for, almost like I was leading with my knees and kicking with my hips. If only Mother could’ve seen me. She’d have rolled her eyes.
I entered the garage and said good night to Randy. The pleasant clap-clap-clap of my boots was amplified in the concrete garage. I reached the second floor by the stairs and walked briskly to my car on the far end of the enclosure. I pressed the unlock button on my remote, and it was only then that I heard the clacking of heels from somewhere behind me. I slowed without turning to get a better grasp on the clearly approaching sound.
High heels. I’d heard them before. Walking into my deli. I stopped and turned around.
“Hello, Lydia.”
The taut face was tauter still, with anger.
“What did he say to you?” she demanded. She didn’t even ask how I knew it was her.
“About what?” I asked. “Your daughter or the fact that you lied to me?”
“Lied?”
“About not considering adoption, about your heart being, oh, so full of love.”
The woman stopped about a yard from me. She was neither repentant nor cowed. “Yes, I considered it. I wanted a good life for my baby, one I could not provide.”
“The thirty grand had nothing to do with it?”
“I didn’t take it, did I?”
“Why?” I asked. “Love?”
“Yes, love. Think whatever you want of me, but don’t ever doubt that I love my little girl!”