• 2 •
In a small town like Chulahatchie, everybody knows everybody, but precious few really know. Some folks you just smile at and say hey when you meet them on the street, but they’ve never crossed the threshold of your front door, and you’ve never set foot in their house, either. Some you sit with at church potlucks and high school football games, exchange recipes, and get together for coffee. Some come to your house for a fish fry on Saturday night or to watch the Falcons get beat on Sunday afternoon. A few, very few, include you at family suppers and birthday parties and Thanksgiving dinners.
But in a whole lifetime there’s usually only one or two people you can call near midnight when your world falls apart.
Mine was Antoinette Champion.
Toni and I had been best friends since kindergarten, got our braces the same week, double-dated to the senior prom, got drunk together for the first time and swore we’d never touch the stuff again. We were maids of honor at each other’s weddings and had no secrets.
At eleven-twenty on the night Chase died, she answered on the second ring. “God, Dell, you mean that ass of a sheriff told you this on the phone? He didn’t come to the house?”
“No,” I said. “Just the phone call.”
“The man’s an idiot. What did he say?”
“I don’t remember,” I said, trying to clear the cobwebs from my head. “Something about a nine-one-one call, and the EMTs finding Chase at the river camp, and transporting to the hospital. Other things, too, details. But he might as well have been talking to a fencepost. I don’t know, Toni. I just don’t know.”
“You’re in shock,” she said. “What are you going to do now?”
I was shaking with the kind of cold that comes from the bones, from the inside out. I took a breath and tried to stop the shudders, tried to sound strong. “I’m going to do what has to be done,” I said. “I’m going to go down to the hospital and talk to the doctor and claim the body, and then tomorrow morning I’m going to make arrangements for the funeral.”
“You shouldn’t be alone. I’ll meet you there.”
For a fleeting instant I flirted with the idea of refusing. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
When I got to the emergency room entrance of the hospital, Toni was already waiting outside, smoking a cigarette. I don’t know how she got there so fast. All I did was throw on some clothes and head out the door, but there she was, two steps ahead of me, as usual.
She crushed the cigarette under her tennis shoe and pulled me into her arms. “I’m so, so sorry,” she murmured into my hair. She was crying—I could feel the warm wet tears on my neck and hear the crack in her voice. But when she let me go, she swiped her eyes and blew out a breath. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Let’s get this over with.”
The doctor on call in emergency looked like Doogie Howser, small and blond and slight. The name stitched over his pocket was DR. LATOURNEAU.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” Toni said. I poked her in the ribs to shut her up, but she didn’t take the hint. “Are you a real doctor?”
He raised his eyebrows at her. “Yes . . . ah, ma’am. I’m fully qualified, I can assure you.”
“Fresh out of med school, I reckon,” Toni persisted. “Ole Miss?”
“UT, Memphis,” he said.
“You don’t sound like you’re from Memphis. You sound like a Yankee.”
“Toni,” I said, “let’s just get on with it.” I ignored her protests and faced the doctor. “I’m Dell Haley. You have my husband, I believe.”
The puzzled look on his face told me he hadn’t the faintest idea what I was talking about. “Your husband?”
“Chase Haley. Fifty-five, big guy—the sheriff said he’d been brought here.”
Blank stare. No response.
“In the ambulance?”
At last the fog lifted. “Oh, yeah. The heart attack. DOA.”
“Charming bedside manner,” Toni muttered, loud enough for him to hear. “You and the sheriff must have gone to the same school. Sensitivity U.”
At least he had the grace to look abashed. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “If you’ll come with me, Mrs. Haley.” He took my arm in what he undoubtedly thought was a solicitous manner and steered me toward the stainless steel double doors, turning his back quite deliberately to shut Toni out.
She was having none of it. She followed along behind, swearing under her breath, the soles of her tennis shoes pounding like a heartbeat on the hard tile floor.
The examining room was a small cubicle surrounded by filmy draperies in the ugliest mustard-colored fabric I had ever seen. The room seemed infused with a pungent, astringent smell, like rubbing alcohol and singed flesh. On a bare, cold stainless steel gurney, Chase lay naked, barely covered by a thin cotton sheet. I couldn’t look at him.
Dr. Latourneau pulled a thin metal clipboard from under Chase’s left thigh. It stuck a little; the flesh wiggled, and my head swam. Toni reached out an arm to steady me. The doctor didn’t notice.
“Call came in to nine-one-one a little after nine o’clock,” he said, reading from the notes on the chart.
“Who called?” Toni interrupted.
Doogie recoiled like he’d been slapped upside the head, and studied the chart. “Doesn’t say.”
“Well, there’s gotta be something there.” Toni jerked the chart out of his hands and scanned it.
“Sorry,” the doctor said, but he didn’t sound one bit sorry. “You can’t have access to the patient’s private medical information.” He pried the clipboard out of her fingers and clutched it to his chest. “Maybe the sheriff’s office will have more information about the source of the call.”
“Yeah, like he knows his ass from his elbow,” Toni said. “Okay, so what else?”
He went back to the chart, holding it up between himself and Toni so she couldn’t see it. “EMTs responded to find a white male, mid-fifties, in cardiac arrest. They administered CPR at the scene and transported, but by the time he got here . . .”
I didn’t hear the rest. At nine o’clock I had been pigging out on chocolate chip cake with double fudge frosting, cursing my husband for ruining my nice dinner and sure, very sure, that he was off somewhere having a roll in the hay with some bimbo in a ten-dollar motel.
“Will there be an autopsy?” Toni demanded.
I’ve watched way too many episodes of CSI. An image of Chase sliced open and peeled back on a coroner’s table slapped me back to reality. “Who said anything about an autopsy?”
Toni turned to me. She had seen plenty of medical crime dramas in her time, too. “They oughta do an autopsy to determine cause of death. Maybe it wasn’t a heart attack. Maybe—”
The Boy Wonder interrupted. “Cause of death was clear. The attending ER physician signed off on it. If you want an autopsy, you can request one, but—”
“No,” I said. “No autopsy.”
“All right.” He made a notation on the clipboard and handed me a brown paper bag with the Piggly Wiggly logo stamped on the front. “These are his personal effects. If you’ll just sign here, we’ll release the body to the funeral home. He’ll be there by nine tomorrow morning.”
I stared unseeing at the paper he held out, the pen poised uncertainly in midair. “Right here.” He guided my hand toward a line at the bottom. I signed. “I’ll leave you alone with him now, so you can . . . ah, say your good-byes.”
An expression something like relief shot across his face as he took the clipboard and left the room. His soft-soled shoes made little squeaking noises across the tile floor, a mouse scurrying away into its hidey-hole.
At last I mustered the courage to look at my dead husband. His eyes were closed, and his hair—gray around the temples and darker on the sides and top—looked matted, as if it had dried all sweaty. His bald spot was showing.
I combed through the hair with my fingers, covering it up as if it were some obscene private part that shouldn’t be showing in polite compan
y.
His flesh was ash-gray and waxy, with a tinge of blue around the lips and under the eye sockets. When I touched his arm, it gave slightly under the pressure of my fingers, like the skin of a water balloon.
The sheet, apparently, had been pulled up over his face, and whoever turned it down had done it carefully, evenly, smoothing it out as if preparing a bed in a fine hotel. I almost expected to see a foil-wrapped chocolate on his forehead, the kind we got every night when we took an anniversary cruise to the Caribbean so many years ago.
The memory sliced through me like a dull paring knife on a green apple—pressing its edge against the resistant skin, bruising, ripping. Not a clean, quick cut, but a painful, jagged tearing.
Toni’s arm went around my shoulders, drawing me back to the present. I could feel the warmth of her body at my side, caught a scent of tobacco and spearmint gum and Cha nel No 5. Her breath came in ragged gasps; she was crying.
For the first time all night I looked at her. Really looked.
Toni had always been attractive—to tell the truth, a whole lot prettier than me. She was tall and leggy and blonde, the kind of Southern girl/cheerleader/beauty queen good looks that might have marked her as an airhead if she hadn’t been so dang smart. And down to earth. And loyal.
Some people are described as drop-dead gorgeous. Toni Champion was drop-dead good. If I lived a hundred lifetimes, I could never have a better friend.
Over the years I reckon I quit noticing how beautiful she was on the outside and just appreciated her heart. Now, in this moment of crisis, I noticed. She still had the legs that went on forever, the slim figure, the high cheekbones, the wide blue eyes. Her blonde wasn’t natural anymore, but it suited her, not like Tansie’s platinum color. Tonight she had it twisted up in a knot with a pencil stuck through it. Somehow on Toni it looked good.
Everything looked good on Toni. Everything except grief.
Her face was haggard, exhausted, with dark circles under her eyes and a little bit of leftover foundation creased in the fold under her neck. Anyone who observed us here, staring down at Chase’s lifeless body, couldn’t have told who was the widow and who was the friend.
My gaze followed hers back to the man on the gurney. The sheet was folded halfway down his chest. The dark tanned V beneath his chin ended just above his breastbone. His shoulders and upper arms were white, and a little mole I had never noticed before stood out like a tick against his pale skin. The patch of hair on his chest was gray and curly, and beneath the surface I could see bruises the color of storm clouds, purplish gray.
“God,” I whispered, “this is what we need children for. Nobody should have to go through this alone.”
I heard a sob catch in Toni’s throat. It was a stupid and thoughtless thing to say, and I cursed myself silently for it. Because although Chase and I were never able to have children, my best friend did have a child—a son. A son now dead and buried in the graveyard on the north side of town, spitting distance from where Chase’s final resting place would be.
His name was Stanley, after his great-grandfather, but everybody had called him Champ. He was a terrific kid—athletic and funny and smart, the star pitcher on his Little League team.
Toni told her husband, Rob, she didn’t want Champ to have that shotgun for Christmas, but Rob didn’t listen. A boy had to have his own gun, didn’t he? He was eleven years old. Time to learn how to hunt, time to bag his first deer. It was a rite of passage for both father and son.
After the accident, the stress was too much for Toni and Rob’s relationship to bear. He accused her of blaming him, and the truth was, she did. It was all his fault, teaching his son to swagger around the county like a redneck with a shotgun slung over his shoulder.
It only took one mistake. Set it against a fencepost while he climbed through the barbed wire, and the next thing you knew—
I tried to push the memory away, but it wouldn’t go far. Toni knew a whole lot more than I did about grief, about the pain of losing someone too soon. She lost twice, lost everything, all in one year. Rob couldn’t take it anymore, and finally, one day, he just got in his truck and drove off. They weren’t divorced, but the paperwork hardly mattered. Last I heard, Rob was living with some woman up around Dahlonega, Georgia, and Toni didn’t care.
I reached for her hand.
“Can you come home with me tonight?”
She nodded and swallowed hard. “Sure.”
I’m sure some shrink would say I was feeding my pain, but by the time we got to the house I was ravenous. I warmed up the chicken and dumplings, heated the squash casserole, got out the chocolate chip layer cake. It was two A.M. by the time we finished, and while Toni put the dishes in the dishwasher, I opened the Piggly Wiggly bag and pulled out my husband’s personal effects.
Someone, a nurse probably, had neatly folded and stacked his belongings. His wristwatch was on top—not the everyday one, but the nice gold-colored Bulova I gave him for Christmas last year.
Something gnawed at my brain, something not right. He should have been wearing his work clothes, but here were his cordovan loafers and navy dress socks. His blue oxford button-down with the windowpane checks, the shirt I had bought him because it reminded me of one he took on our honeymoon trip thirty years ago. His good khakis with the belt loop coming loose in the back, the one I hadn’t gotten around to sewing back on yet.
This wasn’t his stuff, my mind tried to tell me, but it was. I knew it was; I recognized it. His worn brown wallet was there—eighteen dollars in cash, a Visa card, and his driver’s license with a picture of him scowling into the camera.
In a habit born of years of doing his laundry, I felt in the pockets of his pants. A handful of change, the keys to his truck, his Swiss army knife with the chipped handle. And something round and gold and heavy.
His wedding ring.
I didn’t want to see this. Didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to have confirmed what my mind and heart already told me. But I steeled myself and kept going, a lumpy, determined, middle-aged backhoe digging and digging to find the truth.
And I found it. There, at the bottom of the pile, neatly folded beneath a clean undershirt.
A pair of brand-new briefs.
Not white cotton, like my husband always wore. Not sagging and misshapen with the elastic stretched out. Not the underwear of a fifty-five-year-old man in a thirty-year marriage.
New briefs. Black silk bikini briefs.
All doubt vanished. The floodgates opened, and despair, which had been dammed up and waiting at the edge of my subconscious, rushed in to drown me.
• 3 •
“Whoever thought up these rituals for the dead ought to be drawn and quartered and roasted in the third circle of hell,” Mama told me after Daddy died.
She was right. The whole thing seemed barbaric, surreal. Once word got out that Chase was dead, the whole town ground to a halt as if somebody had jerked the emergency brake on a fully loaded freight train.
People flocked to the house, bringing tuna casseroles and macaroni and cheese and homemade apple pies, fried chicken and brownies and peanut butter cookies and huge tin pans full of pork barbecue.
The women clustered in the kitchen like hens around scratch, clucking and ruffling their feathers and vying to be queen of the chicken yard. The men crowded into the living room, sweating in their unfamiliar suits, balancing plates on their bony knees, eating and telling stories about Chase and sometimes laughing, until they caught sight of me lurking in the doorway.
My hunger binge had long passed; I had thrown up everything I ate the night Chase died and hadn’t touched a bite since.
“Come on, honey, you got to eat something,” Rita Yearwood urged, pressing a plate of fried chicken and cornbread into my hands. I hated Rita’s cornbread. I got no idea how she could mess up something that simple, but it tasted like the yellow pollen that comes out of the magnolia trees in the summer time. Kinda resembled that pollen, too, all flat and caked together.
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DeeDee Sturgis stood nearby with a somber expression on her face. She didn’t say anything, but she was itching to get her hands on my hair—I could see it in her eyes. Poor Dell, didn’t get a chance to get her hair done, and then her husband goes and dies, and she’s stuck at the funeral looking like that . . .
Without warning my head began to swim and the walls started to close in, just like the hot flashes and panic attacks I used to get when I first started going through the change. I pushed past Rita and ran for the bathroom. I was still heaving into the sink when Toni came in and shut the door behind me.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, great. Don’t I look it?” I ran some cold water into my hand and rinsed my mouth out. “Why can’t they just leave me alone?”
“Because that’s not what people do when someone dies. They bring food. They come to call. They pay their respects.”
“Respects?” The word stuck in my throat. “Everybody out there knows what Chase was up to. They know. And they’re all pretending that nothing’s wrong, that everything’s normal, that I’m the grieving widow who’s lost her faithful and loving husband—”
“Look,” Toni said, “why don’t you lie down and rest for a while? I’ll tell everybody to go on home, that you’ll see them at the funeral later this afternoon.”
“What about the food?”
Of course, I’d think about the food. And all those women messing around in my kitchen.
“I’ll take care of it.” She laid a hand on my shoulder and chuckled. “You won’t have to cook for months.”
“Assuming I’d want to eat DeeDee’s tuna casserole,” I said. “It tastes like hair.”
“It’s made with clippings from the shop,” Toni said. “Didn’t you know? That’s why she never gives out her recipes.”
We both started to laugh—the kind of wild, hysterical giggling that takes you over and can’t be stopped. “Her secret ingredient!” I whispered, but it came out as more of a squeal.
We laughed and laughed, leaning against the sink in the bathroom with our arms around each other. For a minute or two I felt like a teenager again, and then, without warning, the tears came. I couldn’t stop them, any more than I could stop the giggles—great wracking sobs, wrenched from my gut and dragged out into the open against my will.
Heartbreak Cafe Page 2