He hugged me for a long, long time, holding on very tight. “Dell,” he said.
That was all, just “Dell.” But it was enough.
When he let me go, I stepped back to look at him. I could never get over how handsome he was, even though I’d known him forever. He was a few years younger than me—forty-something, forty-five, maybe—but he looked thirty. Broad shoulders, dark hair and eyes, a little cleft in his chin. Handsome enough to be a heartbreaker, if the situation had been different. He didn’t look like a librarian, that much was certain.
I frowned at him. “How come it took you so long to get here?”
He didn’t answer just yet, but followed me back to the kitchen. “Something smells wonderful.”
“Fried apple pies. I just finished. Sit down and I’ll make us a pot of coffee.”
He settled at the kitchen table and watched me while I put the coffee on and piled a plate with the fresh apple pies. Boone had the ability to be quiet without being uncomfortable, something most people can’t do to save their souls.
I finally quit ginning around the kitchen and sat down. Boone gave me about thirty seconds, then leaned forward with his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands. “What are you going to do, Dell?”
It was so sudden and so blunt that I laughed out loud and sprayed coffee halfway across the table. “Not much for small talk and superficialities, are you?” I said.
“Not with you.” He took one of the pies and bit into it. “This is wonderful, Dell. Just sweet enough, lots of cinnamon. The crust is so flaky—except for the part you spit on.” He grinned. “Answer my question.”
“The answer is, I don’t know.”
“Well then, I’ll answer your question. I waited this long to come and see you because when someone dies, everybody gathers around the grieving family members for a couple of weeks, and then it’s business as usual. People go back to their lives. They forget, because they’re not living with it, that the pain and lostness and unpredictability of grief go on and on and ambush you when you least expect it. When you’re grieving, you need people there after the funeral is over, after the food is gone, after the closets have been cleaned out and the thank-you notes written. I know you’ve got Toni, but I want you to know that you’ve got me, too.”
His face wavered in my vision, like he was underwater, or like I was looking at his reflection in the bottom of a well. I blinked back the tears. “Thank you.”
“It’s okay to cry, Dell.”
“So they tell me. But I’m having trouble with that, Boone. I can’t seem to cry for the right reasons—because I’m sad, or because I’ve lost my husband of thirty years, or even because I’m lonely. I only seem to cry when I’m mad. I mean really mad, furious enough to throw things or punch a hole in the wall.”
He gazed at me with an expression I hadn’t seen very often—tenderness, and understanding. “You’ve got plenty to be mad about.”
I took a bite of one of the pies but couldn’t taste it. It stuck in my throat like a lump of Mississippi red clay. “You know everything that goes on in this town, Boone,” I said when I finally got it down. “Tell me the truth.”
“The truth about what?”
“About Chase. I know he was having an affair, and nobody can tell me different. But I don’t know who, or where, or when. Everybody’s talking about it, except to me.
“They found him at the river camp that Friday night, but I went out there in the afternoon, and his truck wasn’t there. Somebody called nine-one-one, but I don’t know who.”
“Why do you need to know?” he asked.
“I need to know because I need to know!” I said. “Call it natural curiosity. Call it retribution. Call it anything you like. I want the truth.” I put my head in my hands and swallowed hard. “I can’t walk down the street in this town without wondering: Was it her? Or her? Or maybe her? Who can I trust? People avoid me or talk in whispers behind my back or give me this look of pity that makes me want to throw up. I just wish I knew. Then maybe I could get on with my life and things could get back to normal.”
Boone smiled and put his hand on my arm. The touch of his flesh felt warm and solid, real. The realest thing I’d felt in a very long time.
“It’s not going to be normal,” he said quietly. “It’s never going to be normal again—or at least it will be a different kind of normal. Everything’s changed. You may never have all your questions answered, Dell. If you knew who, you still wouldn’t know why. If you knew why, you still wouldn’t know how—how your husband could do such a thing, how you could be so blind as not to realize.”
He paused and looked long and hard at my face, as if trying to see something hidden behind my eyes. “I don’t know who it was,” he said. “But Chase was at the river camp. His truck was parked around back, under the deck. It’s still sitting there, right where he left it.”
I thought about this for a minute. “Yeah. I guess I wouldn’t have seen it from the road. He always just pulled up in front of the door. But if he had some woman out there—”
“Maybe he thought you might come looking for him.”
A rush of gratitude welled up in me for this man, this dear, sensitive, honest man. He didn’t try to argue me out of the conviction that Chase had been unfaithful. In his own way, he confirmed my suspicions, validated my emotions. At that moment I loved him more than I ever thought possible.
“Thank you,” I said.
“For what?”
“For not trying to talk me out of this, or explain it away, or spare my feelings by convincing me it’s all in my head.”
“No good ever comes from living with self-deception.”
The knot of anxiety in my gut loosened up a little, and I ate another fried pie and refilled our coffee cups. I told him about the mortgage, and the life insurance, and the reality that I had about eleven months and nineteen days before I’d be out on the street sleeping in a cardboard box.
He listened without interruption, only muttering something under his breath when Marvin Beckstrom’s name came up, something that sounded like poisonous little toad. When I was done and came up for air, he was smiling.
“What?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking that probably everybody in this town has an opinion on what you ought to do next.”
“You got that right. Tansie Orr suggested I open a bed-and-breakfast.”
He gave me a disbelieving look and then grinned broadly. “That woman is a candidate for the Whitfield State Hospital.”
“Tupelo Psychiatric would be closer,” I said. “But you should have seen her face, Boone. She thought she was being brilliant, like she had discovered some new principle of quantum physics or proved Einstein’s theory of relativity.”
“Bless her heart.”
This made us both laugh. In the South you can say anything about anybody, and you’re not being bitchy as long as you qualify it with, Bless her heart.
“So,” I said finally, “you got any bright ideas about how to keep your old friend out of the poorhouse?”
“As a matter of fact, I do have one suggestion.”
“Well, don’t hold back, honey. Let me hear it.”
He took a sip of coffee and sat back in his chair. “Play to your strengths.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I said. “Haven’t you been listening? I have no salable skills. I don’t have a college degree, I’m too old for manual labor, and—”
“Play to your strengths,” he repeated. He picked up another fried pie, saluted me with it, and took a bite. “Mmm. Delicious. Dell Haley, you are without a doubt the best cook east of the Mississippi and south of the Mason-Dixon Line.”
And, as Boone knew I would, I finally got it.
• 6 •
On the west end of town just off the square was a little store-front I had passed by a million times without even noticing. It had been boarded up for so many years that the newspapers covering the front windows still had the Katzenjammer Ki
ds in the comic strips. It sidled up to the Sav-Mor Dollar Store parking lot on the left, and on the right shared an ancient brick wall with Runyan’s Hardware.
When Boone produced a key and ushered me inside like he was presenting me with the Taj Mahal, I was sure he had lost his mind and would end up sharing a room at Whitfield with Tansie Orr.
The power was off, but enough daylight was coming through the papered-up windows to see that the place was a mess. It had the dank feeling of a building closed up too long, and yellowish grime coated every surface—a combination of grease and nicotine, my nose told me. Beneath that smell was the faint odor of mice. Something scuttled behind a baseboard. I was sure I had died and gone straight to hell.
Boone, however, was in heaven. “Just look at this place!” he said.
“I’m looking.”
Apparently my tone indicated I wasn’t impressed. He came over and put an arm around my shoulders. “Don’t look with your eyes,” he said. “Look with your heart. Look with your imagination. Look with your soul.”
I swear, sometimes I think the man deserves his reputation. Still, I tried to humor him.
All along the back, directly across from the front door, ran a long counter with swiveling stools. The side walls were lined with high-backed booths, most of the red vinyl seats split open with the stuffing coming out. In the center of the room were six or eight square Formica tables that dated back to the fifties.
I guess I wasn’t doing too good at what Boone called “looking with my heart.” My eyes kept getting in the way.
“Look up,” he said. “What do you see?”
“I see a ceiling about to fall on my head.”
“It’s tin, Dell. It’s original.” He went over and rubbed his hands along the countertop. “This is marble, the soda fountain counter from when this place was the old drugstore. And come here—”
He dragged me through a swinging door into a kitchen with a huge cast-iron eight-burner stove, two ovens, and a massive grill. “See, there’s a big walk-in freezer, and a huge fridge—okay, that will have to be replaced, but there’s plenty of pantry space. It’s perfect.”
“It’s old,” I said. “It’s filthy.”
“It’s vintage,” he said, undeterred.
“All right,” I conceded. “Maybe it does have potential. But you know I can’t afford to buy—”
“That’s the beauty of it,” he interrupted. “You don’t have to buy it. You can lease it—cheap. I talked to Marvin Beckstrom, and—”
“Hold on. Are you telling me this place is owned by Chulahatchie Savings and Loan?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Absolutely not. There is no way in hell I’m doing business with Chickenhead Mouseturd. He thinks I’m an idiot. You should have seen the smirk on his face when he told me—”
Boone came over and put his arms around me. That little bit of tenderness did me in, and I started to cry.
“Then prove him wrong,” he whispered. “Prove to Marvin Beckstrom, and to this whole stupid back-assward town, that you’re worth more than they give you credit for.”
That night at Toni’s house I picked at my chicken pot pie and told her everything—about my finances, about Boone’s bright idea, about the old diner and what awful shape it was in and how scared I was about the future.
“It’s brilliant,” she said when I had run out of words. “It’s so brilliant I wish I had thought of it.”
“I could lose everything, right down to the gold crown on my left molar.”
“Yeah, but think of the possibilities,” Toni said. A wistful, nostalgic expression came over her face. “Remember when we were kids, and that place was a diner?”
“I remember when it got shut down for health violations,” I said. “Besides, who’d come, when we’ve got Barney’s, and McDonald’s up on the bypass, and Fiesta Mexicana?”
“Everybody would come. Barney’s only serves dinner. Fiesta Mexicana is a roach pit,” Toni said. “Besides, that’s not the issue. The issue is, this is perfect for you. What do you love most? Cooking. What do you do best? Cooking. Can you think of a better way to earn a living?”
“Well, no, but—”
“I swear, Dell Haley, you can be so dense sometimes!” She sighed dramatically. “You’ve been married to Chase since you were twenty years old.”
“Twenty-one.”
“Don’t pick nits with me, girl. You’d been twenty-one for all of three days. And besides that, we both know that numbers don’t tell the whole story. At twenty—or twenty-one, if you insist—you may be able to vote and reproduce and buy liquor, and you may be sporting a woman’s body, but nothing else is grown up yet. Not your mind, not your heart, not even your God-given common sense. Shoot, a woman doesn’t even know herself until she hits thirty or thirty-five. Maybe even forty.”
“I’m sure you got a point in there somewhere.”
“The point is, you lived Chase’s life, not your own. He made all the decisions, or else you made decisions based on what he wanted and needed. Now he’s gone, and it’s your turn. For God’s sake, Dell, take a risk. For once in your life, take a chance and see what you can do.”
“Boone said the same thing to me, almost in those exact words.”
“Boone is a smart man. Very, very smart.” She gave a crooked little grin. “About everything except the color of his house.”
Once word got out that I’d leased the old diner and was planning to open a restaurant, people flocked in to see what was going on. It reminded me of the year the Tombigbee flooded, and half the town was standing out on South River Street watching to see how deep the water was going to get. Some of them hadn’t spoken a word to each other in ten years, but there they were, scratching their heads and laying bets on the high-water mark and joking around like long-lost cousins at the Baptist church homecoming. Nothing brings folks together like a good disaster.
Evidently you didn’t even need a full-blown catastrophe to lure folks out—just the hint of impending doom. Half the people in Chulahatchie came to see the show. I reckon a number of them actually did place whispered bets on how fast I’d crash and burn. Others just stood around shaking their heads and predicting ruination and generally being useless and in the way.
Tansie Orr had to put her two cents’ worth in, of course. “I’m tellin’ you, Dell, you shoulda thought about a bed-and-breakfast instead.”
“Naw,” DeeDee Sturgis said. “You shoulda come and worked for me. You could make good money doing those new acrylic nails.”
I wished I’d had a comeback for this. What I wanted to say was that no sane woman in Chulahatchie County would pay for acrylic nails. Except for Tansie, and she was standing right there, so I had to keep my mouth shut.
Marvin Beckstrom sidled up and ignored the venomous look Tansie was giving him. “This is a bad idea, Dell. You could lose your shirt.”
As if I didn’t already know that. But dang if I’d give him the satisfaction of hearing it come out of my mouth. “Thanks for the encouragement, Marvin,” I said.
The sarcasm passed right over his head. “Just being realistic, Dell. I told you—”
“I know what you told me,” I said. “But you leased me the place anyway, didn’t you?”
He raked his eyes over the derelict building and shrugged. “Business is business.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So why don’t you go mind your own business and let me get back to mine.”
He ambled off toward the square with his hands stuck in his pockets, jingling his keys and whistling. Anybody else looking on woulda seen a cheerful little man without a care in the world. I saw a black hole of despair, sucking all the life and energy right out of me.
Dang, that man could turn a wedding into a funeral just by showing up.
• 7 •
Mama always said you could tell your friends from your enemies by the ones who didn’t say “I told you so.”
Boone took a week of his vacation time to help me get the pla
ce in shape. Toni showed up every day after school. Fart came with his tool belt and extension ladder. Even Tansie and DeeDee came to help.
I was in the kitchen staring at the mess and getting absolutely nothing done when I heard the argument start up. “Boone, no!” Toni yelled. “Absolutely not.”
Glad for a reason to abandon the disaster area, I went out into the dining room. “What’s going on?”
“Boone wants these, can you imagine?” Toni held out a fistful of color chips. “Purple Sunset and Sweet Surrender, for God’s sake.”
“Have you ever been in an upscale restaurant in your life?” Boone said. “These are fabulous colors. Peaceful, yet compelling. Very avant-garde.”
“Avant-garde, my ass,” Toni said. “Lord help us, Boone, are you auditioning to be a stereotype? I’d think you might’ve learned a thing or two when you painted your house purple.”
“Let me see,” I said. Toni handed over the cards. “What’s this one?”
Boone squinted and turned up his nose. “Chocolate Whip? No, Dell. You want something more vibrant, more alive. This is so . . . so taupe.”
Toni glared at him. “Taupe is good. It’s neutral, but not white. And it will go nicely with the wood floors and the burgundy booths.”
“Why do the booths have to be burgundy?” Boone said. “We could recover them in a deep plum faux leather—”
I shut my eyes and took a breath. “Boone,” I said when I was finally calm enough, “I appreciate your sense of style, but we don’t have money for plum faux leather. We’ll fix the seats that need it, and leave the booths the color they are. And besides, I like this Chocolate Whip. It reminds me of the Yoo-Hoos I used to drink when I was a child.”
“You did not drink Yoo-Hoos,” Boone said. “Those things are nasty.”
I grinned at Toni and shot her a wink. “They’re delicious. And even better with a MoonPie. You should try it sometime.”
Boone gave a little shudder. “There is no culture in this town. None whatsoever.”
“That’s what you’re here for,” Toni said. “To make us all a little more—what did you call it? Avant-garde.”
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