“Oh God, no, it’s you.”
“Nice to see you, too,” I said.
She heaved an enormous sigh and stood aside. “Something tells me Fart came to see you. You might as well get on in here.”
Their house was almost as familiar to me as my own: three bedrooms, two baths, a pine-paneled family room addition on the back. It wasn’t fancy or modern, but it was always spotless. Brenda bordered on being obsessive about housework. You could eat banana pudding off her kitchen floor, all the way down to the very last vanilla wafer.
At the moment, however, the place was a holy wreck. Shoes in the middle of the living room floor, a basket overflowing with unfolded laundry on the couch, dust bunnies under the dining room chairs. She didn’t even apologize for the state of things, just turned her back and headed toward the kitchen, expecting me to follow.
“Sit down,” she said.
It was almost three in the afternoon, and the kitchen table still held the remains of breakfast: egg-crusted plates and leftover bacon congealing in its own grease. She stacked them up and set them in the sink, and didn’t even bother to wipe the crumbs off the vinyl tabletop.
“You want something? I can make coffee.”
I grew up in Mississippi, and knew the coffee code words as well as any Southern woman. “I just made a fresh pot” meant a long visit and cinnamon coffee cake to boot. “I’ll put some on; it’s no trouble” meant it was a bit of a bother and don’t expect cake, but stay a little while and then let me get back to what I was doing. “You want something?” meant you’re really not welcome, so state your business and be on your way.
“No thanks, I’m fine,” I said. I plunked myself down at the table and proceeded to herd the crumbs into a pile with the edge of a used paper napkin. She could be as rude as she wanted, but I had no intention of leaving until I got some answers. Besides, two could play the rude game.
“What’s going on, Brenda?”
She set herself down, took the napkin out of my hand, and started fiddling with the crumbs, arranging them into patterns the way you’d play with sand at the beach. “I guess you know what’s going on if you talked to Fart. We’ve decided to separate.”
“That’s not what he says.”
She snapped to attention. “Excuse me?”
“He says you’ve asked him for a divorce.”
“Didn’t I just say that?”
“No, you said, ‘we’ve decided.’ What Fart told me didn’t exactly sound like a mutual decision.”
“All right, have it your way,” she said. “I just can’t do this anymore. Life’s too short to be unhappy.”
“But I thought you and Fart were happy. You’ve always seemed like—”
“Like the perfect couple, yeah, I know.” Her tone softened, and she looked at me with the same miserable expression I had seen on her husband’s face. “Fart’s a good man, a good provider. This isn’t his fault. He’s never done anything to hurt me. I suppose he loves me—”
“He’s crazy about you.”
“Okay, if you say so. He doesn’t drink. He’s not abusive. He doesn’t gamble away his paycheck. He comes home every night. He’s always been great with the kids—took them fishing, taught them how to play basketball. Even now that they’re grown and gone, he’s the one they come to when they need something. Like I said, he’s a good man. For a long time I thought that could be enough, that there wasn’t anything more. Until—”
She couldn’t say it, so I said it for her. “Until you had an affair.”
She put her face in her hands, her elbows planted in the toast crumbs. “Yes.”
“Look, honey,” I said. “I don’t pretend to understand what would motivate you to go off with some other man, but I reckon I know a thing or two about being married for thirty years—some things Chase apparently didn’t know. I know it’s not always exciting, but at some point you choose between passion and promises. That doesn’t mean that love isn’t important anymore. It’s always important. But somewhere along the line you realize that long-term loving is different from the temporary insanity of falling in love. You made a mistake, Brenda, but I know Fart loves you. And it doesn’t have to change everything, if—”
“God, Dell, just leave it alone!” she shouted. “You’re the last person I want to be talking to about this.”
A faint little warning light flickered on in the back of my head, but I didn’t pay it any mind. “Brenda, we’ve been friends for years—you, me, Chase, Fart. I was with you when your water broke with Bertie, took you to the hospital. Why on God’s green earth wouldn’t you tell me about it?”
Her head jerked up, and she fixed me with a look so fierce and fiery that I shoulda been scalded. “It’s precisely because we’re friends that I didn’t tell you. You’ve been through enough. You don’t need to be dealing with this, too. You’ve got plenty of pain of your own without me adding more.”
She went back to playing with the toast crumbs. “It’s over now,” she said. “But it showed me what my life mighta been like, what it still could be like. I’m fifty years old, Dell. I might live another thirty or forty. I don’t know what’s out there for me, but it’s gotta be better than this.”
We talked a little more, and after a while I left. But I couldn’t shut out of my mind the things she’d said to me, and it gave me a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. The same one Jesus got when Judas kissed him.
• 16 •
I replayed the discussion over and over in my head, but the suspicions wouldn’t go away. Was it even remotely possible that Brenda Unger would betray both me and Fart with my husband, Chase? The idea ate at me like poison, like a brown recluse spider bite working its way toward the bone.
She hadn’t really said it, of course, and I wasn’t at all sure that’s what she meant. I kept trying to rationalize it away, put a different spin on it. But the idea haunted me anyway—a face to paste on that faceless woman in my dreams. All the feelings I thought I had resolved came rushing back in to drown me. Rage, confusion, worthlessness—pain so bad I thought it just might kill me, and sometimes wished it would. It’d be pure relief to be put out of my misery once and for all.
“You live long enough,” Mama used to say, “and sooner or later you come to realize there’s a lotta things in life that hurt worse than death.”
So while my heart ran off in one direction, my brain stayed home and worked overtime raising all sorts of questions it couldn’t possibly answer. What was it about Brenda Unger that could possibly tempt Chase? I always imagined him with some young thing, blonde and brainless, hanging on his arm and flattering him with toothy smiles and fluttering eyelashes. Brenda was a sensible woman, my age, funny and outgoing, but nobody’s fool.
Hell, she couldn’t even cook.
But on second thought, I suspect Chase wasn’t exactly looking for chicken and dumplings.
Maybe it wasn’t about Brenda at all. Maybe it was just about something new, something exciting. Something forbidden.
Well, you couldn’t get more forbidden than your best friend’s wife.
The next day I went on about my business, trying to act normal, but when Fart came in, I avoided talking to him. I could see the hurt and confusion in his eyes, but I couldn’t help myself. I felt like I had done something wrong, like I was the one who had betrayed him, and I knew if I got too close, I’d spill it all. He deserved better than hearing it from me like that.
I reckon emotional exhaustion takes more of a toll than physical tiredness, because I went home beat. And then that night, while I was asleep and my defenses were down, it all came crashing in.
The dream started out like a lot of dreams do, with people I knew in an environment that didn’t fit them. In this case, it was me and Chase and Brenda and Fart at some kind of resort hotel, all fancy and luxurious.
I kept telling Chase he wasn’t supposed to be there. He was dead. But he had come back again, assuming that everything was exactly as he had left it, and I would jus
t be hanging around waiting for his return.
In real life, I don’t wear glasses except for reading, but in the dream, I did. And they had broke—the little brass screw on the left side had come out, the lens was missing. Everything was all fuzzy and distorted.
I kept looking for the lens, looking for the screw, and all the while Chase kept moving from room to room and talking, expecting me to follow him. But he was mumbling and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. It reminded me of trying to carry on a conversation with Toni on that blasted cell phone of hers. Every time I asked for clarification, for him to repeat himself, he got madder and madder, as if I didn’t have the intelligence or the courtesy to pay attention.
The vividness, the detail of it, was unlike any dream I’d ever had. More like watching a movie, except that I was one of the actors. As we kept moving—Chase roaming through rooms, me following—everything around us became worn and shabby, like somebody’s grandmother’s house that needed a good scrubbing. The rugs were dingy and gray; the towels in the bathroom were thin and overused and cheap, like the kind people used to get for free when they bought twenty bucks worth of groceries.
I wanted to scream at him, “What are you doing here?” but my voice wouldn’t work, as it never will in dreams.
There was no choice but to keep on following him, trying to talk to him, trying to figure out what he was saying. But the more I tried, the more garbled his speech became, and the more frustrated I was with not being able to understand.
And then I realized: He was morphing into something else—something human and yet not quite human, with gray skin and suspicious eyes and quick, jerky movements. Not at all the person I had once loved. And the change terrified me.
I woke up sweating, with my heart pounding so hard I thought it would jump straight on out of my chest. As I lay there in the darkness, trying to catch my breath, my mind scrambled to hold on to it, to make sense of it all.
Boone told me once that dreams are a person’s subconscious sending a message to them, to let them know something the conscious mind has suppressed. I understood the part about not being able to see or hear clearly—I was pretty sure that had to do with Chase and his infidelity.
But it was the final transformation that disturbed me most. It seemed familiar, and yet foreign. And then I remembered, and it came into focus:
Gollum, from Lord of the Rings, clutching the magic ring and calling it his “precious.” Refusing to let it go even though it was destroying him.
I cried so hard my ribs felt bruised, and my sinuses filled up until I thought my head was gonna explode. When the alarm went off at 4:30, I was shocked that I had fallen back to sleep, and the last thing I wanted to do was get out of bed and go to the Heartbreak Cafe, to cook breakfast and feed folks and listen to their troubles and their joys.
But I went anyway.
By the time I dragged myself into the cafe, Scratch was already there, prepping for breakfast and making coffee.
He gave me the once-over. “You all right, Miz Dell?” he said. “You don’t look so good.”
Why people think it’s helpful to state the obvious is beyond me. “Bad night,” I said.
He nodded. “Sometimes when folks get troubled, working helps,” he said. “Hard work can be a pure salvation.”
I glared at him but managed not to say what I was thinking—that he could keep his worthless drivel to himself. Besides that, maybe he was right. Maybe the Heartbreak Cafe was meant to save me. I don’t know. I didn’t feel saved, and if truth be told, it ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, this idea of getting rescued from your own sorry self. Sometimes you just wish God—or the universe, or whoever—would simply leave you alone to steep in your own despair.
It was closing time on Saturday afternoon. Scratch had cleaned the kitchen and gone on up to his little apartment, and since I didn’t open on Sunday, I didn’t have any baking or prep work to do. But Peach Rondell was still there, in the back booth that had become her second home, her head down, writing furiously in that familiar brown leather journal of hers.
I stood by the counter and watched her for a while. It must be nice, I thought, to be able to escape into another world like that, to shut everything out and just sink down into your own thoughts. For the hundredth time I wondered what she was writing, and why it was so important to her.
I waited until she got to a stopping place and went over to the table. She was staring off into the distance as if she saw something else altogether—not me, not the empty restaurant, not anything in this present universe. She didn’t come to until I spoke to her, and then she jerked as if I’d materialized in front of her out of thin air, and slammed the book shut before I could get an upside-down peek at what was in it.
She was wearing beat-up jeans and a sweatshirt again—this time a frayed gray one with a huge blue W on the front, a relic of her time at Mississippi University for Women, more than twenty years ago. I thought about the first time she had come into the Heartbreak Cafe, and how bitchy I had been about the way she looked.
“Hey, Peach,” I said.
She glanced down at her watch. “Sorry, Dell, I let the time get away from me. I didn’t mean to keep you.” She gathered up her stuff and made to slide out of the booth.
“Sit, sit,” I said, motioning her back down. “I’m in no hurry. You got a minute to talk?”
“Sure,” she said. “What about?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Tell me about yourself. How is it for you, coming back to Chulahatchie after all this time?”
She ducked her head and rubbed her hands together. I noticed her fingernails were cut short, without so much as a dab of polish. “It’s all right, I guess. Not the best of circumstances, but—” She gave a little shrug. “I didn’t have much choice in coming home, you know.”
I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but she cut me off.
“Don’t bother denying it. I may have been gone for a long time, but some things don’t ever change. This town still gossips, and I’m not deaf to it. After my divorce—well, separation, the divorce isn’t final yet—I didn’t know what to do. Daddy died, and Mama was alone here, and all things considered, it just seemed like the logical move.”
“You don’t sound so sure,” I said.
“I’m not sure of anything,” Peach said. “Staying with Mama is . . . well, a challenge.”
“I can imagine.”
“No offense, Dell, but you really can’t. Mama puts on a good front, but I don’t think anybody in three counties knows what she’s really like. And I know what people are saying about me. Peach Rondell, the Bean Queen gone to pot. Broke, divorced, a failure.” She picked at a loose cuticle and avoided meeting my eyes.
“So,” I said, opting for a change in subject, “what are you writing in that book of yours?”
She laid a hand on the brown leather cover and pressed down, hard, as if she was afraid it might jump open and start spouting confidential information all on its own accord. “Just . . . stuff.”
“Stuff,” I repeated.
“Just thoughts. Ideas. Stories. Five hundred a month and a lock on the door.”
Peach musta seen the confusion on my face.
“It’s a quote from Virginia Woolf,” she explained. “She said that every woman needs a room of her own, a place to think and write and discover herself. Five hundred a month—her own money to sustain her and set her free—and a lock on the door so she can create without interruption.”
She gave a crooked little smile and shrugged. “Seems like this booth has become my room. Lord knows I can’t get a moment’s peace at the house, with Mama hanging over me nagging on me all the time.” She waved a hand in front of her face, like she was swatting at gnats. “It’s my soul’s salvation, this restaurant, this booth. The only place I can seem to focus.”
“Well, you’re welcome to it anytime,” I said. “Glad I can accommodate you.”
“When I first came back to Chulahatchie, I
was certain I had died and landed in the third circle of hell. But maybe one good thing has come out of it.” She grinned. “This town sure has its share of characters.”
I pushed down a twinge of apprehension, and wondered if Chulahatchie was about to become the new Peyton Place, with all our secrets revealed. It felt a little frightening, but exciting, too.
“You always wanted to be a writer?” I asked.
“Always,” she said. “But life tends to get in the way. Expectations, you know.”
I knew. Peach assumed I had no idea what her life was like, but I remembered how her mama was when Peach was a child. And I had a pretty good idea what Donna Rondell would think of her daughter now, all grown up and no longer a beauty queen.
“Things don’t always pan out the way we hope,” I said. “But maybe this turnaround in your life is giving you the chance to do what you’ve always wanted to do.”
“I wish it was that easy.”
“Oh, child, it’s never easy,” I said. “And it almost never looks the way you imagine it.”
It sounded like something Mama woulda told me. And maybe something I needed to tell myself as well.
• 17 •
The dream about Chase, with all its hidden meaning and significance, had begun to fade. I kept trying to recapture it, to replay it in my mind and figure it out, but it was like trying to hold sand in the palm of my hand. No matter how hard I clenched my fingers, it sifted away in the wind, leaving behind just a few grains, enough to settle in unreachable places and rub my heart raw.
When I was younger, and unafraid of what it would do to my spine or my heart rate, I used to love roller coasters. I was never scared, even of the rickety old wooden things they set up once a year at the county fair. You’d clink and clunk up and up and up, until you could see the river bend and half the county spread out below you. Then your stomach would lurch, and you’d plunge and scream down and down, into a hairpin turn that defied every law of physics I never learned.
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