Heartbreak Cafe

by Penelope Stokes J.

  I loved it, couldn’t get enough. But in the back of my mind, I always knew I was safe, that in a couple of minutes everything would level out and jerk to a stop and be normal again.

  Now there was no safe place, no leveling out. No normal world to come back to when the ride was done.

  Boone insisted that this was grief, not depression. But it didn’t much matter what label you used, it was a downward spiral without any brakes. You teeter for a second or two up on a rise where you think you just might be able to see the sun again and smell fresh air. Then gravity takes you, and the trip down is always a heck of a lot faster and more frightening than the tedious climb up.

  Much as I tried to reassure myself that things would get better, my mind wouldn’t stay there. It kept coming back to Chase, and the dream, and the images of deception and betrayal that writhed in my gut like a cutworm.

  I was sinking fast. I needed my best friend.

  “Well, call her then,” Boone said curtly. He had come in for breakfast on Saturday morning and stayed right through lunch. It took me a while to figure out that he was waiting for me. Now it was almost closing time, and I had finally settled down with a glass of sweet tea and a bowl of apple crumb cobbler.

  I pretended to be interested in the cobbler.

  “Look,” he said, leaning across the table, “I don’t know what’s going on, Dell, but something’s eating at you. If you can’t tell me, tell Toni. Talk to somebody, for God’s sake.”

  Tears burned my eyes, a sudden stab in my stomach, a knot in my throat. I wasn’t used to Boone being impatient with me, and I wished he wouldn’t be. But there was something else in his voice, too, and in his eyes. Worry.

  I hadn’t told him about the dream. I hadn’t told anybody. I had just kept it to myself, holding it close, picking at it like a scab.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “I’ll call her.”

  But I didn’t call her. Not right away, anyhow. I couldn’t. I had to work up my nerve first.

  Because the truth was, I was ashamed. Ashamed of being so caught up in my own narrow world that I had tunnel vision about anyone else’s. Boone had tried to tell me that Toni missed me, that she was lonely. Every time, I vowed to myself that I’d get together with her. Soon.

  And I meant to. She’d call me, and we’d talk on the phone for a while—mostly about me, now that I think about it. I’d complain about how much work it was to run a restaurant, and how tired I was, and she’d sympathize. We’d end up promising to have Sunday brunch or go shopping, just the two of us. But somehow it never happened.

  Gradually the calls became less frequent, and shorter, and more like small talk. She came into the Heartbreak Cafe now and then, usually with Boone, and we’d hug each other and laugh and act like everything was fine.

  But it wasn’t fine. On top of all the other losses of this terrible year, I was losing my best friend. And it was my own damn fault.

  Sunnyside Up was our favorite place for Sunday brunch—the only decent place, to tell the truth, within a fifty-mile radius of Chulahatchie. It was about twenty minutes out of town, on an unmarked dirt road back in the boonies. Right on the river, with a covered deck overlooking the water—the kind of place you’d never find if you didn’t already know exactly where it was.

  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how the owner, a huge cushy black woman named Netta Byrd, ever managed to make a living at it. But the woman worked magic with an egg, and baked wonderful yeasty caramel rolls, so locals came from all over the county. Especially on Sunday.

  On weekdays Netta specialized in fresh fried catfish caught by her nephew Stub and brought up from the bank in a wheel-barrow full of river water. But on Sunday it was brunch, all day. And if you wanted those caramel rolls, you either had to skip church or hightail it out of there as soon as you heard the last amen. Otherwise you’d never beat the Baptists before they overran the place like a horde of swarming locusts.

  Toni and I hadn’t talked much on the ride over. The morning was warm and bright, one of those radiant November days you get now and then. We took a seat outside in the corner of the deck.

  Netta spotted us at once and came rushing over. I braced myself. The woman’s hugs were pretty overwhelming, but she didn’t give them out to just anybody, so I figured I ought to count my blessings.

  She embraced me and then Toni, and patted us into our seats. “Dell, baby,” she said, “I’s so glad to see you. You all right? I’ve had me some troubling dreams of late.”

  Netta’s dreams were the stuff of legend around Chulahatchie. She had her own kind of religion—part Christian, part pagan, with a little voodoo thrown in for good measure. Boone suspected that if anyone on earth was truly psychic, it would be Netta Byrd.

  “I’m fine, Netta,” I lied. “Busy. You shoulda told me how much work it was to run a restaurant.”

  Netta raised her eyebrows. “You didn’t ask me, now did you?”

  Toni laughed, but I could hear an edge in the sound, just a hint of sharpness.

  “I reckon I didn’t,” I conceded. “I’m just glad somebody else is cooking on Sunday.”

  Netta threw back her head and laughed, showing a multitude of gold crowns and caps. “The good Lawd’s done give me a special dispensation to work on the Sabbath,” she declared. “So’s I can fatten up all these back-sliding Christians.”

  She waddled away, chuckling to herself. A skinny young girl, all knees and elbows and braids, sidled up to the table with a coffeepot in her hand. “Y’all want coffee?”

  “Yes, please.” Toni pushed her cup in the girl’s direction. “And water, when you get time.”

  “Yes’m.” The girl bobbed her head and vanished.

  “She’s just a child,” Toni said, “not much older than my students.”

  “I expect she’s one of Netta’s grandchildren. Or a niece.”

  The conversation, such as it was, faltered. The grand-daughter came back with water, refilled our coffee cups, and took orders. I chose a sausage and cheese omelet, biscuits and gravy, and hash browns. Toni ordered French toast and bacon. The caramel rolls would come later. We’d both be waddling like Netta by the time we were done.

  We looked out over the river, watched the brown water oozing by like blackstrap molasses, commented on the nice Indian summer warm spell and the vibrant colors of the maple trees this year. I started squirming inside, uncomfortable with the small talk and the bigger talk I knew was coming, assuming I ever worked up the gumption to jump off that cliff.

  Toni saved me the trouble.

  “All right, Dell.” She waved a forkful of French toast in my direction. “Out with it.”

  “Out with what?”

  “Whatever it is that’s on your mind. You’re jumpy as a cat in heat. You won’t look me in the eye, and there’s obviously something you want to say but can’t figure out a way to do it. For God’s sake, woman, we’ve been best friends for a hundred years. Granted, you haven’t been acting like a best friend in the past few months, but—” She stopped suddenly, shrugged, and put the wedge of French toast in her mouth.

  I fiddled with my hash browns, picking off the crispy top part and scattering the rest. “You’re right,” I said. “I haven’t been acting like a best friend. I’ve been preoccupied, and—”

  “You think?”

  I looked up at her. She was trying not to smile, but it wasn’t working. I grinned at her.

  “Yeah, I think. So, well, I wanted to apologize, and ask your forgiveness, and—”

  “All right, all right, let’s not make a federal case out of it,” she interrupted. “But you’re buying breakfast.”

  I felt that knot inside my chest loosen up a little and realized all of a sudden how long it had been since I had taken an easy breath. Since the day I went to see Brenda Unger? Since the night Chase died?

  I thought it would be hard, but once I started talking everything just sorta gushed on out of me—all those months of wondering, obsessing about the
identity of Chase’s mistress, with no clues to go on. Then Fart telling me about the divorce, and my conversation with Brenda, and the dream where Chase became something else, something awful.

  Lord help me, it was such a relief to get it off my chest, to share the burden with somebody I trusted. I didn’t have the first idea what I was gonna do now, or what difference any of it would make, but at least I wouldn’t be in it alone.

  Finally I finished and looked up.

  Toni was staring at me with her jaw gaping and her coffee cup halfway to her mouth. She put the cup down so hard the whole table rattled.

  “Shit, Dell,” she said.

  “I know.” I shook my head. “I never woulda guessed—”

  “No. Listen to me. You’re wrong.”

  “I wouldn’t have believed it myself, Toni. But Brenda said—”

  She propped her elbows on the tabletop. “Tell me exactly what Brenda said. Word for word.”

  I cast back in my mind, trying to bring up the conversation. “Well, she admitted she’d had an affair. When I tried to reason with her about leaving Fart, she got pretty agitated, said I was the last person she wanted to talk to about this, that we had been friends for a long time and she didn’t want to cause me any more pain.”

  “But she didn’t say, ‘I was the one having an affair with Chase.’ ”

  “Not in those words, no. Not right out. It was pretty clear, though, what she was trying to tell me.”

  “Was it?”

  “Well, yeah. It was clear enough. I tried to second-guess it, but what else could she mean? Fart told me she hadn’t been herself for some time—months, maybe a year. And then Brenda said it was over now, but she couldn’t go back to the way things were with Fart, and she didn’t want to tell me because I’d been through enough.”

  I narrowed my eyes and squinted at Toni. She had an odd expression on her face, one I couldn’t quite read.

  “We’ve been friends all our lives,” she said at last. “And you know I love you. But I’m going to tell you something now that you need to hear. So pay attention.”

  She took a breath and exhaled heavily. “You don’t listen, Dell. You don’t. Especially in the last few months, you’ve been so caught up in your own pain and grief that you can’t see anything else. Now, I know it’s been a tough time for you, so I’ve cut you some slack. I’ve tried to be understanding. But you’ve got blinders on about this thing with Chase. You’re jumping to conclusions, and you need to hear the truth.”

  She paused and pushed her plate away. I waited, watching that little vein throb just above her right eyebrow.

  “It wasn’t Brenda Unger.”

  “But she said—”

  “What she said was that she didn’t want to cause you any more pain, that you had been through enough. That’s what I mean about not listening, Dell. What she said was that she didn’t tell you about her affair because she thought it would open up the wounds again. And that’s exactly what she meant. That’s all she meant.”

  “No, you’re wrong,” I said. “You weren’t there.”

  “Trust me,” Toni said. “Brenda didn’t have an affair with Chase.”

  “How do you know?”

  I had a dog once, a little spaniel mix, who would bite if she was scared or hurt or felt trapped. I learned to recognize the signs. She’d go rigid, just for a second, and her head would snap around. And she’d get this look in her eye, a glazed kind of look, as if she knew she’d regret it after it was all over, but she was going to bite anyway.

  Toni had that look now. Instinct told me I ought to back off, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “How do you know?” I repeated.

  She chewed on her bottom lip and stared out over the river.

  “Because I know. Just leave it at that.”

  If I thought Brenda had given me the Judas kiss, here sat Toni with a big old sledgehammer, driving in the spikes. I could almost feel the vibration of the blows inside my head, running along my jawbone. Could almost hear the clang of iron against iron.

  Netta tottered by with a coffeepot and refilled our cups while I struggled to swallow down the cannonball in my throat. Toni thanked her, and sat back in her chair, sipping her coffee, as if that was the end of the discussion. She watched me over the rim.

  At last, when I managed to speak, my voice came out hoarse and creaky. “Just what, exactly, do you know?”

  “I know it wasn’t Brenda.”

  “Then who was it? And why the hell didn’t you tell me? You know this has been eating me alive, Toni.”

  She reached across the table and tried to take my hand. I snatched it back. I didn’t want her touching me, didn’t want to have to look at her.

  “I told Boone you’d respond like this,” she muttered.

  My heart dropped into my shoes. “Boone?” I said.

  “Who else was I going to talk to? Let me explain.”

  “What is there to explain?” I shouted. “Another betrayal? Another twist of the knife?” I threw a twenty-dollar bill on the table and headed for the parking lot. Toni followed, running to keep up, still trying to talk.

  “Just shut up, will you? Shut up and leave me the hell alone.”

  She shut up.

  We drove back to town in silence. I don’t know how we made it without ending up in a ditch, because I could barely see the road through my tears, and my hands kept shaking on the steering wheel. When we finally pulled up in front of Toni’s house, she got out and I drove away.

  Without even saying good-bye.

  • 18 •

  I’d lived in Chulahatchie all my life and never once felt lonely.

  Sad, sometimes, but it was the kind of sadness I reckon all women experience at one time or the other, when their husbands don’t pay attention to them, or they’re feeling put upon and unappreciated.

  Never this block of ice in the pit of my stomach, this isolation. It made me feel like an alien set down off a spaceship, on a planet where people were saying words I understood but putting them together in sentences that didn’t make a lick of sense.

  It was like a bad dream I couldn’t wake up from, like that movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. All the people I loved and counted on and thought I knew were morphing into terrifying strangers with familiar faces. Chase first, then Brenda, and now Toni and even Boone. Nothing was solid enough to hold me up. The whole world had turned into sinkholes and quicksand.

  The Monday afternoon lunch crowd had cleared out and the Heartbreak Cafe was closed, but here I sat in the corner booth, unable to force myself to get up and do. For fifteen solid minutes I’d been tracing a scar on the Formica tabletop with my thumbnail.

  My stomach rumbled and my hand shook. Vaguely I thought I might be hungry, but it was hard to tell hunger from the emptiness inside.

  I looked up to see Scratch standing over me with a plate in his hand.

  “I know. I gotta get stuff ready for tomorrow morning,” I said. “I just can’t seem to . . .”

  Can’t seem to what? I thought. Can’t seem to function? Can’t seem to finish a sentence? Can’t seem to come to grips with the fact that everybody I had ever loved turned out to be a liar and a cheat?

  “It’s all right,” Scratch said. “Everything’s done. I set all the food away and put a soup together for in the morning. Kitchen’s clean and shut down.” He motioned with the plate. “The vultures ’bout cleaned us out, but I made this for you. Thought you might be hungry, seein’ as you hadn’t eaten.”

  He set the plate in front of me. “Mind if I join you?”

  I did mind. It felt wrong, somehow, sitting in a booth across from a black man, and although I wanted not to feel that way, I didn’t have the energy to filter my own thoughts and make myself feel something else.

  I liked Scratch, I really did. He was a hard worker, and kindhearted, and never gave me a minute’s trouble. And yet I couldn’t get over feeling a little tense around him, a kind of innate suspicion that to Southerners w
as bred in the bone.

  Still, I said the right thing, even if I wasn’t feeling it. “Have a seat.” I peered at the plate he had brought me. “What is it?”

  He sat down, slowly, like he was testing whether the seat would hold him. Seemed to me he wasn’t exactly comfortable with the situation, either. “It’s a sandwich.”

  “I can see that. What kind of sandwich?”

  “Peanut butter and jelly and fried Spam.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Don’t knock it if you ain’t tried it. They say Elvis was partial to grilled peanut butter and bananas. Guess he never discovered Spam.”

  “Yeah, Elvis was forty-two when he died, too,” I said. “Not the greatest recommendation.”

  Scratch motioned to me to eat up. “Go on, take a bite. Best comfort food in the world.”

  He had already cut the sandwich, on the diagonal the way I liked it. I picked one half up and took a bite out of the corner.

  “Good, ain’t it?”

  It was more than good. The combination of flavors and textures was downright amazing—the smooth nuttiness of the peanut butter, the sweet tang of strawberry jam, the salty, slightly spicy flavor of the Spam.

  I took two more bites and swallowed. “You win. It’s delicious. But what makes you think I need comfort food?”

  He drummed his fingers on the tabletop and then turned them palm side up. A simple movement, but it seemed so vulnerable, showing the pale underside of those strong black hands.

  “Don’t take a genius to recognize the signs.” He shrugged. “You want to talk about it, I’m listening.”

  I opened my mouth to say no, I was fine. But then my heart betrayed me, and I couldn’t hold back the tears.

  “That’s good. Let it out,” he murmured. He pulled a handful of napkins out of the dispenser and handed them across to me.

  I cried for a while, avoiding his eyes, and when I finally blew my nose and looked up again he was still there, gazing at me, waiting patiently. I’d never met a man except Boone who was comfortable with a woman’s tears, but Scratch surprised me. The thought flitted briefly across my mind that he might surprise me in other ways, if I’d just give him a chance.