Heartbreak Cafe

by Penelope Stokes J.

  Hooch leaned over and gave Pansy a little kiss on the cheek. She never would have allowed it if she had been sober, he knew, but he had to take his opportunities when and where they came.

  The blasted bow tie was about to choke him half to death. She smelled of homemade gin and face powder and a perfume so heavy it made his eyes water, and something else—Eau du Nursing Home, he thought. That peculiar smell you always got when a lot of old and dying people were herded together in constricted quarters.

  My suspicions were right—Peach was writing about Chulahatchie, and the people in it. The people right here in the Heartbreak Cafe, in fact, and stuff that was happening here every blessed day.

  And what else had she written?

  I flipped the pages, scuttling backward like a crab. She’d written about everybody—Scratch, Fart, the boys from Tenn-Tom, the truckers, the little blue-haired ladies who came for coffee and pie. DeeDee Sturgis and Tansie Orr. Marvin Beckstrom, even.

  Then a particular name caught my eye, and I stopped. Stopped and stared.

  I should have said yes to Boone Atkins years ago when I had the chance. He was so sweet and smart and sensitive—not to mention damn good-looking—and we might have had something, if only I hadn’t been a spineless wimp and given in to Mama like I always did. I hate the woman, honestly I do, and though I’m not proud of thinking it, my life would be infinitely easier if she’d just go ahead and die. But she’s too hateful and too stubborn to give me the satisfaction. With my luck she’ll probably live forever . . .

  My heart hammered in my chest, and I shut the book, keeping my finger inside to hold the place. This was very private stuff, stuff I was sure Peach intended to keep to herself. I felt like a thief, stealing somebody else’s precious possessions and then going on pretending to be a friend. But I couldn’t quit. Not yet. Not if what I needed to know was in this book.

  If I’d ever doubted it before, I was sure of one thing now. Peach Rondell understood people. She watched. She listened. It was all here, in her journal. All the quirks and eccentricities, the little details that made individuals stand out. The truth about Chulahatchie.

  The things folks tried to hide, Peach saw.

  Scratch, for example. She wrote about him with tenderness and compassion, characterizing him as a failed artist, a man with a painful hidden past. A love gone terribly wrong. A career in ruins. Reduced to waiting tables at a second-rate diner, never given the admiration he deserved.

  How did she know anything about Scratch’s deeper side, when all she’d seen of him was a short-order cook and bus-boy? And how did she understand about Fart? She painted him to perfection—a broken-down basketball star whose whole life and self-image was tied up in being a good provider, a good husband, a good father. A man who had buried his dreams of glory to make his wife happy, only to watch her walk away without a backward glance.

  And Tansie Orr, whose husband, Tank (Peach called him Hank), played the adoring spouse in public but slapped her around behind closed doors. Did he really? I wondered. What had Peach seen that I had missed? Was she right, that Tansie’s only recourse was to put on a front, to try to act as young and sexy as possible to bolster her flagging self-image? Was that why Tansie dressed so provocatively and dyed her hair and wore those outrageous acrylic fingernails?

  It was all very interesting, very enlightening, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. I was sure it was here, somewhere. I just had to find it.

  And then my eye snagged on a word. A name. My name.

  Dell Haley is an amazing woman. I sit here in this booth every day and watch her, and although I know some of what she’s been through and can imagine, at least in part, the pain and grief she must be experiencing, she just keeps going. She smiles and talks and listens and makes people feel important and treats them with dignity. Even if they’re idiots or assholes, like Marvin Beckstrom.

  I’ve never seen that kind of strength in a woman. I was always taught, by precept if not by example, that a woman is the weaker vessel, and without a man to support and sustain her, she will crack and shatter into a thousand pieces.

  When I came home to Chulahatchie I was cracked and on the verge of shattering. I didn’t care if I lived or died. But Dell gives me an example of how to be strong, and thanks to her I have the will to go on. Maybe someday I’ll work up the nerve to actually talk to her, to tell her that she’s my hero and my inspiration.

  Maybe someday we might actually be friends. Maybe—

  The telephone rang, shrill in the silence of the empty restaurant. I jerked, slammed the journal shut, and pushed it away as if whoever was on the other end of the phone could see through the lines and know what I was doing. My heart thudded in my chest. Guilt smothered me so that I could barely breathe.

  The phone continued to ring. I craned my neck to see the clock on the wall over the kitchen pass-through window. It was nearly four. I forced myself up and out of the booth, and answered the phone with a shaky voice.

  “Dell, thank God,” a voice said. “When I didn’t get you at home, I was hoping you’d still be at the restaurant.”

  I swallowed vainly at the lump of cotton in my throat. The silence stretched on.

  “Dell? Are you all right? It’s Peach.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Sorry. Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “I thought you’d want to know about Purdy Overstreet. She’s okay. Like Scratch said, it’s just a sprain, although the doctor says the ligaments are pulled a little, so he’s put her in a walking cast for six weeks. One of those boot things you can take off to take a bath, and to sleep at night.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “It just took a lot longer at the emergency room than we expected.” Peach laughed. “And get this—Hoot Everett is determined to take care of her himself. He’s got her set up in the spare room at his house.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Apparently she figures he’ll be more interesting company than the folks at St. Agnes—she calls them the ‘geri atric set.’ Jane Lee Custer came down to the hospital while Purdy was being treated. Says she can’t keep Purdy at the nursing home against her will, but she’ll send somebody over to Hoot’s every day to check on her.”

  “Guess I’ll be delivering lunch to them, then,” I said. “Purdy hates the food at St. Agnes.”

  “I think she’d like that,” Peach said. “Although she’d like it better if Scratch did the delivering.”

  “Just what we need—a fistfight with Hoot defending Purdy’s honor.”

  “Life’s nothing if it isn’t drama,” Peach said. “Everywhere you go, there’s a floor show.”

  I had no answer to this. Peach’s journal sure reflected the drama she saw all around her.

  “Listen,” she said. “With all the commotion, I accidentally left my journal in the back booth.”

  I tried to keep my voice calm, to sound normal. “Yeah, I found it.” I held my breath. She was going to suggest coming over to pick it up right now, I was sure of it. But I needed to buy myself some time. “Tell you what, I’ve got a few things to finish up here, but I can drop it by on my way home if you like.”

  “Thanks, Dell, but that’s not necessary,” Peach said. “I’ll get it tomorrow. Just put it somewhere safe, will you?” She hesitated. “It’s kind of important to me.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “I know you will. I trust you.”

  She signed off and hung up, and I dragged myself back to the booth and the journal feeling like pond scum.

  I sat there for ten minutes or so, fingering the soft leather of the cover and battling inside my head. She trusted me. Well, I’d be worthy of that trust. I wouldn’t read another word, and no harm done.

  But I couldn’t do it. It was like my hands belonged to somebody else, flipping those pages, and my eyes were out of my head and reading on their own. And then I found it, and I couldn’t quit now, not if my soul would burn in hell for the sin.

  He waited there, i
n the gathering darkness, looking out over the river and watching the snowy egrets that came in to fish in the shallows near the dock. The water had gone red from the reflected light of the sunset, bloodred like the rivers of Egypt under Moses’s plague.

  The cabin stood on pillars above flood level, although the waters had kept to their banks since the Army Corps of Engineers had built the dam and waterway. Below, underneath the back of the house, his truck stood hidden from prying eyes. An unnecessary precaution, probably. Only the egrets were fishing tonight, and the camp was situated at the end of a narrow dirt track, far off the beaten path on an isolated bend of the river.

  He saw the reflected glow of headlights against the trees and crossed to the other side of the deck to watch the car bounce slowly into view. Behind him, in the cabin, the lights were off, candles lit, wine chilled, soft music playing. Everything was ready.

  The car turned into the driveway. She got out and climbed the stairs, her long legs lithe and elegant in black jeans, her blonde hair swaying with every step.

  She was beautiful and a little shy, and laughed easily, and made him feel attractive and sexy and desirable. He had felt that way once, long ago, when he was thirty and fit and still had his athlete’s body and a bright future ahead of him. But time and reality had a way of flabbing muscles and dimming dreams, and it had been years since he had felt like anyone special.

  And so he had kept his distance, plagued by self-doubt, questioning if he was interpreting the signals correctly. When she had finally made a move on him, he was so aroused he could have taken her right there, in the produce aisle of the Piggly Wiggly.

  But this was better. Private, relaxed, secretive. The forbidden fruit, just waiting to be picked, and to hell with the consequences.

  Mama used to say you should never condemn somebody without the testimony of two witnesses. It was somewhere in the Bible, I think, but wherever it came from, it was probably good advice.

  A voice echoed in the back of my mind, my best friend’s voice, telling me she knew for certain that Brenda Unger didn’t have an affair with my husband—but not telling me how she knew. Now I stared at the journal, its pages spread out before me like a centerfold in all its obscene glory. My jaw ached from clenching my teeth, and my head throbbed with the strain of trying to read the words again in the fading afternoon light.

  I reckon I just got my second witness.

  • 21 •

  Thanksgiving came and went, the worst Thanksgiving of my entire life.

  The Heartbreak Cafe was closed for the day, and I sat alone in the house I had shared with Chase, eating a turkey sandwich and trying to distract myself with the Macy’s parade and ten hours of nonstop football. I couldn’t have told you who was playing to save my soul.

  Toni. I couldn’t believe it—my best friend and my husband. How could she have done such a thing? And how did Peach Rondell find out?

  Besides that, who else knew, and wasn’t telling? Boone, for sure.

  I paced. I pounded the sofa pillows. I swore at the top of my lungs, yelled at the TV, cried until I thought I would drown in my own snot. Cried out to God, to the universe, to whoever the hell was listening: “No, dammit! No! I don’t deserve this!”

  But no one answered.

  Friday, after three hours of sleep, I dragged myself out of bed and went to the restaurant. Scratch was already there, prepping for breakfast, making coffee. He gave me a look but didn’t say anything other than, “Mornin’, Miz Dell,” and went on about his work. I let him do everything. I just sat in a booth and drank most of the first pot of coffee, and wondered what in blazes I was gonna do. How I was going to go on. How I could possibly survive.

  Nobody showed up that morning. Nobody except Fart Unger.

  He joined me in the booth and accepted Scratch’s offer of coffee. For a while he just sat there with his hands cradling the mug, and then he said, “Dell, what’s wrong? You look like you’re on your last nerve.”

  I couldn’t tell him. I just sat there with a fist-sized lump in my throat and shrugged.

  “You’ve been working too hard,” he said after a while. “Maybe you oughta take a few days off.”

  The kindness in his voice unraveled me, and I swiped at the tears. “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “I’ve been under a lot of stress lately.”

  He took a sip of his coffee. “I can listen, if you need to talk.”

  I gritted my teeth and determined to buck up. “I’ll be okay,” I said.

  He reached out a callused hand and touched my fingers, just lightly, like a brush of sandpaper across my skin. “You don’t need to be strong all the time,” he said. “You got friends.”

  “I know.”

  That was all the response I could manage. If I said another word, I would start crying and not be able to stop. I changed the subject. “You want some breakfast?”

  “You’ll join me?”

  I looked around the empty restaurant. “Why not?”

  Scratch wouldn’t hear of me getting in the kitchen. He made bacon and eggs and hash browns and banana pancakes and brought them to us like he was serving royalty. We small-talked our way through breakfast; Fart ate his and half of mine. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he preferred Scratch’s cooking. By the time he’d finished the last of the pancakes, I pretty much had him convinced that I was all right. Just tired. Just in need of a little break.

  “Then take a break,” he said. “The restaurant will still be here when you get back.”

  I musta been out of my ever-loving mind, taking off the way I did. The next morning I packed a bag, handed Scratch my keys, and put the CLOSED sign on the door of the Heartbreak Cafe.

  “I’ll be back in a few days,” I said. “Folks can survive without my cooking until then.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Shouldn’t you call Toni? Or Boone? Somebody oughta know where you’ve gone to. They’ll worry.”

  “Let ’em worry,” I said. “It might be good for them.”

  Then, feeling a little bit like a rebellious teenager running away from home, I drove through the ATM at Chulahatchie Savings and Loan, withdrew the maximum—two hundred dollars—and headed for the Alabama line.

  I had only a vague idea where I was going—Atlanta, maybe. Didn’t much matter; I just wanted to get out of Mississippi, out of Chulahatchie in particular. As far away from Toni and Boone and the memory of Chase Haley as I could get on raging fury and a Visa card.

  I might even drive all the way to Asheville—Tansie Orr couldn’t stop raving about the place after she and Tank went last year. I remembered those mountains from long-ago trips to the Smokies, pristine and gentle and peaceful.

  An hour into the trip, I was pretty sure I’d lost leave of my senses. Traffic through Tuscaloosa was a nightmare—apparently Ole Miss was playing Alabama. On both sides of me were cars full of honking, screaming college students and aging alumni flying flags out their windows and yelling at each other across the highway.

  By the time I got past the university and out onto the Birmingham bypass, eastbound traffic was lighter, but my nerves were frayed to a ragged edge. Only then did it occur to me that I’d never done this before, taken a road trip by myself. Chase did the driving, and the few times we traveled over to East Tennessee and Western North Carolina, all I had to do was consult the map and enjoy the scenery.

  Alabama didn’t have much scenery to speak of, not that I coulda seen it anyway, sandwiched like I was between roaring semis. I almost missed the exit toward Atlanta. I caught a glimpse of the sign at the last minute, held my breath, floored it across three lanes, and swerved onto the exit ramp. Behind me, brakes squealed and horns blared, but at least I wasn’t dead and didn’t hear any sirens or crashing metal.

  Thank God for small favors.

  Three hours later, give or take a rest stop or two, the tall skyline of Atlanta emerged out of the mist. I came over a rise and there it stood, shimmering in the distance like the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.

>   But there was no magic, unless you count the miracle of surviving rush-hour traffic. I passed Six Flags, closed for the season, with its empty roller coaster hulking like a dinosaur skeleton in the rain. It took me another hour and a half to get to the far side of the city. By the time I pulled off at the Days Inn and rented a crummy room for the obscene price of sixty-four dollars a night, I was exhausted, depressed, and almost ready to turn around and go back to Chulahatchie.

  But going back wasn’t an option. This trip might have been crazy and impulsive and totally unlike the Dell Haley everybody thought they knew, but it was instinct, survival. I took myself back out again, went scouting, and ended up at an Italian cafe nearby, a place called Macaroni Grill.

  How you grilled macaroni, I had no clue, but it turned out to be a Tuscan-style, overpriced restaurant that offered a mind-numbing assortment of pasta dishes, served with huge wheels of warm, crusty bread. I opted for the maximum dose of fat, cholesterol, and garlic, and chose the shrimp scampi Alfredo with Caesar salad and half a carafe of a white wine I’d never heard of.

  Chulahatchie is the kind of place where wine comes with a screw-off top, or if you’re a big drinker, in a box that will fit in the fridge. According to my waiter, a handsome young man worthy of Chippendale’s, this was an Italian Pino, whatever that meant. I didn’t much care—I just liked the idea of having somebody else cook, serve, and clean up.

  Being served by a gorgeous hunk who flirted shamelessly was an unexpected plus.

  The gorgeous hunk, of course, talked me into having dessert—a wedge of cheesecake half the size of my head, with hot fudge dolloped over the top and running down the sides into a small pond on the plate. After wine, shrimp, pasta, bread, and chocolate fudge cheesecake, I felt a little more cheerful, although if I’m going to be perfectly honest, the attention didn’t hurt, either. I paid the tab with two crisp new twenty-dollar bills, patted my little Chippendale on the cheek, and told him to keep the change.