Heartbreak Cafe

by Penelope Stokes J.

  I kept my eyes trained on the coffee in my cup. It was vibrating in circles, shaken by my trembling fingers. An earthquake in miniature. A shifting of the world.

  She didn’t answer. I didn’t look at her. The silence between us stretched thin as taffy, pulled to the breaking point. And then I heard a sound. A gasp. A little croaking noise.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  I raised my head. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Her shoulders rose and fell with her sobs. She put her face in her hands and cried so hard I thought she might wrench her soul out of her body.

  She fought for air like a woman drowning. I knew the feeling; I’d cried like that many a night since Chase had died. I pulled a handful of napkins out of the dispenser and pressed them into her hand.

  My touch seemed to burn her skin. She jerked away, and I could see her withdrawing into herself, collapsing. “No,” she said. “Please, no.”

  I didn’t move, but I didn’t touch her again, either. After a while the weeping subsided. She sat up and blew her nose, and at last she spoke.

  “Dell, I’m so, so sorry.”

  “Sorry for what? I’m the one who needs to apologize.”

  “No, you don’t understand.” She took in a ragged, pain-racked breath. “It was me.”

  She was right; I didn’t understand. “What are you talking about?”

  “The man. The river camp. The woman. It was me.”

  “You wrote about it, yes. I shouldn’t have read it, but I did. And—”

  “Dell!” she said, her voice sharp. “I wrote it from the man’s viewpoint, wrote it as a fictional scene, like in a novel. But it was me.”

  “It wasn’t you. It was a tall, thin blonde woman, it was—”

  And then the truth sank in, all the way down to the pit of my stomach. She had been writing about herself, as she saw herself, as she used to be, or as she wished she could be again. Thin, beautiful, attractive. Desirable.

  “But Chase—”

  “I didn’t know you at the time, Dell, and I sure didn’t know he was your husband. I didn’t know he was anybody’s husband, not until the very end. He told me—” She stopped. “Well, never mind what he told me.”

  “I can guess,” I said. “Probably the same thing every married man tells a woman he’s trying to seduce.”

  “Probably.” She looked up at me, her eyes full of misery and despair. “I was an easy target, I suppose. Lonely, hurting, feeling abandoned. New in town, for all practical purposes. He told me his name was Charles.”

  “It is,” I said. “Chase was a nickname, but nobody ever called him anything else.” I felt as if I might unravel at any second, but I pulled myself together and forged ahead. “Did anyone else know?”

  When she answered, her voice came out a whisper. “We only met at the river camp, and once or twice at a restaurant in Tuscaloosa. Hardly anybody was aware that I was back in town, or would have recognized me even if they’d known. People might have suspected him, I’m not sure.”

  “They suspected, all right,” I said. “But y’all must have been pretty discreet, because nobody knew for sure, or at least if they did they kept quiet about it, and that’s not very likely in this town.”

  She offered no comment on this. I waited, and then finally asked the question I had to know. “Were you there the night he died?”

  Peach shook her head. “No. I had been there earlier in the day. He was alone, as far as I know.”

  She didn’t say what I expect we both were thinking, that maybe she was to blame for his heart attack, that maybe the exertion was too much for him, or the stress of keeping such a secret. An image shouldered its way into my head, of Peach and Chase together—not the imaginary Peach with the long legs and flowing blonde hair, but the real Peach, with her dark roots and puffy eyes and faded Ole Miss sweatshirt. What did he see in her that I didn’t see?

  Then a strange sensation came over me. A door shutting in my mind. Or maybe it was a coffin. I had my truth at last. Maybe in time the pain would subside and the wounds would heal, but right now that truth wrapped around my senses like razor-sharp barbed wire. There was no solace in Peach’s confession, but at least there was resolution. At least there was relief.

  And oddly enough, I didn’t blame her. Like the rest of us, she sought comfort where she found it. Like the rest of us, she went in blind, feeling her way through the darkness.

  “Dell,” Peach said, “that last day, the day he died, he told me he couldn’t see me anymore. He told me he was married, and that he had to try to make things right.” She paused. “He loved you, Dell. He always loved you.”

  I didn’t believe she was telling the truth. But it was a compassionate lie, all the same.

  • 32 •

  I never revealed to anyone what Peach Rondell had told me.

  Not Toni. Not Boone. Not anybody. I just kept it shut tight between the pages of my heart, hidden away. Some things are too precious or too painful to be spoken.

  It’s a lesson I’ve been slow in learning. Certain gifts, certain heartaches, certain memories, lie too deep for words, too close for tears.

  I had my answer. There was no reason for anyone to think less of Peach because she was the one who supplied it.

  After Peach left, I locked the door, turned off the lights, and sat there while the early dusk of December closed in on me. It was almost Christmas, and I couldn’t think of a single damn reason to celebrate.

  Boone, who had grown up Catholic while I was getting born again over and over at the Baptist Church, had tried to educate me about the season of Advent. The liminal time, he called it—the threshold moment between darkness and daylight, between now and not yet. The transition, the waiting time.

  I’d never quite gotten it. Baptists didn’t do Advent—we just went straight to Christmas, to the baby in the manger, to shepherds and wise men and starlight shining overhead and angel choruses. I reckon we didn’t like waiting much, and sure as heck weren’t sophisticated enough to appreciate what Boone called “the gifts of the darkness.” Baptists are all about light, and come hell or high water, we’re gonna switch the power on.

  Now I was beginning to understand. I thought about Mary, too young and too naive, pregnant and afraid and shamed—because who would believe such an outrageous story, anyway? An angel visitation, a virgin birth? At best, it had been a dream or a vision. At worst, a psychotic breakdown. Either way, a pretty lame excuse for a sin that could get her stoned.

  I could imagine the reality of it now; for the first time in my life I got past the tinsel and the presents and the glad tidings. I saw an exhausted teenage girl, pregnant as a beach ball, riding into Bethlehem on an uncomfortable and stubborn ass. Standing in line for hours, while her ankles swelled, to pay taxes they couldn’t afford. Going into labor in a barn because all the hotels were overcrowded and they didn’t have money for a room, anyway. No midwife around, just a burly, rough-handed carpenter who didn’t know nothing about birthin’ no babies.

  Mary didn’t have a clue about the hallelujahs ringing over the fields, spooking the sheep and scaring the bejeebers out of the shepherds, or about rich kings making their way from the Orient with expensive gifts. All she knew was the night and the cold and the pain. All she felt was the blood and the mess and the terror of childbirth. All she heard echoing around her was the shuffling of animals pushed out of their stalls, and Joseph’s desperate prayer that she wouldn’t die, that the baby wouldn’t die, that somehow they’d all live to see the sunrise.

  The waiting time. The darkness. The fear. The trembling, feeble hope that somehow hung on, persistent, in the face of all odds—

  Someone was knocking on the door.

  I jerked back to reality, turned to look. It was Marvin Beckstrom, peering in through the glass, with the fresh new lettering, HEARTBREAK, reflected backward over his big buggy head. Behind him stood the sheriff, motioning for me to unlock the door and let them in.

  I was pretty darn sure they weren�
�t here to say they’d caught the thief and return my stolen money.

  The eviction notice was clear, even to me: I had until January 1. Alyssa looked it over and said that, unfortunately, it was legal and there was nothing I could do about it. Pretty quick work, to my way of thinking, but my lease specified thirty days’ grace in the event of nonpayment. After the robbery, I hadn’t been able to make the December rent.

  It was over. The Heartbreak Cafe was history.

  Back in April, I had set my sights on still being solvent by the end of the year. A pretty modest aspiration, all things considered. Nine months. But it wasn’t going to happen. This baby was going to die.

  The day after the papers were served, Scratch came into work bringing a small fir tree from the riverbank. He set it up in the corner near the door, where it stood looking bare and forlorn. A Charlie Brown tree.

  He stood back and surveyed it. “Reckon I’d better get some decorations before it depresses everybody who walks through the door.”

  “I’ve got plenty,” I said. “I’ll bring some in tomorrow.”

  I wasn’t putting up a Christmas tree at home this year, and didn’t really want one in the cafe, either. There didn’t seem to be much point. There would be no presents, no lights, no celebration. Chase was gone; the cafe was gone; life as I knew it was gone. At the moment the only blessed thing I could do was hang on and try to survive the holidays, waiting for the axe to fall.

  When you’re part of a family—a wife or husband, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins and friends—you don’t think about how hard those special days are for folks who don’t have anybody. You don’t think about the lonely widower rambling around his empty house, eating a turkey sandwich and trying to distract himself with Thanksgiving football. You don’t think about the divorcee whose life is in shambles and who fights every single day to keep from giving in to despair. You don’t think about the old woman down the street living on Social Security and trying to decide whether to buy food or medicine. You don’t consider the folks who have no one to kiss on New Year’s Eve at midnight, no one to bake a birthday cake for, no one who’s waiting for a phone call. You don’t think about the homeless, the loveless, the lonely.

  Now I was thinking about all that, and more. Feeling it. Trying unsuccessfully to push it down below the surface of my consciousness. Trying not to panic.

  “Oh, there’s something else,” Scratch said. “Hang on a minute.”

  He went outside and came back in cradling an enormous turkey in his arms. “I stopped by the Piggly Wiggly this morning. Seems like you won the raffle.” He held out the bird, a twenty-pound monster encased in thick plastic and yellow netting.

  I stared at him. “What the heck am I supposed to do with that?”

  “Cook it,” he said.

  The man did have a way of cutting right to the heart of the matter. In spite of myself, I started to laugh.

  “Scratch,” I said, “what are you and Alyssa and Imani doing for Christmas?”

  He shrugged. “I reckoned we’d just spend the day at the river camp. Alyssa took off work until after the first, so we’re in no rush to go anywhere.”

  “How about if we serve Christmas dinner here, for folks who got no family and no place else to go?” I said. “You know, turkey and dressing and all the trimmings? Fix it up real nice, like a banquet?”

  “You feel like doing that?”

  “What else am I gonna do?” I said. “Besides, the worst has already happened. I’ve lost the cafe. Might as well go out with a bang.”

  And so we did.

  Christmas Day dawned bright and chilly. I was up before dawn with all the lights blazing in the Heartbreak Cafe, baking pumpkin pies and stirring up a huge vat of cornbread dressing while the turkey began to cook. Everybody was bringing something—mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes and green bean casserole. Boone promised to put together his famous oyster casserole, and Toni was making her aunt Madge’s homemade yeast rolls.

  Scratch had pushed four tables together in the center of the room to create a kind of long banquet table, and we’d covered it with a dark green tablecloth and red cotton napkins. The effect was remarkably festive, for a dumpy little diner on the verge of bankruptcy.

  By the time everybody started to arrive, the cafe was filling up with all those nostalgic smells. Toni had brought a CD player and set it up in the corner, and the sounds of Mannheim Steamroller’s Christmas album threaded in and out among the buzz of conversation. Every now and then the bell over the door would jingle, another friend coming to join the party. It reminded me of my favorite Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. Another angel gets its wings.

  I was just stirring up the gravy, and Scratch was slicing the turkey, when the door opened and Hoot and Purdy waltzed in. Hoot looked downright spiffy, in red suspenders and a matching bow tie. Purdy was wearing an ill-fitting wraparound skirt poofed out with crinolines and sparkling with glitter and sequins.

  Her ankle was completely healed, it seemed, for she twirled around like a ballerina and only stumbled once. Hoot caught her in his arms, and she planted a big old red-lipstick kiss sideways across his mouth. Glitter scattered around her as she righted herself.

  “Guess what ever’body?” she yelled above the music. “Hoot and me are getting married!”

  All conversation skidded to an abrupt halt. “Well, ah, congratulations,” I said. “But isn’t this kinda sudden?”

  Purdy snorted. “When you’re eighty-something, you ain’t got time to mess around.” She cackled and gave a wicked little grin. “Besides, we gotta get married. We already done the dirty deed.”

  Hoot blushed. “More than once,” he muttered.

  This was way more information than I was comfortable with, and a mental image I desperately wanted to erase. I was thankful when Scratch came to the rescue. “Congratulations, Miss Purdy.” He gave her a kiss on the cheek and shook Hoot’s hand. “I reckon the best man won.”

  “That’s all right, honey,” Purdy said in a whisper everybody could hear. “You’re still second on my list, and if this thing with Hoot doesn’t work out, I’ll be parking my bony little ass right on your doorstep.”

  “I’d be honored,” Scratch said. “But in the meantime, there’s somebody you need to meet. Purdy, this is my wife, Alyssa, and my daughter, Imani. Alyssa, Miss Purdy Overstreet.”

  “You got a wife?” Purdy shrieked with laughter. “You bad, bad boy!” She thumped him on the chest with her purse and turned toward Alyssa. “You treat him right, now. You got competition waiting in the wings.”

  Imani was staring wide-eyed at Purdy and Hoot. “Is that a Christmas tree skirt you’re wearing?”

  Alyssa prodded her in the arm. “Imani! It’s not polite to comment on people’s wardrobes.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  Purdy was unfazed. “You bet it is. I got the idea from that show Designing Women. Those ladies got real good taste, and they’re funny as hell, too.”

  Dinner was ready, the makeshift banquet table loaded down with a dozen steaming dishes and that huge golden-brown bird. Peach Rondell appeared, having escaped her mother’s house at the earliest opportunity, and squeezed in between Imani and Fart Unger.

  Peach glanced at me, as if to ask if it was okay for her to be here. I smiled and discovered it wasn’t really an effort, either. I’d quit hugging the cactus, I guess, and the wounds had begun to heal up. She smiled back.

  Imani gazed up at Peach. “When I grow up,” she whispered, “I want to be a beauty queen, just like you.”

  Peach patted her cheek, then reached down and took something out of her purse. Something bright and sparkly.

  She leaned over and placed the tiara on Imani’s head. “I crown you Queen of Corn Casserole,” she said. “Duchess of Dressing. Princess of Pumpkin. Monarch of Muffins.”

  Imani started to giggle and ducked her head as everyone clapped and cheered.

  When the applause died down, we all sat there, a lit
tle awkward, waiting for someone to start. At last Scratch said, “If nobody has any objections, I’d like to give thanks.”

  We held hands and waited for him to speak. As silence descended over us, a certain slant of winter sunlight came in through the window and glinted off the tinsel on the pitiful little Christmas tree.

  “Thank you,” he said in a quiet voice, “not only for this food, but for all the ways you feed us. For love and friends and family reunited. For acceptance and trust and honesty. For giving us each other. For healing our wounds and making us whole again. Fill our hearts with gratitude, and fill our lives with grace. Amen.”

  Murmured “amens” circled around the table. It was a hushed and holy moment, a moment filled with truth and significance.

  I knew. We all knew. No one here was alone anymore.

  We were family.

  It was the best Christmas dinner ever. Purdy and Hoot held hands under the table like giddy teenagers. Scratch couldn’t keep his eyes off Alyssa, and he held Imani on his lap for most of the meal. Toni, Boone, and Peach carried on an animated conversation about some new novel that had just been released. Fart was subdued, but seemed content to take it all in.

  And then, just as I was about to suggest another round of pie, Purdy spoke up—not in her usual fantasy-land voice, but in a clear, straightforward manner. “Dell,” she said, “what are you going to do about Marvin Beckstrom’s plan to sell this place out from under you?”

  I choked on my coffee and set the cup down with a trembling hand. “What did you say?”

  Purdy gave me the eagle eye. “I overheard him in the bank the other day. Folks talk around me like I’m not there, but I heard him plain as day. On the phone with somebody, telling them you were broke, and the Heartbreak Cafe would be empty by the first of the year, and then the sale could go forward as planned.”

  Boone leaned forward. “Purdy, are you sure that’s what he said?”