Heartbreak Cafe

by Penelope Stokes J.

  “I’m old, I ain’t deaf,” she said. “I heard him clear as water. He’s planning to buy this place come January, so he can resell it and make himself a bundle. Got a buyer all lined up.”

  I looked into her eyes, clear and bright and lucid. And then, in the space of a breath, a shade fell over them again, and she said, “Why isn’t your mama here, Dell? She’d enjoy this little get-together.”

  No one seemed to want to leave. The afternoon shadows stretched across the floor and faded into an early dusk. I went back into the kitchen to put away the leftovers and make another pot of coffee.

  Fart Unger followed me. While I stacked plates in the dishwasher, he deboned the turkey and transferred the remaining dressing into a smaller container to go in the fridge. We chatted about nothing, barely avoiding grazing the subject of Brenda a time or two.

  And then he stepped around me to reach for a towel, and our hands met. “Sorry,” I said. I pulled back, but he didn’t let go.

  “How’s the finger?” he asked, raising my hand to eye level.

  “All better.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I was flooded with the memory of that moment when he kissed the bandage. I flushed and turned away, but he wouldn’t let me.

  “Dell,” he said. “Thank you for including me.”

  “Of course.” The words came out curt and dismissive, not the way I intended it at all. “I mean, of course you would be invited. There was never any question. I wanted you to be here.”

  “And I wanted to be here. Without you—and, ah, everybody—this would have been a miserable Christmas.”

  “For me, too,” I said. “It was probably selfish, actually. I did it so I wouldn’t feel so lonely.”

  “There wasn’t a thing selfish about it,” he said. “And you know it.”

  • 33 •

  Our Christmas gathering of the odd and the outcast had brought a welcome, if temporary, respite from the stress and panic. But once the turkey was demolished and the little Charlie Brown tree stripped of its ornaments and flung in the Dumpster, anxiety overwhelmed me like a drowning wave.

  Six days until eviction. Five. Four.

  I decided not to reopen the restaurant for this final week. I had too much to do, and what was the point, anyway? A few hundred dollars of profit wasn’t going to make any difference. A partial payment wouldn’t bail me out; besides, Marvin Beckstrom obviously had other plans for the Heartbreak Cafe, much more profitable plans.

  Marvin. Even the thought of him galled me and set my teeth on edge. I’d seen him on two or three occasions since he’d served papers on me—in the bank, on the square. Every single time, he’d been wearing that smug gotcha! expression.

  “You think it’s possible Marvin’s behind the break-in?” I asked Scratch and Alyssa for the hundredth time.

  “I don’t know as I’d go that far,” Scratch said. “But he’s gonna profit from it, that’s for sure.”

  I had to agree with Scratch. Marvin had an agenda in shutting me down, and whether or not he orchestrated the whole thing, he was set to cash in big-time from the sale of this building. Meanwhile, the sheriff was so far up Marvin’s butt he couldn’t see daylight, and I had lost all hope of ever finding out who stole from me, much less getting my money back.

  “The problem is,” Alyssa said, “it’s not illegal for him to buy a rental property from the bank and then resell it.”

  When you’re stuck with your foot in the rails and a train coming down the track, your mind goes to crazy places. My brain was full of old television shows. I fantasized about Magnum, P.I., breaking into the bank at night with a little flashlight clenched between his teeth, finding a paper trail, written evidence of the Chickenhead’s crime. Memo to self: Hire someone to break into HBCafe, ASAP. With a canceled check for final payment stapled to the top.

  All right, maybe there wasn’t a paper trail. But Perry Mason could trick the truth out of him. He did it all the time, every week, at least he did twenty-five years ago. Got the perp on the stand as a witness—“Permission to treat the witness as hostile, Your Honor”—and then proceeded to weasel the truth out of him, making him so guilty and antsy that he’d stand up and yell, “Yes, all right! I confess! It was me!” And the bailiff would take him away in handcuffs.

  But some folks don’t cave in so easy, and I suspected that Marvin Beckstrom had been born without a conscience, just as he had been born without a chin. So the last resort was Mission: Impossible. And this one had to work.

  It was a complicated plan, involving an elaborate setup with an exact replica of Marvin’s office at the bank. Martin Landau, in disguise as the sheriff, would manipulate him into admitting, on tape, that he was the mastermind behind the whole caper. All to get his hands on the cafe and sell it for an obscene profit.

  I was deep in fantasy about the creation of Martin Landau’s latex mask from a bust of the sheriff when Scratch broke into my daydream.

  “You wanta take these?” He held out a cardboard box filled with miscellaneous utensils—stainless steel spatulas and large slotted serving spoons, graters and paring knives and all the paraphernalia that went into equipping a restaurant kitchen.

  “I don’t know. I don’t really have room for them at home.” I shrugged. “Never mind. Just set them on the backseat of my car, if you don’t mind.”

  Scratch shouldered his way through the door.

  In a minute he came back with a strange look on his face. “Come outside. There’s something you gotta see.”

  I followed him out and stood on the sidewalk shivering in the December wind. He pointed down West Main Street, to the liquor store on the other side of Sav-Mor discount.

  “What are we looking at?”

  “See that old red F-150 in front of the liquor store? Just wait.”

  An “F-150” meant nothing to me, but I gathered he was talking about the battered pickup parked at the curb. I waited, and within a couple of minutes a man came out of the store with a case of Old Grand-Dad, loaded it in the truck, and went back for more. Three trips. Then he got into the truck and drove away.

  There was something familiar about him. Something that made my stomach jerk into a knot.

  Lean and sharp as barbed wire, with that peculiar sloping walk.

  Jape Hanahan.

  “What the—”

  “Yeah,” Scratch said. “Last time we saw him, he was drunk as a skunk and looking for a handout.”

  “He was drunk?”

  Scratch ignored this. “Question is, where’d he get the money for all that liquor?”

  December 29. Three days until eviction.

  “We got it,” Alyssa said. She slapped a manila folder down on the table and grinned at me. Scratch stood behind her wearing an equally broad grin.

  “He confessed?” I said.

  “Spilled his guts.” Alyssa sat down, took off her pumps, and rubbed her feet. “I’ve got the notes right here.” She sighed. “You got any fresh coffee?”

  “Sure, hang on.” I brought the pot and three mugs. “How did you do it?”

  “My wife’s a pretty intimidating lawyer,” Scratch said.

  “You wish. The intimidation didn’t come from me.”

  I looked at Scratch. “You didn’t beat him up. Tell me you didn’t hit him.”

  “He didn’t have to,” Alyssa said. “Just one threatening glance from John is enough to make a coward like Jape Hanahan give up his own grandmother.”

  Scratch shot me a humble little aw-shucks look. “That nice young deputy met us out there—sheriff himself wouldn’t come. Didn’t take long for Jape to cave in, and get himself arrested.”

  “Apparently he was watching the place while you were gone,” Alyssa said, “and as soon as John left the premises, he saw his chance and broke the door in. If the cases of booze in his cabin are any indication, he spent the whole wad on whiskey—much of which is already gone.”

  I had to ask the question, even though I already knew the answer. “Will I get my
money back?”

  Alyssa bit her lip. “The money’s gone, Dell.”

  “I figured. It was too much to hope for, I guess, to save the cafe.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Wish it could have turned out different.”

  “Oh well,” I said in a vain attempt to be stoic. “It was fun while it lasted.”

  At 4:30 the next morning I woke up to a shrieking alarm clock, jerked out of a dream about the cafe going up in flames, and all of us—me, Toni, Boone, Fart, everybody—standing helpless on the sidewalk as the volunteer firefighters joked and laughed and refused to do anything to stop it.

  It wasn’t my alarm clock. It was sirens—lots of them, shattering the early-morning silence with their high-pitched Doppler screams. I listened. Cop cars, fire trucks, an ambulance or two. Years of living in a small town had taught me the difference. In Chulahatchie, you take your entertainment where you can get it.

  The dream still lingered around the edges of my mind. I could almost smell the smoke. I stumbled out of bed, pulled on a pair of jeans and an old Falcons sweatshirt of Chase’s, and reached for the phone.

  Toni answered on the first ring. “Good, you’re awake,” I said. “What the heck is going on?”

  “I don’t know, but every light in the neighborhood is on. It sounds like it’s coming from the square. I’ll meet you down there.”

  She hung up. I called Boone, who was also awake, and then dialed the river camp and got a very sleepy Alyssa on the line. “Tell Scratch to get down to the cafe,” I said without bothering to explain or even apologize for waking her. “Something’s happened, and it doesn’t sound good.”

  By the time I got to the square, half the town had gathered, some of them straight out of bed, with coats thrown over their pajamas. Three fire trucks were on the scene, and two ambulances, and three deputy sheriffs milled around aimlessly, as if trying to decide what to do next and who was in charge. The sheriff was nowhere in sight.

  I parked down near the cafe—which wasn’t on fire, although since I was being foreclosed on in two days, I didn’t know why I should care. Toni pulled up, with Boone right behind her. How Scratch and Alyssa got there so fast, I’ll never know. Imani was sound asleep in the backseat with a blanket tucked around her.

  “What’s going on?” Boone said.

  “No idea. Let’s get up there and see.”

  We threaded through the crowd until we got close to the front, where the deputies had finally set up barriers to keep the onlookers out of the way. The firemen were struggling with the Jaws of Life, trying to pry open the door of a pickup truck.

  A battered red F-150 with its windshield shattered and its front end wrapped around the statue of a Confederate soldier.

  Jape Hanahan was pronounced dead on arrival at the Chulahatchie County Hospital, but everybody knew he was a goner when he hit the windshield. Truth was, he’d been dead for years—suicide by alcohol. His body was just too stubborn to quit.

  “What was he doing out of jail?” I asked Alyssa.

  “That’s the kicker,” Alyssa said. “He bribed the sheriff with a case of booze, went home, and drank himself into oblivion. When he hit the square, his blood-alcohol content was more than twice the legal limit. No skid marks.” She shrugged. “The ironic thing is, the sheriff resigned first thing this morning. Said he feels responsible for Jape’s death because he let him out.”

  She’d gotten this information from the sheriff’s office, where the deputy on duty gave her whatever information she wanted. With the sheriff gone, seemed he was glad to talk to somebody—anybody—who knew what they were doing.

  Scratch came out of the kitchen carrying the last of the bacon and scrambled eggs, and then went back for grits and biscuits. Folks had to eat, even when the world was coming to an end.

  “So that’s it, then,” I said. “The money’s gone for good, and so is the Heartbreak Cafe.”

  We ate in silence for a few minutes. The sun came up, light in defiance of the darkness. I thought about Boone’s liminal time, but there was nothing left to wait for.

  • 34 •

  New Year’s Eve arrived, with Chulahatchie reeling from its biggest scandal in decades.

  I was still dead broke and facing eviction. Given all the upheaval in the sheriff’s office, I hadn’t been served the final eviction yet, but a day or two wasn’t going to make any difference. The other shoe was destined to drop, today or tomorrow or the day after that. If I’da been stronger, I woulda just locked the door and turned my back on the whole shebang.

  Still, I couldn’t seem to stay away from the Heartbreak Cafe. I’d go over there every morning and make coffee and wander around like a lost soul on the way to Hades. I could almost hear echoes of the conversation and laughter, could almost see the faces of the people I had come to regard as family. Boone and Toni. Scratch, Alyssa, and little Imani. Peach Rondell. Fart Unger. Even Purdy and Hoot, crazy as they both were.

  “Bless their hearts,” I whispered to no one in particular. It made me laugh. And then the tears came.

  I swiped at my eyes and argued with myself. It wasn’t like they’d died, I thought. They’ll still be my friends. Still part of my life. But the Heartbreak Cafe would be gone. Nothing would be the same. It was like watching somebody you love give up the battle with cancer. Like watching a dream drift out to sea and sink beneath the waves.

  At long last, grief pierced my gut like a blade. I could finally look at this old place with my heart instead of my eyes, and I loved it. Loved the way it felt, loved what it represented. It was the first thing in fifty years of living that I’d ever done on my own, my first real accomplishment. It was a monument to my ability to become what I’d never even dreamed I could be: a woman capable of taking care of herself.

  Peach Rondell had seen it before I did, had written about it in her journal: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.

  I’d never been anybody’s hero before. Never been an inspiration. Never been more than Chase Haley’s wife.

  But for a few more minutes, maybe another day, I’d be more than that. I’d be the owner of the Heartbreak Cafe.

  This place had saved me, I knew that now. Even when I didn’t want to be saved. Even when I wanted God and karma and the whole wide universe to just leave me alone.

  The phone rang. I didn’t move. I shoulda had it disconnected already. One more thing I needed to put on my final checklist.

  Whoever was calling was a persistent so-and-so. It rang and rang, and finally, against my better judgment, I got up and answered.

  “Dell?” It was Alyssa. “Listen, ah, could you come out here to the river camp?” Her voice sounded oddly strained. “As soon as possible.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “Just come.”

  I hesitated.

  The truth was, I didn’t want to go out there. Didn’t ever want to see the place again for as long as I lived. It had offered a place of sanctuary for Scratch and Alyssa, and for that I was grateful, but as far as I was concerned the place could burn to its foundation or be swept by a flood all the way down the Tennessee-Tombigbee to Mobile and the Gulf.

  That camp had been Chase’s baby, from beginning to end, and the very thought of it caused me nothing but heartache. I’da been happy never to see the place again, but I reckoned now I was just going to have to grit it up and go. I just didn’t know if I had the fortitude to face the location of my husband’s last and worst betrayal.

  I remembered the river camp as a big box on stilts, built over a cement pad that served as storage for fishing gear and a shelter for Chase’s boat and trailer—not to mention a hiding place for the truck. On the back side of the house stretched a broad screened-in deck overlooking a quiet bend of the Tennessee-Tombigbee, with steps leading down to ground level and a narrow path to the dock.

  It was,
as Scratch had once observed, “rustic.” Cedar-plank siding, a silver tin roof, one large room with an unfinished wood floor, a stacked stone fireplace, and a kitchen separated by a waist-high bar. The place had two small bedrooms with a bath between—sufficient for a weekend getaway, but certainly nothing fancy or upscale. Envisioning the elegant Alyssa there stretched my imagination to its limits.

  “Dell?”

  I stared at the phone and heard Alyssa’s voice repeating my name, muted and far away, like a child’s secret stretched between two tin cans with a string. I tried to swallow past the knot in my throat.

  “Sure,” I managed at last. “Sure. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  The lower level, beneath the camp house, was shielded from view of the road by a stone wall that went all the way up under the foundation. The wall did nothing to support the structure, it was just there to hide the underneath storage areas from sight. On the back side, facing the river, it was all open, forming what amounted to a vast covered patio at ground level.

  Chase’s boat and trailer were parked to the far left, shrouded in a tan cover. The patio had been swept and washed, and now served as a play area for Imani, complete with a picnic table, several Adirondack chairs, a couple of overhead fans, and a porch swing hanging from the rafters. Scratch had been working, that much was clear. The place looked clean and inviting. A few things removed from upstairs sat in a neat line next to Chase’s boat as if waiting for a pickup from Goodwill or the Salvation Army.

  Scratch and Alyssa met me at the car when I drove in. I could see Imani down by the bank, digging for crawdads in the sucking mud. She looked up and waved and went back to her work.

  “Hey, Dell.” Alyssa hugged me and held on like somebody else had died. I hugged her back and held on, too, because all of a sudden I needed a sympathetic human touch. When you’re fifty and single, you don’t get touched very often, and the skin hunger can get pretty bad even if you’re not conscious of what you’re missing.