The Crossroads Cafe

  I followed her wearily into a spacious glassed porch filled with plants and wicker. An electric space heater hummed in one corner. We settled in cushioned lounges with the wine on a small table between us. The room looked out over the Cove’s enormous pasture. A half-moon hung in the clear winter sky over the mountains. Frost glinted on the winter grass. I peered into the silvery darkness. “Where’s Thomas tonight? After watching me throw up he retreated to his cabin, right?”

  “No, he’s playing poker with Pike, Jeb, the Judge, Dolores—the usual gang. Pike has a little trailer out back of the café. It’s got a table, some comfortable chairs, a fridge, some deer heads and stuffed turkeys. That’s where the card sharks go every Saturday night.”

  So Thomas had stayed nearby. I could go see him, if I wanted to. Discuss blue dots with him. That cheered me up.

  “The rest of us hang out in the café’s side room,” Delta went on. “Drink wine, shoot the breeze, hold our weekly quilting bee. We finish a quilt every couple of months, give it away, then start another one. The quilt-in-progress is on a quilting frame we pull up to the ceiling during the week. You’ll see. Do you sew? We’ve always got room for another quilter. No experience needed.”

  I looked at her dully. “I don’t think I’m going to be part of the gang around here. After what happened today—”

  “You threw up. Who cares?”

  “I didn’t just throw up, I panicked. I embarrassed myself, I ruined your decorations, I upset you and your family, not to mention being the reason Thomas jumped in the pond at my grandmother’s house. I have ... disabilities, Delta. Phobias. Quirks. My skin crawls when people look at me. I freak when I see an open flame. I’m too scared to drive a car. All I want to do is find a way to live up at Granny’s place with as little human contact as possible, so I won’t keep making a fool out of myself.”

  “You got off to a bad start is all. Look, you just need a plan. A recipe for easing yourself out into the world again. Let’s start by talking about your granny’s house. You should put in electricity and plumbing. She’d want you to fix it up however it suits you.”

  “You think so? She could have upgraded the house, but she didn’t. Why?”

  “It suited her. She grew up with it that way. But that doesn’t mean she’d want you to keep it the same.”

  “It’s a vintage design. There aren’t many of those Sears kit houses left. Especially ones that haven’t already been remodeled. If I change anything, it would be like boring holes into a Ming vase to turn it into a lamp.”

  “Mary Eve was into Zen and all that stuff. She’d say change is good.”

  “Thomas loves the house the way it is. He’s taken care of it devotedly. I’m not comfortable betraying his vision of the place.”

  “It’s your house, hon, and you need to claim it.”

  “Maybe Thomas is right. He says I’ll want to leave some day, go back to the so-called real world. I should give this house to him then, in pristine antique condition. He’s just waiting for me to leave.”

  “If you think Thomas wants you to leave, you’re more stoned than I thought. Give him half a chance and you’ll have him on your doorstep all the time.” She winked. “And elsewhere.”

  “I’ve got to stand on my own two feet without needing a man’s help. Besides, what man wants to touch a woman who looks like this?” I pointed to my face.

  Delta frowned at me. “If women sat around waiting to feel perfect about themselves before they got laid, all the ugly-as-mule-peckers men would be awful lonely. They’d never get any action.”

  I took a deep swallow of wine. “A little cellulite and sagging skin isn’t bad. But my scars are . . .”

  “Cathryn Mary Deen! You listen to me! By the time she died your granny had an ass like the backend of a fat hen, big freckles, liver spots, an appendix scar and big knuckles from arthritis, but she still got more pecker than any woman in ten counties. Men adored her. It’s about attitude. If you think you’re sexy, men will too. You gotta stop using your old standards and learn to see what’s right about yourself, not what’s wrong.”

  “I don’t know how to do that.”

  “You think you’re the only person who’s ever had to rethink everything they know about themselves? Let me tell you about my son. Jeb was in the National Guard. He got called up at the start of the Iraq War. He only spent about six months over there before he nearly got killed by a mine. He came home a stranger. He’d seen terrible things but he couldn’t talk about ’em. He slept with a pistol under his pillow. He cried when he tried to touch Becka. We found out later he killed some Iraqi women and children by accident. Poor Becka and the kids were scared to death of him and for him, and so were Pike and me. He disappeared one night during a thunderstorm, and we all nearly went crazy. Thomas and Pike trailed him up to Devil’s Knob. Jeb was going to jump. Thomas had to crawl out on a ledge and coax him back. Whatever Thomas said to him out on that cliff—neither one of ’em will tell—it made a difference. Jeb started to get better. Now he’s okay, but is he the same? No. The fun-loving, laughing boy I raised is gone forever. It breaks my heart.”

  “Thomas saved his life?”

  She nodded. “Thomas has a knack for knowing what to say to somebody in despair, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “So look at it this way: You’re returning the favor.”

  “No, I’m just frightening him into a new attitude. He’s afraid to turn his back in case I do something awful to the house. Remove a nail. Polish a splinter the wrong way.”

  “He could use his splinter polished, that’s for sure.” She poured more wine in my glass and then hers, took a long swallow and waved her glass at me. “Here’s a little secret for you. The Log Splitter girls? Well, their names are Alberta and Macy, really. Alberta and Macy have their eye on his sperm.”

  “Why?”

  “They’ve had two children together already, with the help of a man around here who shall remain nameless.” She leaned close to me and whispered, “Santa.” I nearly spit my wine. Delta settled back and went on, “And they want to have a third child, but they’d like a little diversity in the gene pool so maybe folks won’t notice that the two they’ve got already look a lot like a certain dope-growing old hippie. They’re real fond of Thomas so they’ve set their sights on him. Call him a ‘metrosexual,’ I guess because he’s respectful and doesn’t dog their commune of hard-luck women. Anyhow, they’d love to get him on the receiving end of a specimen cup and a turkey baster.”

  I downed most of my glass of wine at that point and held it out for a refill. “Is he interested?”

  “No way. He’s scared silly of ever being responsible for another child, even if nobody asks him to help raise it.” She poured my wine. “But all you have to do is see him with Cora and Ivy to know he’s cut out to be a daddy. He’s a natural.” She paused, frowning at me as she set the bottle down. “Please tell me you weren’t planning to have babies with that mule pecker.”

  “Who?”

  “Gerald.”

  I hesitated. My relationship with Gerald sounded so cold-blooded, now. “We had an agreement. Oh, all right. A pre-nup. Babies were in the contract. Two. The timing had to be mutually agreed upon. I had my attorneys amend it to say if I got pregnant unexpectedly it was my choice whether to have an abortion or not. I’m pro-choice, but I doubt I’d ever choose that option for myself. So I wanted it clearly stated. Gerald wasn’t happy about the option, but he agreed. You know, I suspect he’d secretly had a vasectomy, anyway.” I gulped some wine. “Mule pecker.”

  “You can put all that intimate stuff in a contract?”

  “You can put anything in a contract if you’re stupid enough to love and trust a man.”

  “Don’t go painting with a broad brush, now. You picked one rotten apple off a tree full of good ones.”

  “I know, I know. I don’t want to hate men. I just don’t want to ever depend on one, again.”

  “Well, well, that double
-edged dilemma’s really gonna work out.” She stared into her wine glass for a long time. Then, “Before Jeb was born, Pike and me nearly divorced. We were only in our early twenties, but we’d been married since we were sixteen. Felt like we’d been together our whole lives already, and after ...” Her voice trailed off. She shifted in the lounge chair, drank more wine, stared into the moonlit winter pasture. “I’m gonna tell you something very few people know. Even Thomas doesn’t know this.” She looked at me with tears already gleaming in her eyes. “We had two children who drowned.”

  “Oh, Delta.”

  “Pike, Junior, our first-born, and Cynthia, our little girl. He was six and she was four. They went on a Vacation Bible School outing to the French Broad. The river, the big one, you know, east of here. I wouldn’t have let ’em go without me, they were so little, but Santa’s wife—he was married, then—she was one of the chaperones. She was young and flighty. I should have known better. She turned her back and they wandered off. It took . . . two days . . . before their bodies were found downriver. We figure Cynthia fell in and Pike, Junior tried to save her.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I thought I’d die. Me and Pike both nearly lost our minds and our hearts and our souls. What happened broke up Santa’s marriage. His wife wasn’t a bad girl but I hated her from then on without any hope of forgiveness. She left here and never came back. Died a few years ago. Left us a letter that said she’d never forgiven herself. So her life was ruined, too.”

  Tears slid down Delta’s face. She kept her gaze on the moon light. “Pike and I didn’t know which way to turn. Who do you blame when there’s nobody to blame? I accused him of blaming me for letting the kids go on the trip, he accused me of blaming him for not being a good provider—by that I mean, he was working long hours at a lumber mill halfway to Asheville and working part-time as a sheriff’s deputy, and I was working at the county high school in the cafeteria and helping my parents take care of two sets of grandparents who were getting old and needy. So to Pike’s way of thinking, I let the kids go on the river trip because I was worn out and needed a rest, and that was because he didn’t make enough money for me not to work. It was just crazy, sad talk, made no sense then or now.”

  She held her wine glass to her cheek for a moment, as if it were a child’s face she could cuddle. “We didn’t touch each other for nearly two years. Pike took to drinking and smoking dope with Santa. They’d disappear for whole weekends doing God knows what. And me? I screwed a couple of men who came through here to go fishing. How do you like that for a confession?”

  I wiped tears off my face. “It must have made sense at the time.”

  She nodded. “My babies died in a way I couldn’t bear to think about. I didn’t care if I lived or died, either. My husband didn’t want me anymore. So what difference did it make?” She sighed. “Pike knows about those men. We got past them a long time ago.”

  “What brought you and Pike back together?”

  “Your granny. She stood by us, she kept saying we’d be okay if we could just remember why we loved each other. Your mama was gone by then, I mean, she was down in Atlanta being a career girl and working as a paralegal at your daddy’s law firm. Mary Eve was lonely and she had time on her hands, so she’d show up at our house nearly every day—well, hell, it wasn’t a house, we were living in an old trailer back here in the woods—she’d come by every day and bring biscuits and talk to me. When my Grandma and Grandpa McKendall died, they left me the café. Nobody thought I could make a go of it. My own mama—my mama was a mean piece of work—she said I didn’t deserve it, I was no business woman, that I should sell the place to her and Daddy, and she wouldn’t let Daddy loan me the money I needed to get started. The cafe wasn’t anything but a sandwich shop then. There wasn’t even a stove in the kitchen.

  “Mary Eve loaned me the start-up money. She told me to follow my heart. She said if I went around listening to everybody who said I had odd or stupid ideas I might as well sit in a corner and suck my thumb the rest of my life. She said, ‘The Lard cooks in mysterious ways, and it’s up to you to make a meal with what He gives you.’

  “So I started cooking. Cooked eighteen hours a day for months, feeding anybody who came by. People needed my food, they liked my food. And I felt alive again, just a little. Then one day I looked up and there stood Pike. He’d kept his distance since we barely spoke anymore. But there he was. He walked into the kitchen and said, ‘You need a dishwasher?’ and I said, ‘I could use your help, sure,’ and he went over to the sink and rolled up his sleeves and started washing. There was no big moment when we made up. There were lots of small ones. Then one night after closing we walked into the trailer, and we went in its tiny bedroom, and we made love. And slowly but surely, we were okay. Jeb was born a little over a year later.”

  I was crying long streamers of tears by now, and Delta reached over and patted my hair, comforting me for her sorrows as well as my own. She pried my scarred hand free from my wine glass and squeezed it hard. “I feed people,” she whispered fervently. “I feed them with my heart and my hopes, and I nurture every hungry part of them. That’s what I do. I feed their souls. That’s the only way to keep going when times are bad. For them and for me. To know I’m here for a reason. That I can make a difference in other people’s lives. Just like your granny did. And just like you will, and Thomas will, when you finally figure out the way.”

  I swung my feet off the lounge chair, sat facing her, and bent my head to hers. “I’m going to try my best not to disappoint you,” I sobbed. “I love you, cousin.”

  Apparently, those were words even stoic Delta couldn’t resist. She began crying hard, too, and only managed to say, “I love you, too, cousin,” between ragged breaths.

  Of course, in the midst of our full-fledged mutual breakdown we heard a back door open and shut, followed by two sets of heavy footsteps in the house. We quickly straightened up, scrubbing our eyes with our sleeves, wiping our noses, clearing our throats, and trying to breathe normally. We made snorting sounds in unison.

  “We’d be more delicate if we weren’t drunk,” Delta said with a broken laugh.

  “At least you’re only drunk. I’m drunk and stoned.”

  “Sssh. Here comes Pike. And Thomas.”

  The men’s tall frames filled the sliding glass door from the sunroom into the kitchen. They were backlit by a lamp on the counter. I hoped they couldn’t see our faces in the dark sunroom any better than we could see theirs silhouetted against the light.

  “Everything all right here?” Pike drawled. From the tone of his voice, he knew it wasn’t.

  “We’re just talking about food.” Delta answered, her voice a wobbly treble. She hoisted the nearly empty wine bottle. “And wine.”

  “And wine,” I echoed, nodding. To be honest, I said it this way: “An’ vine.”

  Thomas leaned against the door frame. He sank his hands into the pockets of his borrowed overalls. Their soft denim clung to his long legs. The lamp highlighted the broad cut of his shoulders above the narrow bib straps. He had shoved the sleeves of his borrowed sweatshirt up to his elbows. His forearms were thick and graceful. The side of his throat, above the sweatshirt’s round neckline, made a clean, strong line against the lamplight. Who knew overalls could be so erotic? “Stomach better?” he asked gently.

  “Just fine, thanks.” Jus’ fine, tanks. I looked at Delta. “Off to bed. Goodnight, cousin.”

  She draped an arm around my neck and hugged me. “Goodnight, cousin. You need any help?”

  “Nah. When I was in the Miss Georgia pageant? Had vertigo from an ear infection. I walked on four-inch highheels in a thigh-cut green maillot with a big sash across my boobs saying Miss Atlanta. Damned sash wasn’t pinned correctly on my shoulder strap, so I had to walk just-so or poof! The banner’d fall off. I was so dizzy from the ear thing I felt like I was on stilts on a trampoline. But I made it. I nailed that swimsuit competition. Hah. This?” I waved a hand at myself,
meaning my current tipsy circumstances. “Piece of cheesecake.”

  Delta laughed. “Okay, Miss Atlanta, you teeter off to bed. Thomas, give the gal a no-questions-asked escort down the runway, please-sir.”

  “I’ll make sure she gets to the end of the runway, but I can’t guarantee she won’t waggle her wings and trip over her landing gears.”

  I stood. I had never been a sloppy drinker; I could hold my liquor. But my face was swollen from crying and I was dressed like a homeless person at a pajama party, so my goal in life at that moment was to make it through the lighted part of the house to my bedroom with as much speed and élan as possible. “Outta my way, please. I’m cleared for take-off.” I gave Delta’s slightly graying dark hair a pat. “I’m going to give you gold highlights.”

  She laughed. “Will it hurt?”

  “No pain, no gain. Beauty is as beauty does. Life is a box of highlights. Or something. Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight.”

  I started past Pike. I couldn’t resist a big, middle-aged daddy figure. “Goodnight, Cousin Sheriff. You know, growing up, I watched re-runs of Gunsmoke with my aunts.” I patted his chest. “You look like James Arness. You know. Sheriff Matt Dillon?”

  “Thank you, Miss Kitty,” he drawled.

  “You’re welcome.”

  I avoided looking at Thomas as I continued on to the kitchen. “No need to walk me back to the saloon, Festus.”

  He caught me by one elbow as my tube socks slipped on the kitchen’s smooth tile floor. “Why, shucks, Miss Kitty, but I disagree.” We headed down the hallway toward the guest rooms, his hand bolstering me like a warm steel brace. “You okay?” he whispered. “Were you crying with Delta or was Delta crying with you?”