The Crossroads Cafe

  Of course, I thought. I’ll be fine. Probably just a few blisters.

  My vision was a little blurry, and when I looked upward I saw something puffy and red. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was looking at the swollen underside of my eyebrows. I thought I was wearing some kind of pink-brimmed cap. I looked beyond it and found the source of the voice. It came from a white-swaddled shape hovering over me. The shape was masked and gloved, as if dealing with toxic waste. It might have come from another planet. It clearly had confused me with a serious burn victim.

  “Get me to . . . a spa,” I told the alien. “Just need a . . . mud wrap.”

  “Try to pay attention, Cathryn. There’s lots of good news to report. Your eyes are fine, your lungs are fine, you are very lucky. Your burns cover slightly less than 30 percent of your body, which gives you an excellent prognosis for full, functional recovery. Your burns are primarily second-degree, meaning most won’t need skin grafts, though there will be permanent scarring.”

  Scarring? Scarring?

  “Your right hand suffered some deep tissue injury, so you’ll need surgery to ensure joint mobility in your fingers. But that’s very do-able.”

  Do-able. I was do-able.

  “The worst thing I have to tell you is that you do have several areas of third-degree burns. In those places, the skin was destroyed and so can’t renew itself. These areas include your right shoulder, on the right side of your neck and throat, and . . . on the right side of your face, from the corner of your eye and mouth to just behind your ear. Over the next few weeks we’ll take skin from your undamaged left side, and your back, and graft it. It will replace the burned skin.”

  Okay. Essentially, I just needed a good exfoliant.

  “The lower lobe of your right ear had to be amputated, but the rest of your ear is intact—though badly burned—and your hearing should be unaffected.”

  Wait a minute. This creature from another planet must be joking with me. I could have sworn it said I no longer had an ear lobe on one side. Guess I’d save money on earrings. The Oscars were in a few weeks. Would Harry Winston still loan me the twenty-carat tiers Princess Di commissioned not long before she died? I could wear one on my good ear, and one in my navel.

  “Very funny,” I whispered.

  “I’m afraid this isn’t a joke, Cathryn.”

  “Let me out of here. Have . . . work to do. Due in England on Wednesday. Photo shoot for Vogue, too.”

  “Try not to worry about your career, for now. You’re probably going to be in the hospital at least six weeks. You’ll be undergoing numerous small surgeries, and also, I’m afraid, regular debridement. Debridement is a procedure in which we change your bandages twice daily and remove dead tissue from your wounds. It’s not very pleasant, I’m afraid. But don’t worry about that right now.”

  Don’t worry? “Gerald! Gerald. My husband. Tell him. I want out . . . of here. He’ll handle this.”

  “He’s very busy right now. Talking to the press, to your agents, all of that. Don’t worry.”

  “I want him . . . here.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t allow him, or anyone else, to visit you yet. The burn unit is a very sterile environment, Cathryn. Infection is a major concern for patients recovering from large-scale loss of skin. You won’t be allowed to have many visitors, and the ones you do have will be covered in antiseptic surgical outfits like mine.”

  “Call him. I’ll call him.”

  “You’re in no condition to do that right now. Plus your husband has requested that you not be disturbed. We don’t want any reporters trying to talk to you. You can’t call out, and no one can call in without his permission. He doesn’t want the media to harass you.”

  “But . . . I need my . . . my friends. My stylists. Judi, Randy, Luce. My people.”

  “I’m sorry, Cathryn. You have no ‘people’ here. Sometimes the burn unit feels like one of the loneliest places in the world. But you’ll be all right. You get some rest. You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you.”

  She left. Other creatures from the toxic-waste patrol hovered over me. “We’re going to help you go back to sleep now,” one of them said. “We’ll play your favorite music to keep you company while you drift off. Your husband says you love Gwen Stefani.”

  The creature put a CD in a sterilized boom box. Hollaback Girl, Stefani’s hip-hop anthem, began to pound me like a drum. I couldn’t really be trapped in a hospital bed listening to a thirty-five-year-old woman sing, “This my shit,” could I? I didn’t love Gwen Stefani’s music, Gerald just told people I loved it because his marketing people said she tracked to a young demographic who’d buy my cosmetics.

  My favorite music? Bonnie Raitt, Rosanne Cash, the Dixie Chicks. Wise women with guitars. Gerald said they were too old and too feminist for my fun-loving image, and they probably didn’t even wear makeup, much less encourage other women to wear it, but . . . where was he? And why wouldn’t he even call me on the phone?

  “I can listen,” I mumbled. “I have an ear left.”

  “Go to sleep,” a creature ordered, pulling a syringe out of a stint in my arm. “It’s better if you don’t think too much.”

  I shut my eyes. Aliens in antiseptic jumpsuits said I couldn’t move, couldn’t talk to anyone, that my right earlobe was missing, that parts of my skin would have to be replaced, and that I was lucky to be alive. Plus they made me listen to Gwen Stefani. No one who knew me, no one I trusted, was here. Not even my own husband and my family ghosts.

  My people were gone. Even the dead ones.

  Thomas

  “Next time, ask me for something easy, Thomas,” my brother said. “Like trying to get in touch with the Easter Bunny. And, by the way, I’m sending you a new cell phone. One with GPS tracking.”

  Since he was shouting, I moved the phone I’d borrowed from one of Delta’s grandkids further from my ear. Even so, John’s voice echoed off the unlined metal innards of my truck’s cab. “Good,” I shouted back. “When the satellite shows the new phone roaming around the barn behind the café, you’ll know Banger ate it, too.”

  “I’d just like to be able to locate your body. Monica and the kids will be disappointed if there’s nothing to bury. Did I mention she’s planning a Jewish funeral for you?”

  I liked my brother’s wife. Her morbid sense of humor fit in perfectly with the Mitternich family brand. “Tell Monica I appreciate it from the bottom of my atheistic, gentile heart.”

  “She’ll get all her family together and sit Shiva in your honor. Me? I’ll just go to the nearest pub and raise a beer to Thomas Karel Mitternich, my self-destructive older brother, and then I’ll find a kindly priest who’ll lie to me and swear you aren’t in hell for killing yourself.”

  “I love these cheerful conversations we have.”

  “Me, too, Thomas. But I digress. Have you completely lost your mind? Cathryn Deen’s people will never let your pal Delta—or anyone else from the non-Perrier sipping, NASCAR-loving hinterlands—within so much as Jethro-yodeling distance of Deen’s V.I.P room in a Los Angeles burn ward.”

  John had done his best to help me fulfill Delta’s mission to call her cousin Cathryn, but he was right. Getting through the wall of privacy—or secrecy—Cathryn’s husband put around her was impossible. It had been more than a week since her accident. John, a financial planner in Chicago, could follow a money trail to all kinds of information, but even he couldn’t crack this code. Celebrities at Cathryn Deen’s level of fame were either naked in the spotlight or invisible. Sadly for her, she was both, right now.

  The bastard who shot the gruesome video of her trying to escape from her car, and then stuck his camera in her face while she was burning, was already selling the clip on the Internet. He’d dodged a criminal charge because his lawyer argued she was driving recklessly before he chased her. In a dangerous situation like a fire, the law says you don’t have to risk your own safety to rescue someone else. How convenient.

  So the video was availa
ble for a hefty download fee, and the major news channels were showing snippets of it in the guise of covering the controversy. In terms of debased human nature, the Christians-versus-lions smackdown at the Roman Coliseum had nothing over modern voyeurs. Delta was furious. So, on a quieter level, was I. I knew how it felt to see my loved ones exploited.

  There was only one option left.

  “I’m calling Ravel,” I told John.

  Silence. Then, very quietly and seriously, my baby brother said, “She’ll eat your gonads with a side of lemon risotto and a nice cabernet.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “You don’t deserve what she’ll say to you.”

  “That’s debatable.”

  “She wants blood.”

  “I’ve got plenty.”

  “Is Cathryn Deen worth it? A stranger, Thomas? Worth it? Why? And don’t tell me this is only about that farm you want to buy from her.”

  I looked at the pictures on my truck visor. The slow, steady squeeze of misery eased for just a second. “Maybe, just maybe, this time I can make a difference in someone’s life.”

  Two hundred and fifty million years ago Africa bumped into North America, buckling masses of metamorphic rock over layers of limestone, and thrust up the Appalachians. Throw in a few glaciers and eons of erosion, and now you had Devil’s Knob, a craggy, treeless monolith protruding from Hog Back Mountain like a spike on the hog’s side. I loved the primordial purity of the place. Touch the rock, and you were touching antiquity. Stand there, and you stood on eternity.

  At 4,000 feet, Devil’s Knob was one of the highest local balds. As I stood there, cradling another borrowed cell phone in one hand, I gazed north over the Crossroads Cove toward New York, approximately four states away. Barricading me from my old life were high ridges, deep hollows, forests of huge evergreens, rushing trout streams, secluded farms, ramshackle tobacco barns, placid black bears, herds of deer, flocks of wild turkeys, and the occasional liquor still alongside a marijuana patch.

  Still not enough wilderness between me and my sister-in-law, but it would have to do. Ravel, Sherryl’s sister, was no doubt lurking in her Trump Tower penthouse on Fifth Avenue, approximately seven hundred feet above sea level. I was at 4,000 feet. I needed to know she had to look up to me.

  “Thomas, you sure you don’t know anybody in the CIA to call instead?” drawled Joe Whittlespoon. Pike’s older brother, nicknamed “Santa” for his obvious resemblance, sat a few feet away with legs dangling off the Knob’s rocky ledge. He stroked his curly white beard with one hand and fingered a long cheroot of homegrown marijuana with the other. The sweet scent rose on a high breeze, mingling with the rich fragrance of pine and earth. A tie-dyed bandana hung from the bib of Santa’s overalls. Rough rubies and sapphires, panned in local creeks, decorated the bracelets and rings he wore. Everyone in the county knew Santa was an old hippie who grew weed up on Hog Back, but he was Pike’s big brother, after all. People in the mountains of the South had respect for their elders, especially those related to sheriffs. I had intervened on his behalf once when two beefy young entrepreneurs from Asheville tried to steal his harvest.

  “I’m just saying,” Santa went on, “that the CIA’s got to be easier to deal with than your wife’s sister. And better-tempered.”

  “I’m out of alternatives. Believe me, this is my last choice. I wouldn’t do this for anyone but Delta.”

  “I warn you. Delta sees you as dough she can mold to her own purposes. There’s an art to kneading people that way, and she learned it from the most irresistible force of nature the Cove ever saw, and I do mean Mary Eve Nettie. Mary Eve could spin people through her fingers like a magician twirls a coin. Godawmighty, that woman could make a man jump up and holler then lay down and moan. I ought to know. I was nineteen and Mary Eve was at least thirty-five the first time she flipped me on my back.”

  I stared at him. “You and Mary Eve—”

  He nodded. His eyes became distant and tender. “That woman knew how to get what she wanted. And she gave as good as she got.” Santa’s phone suddenly vibrated in my palm, playing a few bars of The Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’.” Santa scrubbed a hand over his wistful expression then scowled at me. “Just remember, I warned you about Delta using you to get what she wants. She doesn’t use sex to grease the skids the way Mary Eve did, but she’s just as determined.”

  I looked at the incoming phone number. A 212 area code. Manhattan. Ravel. “Showtime.” I let a few more bars of “Truckin’” play.

  “Talk or jump off the cliff,” Santa drawled. “Jerry Garcia isn’t gonna save you from reality, son.”

  I put the phone to my ear. “Hello, Ravel. I appreciate you returning my call. If this weren’t an emergency, I’d never ask for, or expect, your help.”

  “You fucking parasite.” Her voice shook with emotion. It always chilled me to be hated so much. “There’s only one reason I remain interested in your fate, Thomas. I keep hoping I’ll hear that you’ve had the decency to blow your fucking brains out.”

  “Let’s keep this simple. You got my message. You know what I want. You’re a major stockholder sitting on the board of one of the biggest hospital corporations in the world. You can find out everything about Cathryn Deen’s situation, right down to the name of the nurse’s aid who cleans her trash can. I need that contact information, and . . . I’ll do whatever you want, in return.”

  “I want you to suffer and I want you to die as miserably as Sherryl and Ethan did, you heartless, pathetic waste of human flesh.”

  “I’m not asking you to do me any favors. This is for some good people who need a break.”

  “Spare me your ludicrous attempts to deflect your own guilt by becoming a do-gooder for those white-trash hillbillies with whom you associate.”

  “Ravel, do what I’m asking, and I’ll send you the watch.”

  Silence. After a minute I heard her crying softly. Then, “Ship the watch by private courier, insured, and when I’m holding it in my hand, you’ll get the information you want. You emotionally manipulative bastard.”

  She clicked off.

  “Well, that was easy.” I tossed the phone to Santa.

  He frowned at me over a plume of medicated smoke. “Delta didn’t expect you to bribe the Death Haint of Yankeedom with your keepsake.”

  The Death Haint. I liked how Southerners categorized the demons in our lives. You give a demon a funny name, the demon can’t hurt you so much. I took my antique silver watch from my pocket and stepped to the edge of Devil’s Knob. As I looked down into a maw of boulders, cliffs, and the greening tops of a hardwood forest far below, I popped the watch’s lid and rubbed the pad of my thumb over the engraving one more time. The watch was one of my touchstones. I didn’t have many left.

  It had belonged to Sherryl’s grandfather. Sherryl had had it engraved for me. Thank you for giving me Ethan. That summed up why our rocky marriage was worth it; it summed up everything that had been wonderful about waking up every morning. Our son. It was more than a trinket to me, more than a casual heirloom from my wife’s family. Her sister knew that. It was the last gift Sherryl and Ethan gave me before they died.

  And I had just traded it to help Cathryn Deen, a stranger.

  Santa got up slowly, watching me. He was too stoned to stop me from taking a long walk off a short cliff, and he knew it. “Thomas,” he said carefully, “I know why you come up here.” He nodded at the phone I’d handed back. “Just like I know why you don’t like for the outside world to find you too easy. I know why you go to the high places and look down and think about what it was like for your wife and son. But trust me. Some day you’ll look up instead of down, and you’ll see it all differently.”

  I closed the watch, slid it into my pocket, and stepped back from the edge.

  All I saw was thin air.

  Puffing with the effort, Delta climbed up a ladder to the low-pitched roof of Mary Eve Nettie’s house and sat beside me in the glow of a setting sun. Gold, red, l
avender, pink—the sky over Hog Back was a concentrated rainbow. Mist fringed the mountaintops, and the deepening blue-black night at the apex of the sky drew me to its infinite focus. There was no better view in the mountains than the one from Mary Eve’s rooftop on Wild Woman Ridge.

  A small herd of deer—mostly does with pregnant bellies but also some yearlings and young bucks with two-point antlers—grazed in the pasture near a weathered barn. A flock of wild turkeys pecked at the ground among the deer. I stored bags of corn in the Nettie barn, throwing out several buckets full every day to lure a crowd. I didn’t hunt. I just liked the company.

  “I expect Mary Eve likes the idea of a good-looking man sitting on her roof,” Delta said quietly. “She’s probably right out yonder in the pasture, looking at us right now. That big doe with the frisky eyes? Yep. That’s her. Mary Eve always said she wanted to come back as a deer. Eat, sleep, screw and hang out with some good friends. ‘Keep it simple but elegant,’ she liked to say.”

  “I agree.”

  Delta patted my arm. “Your pocket watch is on its way to New York. Anthony picked it up an hour ago. He said he’ll take extra-special care.” Anthony Washington was the UPS driver out of Asheville. Delta insisted he eat every time he made the long trip to the Crossroads. For Delta’s chicken and dumplings with biscuits he’d hand-deliver the watch to Trump Tower himself. “Thomas, I—”

  “It’s just a watch.”

  “No, it’s not. Thank you, Thomas.”

  “I only did it because I want this house.”

  “You’re a sorry liar.”

  “When Cathryn Deen’s well enough, you tell her to sell her grandmother’s house to me. That’s the deal. Shake on it.”

  “Now, you know I don’t do business with drunks who smell like my granddaddy’s still. When Granddaddy McKellan poured off his makings the whole house smelled like a bar. Go and stick your head in one of the café’s closets and take a big sniff. Corn liquor. Granddaddy was a conniving, adultering old dog who shamed the reputation of the McKellan family throughout these parts for decades. Plus he called me ‘a fat little ugly girl’ and told everybody I’d never amount to a hill of beans. You don’t want to smell like his memory.”