Leaving the Comfort Cafe (9 page)

“I haven’t been on a bike in forever.”

“They say you never forget.” She hopped on the shorter bike and meandered around the parking lot in lazy circles. “But you know, forgetting is a lot harder than people think it is.”

Austin found his bike was too short and wanted to adjust the seat, but he didn’t have a wrench. Instead, he opted for standing up in the pedals, like a jockey delicately balancing on the back of a thoroughbred, as if, like a nervous racehorse, it would snort and bolt if given half a chance.

“Come on.” Blythe biked out of the parking lot and took a sharp left down by the Little League fields. “You can tell me all about the things you can’t forget while we go see the Virgin. Oh, and be careful with that thing. It’s borrowed. Landon needs it tomorrow for his paper route.”

Paper route? Kids still do paper routes? Am I regressing to where I’ve arrived in Mayberry?

“Had a hell of a time convincing him to let you borrow it.” Blythe winked, as if she enjoyed letting him know just how much trouble he was. “I had to pay him off.”

“Really? How much.”

“A few slices of chocolate cake.”

“Sounds like a shrewd negotiator.”

“Well, the mayor was more than happy to contribute to the cause.”

He could have asked himself a million times why he did it. Why did he take off on a bike built for a twelve-year-old? He had other things to do. He could get ahead on things at the office. He could call Kerry and spend the evening wishing he were in New York. But yet, this evening, this time, this instant, it seemed like the right thing to do. As if like with Oz and Neverland and Narnia and all the other fabled imaginary places, Blythe knew a shortcut to a world that could save him from spreadsheets and politicians and late-night meetings. Wherever this world was, Blythe knew, and she knew which stones were the magical ones able to tell you where snakes were located. Maybe it was the key to her conflicting stories. Maybe she had the ability to be in several places at once, so she had inhabited the Southwest, Charlotte, and Manhattan all at the same time. Or maybe she had simply forgotten herself and ran headfirst too fast into an uncertain future, and by the time she was able to catch up with herself, she realized that she had already moved on and gone someplace else, forgetting to pack herself with all her belongings, just like you leave an old toothbrush at a hotel without thinking twice about what you’ve left behind.

He smiled. A pilgrimage in eastern North Carolina. There were other things he could do, but at this moment, there was nothing he’d rather do. Not at this moment. He wanted to ask her a million questions, but instead, he just muttered a “where to?” slightly under his breath.

“Oh, I almost forgot to tell you—see that gray house on the corner with the blue shutters?” Blythe pointed ahead at the next block of houses.

“Yeah.”

“There’s a dog in that yard. A big, black, mean-lookin’ dog. You want to go by that house as fast as you can. Unless she’s got him tied up, in which case, take your time, but you got to watch out for that dog. Rip your throat clean out.”

“Really?”

“Seriously. It came after the mayor once. That’s when he got the big push to get that leash law to take care of all those animals that are running around. Shortly thereafter, Snake Lady started poppin’ her head up, figuring that if there were all these crazy dogs around, there have to be snakes, because you know wherever dogs are there are going to be snakes.”

“Of course.” Austin had no idea what she was talking about.

They biked through the four-block down town district and turned right onto Emerson Street, which took them through a neighborhood where every other house looked as if it could be a historical landmark. A few were getting a new dose of life from a coat of crisp, light yellow paint, but the others were slowly shedding their white exterior like skin peeling from a bad sunburn. There were only twelve houses in the Emerson area, worn down Queen-Anne style-homes with bay windows, broad shutters, and wide, welcoming porches. Queen told Austin that Emerson would be an ideal restoration project to establish a holiday tour of homes.

After Emerson, she took a left on Crescent, where the houses became fewer, separated only by worn country barns and fields of cotton and tobacco. Blythe’s firecracker orange hair broke defiantly free from its scrunchie. It started gingerly peeking around her right ear, but soon was riding the wind in a slim streamer strolling resolutely behind her. It looked like a cape. She looked like one of the comic book women the hero always rescued, except more down to earth, more homespun, more real, more imperfect and more artistically beautiful in her imperfections. But Austin doubted Blythe would ever need saving, and if she ever did need to be saved, she certainly wouldn’t admit it, and if you even finally did get her to admit it, she would never allow you to help her.

As he approached the house with the deadly, demonizing Cerberus, Austin shifted his feet in the pedals to make sure he had excellent traction in case haste brought the need to outrun a four-legged domesticated wolf. But as he went by the gray bungalow with green shutters, an old, speckled brown mutt lazily raised its head from its perch on the sagging front porch. One of its ears was longer than the other, and the dog looked as if it had lost some fur due to mange or whatever skin diseases dogs get from rolling around in the dirt. It glared at Austin, as if wondering if it was worth the breath to even bother to bark at him. The dog gave a hollow, halfhearted “oof” sound that seemed to come mostly from the roof of its mouth: the canine equivalent of a nod of the head to a passing motorist.

“Where’s the dog?” Austin asked Blythe, hoping the dreaded animal wasn’t using this dog as a distraction to snare unsuspecting walkers and bikers and meanderers into a false sense of security.

“Don’t you see him? Right there on the porch.”

“That dog?”

“Yep.”

Austin pulled his bike beside her so he could see her expression.

“You’re kidding, right? That dog?”

“Your throat. Rip it clean out, he will.”

“But he—”

“Clean. Out.”

A block later, the string of country houses gave way to wandering dirt road. They passed a pasture with a few painted ponies grazing. The larger one walked toward them, as if half-expecting them to pull out an apple or some other treat. Another one snorted, tossed its mane and darted across the field, as if being chased.

“That’s why I like horses,” Blythe said.

“Because they bolt?”

“No. Because they just are. They can run wild or burn up the racetrack or do tricks for kids at birthday parties. These huge, fifteen hundred-pound pieces of marble, just waiting for to us polish and shape and build them up the way we want them. I’ve always wanted to see the wild ponies on the Outer Banks. They run wild there. No barns or fences or barbed wire.”

“Well, why don’t you go see them?”

She changed the subject. “There’s a statue of the Virgin in a phone booth over by the Mexican store.”

“Phone booth?”

“At least it looks like a phone booth. They got an altar or something. All glass-enclosed…I think it used to be a phone booth…and the Lady of Guadeloupe just staring out of it as pretty as you please.”

“Like a painting?”

“No, a statue.” She rode large, slow circles around Austin. “You know the deal with her?”

“With her or with virgins in general?”

Blythe smirked. “The lady of Guadeloupe was one of those miraculous appearances by the Virgin.”

“I thought any time a virgin appeared it was miraculous.”

“Funny.” She made a sharp left down a short gravel driveway into La Tienda Latina. The store was tucked away neatly beside antique, rusty gas pumps and a short, sturdy Bradford pear tree that was slowly losing its puckered, pink, pale blossoms. A faded Mexican flag hung above a sign in the window that reminded patrons of tarjetas de teléfono from Sprint that could be used llamar Guadalajara por cinco centavos de minutos. There was a trash barrel located near the gas pumps in the gravel driveway, and although Austin could see the store lights through the window, it looked as if it had been abandoned.

The Virgin was inside a phone booth that had been converted into a makeshift shrine. She was about five feet tall and had recently been painted, her long, flowing robes and mocha skin reflecting the rich red, green and gold texture that was everything colorful, passionate and perfectly optimistic. While the phone booth had no door, the Virgin seemed protected from the elements, as if dedicated followers stopped to shine her sandals. At her feet were silver coins, dollars, paper money, notes, letters and even a few photos of family members that Austin assumed were still in Mexico. The statue’s eyes were as finely crafted as delicate porcelain and seemed to stare down at the memorabilia at her feet, as if peering into the heart of the distressed, the lost, the everyday hero.

Blythe had popped into the store and bought a Mountain Dew before he realized she was gone. She took a deep inhale of her drink while staring at the Blessed Mother.

“Maybe you should have some water.” Austin didn’t know what to say, but the statement made sense at the time. “Soda dehydrates you.”

Blythe cleared her throat.

“That caffeine’ll dry you out. “

Blythe ignored him and continued, “When was the last time you loved a flower just for being a flower? Love it just for the sake that it’s breathing. The Virgin’s like that. She just is. Watching. She just is.” She kicked up a piece of gravel where flowers were starting to peer about the base of a trash barrel.

“Do you want to head back?”

“Do you believe people ask her for forgiveness?”

“I don’t know. I’m not Catholic.”

“But do you think people ask her?”

“Maybe. Why?”

“I did something bad.” She turned and faced him, leveling her gaze directly at his eyes. “I did something bad and that’s why I’m here.”

Something bad? Shoplifting bad or murder bad?

“Um…are you on work release or something?” He didn’t know what else to say.

“No, nothing illegal, just bad. And stupid. That’s why everyone hates me. That’s why my family’s gone.”

“I heard all your family is dead.”

“Mm. I guess they are.”

“You guess they are?”

“Like I said, that’s why I’m here.” She emphasized the word “here,” as if Conyers was a type of limbo or purgatory.

“I think we all have to believe in forgiveness,” Austin said.

“Why?”

“Because we all need it.”

“But that doesn’t count.”

“What do you mean it doesn’t count?”

“It doesn’t count to believe in something just because you need it.”

“Who are you?”

On cue, her shoulders straightened and she tossed her ponytail to one side, like she had practiced and rehearsed this move in front of the mirror for several days. “I’m Blythe Shelley. Distantly related to the poet. I only charge an extra fifty cents for a pretty smile, and I—”

“I’ve heard that you lived out in the desert southwest with an Indian relative, then I heard you were related to some famous writer in Charlotte. Then the mayor said you were from Manhattan. What’s your story?”

“I have a lot of stories. Which one do you want to hear?”

“The one that’s true.”

“That’s the problem, hon. No one wants to hear the one that’s true. They think they do, but they don’t. It’s never as interesting.” Blythe’s eyes were on a horizon a thousand miles away. “It’s never as interesting.”

With a half-hearted flick of her wrist, she placed her empty soda can in the rash barrel and gave a last look at the Virgin before pedaling off. Austin watched her for a few seconds. Her wheels wobbled slightly, and he wondered if one of her tires had picked up a stray piece of glass in the parking lot and was slowly starting to lose its shape.

Before he left, he gazed at the Virgin and said a quick prayer and crossed himself, even though he wasn’t Catholic.

North Carolina sticks defiantly away from the East Coast. Austin could see it clearly on the hurricane-tracking map that was a permanent fixture in his Town Hall office. The pale blue ocean was littered with small holes that traced the path of thumbtacks that made a continual trek from the Caribbean to the Carolinas. The western part of North Carolina (which for some reason was always shaded purple on the newspaper map, as if it was not a part of the state, but another country entirely) seemed to slide in nicely beside Tennessee and Virginia, like a neat, well organized and resolved jigsaw puzzle, but its ragged coastline jutted into the Atlantic Ocean. It was as if were it not for some invisible force, the small sandbar islands of the Outer Banks would depart from the state altogether and drift across the sea until they came to settle on the coast of Spain, Portugal or—depending upon how the tides were flowing—Cuba.

Depending upon the zealousness of the meteorologists, predictions were that the hurricane season could run through the entire alphabet. Hurricane names always started with A and continued through the alphabet, alternating genders from year to year, although Austin could only remember the hurricanes that had female names. Conyers was close enough inland to spare it from damage, but it was one of many small towns along the highway that was the evacuation route if things were predicted to get too dicey.

Hurricane Amy was just barely large enough to be upgraded from tropical storm status. In Conyers, Amy’s upcoming approach, predicted to bring heavy winds and not much more than a good soaking, was the green light to stock up on supplies and call out of work. Employers, paranoid that someone would get into a wreck and sue them, were always lenient.

Even though Hurricane Katrina was hundreds and hundreds of miles and thousands of memories away, it always brought a fresh undercurrent of worry resting underneath everyone’s breath. Even though Hurricane Amy was just barely strong enough to be a hurricane, there was always that fear—a fear asking, “What if someone’s wrong and it’s going to be a category four, surprising everybody and taking the Outer Banks clear across the Atlantic, shifting the Carolina coast all the way up to Maine?” It was an unspoken anxiety that the meteorologists were wrong, the government was wrong, the Doppler radar was wrong and maybe even something with the turn of the earth itself was wrong. A fear, but for the grace of God, North Carolina’s coast could take center stage with Matt Lauer interviewing locals and the President observing the damage from an Army helicopter. But no one ever voiced anything out loud. No one said anything about it. Which made it even scarier.