One Foot In The Gravy (10 page)

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Authors: Delia Rosen

BOOK: One Foot In The Gravy
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Chapter 11
Remember what I said about the happiest thing in the world being when you were proven wrong about something bad that had its claws in your soul? I’d like to amend that. It’s happy only so long as the bad thing stays away. If it comes back, metamorphosed into something even uglier, the happiness turns to ash.
Grant didn’t stay the night. He left sometime after—well, just after. I didn’t know he had; I was sleeping. A deep sleep. A grateful sleep. I woke about seven and the bed was empty, the covers crudely straightened on “his” side. I listened for the sounds of water running in the bathroom. Nada. The
plip-plub
of Mr. Coffee hard at work turning McNulty beans into morning glory. Also no-go. I stretched myself from a fetus position, looked on the floor where I knew we had left his pants. They were gone.
It felt like my heart had become stone and my brain numb. The first thoughts were a rerun:
Dumb, dumb, dumb!
What did I expect? A little velvet box with a ring? Crap, I didn’t even want that. Life returned swiftly to my two stupidly impressionable organs.
Brain: One-night stands crash. Even second one-night stands.
Heart: That’s usually because the participants are usually too drunk to go. I thought this was more.
Brain: No,
I
think.
You
feel. You felt this was more. I knew what it was.
Heart: Really, hotshot? What was it? Just a skinny dip? I’ll show you mine if—
Brain : Something like that.
Heart: I don’t believe it. You saw how he was acting.
Brain: He was uncertain—
Heart : Not during.
Brain: Of course ‘not during’! Before.
Heart: He didn’t know how to approach me, how to broach how he felt.
Brain: Uh-uh. He wasn’t
sure
how he felt. Probably still isn’t, which is as good as a loss.
Heart: What are you talking about?
Brain: He likes you enough to have wanted a return visit, but not enough to want you to think it’s anything more than a visit.
Heart: You don’t know that. He may have had to get to work.
Brain: You’re an idiot and you’re blind.
Eyes: Hey, I saw!
Brain: What did you see?
Eyes: How he was behaving. And you’re both wrong.
Heart and Brain: Oh?
Eyes: He came here to stop thinking of the chick he was with. Eyes know eyes, and I could see he was looking backward, not ahead.
Gwen: Shut up, all of you.
 
 
I beat Thom to the restaurant by forty-five minutes. The place smelled of the floor-washing Luke had given it and I left the door open. I turned on the grill, made the coffee, and pulled the chairs from the tables. It felt good to be active, distracted from Grant and Hoppy. I was just about to open the cash register to make sure we had enough change when my manager clunked in the door. It wasn’t that she had a heavy tread; it was that she was always burdened with bags. One for her stuff—mail-order catalogues, water bottle, Bible, breath mints, keys, wallet, pepper spray, brush, and hair clips, which she was always breaking—and one for her clothes, which she changed when she got here. Thom did not like to go home in her work outfit, “Smelling like a sa-lami,” as she put it.
“You think this is gonna get you extra points with the boss for missin’ mosta yesterday?” she asked.
“The boss is a jerk. I don’t care what she thinks.”
“Oooooh. That sounds like—”
“It is. I don’t want to discuss it.”
Thom thunked her bags on the counter. “You can’t just drop that egg and not expect me to call you butterfingers. What up? And you might as well tell me because I ain’t leavin’ it alone till you do.”
I caved. I hadn’t wanted to whine, but I had to talk to someone. Now, Thom had her puritan side, but she wasn’t naive or judgmental. She had that side for a reason.
“Men,” she said and collected her bags. She shook her head. “Oh, man.” She went into the back to change.
That was it. That was the extent of her advice, her strong shoulder, her compassion. But the effort wasn’t wasted: all the thinking I had done had brought me to the same conclusion. Maybe that was as far as the equation could be reduced. They were what they were and you couldn’t expect them to be more. If they were, then they ceased becoming pronouns. They became Clark or Bruce or Peter. They became a boyfriend or husband. Until then, they were just guys.
I had thought Grant Daniels was more than that. My brain interrupted to tell me that she had nothing to do with it: the heart had been doing the thinking, which was the problem. I couldn’t argue with that.
I was curious about something, though, and I grabbed Thom when she returned to set out the napkins.
“Was my uncle happy?” I asked.
She stopped and gave me a hand-on-the-hip look. “You got some kinda MapQuest I don’t know about?”
My look told her I didn’t follow.
“How the heck you get to that, girl?”
I saw her point. Two minutes before, we were talking about my broken-hearted fling with Grant Daniels.
“Two things,” I said. “First, I see his keyboard a couple of times a day. He ended up being a dilettante—”
“A who?”
“A dabbler,” I explained. “He never really made music work as a career. Second, as far as I know, he was alone all his life except for my dad. I was wondering how that worked out for him.”
Thom paused and smiled. It was different from her usual big smile for the customers, or her sassy smile for the staff, or her wouldn’t-itbe-wonder ful-if-you-did-some-more-work-aroundhere smile for me. This one was honest.
“Your uncle may have been a dabbler, and he may only have been Luke-level good on his keyboard, but he loved making his melodies. He carried that keyboard everywhere. And I mean everywhere, sometimes to the john. Went through six Double-A batteries every two days. I know ’cause I ordered them by the case.”
“Did you like what he composed?”
“Not a note of it. But I liked that he liked writing it. He came alive.” She looked at me. “Sort of like you did when you got yourself another little mystery to pick at.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s sort of what I was asking,” I said. “Somebody asked me why I cared who killed Hoppy Hopewell and I made up some shi—some sugar about it being bad for business that we catered the death gig.”
“But that’s got nothing to do with it. In fact, we got calls yesterday to cater two other parties.”
“Did we?”
Thom nodded. “A confirmation and a bachelor party. I asked them how they heard of us. The confirmation was from your online menu. The other was from the news reports of Lolo’s party.”
“How about that.”
The world suddenly seemed a little brighter. I wasn’t incompetent. Some part of me had made a right decision, however ill-advised my romp with Grant may have been. Or maybe wasn’t. I had no idea. Heart sulked about that, but Brain was rightpleased with its business decisions.
“Your uncle made us his family,” Thom went on. “Music was his girlfriend. He dated now and then, but if the gal wasn’t into music, he lost interest. If she was, she lost interest.”
“His stuff was that bad?”
“Not so much bad as completely awful.”
I thought about that for a moment, and it still didn’t make sense. “You’re going to have to explain that.”
“His tunes weren’t bad but he thought he would sell songs, if they were—” She looked for the proper word, gave up. “Check out these titles.
White Christmas Shoes. When Doves Fly. Great Vibrations
.”
“Seriously? He wrote those songs?”
“He wrote them, shopped them around, played them here when I let him—when there weren’t enough customers to scare away—but was so, so sincere about them. He never saw that there were . . . problems.”
My heart was happy to be distracted. It hurt for Uncle Murray.
“How did my dad put up with that?” I wondered.
“I’m guessin’ he just loved his brother and was happy to see him happy. I never met your father, but from what I hear, that was something that eluded him.”
Now my heart hurt for my father. It was more like an emotional bungee jump: it pained me to think that he was chronically unsatisfied. What a sad fate for both my parents. Unhappy together, unhappy apart.
I hadn’t realized my head had dipped. Thom bent and looked up into my eyes. “You okay?”
“Sure,” I lied. There were tears on the way, so I turned to flick on the heat lamps. Thom probably knew better, but she let it go.
“You can’t let yourself dwell on what was or wasn’t,” she said, “on opportunities people missed or were afraid to take. I spent a lot of time doin’ that, regrettin’ how I threw myself at men or family members or employers who didn’t respect me.”
“Then you found Jesus,” I said. I wasn’t being sarcastic; she had.
“Yes, but He was only part of what saved me. The other part was your Uncle Murray. He had this joy about him, this love of each day and each hour in that day. He was a
positive
man. Whatever delusions he had about his music, he had those same delusions about the folks around him. He thought I looked pretty and smelled nice and treated customers better than they deserved. He saw me fuss about how lettuce or a pickle looked on a plate if it had just been tossed there during a rush. He noticed things and made you feel good about yourself, whether you worked for him or were a customer or just passed him on the street. I think that must’ve been one of the things that sustained your father. I dunno—maybe your mom was jealous of that, the fact that from what I hear she wasn’t able to do that for him. It isn’t enough to love somebody, hon. You gotta enjoy being around them and they you.”
Thom had rounded the bases and my heart and brain were waiting in the dugout with open arms.
“Thanks,” I managed to choke out.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
“I
did
have a good night last night.”
“Of course. Sometimes it’s okay to just want to be held or feel attractive.” She was still smiling sincerely . . . until she wasn’t. “You turn on the grease?”
“Oops.”
And she was gone into the kitchen to flick it on, and get out the eggs and butter and fill the salt and pepper shakers and sugar. I finished at the cash register and went into the office, and shut the door and let it all out. Years of it. I had spent a lot of time crying about my failed marriage, but not about my parents’ failed marriage, or my uncle’s failed career, or looking at the shores of middle age with a slightly scary new home and career and warm but provincial new associates I didn’t know well. And men like Grant and Royce, who were like New York men but without the courtesy to be honest about interest that was only marginal.
I cried into my open hand until I heard customers. I washed my eyes with warm water, let hair fall over them to hide the red, and went out to help Newt on the grill. Luke was peeling potatoes for early morning latkes—done shredded, hashbrown-style, instead of pureed so we could sell them
as
hash-browns—and I worked the toaster.
There was no idle talk during rushes, and that suited me perfectly. I needed the distraction. The regulars kept coming through 9:30, after which it slowed enough for me to duck out and change. My head was back in the game, “my” White Christmas Shoes, the desire to figure out who killed Hoppy Hopewell. I found myself even more motivated than before. Rational or sane, fueling my darker emotions or not, I really, really wanted to figure this sucker out before Grant Daniels or his fellow officers did.
The memorial was like a wake.
I was expecting people to be talking to one another or popping over to the open coffin to say good-bye to the Chocolate King. They were doing anything but. There were thirty-odd people in the funeral home chapel, and that included the three black-suited ushers. Neither Pinky nor Jennifer was present, I didn’t recognize anyone from the state legislature—though they may have been there; I just didn’t know those people—and Solly was sitting with his junior partner, a young lady with pearls, blond hair, and a headband holding it in place. A couple of local merchants were present, probably to network.

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