Bobby's Diner (3 page)

My name changed to Georgette
Carlisle. When I arrived here, it was Georgette Daniels. My long hair is still
long but I keep it pulled back now and I have crow’s feet that show the many
times I smiled with Bobby.

Our relationship was organic, if
you will, like it was meant to be. Although Vanessa, Bobby’s ex-wife, tried to
stop it, we married soon after their divorce. But, he left her side the moment
he saw me and I joined his the moment I saw him. Vanessa was a good woman. She only
did what any other woman who still loved her man would do. She fought to keep
him. But, there was no keeping Bobby from me.

Vanessa knew she’d lost the
battle and finally agreed to a divorce.

Bobby moved us into a new house
where we made a lovely home. It had a nice big fireplace where we’d camp out in
an oversized sleeping bag on cold winter nights and it’s where I still live
today.

We’d pull blankets off the bed to
cushion the cherry floor under us. We only had one bedroom. The house wasn’t
big but it wasn’t small. It was perfect for the two of us.

Bobby wanted our place to blend
with the desert. He helped place thick wooden beams over each of the doors and
the arbor. The Indians and Mexicans used to build their walls from adobe. Adobe
is a mud mixture formed into bricks and
 
baked in the hot sun. It takes on the colors of the earth—warm sienna’s
with hints of rose. There’s a lot of clay in the desert earth. That’s where the
rose color comes from. We built our house with adobe and together we lived in a
pink house. Pink, being one of my favorite colors and having an entire house in
that hue, delighted me no end.

Bobby loved to cook and was real
good at it too. That’s
 
probably why he
started the diner in the first place. It was his passion. On the back patio of
our home, he built himself a barbecue with a brick fire pit where we cooked
many dinners.
 
The garden was mine. He
helped me rototill a nice big spot and he built around it a sturdy wooden
fence, gave it a coat of honey-colored stain, and we decided there we’d grow
a
 
vegetable garden.

Vegetables, I love vegetables.
So, in they went! All sorts of seeds—broccoli, cauliflower, radishes, carrots,
celery, lettuces, parsley, chard, garlic, onion (green and sweet
 
yellow
 
onions),
 
green
 
beans,
 
snap
 
peas, tomatoes—everything a
person needs for a salad and a side dish. Then, Bobby built me another box—a
special box—one that snaps together for potatoes as they grow tall rather than
using old tires by stacking one ugly tire upon another ugly tire.

We ate well because of that
garden. And, Bobby built all of it for me. I never imagined life could be so
sweet.

After daddy, through the parade
of men momma brought home, she never once brought home a man like that. I never
knew a man like that existed, until Bobby, that is.

When he died, I was completely
alone. Momma had long since passed on during one particularly bad Georgia winter
a couple years after I’d moved away to California. Bobby and I didn’t have many
friends, being fifty when
 
we met and me
being twenty-five. Well, people my age were a little immature for him and his a
little too mature for me plus, I don’t think anyone ever approved of us. Still,
we never felt lonely because we always had each other.

His daughter, Roberta, disowned
him when he left Vanessa so our holidays were not spent at big family get-togethers
or the way most folks think of spending holidays. We’d still fix huge dinners
with our cold crop of root
 
vegetables—sweet potatoes and squash. Our turkey was small but mighty
and always moist. I’d learned from my grandma at a young age how to fix a
turkey proper. You always baste every thirty minutes and you roast it slow and
evenly until the last hour when you crank up the heat high to four hundred
degrees to brown. My turkeys always turned out moist enough to fall off the
bone. The trick is never to cook a turkey with stuffing inside, breading dries
it out. You shove citrus inside instead—lemons,
 
tangerines, oranges, limes anything you can get your hands on. Cut them
in half and stuff them inside. Citrus are natural
 
tenderizers ‘cause of their acid. I’d slip
leaves of sage in-between the skin and the breast meat and butter—lots and lots
of butter—slathered inside and outside the bird. Rub salt and pepper hard into
the skin, and you’ll have the best damn turkey this side of the Mississippi.
I’d lay money on it any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Bobby loved my cooking. He’d come
home from the diner and tell me my cooking could outdo his but he always had
nice things like that to say.

Vanessa cooked for the diner
before they divorced.

He handled the business side of
things and she handled the kitchen. When they split half of the wait-staff quit
with her. Bobby had a hell of a time trying to make ends meet. We were building
a new home and the diner seemed like it would fail on more than one occasion.
After a couple of years, people forgot about all the nasty gossip and things
smoothed out. I was working too. I’d gotten a job at the gas station. It was
just down the road in the same strip mall as the diner.

This gas station wasn’t your
normal gas station. This one had a curio shop with all sorts of knickknacks for
people visiting and vacationing in Arizona, specifically Sunnydale. T-shirts
that said, “I survived Sunnydale, closer to Hell than anywhere!” And, “You
haven’t lived till you’ve spent the summer in
 
Sunnydale”—funny stuff like that. Cups, mugs, forks, spoons, gold-nugget
bubble gum, cactus locked inside snow balls, scorpion resin paperweights,
little fake saguaro cactus magnets, tiny pots with real ‘old grandfather’
cactus. All sorts of crap that you can pick
 
up easy and give away as mementos of your time spent here.

Since I arrived, I’ve fallen head
over heels in love with Sunnydale. The folks are honest and good and the earth
is real. Bobby and me survived the lean times and built up quite a nice little
diner, restaurant really. After he’d prodded me enough times, I decided to
leave the gas station and help him out in the kitchen. Slowly, I started to add
recipes of my own to the menu, ones that would cost little but present well.
The first new dish I added was fettuccine alfredo. It included a side salad of
organic greens and tomatoes and a chunk of garlic toast. We first served it as
a special to see if people would go for it. When we’d sell out night after
night, Bobby decided to add it to the menu. It went on like this for years and
now that little diner has been named Best of Sunnydale for the past five years.
People travel north all the way from the big city just to have dinner with us.

I’d worked the diner for going on
fifteen years.

Vanessa and Bobby ran it for
thirty years before that.

Never once, since I’d been
around, has she come in and, now, that was all about to change.

CHAPTER 2

Two large women working together
in a tight kitchen looks a lot like a herd of hips and breasts throwing food
around. Mix in one woman who has an attitude and stir in another who cries
 
uncontrollably as the wind blows, well, it’s
not a pretty sight at all. We found our newly formed partnership trying.

The first day proved disastrous.
Vanessa wanted to do things the way she used to, the way she’d done them over
fifteen years ago. I tried as diplomatically as possible
  
to
  
explain
  
we’d
  
changed
  
the
  
menu considerably—no more
mashed potatoes and gravy or

creamed hash on toast. We’d
updated the fare to suit a finer palette. She didn’t appreciate the implication
that her food wasn’t up to standard and took to pouting but continued to work
nonetheless. I had to force-feed the new menu down her throat. She spit it back
at me like a baby in a high-chair.

“What
 
the
 
hell
 
is
 
radic-chee-o ?”
 
She
 
said
 
it phonetically—the way it
looks. My mistake was correcting her.

“Radichio. It’s pronounced
radeekyo.” I went on. “It’s a purplish-red leafy kind of vegetable. Sort of
looks like cabbage. It can taste mildly bitter. And, it’s great for Italian
dishes.” I was explaining all about the proper pronunciation and everything a
person might want to know
 
about or do
with raddichio, on and on. I was chopping up
 
something at the time and didn’t pay attention to the offense she’d
taken from me telling her all the radicchio facts that filled my pin-sized
head. I was just chattering along like a chipmunk after a nut.

“I don’t need you telling me how
to pronounce words, young lady.” Vanessa barked out her objection, untied her
apron, threw it onto the counter, and walked off. “Vanessa, I didn’t mean…”

She didn’t break her stride and
left the kitchen before I could finish my sentence.
 
She went straight for the bathroom,
disappeared inside and slammed the door. Hard.

We were prepping for lunch and
dinner. We were both trying to work the kitchen, the way we had when we each
worked with Bobby. He had always done the rest—host, cashier,
 
supervise the wait-staff and bus- people, do
the books, marketing and promotion… all that was Bobby. The name, “Bobby’s,”
for heaven’s sake, represented the brains behind the
 
organization. The diner was all about Bobby.
I was just a glorified worker in the back and as the day plodded along, I
realized that’s all Vanessa ever was during their marriage. A fear gripped me
while Vanessa threw her temper tantrum in the john.

“Vanessa! Come here please.” My
voice must have sounded a bit panicked because she popped out almost instantly.

She was wiping her nose with her
hankie and sniveling.

“What?”

“Have you ever worked the front?”

“That was Bobby’s job. Why?”

“We don’t have a front person.” I
looked at her in terror. “Do you think you can handle the front, Vanessa?”

“Are you trying to get me out of
the kitchen?”

“Vanessa, I’ve never worked the
front. You’ve never prepared the new menu. What else can we do?” We looked at
each other helplessly.

“Shit. I haven’t run a cash
register in more than twenty years!”

“Do you think you could figure it
out?”

“Well… I do have this sweet
little laptop at home with all the bells and whistles. I even have wide-band
Internet. I can do almost anything on my computer. I don’t see why I can’t
figure out a silly old cash register.” Her defiant demeanor gained momentum as
she spoke and filled me
 
with hope. “I
just need the operating manual and I can learn how to run it. Sure. Why not? Can
you see people’s faces when they see me at the front door? Ha! What a hoot. Yes
sir. What will people think now? Ha! This is getting weirder every minute.” She
giggled and, at that, turned, and left.

I laughed out loud and for the
first time since Bobby died. I shook my head and smiled. We had no idea how bad
the night would get.

***

The first phone call came only an
hour before the doors
 
opened. Glenda,
the head waitress, was down with some grizzly infection that made her sound
like she’d gone down on a cactus. Vanessa and I figured that with the three
other waiters we could manage. We had José bussing and, if need be, Vanessa
could serve some of the tables. Bobby decided long ago that he only wanted a
restaurant with sixteen tables. He told and retold me why only sixteen tables.
I used to say to him “Yes, dear.” I figured it was better than saying “Shut
up.” You see, with sixteen tables, only three waiters were necessary. If one
couldn’t make it, two could definitely handle the room. They’d work a little
harder, make a little more money in tips, but could handle the room.

Unfortunately, the second call
came a half hour later.

Billy, a sweet sexy transient
thing with a propensity toward overimbibing called in drunker than a skunk. She
said she’d make it in if she had to but she might puke on a customer. She
laughed. I fired her. This left us desperately short with only one waiter for
the grand reopening.

“Vanessa!” I screamed as if I’d
cut off my finger. She came running in.

“What is it?”

“Billy just called in drunk. I
fired her. We’re down to one waiter.”

“Have you called anyone else?”

I nodded ‘yes’ but shrugged my
shoulders that I couldn’t find anyone.

“No one’s available. What are we
going to do? This was supposed to be our big reopening night since Bobby died.
What are we gonna do, now?” That’s when I lost it. I thought I’d been strong up
until then. I was proud how well I was holding up through everything— Bobby’s
sudden death, the funeral, loneliness, Vanessa getting half the restaurant, all
of it. The pressure had built and built to a level I couldn’t contain. I just
went off. I cried like a baby. I didn’t make much sound. My shoulders shook and
I caved in.