Love Mercy (2 page)

She had stood at the side of the road with her thumb out, trying not to think about all the
Dateline NBC
shows she’d seen about serial killers and missing girls. A little later, a girl not much older than Rett picked her up. Her name was Eunice Shumaker, and she drove an older white SUV with a faded pink Mary Kay cosmetics sign plastered on the driver’s door. She offered Rett a ride clear to Little Rock, where Eunice’s mother was having kidney stone surgery. Eunice dropped her off at the Petro truck stop and handed her some samples of Mary Kay sunscreen.

“Do
not
leave the house without wearing this,” she’d warned. “You might have brown hair, but, girl, you got the skin of a redhead.”

Brother Dwaine had approached Rett not ten minutes later, a concerned look on his grizzled face.

“More coffee?” The waitress stood in front of Rett holding a stained Bunn coffeepot. She had tired brown eyes and a cool-looking heart-shaped mole on her left cheek. Or maybe it was a tattoo.

“No, thanks,” Rett answered, looking down at her plate where a shriveled pickle was the only thing she’d left uneaten.

“Brother Dwaine says this is on his tab,” the waitress said in a gravelly, Tanya Tucker voice that Rett immediately envied. “He does that all the time. Cook just baked some peach pie. Want some?”

Rett almost refused, hating to take more of the minister’s help, but she thought about the crumpled money tucked down into her dusty red boot. Sixty-eight dollars and forty-three cents, and she still had half the country to travel. She’d started out with a hundred bucks but hadn’t paid real close attention to how much she was spending, a trait her mom often pointed out. At the Wal-Mart where she’d ditched the frat boys, she’d bought wool socks, gloves and a red knit hat. It hadn’t occurred to her to stick those things in her backpack when she left Knoxville. But it was the first week of December and cold across most of the country. It had seemed likely that she’d be spending most of her trip on the side of the highway with her thumb out.

At the same time she’d foolishly splurged on a Rhonda Vincent CD, the one the bluegrass singer recorded at the Sheldon Concert Hall in Missouri. Rett had the CD at home, but at the last minute decided to leave it since her backpack had been jammed full, and she knew every song lyric and banjo lick by heart. She sighed. If she had an iPod, that would have solved her problem. But Mom was old school, thought they were a waste of money and Rett never had the discipline to save her own money for one. So, unable to resist, Rett tossed the CD in her basket at Wal-Mart. Somehow it made her feel less scared to have it nestled in her backpack against her favorite Nashville Sounds sweatshirt.

“Sure, I’ll have some pie,” Rett said. She might as well fill up while she could. But, after this, she wouldn’t accept any more charity from the minister. If she was careful, her money would last her until she reached Morro Bay. Then, hating that it was her mom’s stupidly optimistic words that sprang to her mind first, she’d “reassess her opportunities.”

While she waited for the pie, she reached over and rubbed a nail-bitten thumb over a new scar on the black banjo case. Riding in the college student’s van had banged it up more than twenty county fair gigs.

“You can leave your banjo in the cab,” Dwaine had said when they pulled into the truck stop where he was going to have a pinging sound in the engine checked on. “Won’t no one bother it there.”

“That’s okay,” she replied, hugging the case to her chest. “I’ll keep it with me.”

The preacher would probably be shocked to know the banjo inside the raggedy case was worth twenty-five thousand dollars. And even more shocked to learn it wasn’t exactly hers. He’d probably call it stolen. Rett called it getting even.

TWO

L
ove Mercy Johnson stared at the bright computer screen, trying to resist the urge to grind her molars. The uncooperative numbers blurred before her eyes. Balancing the books was her least favorite part of co-owning the Buttercream Café. December was usually a good month, but so far they weren’t in the black. She sighed and leaned back in her old office chair, the loud squeak startling her dozing tricolored corgi, Ace. He jumped up from a dead sleep, his full, chesty bark loud enough to rattle the windows of her little bungalow.

She twirled around and laughed. “Calm down, flyboy. It’s only my chair. Like the tin man, it just needs a little oil.” He shot her a distinctly cranky look and flattened his batlike ears before settling back down on the braided rug in front of her gray river stone fireplace. She stretched her arms out and flexed her long fingers, then turned to the screen, pushing back the discouragement that was starting to build a wall in her chest.

“We can figure this out,” she said out loud. “We’ve been in worse financial straits when Cy and I owned the feed store, right?” Ace didn’t lift his head. He was accustomed to Love’s conversations with herself.

Unless the Buttercream raised its prices, something that would cause the locals to howl like wounded wolverines, she and Magnolia would have to dip into the money that they’d been saving for a new stove. Dang. Magnolia had mooned over that commercial stove catalog like a teenager would an
American Idol
finalist. Three months ago Love had told her the silver and black Viking stove of her dreams was practically being loaded on the delivery truck. That was before the dishwasher had to be repaired—twice—and the ancient garbage disposal had to be replaced. Plus it seemed people just weren’t eating out as often as they used to. Not really a recession, the government kept assuring everyone.

She and her best friend, Magnolia Rosalina Sanchez, bought the restaurant three and a half years ago. It was something they’d fantasized about from the first week they met twenty years ago while working as waitresses in the very same building, back when it was called Freddie’s Fish House. A small inheritance from Love’s great-aunt Bitsy and Magnolia’s ability to squeeze a nickel had helped Love and Magnolia to buy and fix up the café. It had been a struggle from the beginning, but they’d always made a small profit. Until three months ago. Love even used some of the money she’d made when she sold the feed store after Cy died, but she’d had to set back a little to live on. Even though her house was paid off and she lived frugally, that wouldn’t last forever. The café had to start making a profit again, or they’d have to sell it.

“What now?” she said, wishing for what seemed the millionth time in the last thirteen months that her calm-spirited husband was here to give his two cents.

“Since when have you ever taken my advice?” he would have asked.

“Not often,” she’d have answered, grinning. “But it’s always amusing to hear your opinion.” The truth was, he wasn’t really much better than she was at business. He’d been too much of a soft touch to make a real profit at the feed store, always giving away free dog, cat and bird food to grateful rescue groups and allowing folks credit far longer than he should have. He’d been a sucker for every sad story that trotted up the trail.

How she missed his laid-back personality and that foghorn laugh of his, the laugh that rarely failed to make her join in, even if they’d been quarreling. He’d been totally in favor of her and Magnolia buying the café when it came up for sale. Whenever she worked the counter, he’d come in, pretend he didn’t know her and flirt outrageously. He’d leave her a twenty-dollar tip, which she always slipped right into the cash register.

They’d met in Redwater, Kentucky, when he was on leave from Fort Knox. He bid seventy-five dollars for her strawberry-rhubarb pie at the Redwater Baptist Church Vacation Bible School fund-raiser. That was good deal of money in 1967, so it was clear he was announcing to her and the congregation his serious intentions. He was visiting with one of his training buddies, Jim Shore, whose father was head deacon at the church. Both boys were shipped out to Vietnam a few weeks later. After charming her mother, father and twin brother, DJ, Cyrus courted Love the old-fashioned way, through the mail. He wooed her with his square, neat printing, his silly jokes, his kind and thoughtful observations about the Vietnamese people and his mesmerizing descriptions of the Valley oaks, red-tailed hawks and rolling emerald hills of the cattle ranch his family owned on California’s Central Coast. They’d married two weeks after he was discharged from the army.

Love glanced at the calendar. Thursdays were Italian day at the Buttercream. This week Magnolia was serving her famous gnocchi and homemade lasagna. Maybe if they cut down on the cheese and imported sausage in the lasagna, they could save a little money. Or they could make the portions a little smaller. Shoot, they could do that with all the menu items. The media was always saying that people ate too much. Would anyone notice?

She shook her head. Even if no one else knew it, Magnolia would, and she’d not stand for it. Her daddy was from Alabama, but her mama was pure Italian. Magnolia had spent every summer of her first eighteen years visiting her mama’s sisters on Chicago’s Italian West Side. She’d been taught to cook and bake by her aunts Teresa, Marie and Bettina, loving taskmasters who showed her the secret to flaky cannoli and, as Magnolia called it, smack-your-daddy-good spaghetti sauce. Magnolia’s recipes were the one reason, Love believed, that
San Celina County Life
readers had voted the Buttercream Café as Best Locally Owned Restaurant for the last two years.

Love turned back to the computer and stared at the unchanging figures. Maybe they could find cheaper hamburger buns that still tasted good. Or quit using the incredible maple syrup from that cute little family in Springfield, New Hampshire. It was unbelievably delicious, but was also a lot more expensive than what they could buy at San Celina’s new Costco.

She traced a forefinger over the boat-shaped crystal desk clock next to her computer. It had been a gift to Cy from the guys at the Morro Bay boatyard when he sold his boat shortly after his second round of chemo, when the doctors said things didn’t look hopeful. That had been a hard day for everyone.

Cy bought the battered old boat thirty years ago when their son, Tommy, was ten years old. He and Tommy spent countless hours fishing and bird-watching on that boat. They’d sanded, scraped, painted or stained every bit of the old vessel. Cy named it the
Love Mercy
, despite her protests or the fact that she’d ridden on it only a handful of times. She loved the ocean, never grew tired of photographing its endless colors and eclectic variations, but she preferred to remain onshore. She always claimed it was because of her eastern Kentucky genes.

“I’m a backwoods girl,” she’d declare when anyone teased her about it. “I prefer solid ground beneath these size-eight feet.” The ocean and its mercurial moods were too unpredictable. She remembered that every time she walked by the tiny Anchor Memorial Park on the Embarcadero. The seven-thousand-pound iron anchor set into a concrete square showing the names of the men and women lost at sea reminded her too much of the coal mines in Kentucky that stole so many people from her life.

The boat was the one subject that Cy and Tommy could always discuss when the pangs of adolescence and later, the disagreements between generations had made everything else unapproachable.

After Tommy up and married Karla Rae Murphy and they moved to Nashville a week after the wedding, when Cy missed their son, he would take the boat out and float aimlessly around Morro Rock, watching the peregrine falcons and their chicks through his old binoculars. Love still used those binoculars to watch the ocean from her backyard, placing her fingers in the same spots worn smooth by Cy’s calloused fingers. It comforted her to put her hands where she knew his had been.

After Tommy was killed fourteen years ago, working on the boat had been Cy’s way of coping with a grief too big for him to talk about, even with her. Love spent hours walking on the beach with only her old Nikon camera for company. The photos she took those first weeks after Tommy’s death were packed away in a trunk. Once developed, she’d never looked at the photos, though they were as fresh in her mind as the gash that scarred her heart the moment she received the phone call about Tommy’s accident from a friend of Karla Rae’s. It always hurt Love that she’d heard the news from someone she didn’t even know.

She remembered in detail each photograph she took those weeks of walking. She could still see the loopy wave-diving surf scoters who reminded her of crazed bodyboarders, the black oystercatchers with their chisel-shaped, blood-colored bills, the frantic western sandpipers who were always running and screaming their high-pitched, teenage-girl screech—a sound that, at the time, she was tempted to mimic—and the peregrine falcons, so majestic and distant, perched high on the sheer edges of Morro Rock, looking down on them all, like they possessed the answers to any number of life’s complex questions. But the ones she found the most heartbreaking were the black turnstones: plump, tiny birds with streaks of white in their plumage. They liked rocky areas and, true to their name, spent most of their time turning over stones and seaweed looking for food. Their frantic searching echoed something deep inside her. She spent hours watching them, capturing their struggles to survive on film. Those first few months she and Cy seemed to live on separate planets, each trying to make sense of why their only child was killed by a drunk driver one rainy night in Nashville. The irony of how much that sounded like a country song was something that occurred to her during those long, solitary walks.

She pushed her chair away from the computer, rubbing her stinging eyes. A walk. Yes, what she needed was a good long walk with Ace. Stop thinking about all the losses of her life and concentrate on the living. Maybe it would clear out the cobwebs, and she’d figure out how to keep the café going, serve their expected high-quality dishes, not lay off anyone or cut back on portions. She’d take the Nikon and see if something inspired her. Clint would be wanting February’s photo and column soon. Then she’d head to the café and talk to Magnolia about how they could cut costs and still keep everyone happy. Wasn’t that every middle-aged woman’s lament—how do I keep everyone happy? For pity’s sake, she thought, who in the heck made us keepers of the world’s contentment?