One Mountain Away (6 page)

“Came to get money…” He stops, as if trying to remember what he was just saying. “That grandmother of your’n,” he finishes, after a long moment during which he sways from side to side, as if considering which way to fall.

“Gran doesn’t have any money, Hearty. Her check comes next week, and there’s nothing left of the last one.” I remember what my grandmother has told me and change the subject. “Listen, while you’re here, one of those girls up there said she saw your truck, and you got a flat tire in the front. I’ll go back with you. Maybe we can wrestle it off together.”

“You…come with me?” He snorts. “Since…when you want to be anywhere I am?”

“You want help with that tire or not?” I ask.

“Ran out of gas.” He stares beyond me, as if looking for my grandmother so he can plead his case.

Hearty works in the woods cutting and hauling lumber, but he rarely has money. When he manages to gather a little he buys gas and liquor, in that order, since this is a dry county and he needs the first to get the second. I doubt he’s really run out of gas, but I bet he’s run out of liquor.

I hear a noise behind me and turn. Mrs. Pittman is coming toward us. Her dress has red-and-white checks, like a tablecloth Gran uses in the summertime, and the skirt snaps angrily against her calves.

“That…ol’ scarecrow…” Hearty spreads his hands in some odd sort of illustration, and the motion nearly sends him careening into me.

“What’s happening here?” Mrs. Pittman asks in a voice that says she already knows.

“Nobody…ast you for a ’pinion,” Hearty says.

“You owe this child better than showing up in public looking the way you do,” Mrs. Pittman says. “You’re embarrassing her and your mother-in-law.”

“Don’t care.” Hearty waves his hands again. “I need money. You got some you want to rid yourself of, I’ll take it…and be gone.”

“You’re lower than a rattlesnake, Hearty Hale. You ought to get down on your knees and beg the Lord for forgiveness. You’ve tried the patience of the rest of us for too long. He’s all that’s left.”

Hearty spits on the ground at his feet. “Somebody here’ll give me money.”

“Not as long as I’m standing here. Now you go back the way you came, you hear?”

By now I want to throw myself off a mountain ledge. I know everyone is watching, and a glance over my shoulder shows two of the men from the service are coming up behind Mrs. Pittman, one of them the morning’s preacher, the other Sally Klaver’s father. I realize that most likely they are spurred by embarrassment that a woman has been forced to lead the charge.

Hearty sees them, too, and realizes they aren’t coming to help him. With a snarl, he falls forward. I’m not sure if he propels himself in Mrs. Pittman’s direction, or if he merely loses his precarious balance, but without thinking I sidestep quickly and just in time. In a moment my father is sprawled on top of Mrs. Pittman, pinning her to the ground.

The men launch themselves forward to drag Hearty away. As drunk as he is, he fights back, slugging the preacher in the stomach with a fist, kicking out at Mr. Klaver with the toe of his worn work boot. It’s all over in a moment. While sober he might have held his own, now he’s slow and uncoordinated. The men grab him under the armpits and haul him off Mrs. Pittman, who sits up, then manages, with my help, to get to her feet. By then Gran has joined us.

Hearty is blinking hard, as if trying to remember what’s just happened.

“You hurt, Mrs. Pittman?” Mr. Klaver asks, shoving Hearty to one side. “He hurt you?”

She looks a little dazed, but she shakes her head and begins to brush off her checkered dress. “He wants money.”

“You don’t give a man like this money.” Mr. Klaver looks at Gran. “What are you going to do about him? Why’d you let him come here, anyway?”

I want to weep, but Mrs. Pittman intervenes. “What are you saying? She’s an old woman. There’s nothing she can do, but the men in this community might consider forming a plan. She and that girl need protection, not accusations.”

“Hearty’s never hurt either of us,” Gran says. “He just drinks.”

“And lies and steals,” the preacher says. “Don’t pretend he don’t. He’ll take anything that’s not nailed down and claim he didn’t, so he can buy himself more liquor. People ’round here pretend they don’t see, because they respect you. But one of these days he’ll go too far, and somebody’ll come after him with a shotgun.”

“I’ll take…my shotgun to them first,” Hearty says, just before he bends double and vomits at the preacher’s feet.

“You’uns leave us.” Gran shakes her head as her son-in-law retches and heaves. “We’ll get him out of here. But we’ll have better luck doing it without you. I’m sorry it’s come to this.”

“No,” Mrs. Pittman says sharply. “These men will walk him back to wherever he came from. I’m taking you home myself. You got stuck with Hearty Hale when your daughter made a foolish decision, but you don’t have to be stuck with him today. Now come along.”

I hope my grandmother will refuse, that the command in the other woman’s voice will anger her enough she’ll stay right here. I don’t want to walk back to the preacher’s car and face the knots of churchgoers again, not as long as I live. But Gran looks the way a dog does after he’s been whipped. She doesn’t have the strength to refuse. Instead, she starts hobbling after the preacher’s wife and beckons for me to join her.

The walk back through the lot and over to the preacher’s car is the longest I’ve ever made. I can feel every eye staring at me, particularly Sally’s, and I know what everybody is thinking.

If I ever harbored hope that someday people might overlook the man who fathered me and see me for the person I am, now I know that hope was foolish. I will always be Lottie Lou Hale, the daughter of no-good Hearty Hale. And as long as I live in Trust, North Carolina, my future has already been decided.

Chapter Five

THE COFFEE SHOP where Charlotte had settled to write in her journal had been recently remodeled. Now it was officially a bistro, with a newly painted sign announcing it had evolved, but it was still called Cuppa. The Orange Peel, a music venue down the street, was probably awakening for a long night and beginning to attract patrons, and she was glad she had arrived early enough to find parking.

Cuppa had a row of tall windows looking over the street and fancifully trimmed topiaries between each set. Ferns hung in the window, and the hostess stand was flanked by trios of potted palms. Once past the hostess stand, though, Charlotte had seen just how casual the little restaurant was. Denim ruled, and several patrons had set up laptops on their tables. More were talking on cell phones with nothing in front of them except steaming mugs. A coffee bar jutted from one side of the room, and two young women stood there chatting and waiting for the barista to supply their order. Maybe the owners had added space for more tables and real food, but at heart the place probably hadn’t changed much.

When she had asked for a quiet table, a young man in a green T-shirt had led her as far away from the hubbub as he could without pushing her through the emergency exit, and for a long time she’d had the area to herself. But now that she was finished writing in her journal, it was dinnertime, and a family with two squabbling preschoolers was divvying up a pizza at the table beside hers. A middle-age couple, who looked as if they’d either had a bad day or engineered one for everybody else, had just been seated steps away from both tables, and the man, in his early forties, was squinting at the menu as if it had been salvaged from a shipwreck.

Charlotte knew she had taken up her table for too long, ordering coffee, then an untouched pastry, out of guilt. Now she was finally hungry and knew she should probably try to eat something before she left for home. Cuppa wasn’t exactly her usual, much more casual than the places she frequented with friends and colleagues, but the atmosphere was upbeat and the pizza at the next table smelled wonderful.

She studied a menu snuggled alongside a brief wine list between the sugar dispenser and the salt and pepper shakers. The selection was simple. Pizza, salads, wraps, a variety of sandwiches and a few Italian specialties. As ordinary and ubiquitous as the choices were, the ingredients seemed innovative. The Cobb salad had pea shoots and shiitake mushrooms, the Greek wrap featured baby spinach, fire-roasted red peppers and sun-dried tomatoes.

She had sat there long enough for a shift change. Now a tall young woman approached, dressed in another of the restaurant’s dark green T-shirts paired with an ankle-length khaki skirt. She had long sun-bleached hair pulled back in a low ponytail, masses of freckles and eyes rimmed with sandy lashes. The all-American, girl-next-door essentials were marred by a gold ring in her nose and the winged edges of a tattoo just visible on the right side of her neck. Charlotte thought the image might be a fairy or a dragonfly.

Green eyes flicked to the menu in Charlotte’s hand, then back up again, before the young woman spoke. “Hi, my name is Harmony, and I’ll be happy to get you anything you’d like.” She smiled shyly to show slightly crooked teeth.

“You know what, the eggplant provolone pizza sounds wonderful,” Charlotte said. “Is it as good as it sounds?”

“I like it.”

Charlotte ordered the pizza and a salad, and asked for a bottle of sparkling water to go with them.

The young woman took her order, then moved to the couple who had just arrived and introduced herself to them, as well.

“Harmony?” the man asked loudly enough that half the restaurant could hear him. “I bet that’s not what your mother named you.”

The young woman looked puzzled. “Harmony No-Middle-Name Stoddard, right there for all the world to see on my birth certificate. May I get you something to drink before I tell you our specials?”

“I bet you were born in Asheville.”

Charlotte was trying not to eavesdrop, but it was impossible, since the couple were so close. She knew not everyone held their mountain community in the highest regard. Some of her colleagues thought Asheville was outdated and outclassed, a frontier hippie outpost with a redneck contingent that barely kept it from tumbling off the left side of the universe. Luckily most of them kept such unpalatable sentiments to themselves, at least in public, but this man had either had too much to drink already, or too many frustrations.

The waitress looked perplexed, and the man’s companion, a frumpy brunette who looked only marginally more pleasant, intervened. “My husband’s just saying it’s not as uncommon a name here as it is in other places. He’s making an educated guess.”

“Harmony, Serenity, Moonbeam, Sagittarius.” The man picked up the wine list and waved it as if he were shooing flies. “Do you sell wine by the bottle?”

“I was born in Kansas, and no, we only sell by the glass. What would you like?” The young woman looked composed, but wary, as if she understood she’d been insulted and was hoping to get beyond it.

“I’ll have a glass of red wine,” the woman said. “Cabernet?”

Harmony nodded. “And for you?” she asked the man.

“Whatever…”

“Then shall I bring you the cabernet, too?”

He gave a curt nod.

Charlotte knew all too well what the young server was probably feeling. Years had passed since she’d waited on tables herself, but it wasn’t a time in her life that was easily forgotten. When a restaurant wasn’t too busy and customers were friendly, the work was tolerable, even enjoyable. But when customers were rude, like this man, then a shift could last forever.

Harmony returned with Charlotte’s water and promised the pizza would be ready in about twenty minutes. Then she gave the couple their wine and set ice water in front of them, too. “Would you like to hear our specials?” she asked them.

“Not if they’re low-fat, whole grain and heaped with vegetables.” The man sneered.

“You’ve pretty well described it. You might like the pot pie, though, our chef—”

“It’s an exaggeration to call anybody who works in this place a chef,” he said. “We’ll split a large eggplant-provolone pizza.”

“I have to apologize,” Harmony interrupted, “but the
chef
just told me he used the last of the eggplant on another order. Could I interest you in our pissaladière? It’s a white-onion pizza with thyme, rosemary and feta, and—”

“Unbelievable.”

Charlotte frowned. The girl looked pale, as if having to deal with the man’s bad humor was taking its toll.

The woman poked her menu in Harmony’s direction, as if to forestall more of her husband’s bad temper. “We’ll split a large one, and bring us two green salads, please. I’ll have the raspberry vinaigrette on the side. He’ll have the specialty mushroom blue cheese.”

“Out of eggplant?” he said loudly, after Harmony had left and after he’d taken a long sip of his cabernet.

In a few minutes Harmony returned with salads on a tray. She gave Charlotte hers first, then placed the woman’s in front of her. Just as she was about to set the man’s on his place mat, one of the children at the next table screamed and launched herself off her chair, slamming into the server, who dropped the ceramic salad bowl. Salad flew over the table and into the man’s lap, and the bowl bounced against the table edge and shattered when it struck the floor.

“I’m so sorry,” the mother at the next table said, clearly horrified at what her daughter had done. She grabbed the girl’s arm and hauled her back to her chair, while the man leaped to his feet, eyes blazing.

Harmony, who could not have avoided the accident even if she’d been an Olympic gymnast, tried to apologize, anyway, but he was furious. Dressing splattered his pants and sport coat, and lettuce tumbled to his shoes.

“You need a new profession,” he said. “Who told you waiting on tables was a good career move? Get the manager. Now!”

The young woman’s eyes glistened, and her freckles stood out in sharp relief on pale cheeks. “She…she’s stepped out. I’ll send her right back when—”

He stopped dabbing at the stain with his napkin and threw it on the table. “You think we’re staying?”

“Let me take your number, and I’ll be sure she calls—”