Queenie's Cafe (2 page)

Queenie didn’t have much except a few clothes, television set, worn recliner, and two old cats, Sleepy and Doc. Sleepy, a huge gray tabby, was just like her name. She went from window sill to sunbeam to bed to chair, always stretching, yawning and napping. Doc was an ornery little stinker who lived most of his life outside. Queenie put his food out on the old picnic table and let him fight the raccoons for it. The cat usually won.

When she was in high school, Laura worried about getting fat and surly like Queenie, but she resembled her father. They both had dark hair, almost black, and hazel eyes. Laura kept her hair cut short and easy to manage. Her hair had a little natural wave, and the humidity made it curl around her face. Queenie had straight, limp, mousy brown hair, cold blue eyes, and a pallid complexion. Her once pretty features had been lost in her fleshy face. If Laura hadn’t resembled her father so much, she would have thought she’d been adopted.

She glanced around at Queenie’s shabby room and sighed. If her parents had been able to get along, things might have been different. A divorce couldn’t have been worse than living like they had, with Queenie growing fatter and more surly as the years passed and Dad nursing his bitterness until it became a living thing. Unhappiness had aged them both. Queenie was only forty-two when she died, but she looked twenty years older.

Grabbing her mother’s key off the hook by the door, Laura went to inspect the café. She opened the door and groaned. The café looked and smelled like it hadn’t been cleaned since the day she left home. The place was absolutely filthy, dirtier than she’d ever seen it, and it smelled like smoke and stale grease. Queenie, five-foot-nothing and nearly as wide as she was tall, couldn’t do much cleaning, so Laura had always done it.

Ants crawled over the spilled sugar on the storeroom floor. The toilet in the men’s room was stopped up. Water streaks and mold stains from the ceiling to the floor in the corner of the room told her the roof had been leaking again. That last patch must have blown loose.

It would take at least a week or two to clean everything, then she’d have to restock before she could open.
If
she decided to open it again. If she decided to sell, it would still have to be cleaned to attract a buyer.

The café needed paint, new carpet, and decent furniture. Queenie had spent most of her life in this dump, and except for raising the prices on the menu, she’d never changed a thing. The dirt-streaked flamingo paint outside had been on there forever, and no amount of scrubbing would get it clean.

A tap on the window drew her attention to a man in a suit and tie. He wasn’t from Kingston. Except for weddings and funerals, nobody in this little town dressed like that.

She unlocked the door and poked her head out. “We’re closed today.”

“I’m here to see Queenie.”

“We buried her this morning.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Laura stepped back and let him in. “Did you know my mother?”

“We met. I’m Greg Totino.” He reached out to shake her hand.

“Laura Whitfield. I’d offer you something to eat or drink, but this place is so dirty, I’m afraid it might make you sick.”

“That’s why I’m here. I’m with the King County Health Department. Your mother was given notice to clean this place by today or close it down. She had multiple code violations.”

That wasn’t hard to believe. “If I can get it clean, can I re-open?”

“It needs more than cleaning. It needs a new exhaust system over the stove and probably a new stove. It’s a fire hazard with that much grease caked on it. The plumbing needs work and there’s a leak in the roof over the men’s room. Roaches. Mice. There’s a whole list of code violations.”

“Do you have a copy of the notice you gave Queenie?”

“Right here.” He pulled a copy off his clipboard and handed it to her. “All these conditions must be met before you can re-open. I’ll give you a three-week extension, but we’ll have to inspect it again before you can open for business. I wish you luck, Miss Whitfield. You’ve got a lot of work to do here.”

After the man left, Laura scanned the report. Queenie’d had three grease fires in the past four months. The vents were all clogged with grease, dirt and dust clung to the ceiling and hung off the air vents in the dining area, and everything in the kitchen felt slimy.

Laura felt like crying. Every one of these problems was caused by her mother’s neglect. If Queenie was too sick to keep it clean, she should have closed the café herself. “Maybe one more of those grease fires would solve the problem for good.”

“Maybe it would,” said a voice behind her.

Startled, Laura jumped. “Florence, I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

“I don’t know if this place will ever be clean again.”

Florence looked around. “Charley Fenderman said it was in bad shape, but I didn’t know it was this bad. I’m surprised the Health Department let her stay open.”

“They didn’t. I have three weeks to fix the plumbing, a leaky roof, get rid of the mice and bugs, and scrub off the grease and grime. They also want me to buy a new exhaust system, and if I can’t get the stove clean, I’ll have to replace it. Where am I going to get that kind of money?”

“I don’t know ’bout money, but I know how to clean. How ’bout some help?”

Laura nodded. “Thanks. I’d appreciate it.”

Florence was an attractive woman with a trim figure and hazel eyes. She changed her hair color often, but she didn’t look or act like a prostitute, at least not like Cindy, the only other prostitute Laura had ever known. Cindy wore a ton of makeup and so much perfume you could smell her coming. Laura often wondered if her customers went home to their wives smelling like that.

Although Florence had never been more than a frequent motel guest, a casual acquaintance Laura had barely spoken to before today, things had changed. Dad loved her.

“I’m glad he has you, Florence.”

Her face beamed with a big smile. “Well, thank you, honey. That’s a right nice thing to say.”

“I want him to be happy.”

“So do I, honey,” Florence said softly. “So do I.”

They must love each other. Why else would Dad give up his cigars and move halfway across the state? Laura couldn’t figure out why he’d wasted years in a marriage that was no kind of marriage at all. He should have divorced Queenie and found another woman when Laura was a child. When she needed a mother.

When she was a little girl, Laura used to dream about having a real mother, someone who’d love her unconditionally. Other kids had mothers who took them shopping and to the beach, mothers who tucked them in at night and acted like their kids were the most important people on the planet.

And she had Queenie.

The last time she’d seen her mother alive, she’d worked at the motel from dawn until ten-thirty, cleaning rooms, scrubbing bathrooms and doing the laundry. She’d already done a full day’s work before she went to the café to work the lunch shift. Around three that afternoon, she sat down with a glass of iced tea. There were no customers, so it should have been a good time to take a short rest before the dinner shift began.

Queenie said, “You’re not finished in the kitchen.”

“I need to rest a few minutes.”

“You’re lazy.”

Queenie’s words stung. Laura looked into her eyes and asked, “Why do you hate me so much?”

“Get your lazy butt out of my café and don’t come back.
Go.
I don’t need you here. I don’t want you here.”

“Fine! I’ll find a job somewhere else, somewhere I actually get paid.”

Laura was on her way out the door when Queenie called after her. “Try prostitution. You can spend all your time on your back.”

Queenie had always been critical of Laura flirting with the customers, but she’d never said something that cruel.

The angry words still echoed in Laura’s head. “You’re lazy... lazy... lazy... lazy.”

Now she understood why Queenie had left her the café and motel. She thought Laura was too lazy to handle it. Queenie expected her to fail. It hurt down deep to know that her own mother thought so little of her.

“I’m not lazy,” she said to the room.

“Do you hear me, Queenie,” she yelled. “I’m not lazy.”

Chapter Two

F
lorence left Laura in the café and walked back to the motel, where Bruce was cleaning out the office and getting things organized.

They’d both known Queenie was doing poorly, but nobody expected her to keel over and die so quickly. Bruce said she was dead before the paramedics got there.

She wasn’t sorry Queenie was gone, but she was sorry their trouble had to end this way. Queenie had forced them to live like this, and Bruce couldn’t find a way out. If it had been up to her, she would have taken Laura and left Kingston twenty years ago. If Queenie called the law on them, she would have denied everything.

All Queenie wanted back then was her husband back and a baby to love, but Bruce was so angry, he wouldn’t give her the time of day. She’d blackmailed him into staying here with Laura, but she couldn’t blackmail him into loving her.

“Bruce, did you know the health department shut Queenie down?”

“No. She never said a word.”

Florence gave him a long look. “Of course not, Bruce. When’s the last time you had a civil conversation with her?”

He dropped a few things in a box and closed the desk drawer. “Laura was in the first grade, and Queenie was playing mother, coaxing her to go to the café after school instead of coming home to me. She didn’t deserve to have a daughter, so I ended it.”

No, Queenie didn’t deserve to have Laura, but by denying Queenie, he’d also denied their little girl a chance to have a mother. Florence loved Bruce, had loved him for years, but there were times when she felt like shaking some sense into him.

Bruce never did tell Laura that Queenie wasn’t her real mother. Laura grew up thinking it was Queenie, and Florence grew up without her precious baby girl. Sometimes she ached with wanting to hold her daughter and tell her how much she loved her, but Bruce wouldn’t let her. He said Laura had a hard enough time growing up in this backwater town without knowing her real mother was the woman everyone called Florence the Floozy.

There was nothing in the world she’d rather do than be a real mother to Laura and a wife to Bruce, but their chance had come and gone. Queenie had made sure there would never be a happily ever after.

The three of them would never be a family.

<>

Laura cleaned up the sugar in the storeroom, swept a pile of crumbs and food off the floor in the kitchen, and ran the vacuum in the dining room. The carpet was so worn she couldn’t tell what color it had been when it was new. There were traces of a pattern around the edges of the room, but the middle was grayish, with splotches of grease and ketchup stains.

There was so much work to do, she didn’t know where to start, but she didn’t have time to get into it today. Florence was cooking dinner for the three of them tonight.

She pulled out all the cleaning supplies she could find and dragged the ladder over from the motel storeroom. They’d need it to clean the ceiling light fixtures and replace the burned out bulbs. It was a two-person job, so she’d wait for Florence.

Dad tapped on the open door. “Florence says dinner is ready.” Instead of coming in, he backed away and walked back to the motel.

The only time she could remember him being in the café was when she was in the first grade. He and Queenie had a huge fight that day, and Queenie cried, the only time Laura had ever seen her cry.

She closed the door and locked it. The cleaning could wait until tomorrow. It would take at least a week to scrub the kitchen, and she doubted the stove would ever come clean. How long had Queenie been sick, and why had she kept the café open so long?

Florence was in the apartment kitchen making gravy to go with the roast beef. Dad walked up behind her and kissed her neck. She laughed, and Laura felt a little pang of jealousy. It had always been just her and Dad. Now Florence was stealing him away.

Laura watched them share warm looks and smiles. She couldn’t remember her father ever looking so content. The hard lines of his face softened and the hate she’d seen in his eyes at the funeral was gone. Queenie’s death had set him free.