Running on Empty

Copyright © 2011 by Sandra Balzo 

Life on Main Street has always been inexplicably hazardous, no matter the season.
The skier who choked on her gum halfway down Deer Slope, arriving at the bottom still
standing, if not breathing. The fishermen squashed like road-killed possums by a Toyota
Land Cruiser against the front of Lucky's Bait Shop. The skinny-dipping White Tail
Lodge hostess, dead from hypothermia. And that didn't count the odd tourist or two
each year wandering into the mountains, never to wander back out to our High Country
version of civilization called Sutherton, North Carolina.

Nonetheless, the day Daisy Griggs reportedly siphoned nearly three pints of blood
out of poor Mrs. Bradenham during the town's annual volunteer blood drive is generally
acknowledged to stand above them all.

It's also what was sending me, Daisy's daughter AnnaLise, back to Main Street…

-AG

AnnaLise Griggs stood in a Wisconsin courthouse when she picked up, on the first ring
of her cellphone, the call every adult child dreads.

'AnnieLeez? This is Mama,' her mother's oldest friend said on the other end of the
line.

Mama was the only person in Sutherton — or anywhere else — who seemed constitutionally
incapable of pronouncing AnnaLise the correct way: 'Ah-nah-
lease
'. But, as surrogate-daughter had all her life, AnnaLise let her surrogate-mother's
butchering of the given name ride. 'I just have a second, Mama. Is everything all
right?'

'Pretty much. Excepting Daisy, she went and drained all the blood out of Mrs. Bradenham.'

Well, maybe not the call
every
adult child dreads.

'My mother
what
?' AnnaLise yelled.

Other occupants of the century-old, cavernous lobby turned, en masse, to give the
newspaper reporter a dirty look. They themselves might be junkies or prostitutes,
purse-snatchers or axe-murderers, but blare into a cellphone and everybody becomes
Miss Manners.

AnnaLise pivoted to face the dirty beige wall, still keeping one eye on a courtroom
door in case Urban County District Attorney Benjamin Rosewood emerged through it.
The prosecutor had just filed charges against a sixteen-year-old girl whose car skidded
on wet pavement and jumped a curb, killing her friend.

Tragic, yes. But vehicular homicide? Not in AnnaLise's mind, but reporters weren't
supposed to have opinions. Which is why AnnaLise buried hers in a personal journal,
thereby keeping the top of her head from blowing off.

At least, until now.

'Your mother,' Phyllis 'Mama' Balisteri continued, 'she was working the blood drive
like always, her being a lobotomist and all. But Daisy made a terrible, terrible mistake
this time.'

Despite her occupationally imposed if personality-driven need to edit , AnnaLise also
let ride 'lobotomist' versus '
phle
botomist' and cut to the car chase: 'Is Mrs. Bradenham OK?'

'Oh, sure.' If anything, Mama sounded a bit disappointed. 'But there was blood all
over the floor from running out the tube. Daisy up and cut it in the wrong place,
you understand?'

AnnaLise didn't understand, but Mama wasn't going to give her a chance to request
any clarification. 'Henrietta — the other lobotomist? — she said it looked to her
like three, maybe four pints.'

Three to four pints? Didn't the average person have only nine or ten total? AnnaLise
tented her forehead against the beige brick, trying to ignore both the explicit graffiti
on it and the heightened activity in the courthouse lobby. She did register two videographers
lift their cameras and train them on the arraignment session door.

'Where's Daisy now?' AnnaLise asked in a tone that already sounded tired, even to
her own ear.

'Don't you worry,' Phyllis said. 'I didn't let the chief's police boys take your mother
away.'

Assuming 'the chief' was still Chuck Greystone, AnnaLise's high-school sweetheart,
he certainly shouldn't have, at least not without calling.

'She's here at the restaurant with me,' Mama continued. 'But Dr. Stanton, he says
Daisy might not be quite right.'

'Right?'

Mama lowered her voice. 'You know, like... in the head?'

AnnaLise didn't answer, waiting one, two beats, as DA Ben Rosewood burst from the
courtroom and, throwing AnnaLise an apparently offhand glance, exited the lobby via
another door, all without breaking stride. Shouting questions, a group of her fellow
reporters became more like a pack of wolves, running their quarry to earth.

Feeling even smaller than her five feet of height, AnnaLise stayed where she was,
a human lean-to against the building's scarred wall.

'I'm coming home, Mama,' she said softly into the phone. 'Tell Daisy I'm coming home.'

Friday, Sept. 3, 7 p.m. On the road

Stopped at the Best Western near Middlesboro, Kentucky after a long day of driving.
About to order pizza for dinner, then early to bed. Tomorrow, I cross into Tennessee
and then Sweet Home North Carolina, arriving Sutherton maybe mid-morning. I'm trying
to look forward to Mama's cooking and not fixate on what else might be awaiting me.

-AG

For nearly as long as AnnaLise could remember, and even after leaving Sutherton for
college, she had called her own mother Daisy, and Phyllis Balisteri, Mama.

Half the reason for that was staring the journalist in the face as she waited on Saturday
morning while a black Ford Excursion with Florida license plates backed out of a lined
space. Above it, the sign read 'Mama Philomena's' in two-foot-high, neon letters.

The original 'Mama' had been Philomena Balisteri, Phyllis's mom. When Philomena died,
her daughter took over the restaurant bordering on Main Street, t
he boulevard rimming the south shore of Lake Sutherton. 'Boulevard', however, was
probably too grand a label for the two-lane road with angle-parking on one side and
the revered statue commemorating a loyal, local dog on the minimal median strip.

Most of the businesses stood on the same side of Main Street as Mama Philomena's,
their front windows facing only the beach and Sal's Taproom across the way. Think
of Lake Sutherton — the body of water as opposed to Sutherton, the town — as a figure
eight, but with a withered northern loop nearest the mountains. While Main Street
lived up to its name, other paved tributaries — like Church, First and Second Streets
— fed into it and disappeared.

The driver of the aging but well-preserved Excursion was barely inching backwards
from the space, and AnnaLise fought her mounting impatience with the out-of-stater.
Growing up in Sutherton, she'd learned that its pace of life was dictated by the ebb
and flow — not to mention frequent confusion — of the seasonal population fleeing
the oppressive heat and humidity of South Carolina, Georgia and especially Florida.

'Half-backs', they were called, because, as Mama put it, 'They're northerners who
go south for the weather, and then come halfway back.'

Half-backs, flatlanders, summer folk — whatever you called the crowds that descended
upon the cool, clear lake and ascended into the cooler, surrounding mountains — they
were the very reason the town continued to thrive, even during tough times.

Come summer, the population of Sutherton quintupled from a little less than a thousand
to 'a little more than bearable' as AnnaLise's high-school friend, Sheree Pepper,
would put it.

Winters also brought crowds, but of skiers. There weren't quite the number of tourists
as in the summer, but the snow-seekers seemed to take up more room on the streets,
wearing their down parkas and armed with skis and poles as they headed toward Sutherton
Mountain.

'All tourists, all the time' — another Pepperism.

Not that AnnaLise's friend could reasonably complain. Sheree owned the Sutherton Inn
on the far east-end of Main Street. Her thirteen rooms were booked solid the entirety
of both seasons. This Labor Day weekend, beds in Sheree's inn, stools at Sal's Taproom,
or booths in Mama Philomena's would be even tougher to get than parking spaces on
Main Street.

But AnnaLise hadn't lived in Sutherton — nor the High Country in general — since starting
at the University of Wisconsin, and patience was no longer a virtue of hers. She cautiously
reversed her gas-conscious Mitsubishi Spyder convertible to give the Excursion more
maneuvering room.

The angle-parking on Main Street was always good for a daily fender bender or two
as the summer folk tried to back onto it. The less charitable of the natives, nursing
beers at sidewalk tables outside Sal's Tap, took bets on which vehicle was going to
get nailed next. Mercedes and BMWs brought a special joy to the experience.

As AnnaLise finally wheeled into the space, she cringed at the 'vroom-vroom' caused
by a small hole in her muffler that had worsened on the thirteen-hour drive from the
upper Midwest. C
limbing out of the Spyder, she gave Main Street the once-over, glad — even relieved
— to see that it was pretty much the same as she remembered.

With one exception.

Until this past spring, most of the ground-floor storefront on the far corner had
been Griggs Market.
A small grocery and deli, the family business had become increasingly less profitable
over the last few years. Finally, Daisy had thrown in the towel and declared herself
retired at the age of fifty. She rented the retail space — but not her home, an over-and-under
apartment in the same building — to Tucker Stanton, son of the town's doctor, and
after months of renovation, Tucker's 'Torch', an upscale nightclub, was now open.

Turning back to Mama Philomena's — or just plain Mama's, as everybody called it —
AnnaLise could see her mother through the restaurant's big, plate-glass window.

Daisy was perched on a step stool next to the cash register, feet dangling. The old
place didn't have booster seats or high chairs. Kids who couldn't reach the tables
sat on the step stool or, when that wasn't available, a pile of ancient phone books.

When AnnaLise was little, she'd climb quietly right to where Daisy was now and watch
Mama fill plastic Moo-Cow cream pitchers by twisting off the heads and pouring cream
down the plastic cows' throats. Then, if the pitchers were tipped, cream would come
streaming out of the animals' mouths.

Which had struck young AnnaLise, who preferred her dishware anatomically correct,
as just plain wrong. She'd searched the undersides of the creamers for udders and,
finding none, resigned herself to the fact that adults apparently were fine with plastic
cows spitting into their coffee.

The Moo-Cow pitchers were considered vintage these days, however, and, as they disappeared
at the hands of sticky-fingered customers, Mama had locked up the last three — pitchers,
not patrons — in a glass display case along with other treasures beneath her cash
register.

'Out! Now!' The barked order interrupted AnnaLise's reminiscences as a man with the
itchy look of a corporate bigwig embarrassed to find himself just another schmuck
on vacation with the wife and kids, pushed out the door ahead of his family.