Leaving the Comfort Cafe (7 page)

Why was it when Austin heard a foreign language he assumed it was always about him? He knew the local Hispanics had better things to talk about than the town government Gringos. Whenever he heard Spanish, he remembered that his whole life, he had only studied Latin, mainly at the insistence of his father. As if learning the language of ancient Rome would give him an edge in the job market, should he decide to apply to law school or medical school or run for office as Caesar. Veni, vidi, vici. I came, I saw, I conquered. Town management wasn’t on the list of options. Neither, of course, was cartooning, but town management seemed to sound less distasteful when his father would be asked, “what is Austin doing?” at dinner parities.

“Está bien…es muy paciente conmigo.”

For some reason, Austin felt the Mexican woman was trying to convince someone on the other line the same thing.

The café kitchen seemed to be enjoying the afternoon lull, like a cat stretching on a couch for a brief rest before things got busy. Fresh coffee was made, the kitchen was inventoried, and although there were no waitresses working the front area, Austin could hear their quick, dutiful shuffles in white orthopedic shoes coming from the back of the kitchen. He sat in the same place as last time to ensure Blythe would be his waitress. The table didn’t have any remnants of syrup or any of its sticky accomplices. The afternoon sun bounced a strong glare off of the table beside him, and Austin had to leave his seat and adjust the yellow curtains to tame the light. When Austin returned to his booth, the seat cushion once again squeaked, but it seemed more like a low groan this time instead of the high-pitched scrunch he remembered.

He caught the eye of a waitress who had heard him enter. She picked up a packet of silverware, a placemat and a menu and then briskly walked to his booth. Austin thought she seemed a little too eager when she slapped down the menu and placemat in front of him and unsheathed her note book from her white apron pocket with one smooth, uninterrupted motion of her arm. Her pen was poised to take his order.

“Uh, excuse me, I was looking for…” His tongue tried to form the syllable of Blythe’s name, but it failed him. His throat was unnaturally dry. He could only gesture, twirling his index finger around his hair, as if to imitate her untamed tresses.

“Oh.” The waitress glared. “Blythe!” she barked. “It’s another member of your fan club!” Then under her breath she added, “Stupid redneck.”

Austin sank down in his seat and tried to hide behind the menu. He ran his finger along the “Highlights of North Carolina” placemat, making a mental inventory of places he could ask Kerry to visit…the Lost Colony…Kitty Hawk…Blue Ridge Parkway…and then Austin noticed that where the placemat listed the tulip as the state flower, someone had scratched out “tulip” and wrote beside it in crooked cursive, “It’s the dogwood, you morons!” Austin squinted, wondering if it was the same cursive that had lured him into the café with homemade signs declaring homemade desserts.

Austin skimmed the dessert selections, wondering if the raspberry tart held a captive audience as well as the pecan pie. Then, he discovered a message, scrawled in a half-interested hen scratch, just below the desserts, declaring to all patrons: “For Blythe’s Bedroom Special, call toll-free…”

It bothered Austin with a dull kind of sting you get after putting a tad too much salt on your scrambled eggs—the worst part is that you know that you have ruined your own eggs, and no matter how much you have looked forward to having them, you can’t undo the heavy salting that rendered them inedible.

Blythe arrived from the kitchen. She had changed her fingernail color from a blue to a deep purple. She was chewing gum loudly, and occasionally Austin saw a bright pink wad of bubble gum peek out around her lips. She was wearing the oversized, white orthopedic shoes that nurses wear, and Austin noticed that her socks were mismatched—one was brown and one was black.

“Well, who’s minding the shop now that our town manager is out on his late afternoon, sugar-rush break?”

Austin grinned. “They didn’t tell you? The town just manages itself.”

“Hm. Hm. What can I get you? And don’t say decaf coffee because it’s too late in the day to even think about that kind of junk.”

“I—ah, I thought you should know…” Austin pointed to the advertisement of Blythe’s boudoir abilities etched into the menu. Right above the drinks and across from the kid’s plates. He didn’t want to embarrass her, but felt like it was a way to try to protect her virtue, to show he had her best interests in mind, to return his appreciation for her daring snake attacks.

“Oh, that is so embarrassing.” She gingerly took the menu from his hand and took out a pen. “Thank you so much for bringing it to my attention.”

She plopped the menu back on the table and, to Austin’s surprise, retraced the name, number and derogatory comments over again so that instead of being an afterthought in faded ballpoint pen, they were now in front-page, bold-type for any customer to see, even from a distance.

“I was afraid it might have started to fade a little. A girl’s got to keep her options open.”

Outside, it had started to drizzle. Austin wondered if he had left his windows down.

“Um…Blythe, is the raspberry tart good?”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“Really?” he asked.

“If you like that kind of stuff, see. Now, I don’t care for it myself. She puts too much sage in it.”

“Sage? I didn’t know you put sage in a raspberry tart.”

“Well, you can put all manner of stuff in it if you’d like. You can put beets, chocolate, whatever. Course, stray too far off the beaten path and you haven’t got raspberry tart at all, you got…ah, whatever. You want the tart?”

“What?” he muttered, the sage comment was causing second thoughts.

“Do. You. Want. The. Tart?”

“Um…sure.”

“Oh, and as a part of a special campaign today, we are adding one dollar to every plate to go toward councilwoman Jane’s artistic residency that she’s trying to establish. Heard of it?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact I just—”

“Wouldn’t it just be the greatest thing?” Blythe continued as if Austin was from another planet and had never heard of a residency and had no concept of how they worked or what their purpose was. She explained it to him with the wide-eyed enthusiasm that kindergarten teachers display to keep their charges entertained. “I mean, imagine, being able to just disappear from the world and do nothing but concentrate on your work. No phone, no television, no worries from your job, none of those pesky responsibilities.”

“Didn’t Jane inadvertently harbor a fugitive?”

“Fugitive? You talking about the mayor’s daughter?”

“Holy crap, the mayor’s daughter was a fugitive?”

“Not by a long stretch. Got caught smoking some weed, and after she was processed and posted bail, she was too depressed to go home. So I told her to just go by Jane’s place. Just for the night. But tell her Daddy where she was. He could get all his fuming out of the way while she won’t there, and then maybe he’d have worn himself out and have no cuss left in him the next morning.”

“I thought…”

“Oh yeah. Rumor got started that it was this dangerous criminal from state prison. Mayor’s still jealous because his daughter likes Jane more than she likes him, and so, well, it just seemed it would hurt her chances a little more if he just went with the rumor.”

“I guess small towns are full of stories.”

“How long have you lived down here? Don’t you get that, down South, the art of storytelling is an Olympic sport? Anyway, that’s one reason we want to help out Jane’s efforts. And by ‘we,’ I mean ‘I.’ I mean, just imagine what it would be like, Austin. It would be like—you bury yourself in this cocoon, and when you emerge, you’ve finished the Great American Novel, and as a result, you’re a totally different person.”

Something about Blythe’s tone revealed an inner passion. It was the same eager vibrato he’d heard in Kerry’s voice when she talked about her work. “I didn’t realize you were such an ardent supporter of the arts.”

“Well, I have to admit, I do have kind of a self-serving interest.”

“The artists will come to the café to sample the pecan pie and leave good tips for a pretty smile?”

“Cute thought, but no, I mean…I looked into one of those residencies once, and I just…I just thought it would be great.”

“Really? Do you write?”

“Now why does everybody always ask me that? Do they smell alcohol on my breath or something? No, I’m a photographer.”

“Really. What do you photograph?”

“Whatever stays still long enough, honey. Whatever stays still long enough.”

Austin laughed.

“Seriously though,” Blythe sat directly across from him, looking around to be sure no one was watching, as if sitting in the booth was such a huge taboo that it could only be accomplished by stealth. Austin noticed that the seat cushion didn’t utter a single squeak of protest, as if Blythe were weightless. “Have you ever been to the Outer Banks? They’ve got all these wild horses out there on the islands. They’ve named them and everything. They’re supposedly descended from the Spanish conquistador horses or the horses from the first settlers, whatever, and they just roam wild and free out there on the islands. I’d love to take photographs of them—you know, just camp out and live there among them. Be that Jane Goodall woman, except with horses.”

“Sounds lovely.”

“Or so I’m told. I’ve never been out there. You have to go by boat. Grandma—you know, she owns the café—says she has a cousin who rents kayaks on the coast. Said I should go. But not now. Not in August, she says. Wait until late fall, when the weather cools down and the tourists aren’t crowded around everything. They bite, you know.”

“The tourists?”

Blythe laughed. “Well, I was talking about the horses, but…if the shoe fits. Now, you want to try that tart?”

“Certainly.”

“I’ll tell Grandma to lay off the sage. Want anything else? I’ll give you some decaf coffee, though I don’t recommend it. Don’t recommend it for anyone except maybe people who have insomnia. I might recommend it to them, but even then, I don’t like doing it.”

“Well, since you’re willing, I’ll take the decaf coffee.”

“Sweetheart, you have got to live a little.”

“I guess I just don’t like to stray too far from the beaten path.”

“The beaten path,” Blythe said, tossing her hair over her shoulder as she jumped from her seat, “is grossly overrated.”

“Didn’t you live out West for a while?”

“I’ve lived lots of places. I try to forget most of them.” Blythe scribbled busily on her order pad, even though Austin knew there was no way his order warranted that much writing. He sensed she was getting defensive. Not a good time to shuffle through the stories.

“I mean, I just wanted to thank you for your help yesterday.”

“With what?”

“With the uh—snake eradication program.”

“Ah, yes. The Snake Lady.”

“Does she even have a real name?”

“If she does, no one uses it anymore. I’d guess even she’s forgotten it by now. You laugh, but Snake Lady can carry a surprising influence. Called the Raleigh paper on the last town manager. Told them about how negligent the town management is to have the town’s property become a public hazard.”

“You’re kidding? They ran a story on her?”

“Well, no. Because they got up here and realized the poor woman isn’t all there. She’s kind of ‘gone round the bend’ as the Brits say. I heard that on PBS once. I like to listen to the Brits talk on PBS. Anyway, since then, no one’s ever taken her seriously.”

“Well, at least there wasn’t a media crisis to deal with.”

“True, but do you really want to spend your day dealing with the media when you could be doing other things? It’s just because she wants someone to listen to her. That’s all. She’s lonely…like everyone else in the world. And whether it’s snakes or gophers or the boys down the street with the baggy pants, everyone just wants to feel that the powers that be listen to them. You know what I mean?”

“Well, I’m very grateful for your snake-fighting skills. I would love to have seen you in action. Snake Lady tells me it was quite impressive.”

“You better believe it.” Blythe winked. “That garden hose never knew what hit it.”

Austin watched her leave to get his order. She walked as if one leg was shorter than the other, and the tap-TAP, tap-TAP, tap-TAP of her pace created its own bizarre melody. But Austin couldn’t see any evidence of a built-up heel or specialized shoes. It was as if this was Blythe’s mild-mannered alter ego, and it was just itching to rip off her waitress clothes and emerge as a crime fighting, horse photographing, snake-stomping defender of the downtrodden. He wanted to take pen and ink and delicately glide her figure over a crisp white sheet of paper, taking the artistic license to shrink her waist and enlarge her breasts to ridiculously anatomically incorrect proportions that appeal to the graphic novel’s market share.

Instead, his hands took a life of their own, withdrew his Palm Pilot and copied Blythe’s phone number from the menu.

The Conyers Board of Aldermen only met once a month, and with the problems the town was facing, Austin adamantly told them they should meet more often. He tried to explain that the town garbage trucks were spending more time in repair than they were on the street, and the sidewalks were in such disrepair, it was only a matter of time before someone stubbed their toe and sued the town. In addition, they had to announce the street closings for the Christmas parade in time to schedule public hearings and post the notice in the weekly newspaper. Never mind that the Christmas parade was usually three floats, the local Boy Scout troop, the local VFW and the Kiwanis Club (whose president always dressed as Santa Claus). And never mind that the Main Street of Conyers—which was the busiest thoroughfare in town—still only consisted of four stoplights. Still, there was procedure to follow. Austin hated to think what issues the town was facing that he was not aware of—Robert had to have a huge laundry list of items hidden somewhere. Austin had searched the town manger’s office in vain, hoping to find some type of booklet neatly listing all the priorities for the town, with an asterisk beside citizens like Snake Lady and others who could make his life miserable. It was as if this imaginary guidebook was the Holy Grail of town management, and by simply snagging it from the Fisher King, Austin would obtain all the answers to make his tenure smooth.