The Owl & Moon Cafe: A Novel (No Series) (20 page)

All the time the teachers told them they were super intelligent. In language arts, Mrs. Potter would say, right out loud in class, “Girls, Sally DeThomas is reading at a college freshman level. Lindsay Moon has earned the highest grade on a vocabulary exam ever recorded in the history of Country Day Academy for Girls.” Taylor’s group made kissing noises. Mrs. Potter was hard of hearing.

Country Day students came from mostly wealthy, forward-thinking families. Taylor Foster made sure everyone knew her dentist dad had built that new hotel in Marina that was brown stucco and everyone called the fifteen-story wart. During Choose a Career month, Taylor said, “It doesn’t matter what you do, what matters is that you make enough money for a comfortable life.”

Lindsay’s mom worked ten times as hard as Dr. Foster, but her life was far from comfortable. And look at Allegra. It wasn’t her fault that chemo made her hair fall out and that she sometimes had to use a wheelchair. Sally’s mom was in a wheelchair full time. But instead of seeing a woman trying to save her own life, and a woman succeeding despite her handicap, the Taylors of the world saw only freaks. Gammy said everybody had an Achilles’ heel. Sally had three. One was her chipped front teeth, and being called Roger Rabbit. Two was the subject of her Mexican father, who had died before she was born. Three was the fact that both her parents, mother and stepfather, were confined to wheelchairs.

Lindsay hated her curly hair, but that was nothing compared to being short. She wished she could stop thinking about everything. She knew she wasn’t clinically depressed—she took the internet test but didn’t have enough of the symptoms. But the pressure of conforming to the loose, interdisciplinary structure of teaching was so much worse than following hard-and-fast rules over time. She ached for tests with right and wrong answers, subjects so hard she’d have to resort to using acronyms in order to memorize difficult terms. And to top it off, how about some kind of P.E. that made sense? Some people were just no good at hatha yoga. She knew where the Louvre was, that the political climate in Chile was unstable, and that Billy Collins was the poet laureate of the United States though some people didn’t think it was fair because his poems were too easy to understand.

Mrs. Shiasaka was right to give them the imaginary dialogue assignment. You could have an imaginary conversation with someone and see things differently. Maybe Carl Sagan would talk to her again. A lot of pretending and listening to Carl Sagan—that was what it’d take to get through this last year of Country Day.

As she entered the café she looked up at the owl. He wasn’t great art, but he was always there, his talons gently curved over the moon, not poking. His beak had chipped. Someone should climb up and paint it. When she saw Dr. G sitting at the counter, she said, “Is Allegra going to die?”

“Of course not, Lindsay. I’m sorry I alarmed you.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Picking up some soup for dinner. Apparently hospital food isn’t organic enough for your grandmother.”

“Can I visit her?”

“It’s a school night, isn’t it? Why don’t you call her? She needs to rest. Tomorrow or the next day I’ll probably release her. How was school?”

Lindsay set her backpack behind the counter. “You really want to know?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t mean it.”

She sighed. “I got in trouble and my teacher’s going to call my mom and I’ll probably get a mark on my permanent record. School sucked. Big time,” she said instead of “donkey dong,” like she wanted to. Her face flushed. “Sorry about saying ‘sucked.’”

“Don’t apologize. It sounds as if it did indeed suck.” He patted the stool next to him. Gammy was waiting on customers and her mother wasn’t anywhere to be seen. “I’d be happy to listen if you want to talk about it.”

“It’s complicated.”

“I’ve got time.”

“Some girls at my school are kind of mean to this one person. I stood up for her, and my teacher got mad.”

“Sounds to me like you did a good thing. What’s this teacher’s name?”

“Mrs. Shiasaka. I have her for homeroom and ‘Life Paths, Life Questions.’ ”

“Sounds like an interesting class. I don’t understand why you would get in trouble for standing up for a friend.”

“Probably because I might have…” she hesitated, trying to swallow the lump in her throat. “Been kind of emotional.”

“There’s nothing wrong with showing emotion,” he said. Dr. G took his cell phone from his jacket pocket. “What’s your school’s telephone number?”

“You don’t need to call them,” Lindsay said. “It’s my mess.”

“Oh, but you see I have to, Lindsay. I took an oath to heal others, and this teacher sounds mentally ill.”

Lindsay laughed. “She’s not, honestly. Most of the time she’s pretty nice. We kids drive her crazy.”

“What’s the number?”

Lindsay repeated it, and Dr. G pressed all the numbers.

“Sure, I can hold,” he said, and winked at Lindsay.

Her mother came out from the kitchen. “Hi, Linds,” she said. “How was your day? Did you do anything—”

Dr. G held up a finger like the call was important, and she shushed. Then he walked outside onto the sidewalk and began talking. What was he saying? Was she going to get into more trouble because of it? “My day was pretty much the usual,” Lindsay said, which was the truth. “How was yours?”

Her mom looked around the café like it was a jail cell. “Same here. Hungry?”

“Not really.”

“How about some cocoa?”

“I have a lot of homework.”

Dr. G came back in. “I love it when problems can be so easily resolved. Now, if your grandmother would follow my instructions, the two of us would be going out to dinner and a movie instead of back to the hospital. There’s my soup. Thank you, Mariah.”

“You’re welcome, Dr. Goodnough.”

“I wish you’d call me Al.”

While she waited for her mother to say “Sure, I will,” Lindsay scrutinized Dr. G’s strong chin that jutted out just like her mom’s when she was making a point. His eyes were big like her mom’s and the exact same color. A grandfather paradox, or a grandfather of her own? What if he was her mom’s dad, and this was only the very first time he’d come to her rescue? Wasn’t a good scientist supposed to say something? Or would the truth reveal itself over time? How did a person decide what to do?

“I’ll try,” Mariah said, but to Lindsay it didn’t sound like she meant it.

Lindsay didn’t want him to leave just yet. She wanted to examine him, gather more evidence. “Dr. G, what is your opinion on the Human Genome Project?”

He thought a moment. “Lindsay, it’s so controversial I couldn’t really sum it up in one sentence. How about we take a walk and talk it over?”

Lindsay looked at her mother. “Can I?”

“Fine with me. Take Khan, why don’t you? I’m sure he’d appreciate some fresh air. I’ll put the soup back in the fridge. When you’re ready to go, you can find it there.”

“T
HE DAY HAS ARRIVED
,” Allegra said to Lindsay the morning after she was released from Hell Central, aka the hospital. Her darling granddaughter had brought her toast, tea, and a tiny cup of berries in yogurt for breakfast, and sat there while she ate what she could. Bless her heart. If anyone understood how touchy eating could be to a person who wasn’t hungry, it was Lindsay. “I’m finally ready to do the deed.”

Lindsay grinned. “Good for you, Allegra! Lots of people do it. It’s not just men anymore. If we lived in Europe no one would even notice.”

“Brace yourself, babe. People are going to notice. Gammy, for one. Fetch the clippers. They’re in the hall closet, behind the towels.”

Allegra watched her granddaughter with delight. Her last night in the hospital, Al had stayed long after visiting hours. She laughed when he related Lindsay’s “getting in trouble” at school story, and at how he’d taken care of it with a phone call. How dare you inflate normal schoolgirl tiffs when Lindsay is under such tremendous stress, he’d said, and that was the end of that. Allegra thanked him for stepping in to fight the battle when she was too weak to do it. Which of course was exactly the right time to tell him he was Mariah’s father. But she’d held back, and she knew why. She didn’t want to invoke Hurricane Mariah.

Where Mariah would have grounded Lindsay for talking back to a teacher, Allegra thought the child deserved a reward. Lindsay was standing up for her beliefs—Allegra had filled her with examples: Martin Luther King Jr. speaking for the black man, the scores of kids protesting the Vietnam War, Cesar Chavez organizing migrant workers—here was proof that her investment in the future was paying off. A future that despite Doc’s insistence, she wondered if she’d live to see.

She’d thanked him again, and cried a little. He’d taken her in his arms and patted her back.
Allegra, you’ll be there for her graduation,
he said.
Her first child, too, maybe even her midlife crisis, if you take good care of yourself.
Taking care was the key. These days her heart felt as tender as a rosebud. Any more sadness heaped on it would cause it to wither before it could bloom.

“I found them, Allegra,” Lindsay said, holding up the clippers.

“Thanks. I think the number-two blade will work best. Spread some newspaper around my chair. We don’t want to make a mess, especially since our vacuum is temperamental.”

At the sound of the word
vacuum,
Khan barked.

“Yes, Khan, we know the vacuum’s your mortal enemy,” Allegra said. “Now go back to sleep.”

“Want me to cut it short before we start?”

“Just shave it as close as you can. The nurse at chemo told me that sometimes a wig can be made from it.”

“No offense,” Lindsay said. “But wigs look fake. I think you should just go bald.”

“Let’s see how it turns out.”

Allegra heard the fateful click and the buzzing began. At the pinch on the sensitive hairs at the base of her neck, she closed her eyes, dropped her head toward her chest, and felt the clippers take their first row, and then the next. With every pass, she felt cool air touch her scalp and a weight lift. When the buzzing stopped, she opened her eyes and saw Lindsay arranging handfuls of hair evenly alongside one another at the edge of the newspaper. Mariah was downstairs baking. Gammy was at the store. Allegra had planned the haircut so neither of them would be able to talk her out of it.

“Ready to look in the mirror?” Lindsay asked.

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

Lindsay held up the glass, and Allegra ran her hands over her pale scalp, feeling the bumps and slight depressions. Her scalp felt like Al’s cleanly shaven jaw. Lindsay handed her a ponytail of her former hair. She held it against her cheek, but it no longer looked like it belonged to her.

“Allegra, please don’t cry.”

She sniffled. Step one of her plan was now ticked off the list. “I’m fine, sweetie. Just a moment of barber’s remorse.” She hugged her granddaughter to her, then spoke into the wavy strawberry blond hair so full of health it had a will of its own. “Now be a good girl and find me the prettiest scarf in the drawer.”

Step two, a few days later, required alone time with Al, but halfway through the movie Johnny Depp was doing such a good job of holding in his grief that Allegra lost control of hers. At first it was only hot tears welling in her eyes, the kind of sorrow she felt watching the Pedigree commercial “We’re for Dogs.” Sappy, the last shreds of her idealism waving in the wind like tattered prayer flags, proof her tired old heart could be had for a jingle. But the tears evolved to sniffling, followed by snuffling, and finally she had to hold the popcorn napkins over her mouth to muffle the noise of struggling not to sob.

While the credits ran, Allegra balled up the evidence, stuffed it in her shoulder bag, and walked out of the theater into the balmy October evening on the arm of the man she had never stopped loving.

“I told you we should have gone to the kung fu movie,” he said for the third time when they were seated at a table in Fifi’s, more of a restaurant than The Owl & Moon would ever be. Fifi’s may have had a larger variety of pastries, but Allegra felt sure The Owl & Moon’s were superior. “It’s better to laugh than cry any day of the week.”

She looked up at Al, this growing-old version of the happy hitchhiker, Grateful Dead Head, granola-for-breakfast Vietnam vet. “You’re right,” she said, regretting having lobbied so hard for what was described as the feel-good chick flick of the year. Lying bastard reporters having their fun. “Why do love stories have to be so doggone tragic? Can’t anyone write a happy ending anymore?”

He unfolded his napkin. “Beats me. In the online
Chronicle,
the critics said this movie was a sure bet for an Academy Award. If all it takes is crying, they should come to the E.R. Plenty of sad stories there.”

Allegra squinted at her menu. Could they make the print any smaller? “When did you turn into that kind of person, Al? Checking reviews before choosing.”

“Now don’t you dare pick a fight with me. I took you out tonight so we could have some fun.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He reached across the table and took hold of her hands. “Woman, we’re grown-ups with jobs and responsibilities and illnesses and children and this wonderfully rare connection. I find you sexy as hell and I was hoping if we had an old-fashioned date you might let me kiss you someplace other than your cheek. I’m sorry I researched the movie. Next time we’ll throw the I Ching.”

How did she tell him about Mariah? Her plan that a love story would soften him up had failed. Just as she was about to speak, Al cleared his throat.

“I guess this is as good a time as any for me to lay my cards on the table, Allegra. Do I have a chance with you? If not, let me down right now. My old heart can’t take leaping up if it’s going to be swatted down like some catnip mouse.”

“Al! Is that the way you think I treat you?”

“Not yet, but the possibility exists.”

She sipped her water, hoping that the right thing to say would come to her. She wanted to be brave, to tell the truth, but which truth did you start with? Buying time, she said, “You can’t find me sexy. I have no hair. I’m a scrawny old hen and my boobs have disappeared. You feel sorry for me because my life didn’t turn out very well and yours did. You’re worried that I’m going to die. That’s not love.”

“Horseshit.”

People were looking. “Al, there’s no need to raise your voice like that.”

“Why not? You seem to have no trouble saying blunt things and judging me. Seems to me I’m allowed to say anything I want if you are. I love you, Allegra.” He turned to the other diners. “Everybody got that? I love this woman.”

Allegra was shocked. This was her type of behavior, not his. “Al, let’s go. We’ll finish this in the car.”

He balled up his napkin and threw it down on the table. “No. I don’t want to finish anything. I want to start something. I love you, Allegra. Now look me in the eyes and tell me you don’t love me back.”

She was three days out of the hospital, pneumonia free, hematocrit rising. Instead of resuming the chemo, Doc had decided to put her on the wonder drug, imatinib mesylate, a name that sounded like pig latin. The pills cost three grand a month, and the insurance company was holding some kind of summit meeting to decide if they’d pay for them. What would happen if they said no? With her kind of leukemia, if you stopped the pills, the disease was more than happy to come back and finish what it had begun. The waiter came to the table and lit the votive candle in the glass holder.

Before he could rattle off the specials, Allegra said, “Can you give us a few more minutes?”

“Of course. How about I bring you sourdough bread just out of the oven, and some oil and balsamic vinegar, unless you’d rather have butter.”

“Plain bread and butter,” she said.

Allegra looked into Al’s eyes. “Of course I love you. I never stopped loving you. That’s the truth. I’ve spent years being a party girl, trying way too hard to have fun because I thought it would numb my feelings about you.”

He grinned. “Then for God’s sake, marry me! Let’s go do it tonight and spend the rest of our lives together. No more lost time. Not one single breath apart.”

Allegra bit her lower lip. “First I have to tell you something, and I’m scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“That it might change how you feel about me.”

“Allegra, there’s nothing you could say that will do that. Tell me already.”

“I’m trying to. Give me a minute. I want to say it right.”

The bread arrived. Al picked up a piece and began to rip it into pieces. “Are you planning to tell me anytime in the next hour?”

“First I need to use the restroom.” Allegra excused herself and headed for the door marked women. Inside, she braced herself on the vanity and looked in the mirror at the paper-thin copy of who she was at this time last year. She splashed water on her face, patted it dry with a scratchy towel, dislodging one of her press-on eyebrows. She fixed it, then she turned to the door, and opened it. He was still there, the man who had more hair than she did, her hopeful Doc, sitting and waiting, a tattered pile of bread on his plate that looked like something to feed to ducks.

Back at the table, she folded her hands, and looked up at him. “The Sufi poet Rumi once said that ‘Lovers don’t meet, somewhere along the way, they are in each other all along.’ ”

“Always with the poetry,” he said.

“Al, I’m trying—”

“Okay. I’m good with the poetry. Go on.”

She sipped her water. “It’s taken me thirty-three years to understand what Rumi meant. I was barely sixteen when I met you. Nobody thinks anyone that young is capable of loving somebody forever. Gammy sure didn’t.”

“Ancient history, Allegra. You’re an adult with a grown daughter and a grandchild. You can speak for yourself without checking in with the bingo queen.”

She tugged at the edges of her cloche hat, feeling the ribbon rose on the left side. “I know that now. I wish I’d fought for it all those years ago. Al, Mariah’s going to turn thirty-four this February. She’s your daughter. And Lindsay’s your grandchild.”

When she devised her plan back in the hospital, the pneumonia sat on her lungs like bricks. Between sips of breath, she bargained with Gammy’s God. More time, please. Let me do this one thing right to make up for all the times I got things wrong. She’d imagined Al hoisting her in the air and whooping with excitement; Al buying a round of drinks for the restaurant; Al yelling at her for keeping a secret but instantly forgiving her because he was so happy; the two of them throwing money down on the table and rushing to find Mariah and Lindsay for a family—a
family!
—hug. Instead, the man who had just proposed to her sat there, the expression on his face unreadable. “If you’ll excuse me for a moment,” he said, standing up, his napkin falling to the floor.

“Al, come back,” she said, but he turned and walked out the entrance of the restaurant.

Allegra retrieved his napkin and folded it, setting it next to the plate of ruined bread. How had her plan gone so wrong? Fuck poets anyway. Flowery language was one thing, but real life? Altogether different. She picked up the remaining slice of bread and checked out the cell walls. Really nice for sourdough. Her own starter, begun when Mariah was in kindergarten, had made so many rolls and loaves she couldn’t count that high. She hadn’t used it since she became ill. By now it was probably black with mold. She would give up her hair forever if it meant she could knead dough again.

Ten minutes later, she told the hovering waiter, “I’ll have the soup.”

When it arrived, she sat there staring at it, wondering if she could manage a few tablespoons. What if Al didn’t come back? He could turn her case over to a colleague. She could just hear Gammy: You made your own bed up with those slippery satin sheets and now you’re crying because you keep falling out of it. Well, all I can say is lie still and try not to sneeze. She set the spoon down and looked out the window.

October was unpredictable. Some days it was heat wave hot; other days felt like winter had settled in. Nights, it was damp and cold. Halloween, one of her favorite holidays, didn’t have much appeal this year. Lindsay was going to a party, not trick-or-treating with her scary-looking grandmother who didn’t need makeup to look like a zombie. Mariah had a date with Fergus. Allegra hoped that meant sex. Long ago Gammy had quit making popcorn balls for neighborhood kids due to urban legends about razor blades. Now she avoided the whole mess by playing cards with her friends out in the valley and the café stayed dark.