The wedding was a gaudy, over-the-top affair that was desperate to be featured in the Vows section of the Sunday New York Times. It wasn’t. I was happy to escape early on Sunday before the last round of ostentatious celebrating, which over the course of the weekend had me alternating between feeling pathetically single, righteously indignant about all the waste, and shockingly poor. I hadn’t shared my financial concerns with Lucy, but that five-year-old black sleeveless sheath I wore told the tale.
I dropped Lucy at her apartment, not intending to stay, but she dragged me upstairs and forced three glossy shopping bags into my hands. Recent acquisitions or retail therapy gone awry, many of the items still had tags on them.
“It’s too late to return these, but they’ll look better on you than they do on me anyway.” I peeked in one of the bags-a sequined jumpsuit, a velvet miniskirt, and a huge red patent-leather handbag with so many grommets on it I’d be surprised if they’d let me through airport security with it. Not that I was going anywhere. What did she think my life was like these days? Could I weed in a sequined jumpsuit? The next bag was more promising-a few sweaters and a huge white fur hat, which would come in handy if I happened to get the lead in the local theater group’s production of Dr. Zhivago, but would otherwise just collect dust in my closet. I thanked her.
“Call me. I don’t want you trapped in the hinterlands all winter. You’ve got new clothes. You need places to wear them!” I tried to think of that quote about avoiding activities that required new clothes, but it escaped me. Lucy hugged me, then I hit the road.
If I was no longer the downtown, all-in-black girl or the uptown I-have-so-many-names-on-my-clothes-I-look- like-a-Nascar-driver gal, I wasn’t the Junior-League-let-me-take-my-kids-to-a-playdate woman. I was a hybrid. A false something, like the false lamiums I’d be planting in Babe’s garden. A city girl in the suburbs and a suburbanite in the city. That observation gave me a lot to think about. And I did, all the way back to Connecticut.
The sun was setting over the river, and the orange glow was reflected on the limestone buildings on Riverside Drive. Farther north, I passed the Cloisters, a four-acre shrine to the Middle Ages that the Rockefellers shipped from Europe piece by piece, and that small Pantheon-like structure where I always imagined it would be fun to dance or drink or just sit and watch the river.
What did I care if some woman I used to know just got married? Good for her. And her husband seemed like a nice guy, once you got over the fact all his relatives were named Weena or Bitsy-nicknames that after a few drinks sounded vaguely like dwarves or euphemisms for genitals. For goodness sake, they’d named their dog Patrick. Couldn’t they find human-sounding names for their children?
Once I crossed the bridge I felt the big city trappings slip away. And the snarkiness. The clothing from Lucy would probably make their way to Goodwill, except the hat-she’d ask about that and expect to see me in it. And one of the sweaters she’d most likely bought after seeing Michele Obama wear one just like it, even though I’m of the opinion that argyle is for socks or golfers or Japanese schoolgirls carrying Hello Kitty backpacks. And I was none of those. I thought about my new fall wardrobe until I hit the Merritt Parkway.
At that time of day and that time of year the odds of seeing wild turkeys or deer on the highway were pretty good. I had the gardener’s natural antipathy toward deer, but I got a huge kick out of seeing a rafter of turkeys. I had planned to stop at Babe’s for coffee and one of Pete’s desserts-what the hell, I’d passed on the wedding cake- but when I got there the diner was closed. Babe rarely kept regular hours, so I thought perhaps Neil had surprised her and come home sooner than expected. That made four people I knew who were getting lucky that night, including the newlyweds. Alas, I wasn’t one of them.
I made a wide U-turn in the empty parking lot and out of the corner of my eye noticed it wasn’t entirely empty. Something had moved behind the lattice enclosure and donut sign.
Probably the Terminator raccoons again, who feel no remorse and won’t be bargained with, or maybe wild turkeys living it up in the last few heady weeks before Thanksgiving. I’d make sure to tell Babe next time I saw her so that she could put out the Havahart traps.
Four
It took days of fall cleanups to pay for my long weekend away. They were standing gigs from some of my regular customers and I’d enlisted three of Hugo’s compatriots who’d stayed in the States for leaf season, recruiting them at the bodega near the downtown car dealerships where men gathered every morning, rain or shine, hoping for a day’s work.
After the leaf blowers were turned off and the day laborers piled into their trucks, I’d sweep in to cut back perennials and fling annuals onto the compost pile or into the back of the used pickup that I went halfsies on with Hugo. Now that he was back in Mexico for the winter, I sometimes used it for the messy jobs to lengthen the life span of my Jeep, which was nearing 100,000 miles. The truth was, apart from the lousy gas mileage, I liked the idea of driving a pickup. I was still getting used to the stick and the strange center of gravity, but it made me feel tough, adventurous. American, even.
I didn’t pay much attention to the time, preferring to stop whenever the truck got full or when I got hungry, whichever came first. Then I’d head to Babe’s for sustenance. In the past, I’d brought my lunch like the men did, to save money, but without the social life the diner provided I could conceivably go for days without uttering a complete sentence, and that probably wasn’t healthy.
When I got to Babe’s, I found my usual seat at the counter occupied by a lanky guy in a gray sweatshirt and grimy down vest that looked like all the feathers had been sucked out of it. Just seeing him reminded me to wash up, so I did and came back and sat catercorner to him at the diner’s long L-shaped counter, as far away as I could sit without its being obvious that he grossed me out.
I scanned the blackboard for the day’s specials, but nothing appealed to me. Either I was feeling virtuous for having worked off the weekend’s calories or my grubby dining companion had put me off my feed.
“Just coffee, for now.”
“You sick?” Babe asked, mildly interested.
“No, I just need a few minutes.”
She brought my coffee and topped up my neighbor’s. He moved his keys and phone to one side with a veiny, calloused hand. We dutifully nodded like two people without the slightest interest in each other who were required to be cordial.
In a gravelly voice the guy said his name was Chase and he was in town for a couple of weeks to help a buddy of his who was in the countertop business. During the last week or so he’d become something of a regular at the Paradise while I’d been away and then working my tail off at my fall cleanup jobs.
“Is that right?” I said, hoping I sounded polite. Countertops held about as much interest for me as backsplashes, but every ten or fifteen years homeowners were forced to think about them and my number was coming up soon-the tiles on my kitchen island were popping up like cardboard shutters on an Advent calendar. So far my method of dealing with them was to put a heavy pot or vase on the ones that had erupted, but I was losing valuable counter space and would soon have to adopt another strategy.
“What kind of countertops?” I asked.
“Oh, the usual. The black stuff, the speckled stuff. Stuff like this.” He tapped a fork on Babe’s counter.
“Let me guess,” Babe said. “You’re not in the sales side of the business, am I right?”
He smiled, revealing a set of alarmingly bad teeth. “Yeah. I do the heavy lifting.”
You didn’t need to be a detective to see that underneath the down vest, the sweatshirt, the flannel shirt, the thermal, and who knew what other layers of insulation, this guy had all the brawn of an anemic coyote. Heavy lifting would not seem to be his forte. He saw what we were thinking.
“My pal is helping me out. We met in the service.”
Having had a brief flirtation with countertops the previous spring when the tiles in my kitchen started popping up, I happened to know that most of the stone and granite companies in Springfield were owned by Eastern Europeans. Babe knew it, too, since most of them were her customers. Was this guy trying to convince us that he’d been in the Bosnian army? Another dubious look must have crossed our faces.
“Okay, it wasn’t the service. We got in a little trouble when we were kids. Nothing serious-kids’ stuff.”
Something about the Paradise Diner acted like truth serum on certain people. Maybe there was something in the water. They came in and spilled their guts as if Babe were a therapist, a priest, and a parole officer all rolled
