Looking for Laura, page 4
Greta was a fabulous baker, and as shy as Sally was gregarious. She’d been operating the New Day Café for fifteen years before she’d hired Sally as a waitress, and Sally had turned the place from a sleepy little nook where early-shift workers stopped by for a quick cup of coffee and a warm apple turnover into a prime meeting spot that stayed open until midnight, serving coffee and pastries during the morning hours, light sandwiches at lunch and cappuccino, espresso and slices of cake in the evening to the college kids who were too young to get served at the bars in town.
Sally had loved being an early-morning shift worker, and she’d been able to keep that schedule when Paul was alive. Her routine had been to wake up at five forty-five, give Paul a kiss and slip out of bed, leaving him to sleep for another hour or so. She’d dress out in the hall by the armoire, then creep into Rosie’s room and kiss her, too. Rosie could be a handful when she was awake, but asleep she was one hundred percent angel, a plump little mound of girl under her downy yellow blanket, her hair a mess of auburn curls and her thumb conveniently positioned near her mouth in case she needed an emergency suck. In the predawn twilight she smelled of baby shampoo and powder, and her eyelashes were long against her cheeks. She was truly the most marvelous creature in the world.
Later, when Sally was busy serving the morning customers at the New Day Café, Paul would wake up, get Rosie dressed, fix them both breakfast and take Rosie to school. It was their special time together, that morning hour, and Sally used to be so glad they could have it. Now, though, she couldn’t rid herself of the suspicion that Paul might have been tossing a granola bar in Rosie’s direction every morning and then abandoning her to drool over his poetic missives from Laura. Or maybe he’d been calling Laura during his Rosie time, planning a tryst, whispering erotic secrets to her, swearing to her that there was no love in his house. If he used his cell phone, Sally would never find out, since the cell phone was billed to his office.
Or maybe—even worse—Laura would sneak into the house after Sally was gone. Maybe Paul would only be pretending to sleep through the alarm. He’d lie motionless in bed, listening for the sound of Sally locking the door behind her, opening the garage door, revving the engine of her dilapidated Subaru and driving away. Then he’d bolt out of bed, dial Laura’s number, let it ring twice and hang up. That would be their secret signal: Sally’s gone! The coast is clear! Laura would hurry over, slip inside—had Paul given her her own key? Sally would have to change the locks—and race upstairs to the bedroom, where Paul would “render her nothing but sensation” while Rosie slumbered innocently in her bedroom at the other end of the hall.
The whole thing was so sordid, so tawdry, so…clichéd.
Trying to tamp down her indignation, Sally scanned the café’s dining area to make sure Tina, one of the other waitresses, had business under control. A few of the regulars were there: Officer Bronowski in his crisp blue uniform, drinking a large morning blend, cream-no-sugar, and polishing off an eclair. The two suburban ladies—Sally didn’t know their names, but they always ordered flavored decaf, bemoaned the fact that they were on diets and then succumbed to Greta’s sticky buns and raspberry Danish—at a table near the window. And the mysterious guy in black who sat in the corner, sipping a cup of espresso and scribbling on the pages of a spiral notebook—writing a novel, Sally guessed. A brooding, angst-ridden tale of existential loss and ennui, being and nothingness.
Everything seemed to be under control. Tina stood behind the counter, sponging the polished marble surface. Sally had insisted on marble counters when the place was renovated a few years ago, even though they’d cost more than Greta had wanted to spend. “Stainless steel looks too institutional,” Sally had explained. “And polished wood doesn’t last as long. It gets nicked and gummy. Marble is indestructible, and it looks classy. New Day Café is a classy place.”
“It is?” Greta had asked, apparently bewildered. She herself wasn’t particularly classy. The offspring of German immigrants, she was a sixty-three-year-old widow who knew how to bake and not much else. She dressed in pilled cardigans and refused to read the newspaper because it had too much nastiness in it, and Sally imagined she would be baking her pastries at the New Day Café until the day she curled up and died, which probably wouldn’t happen for another forty years. Greta struck Sally as being as indestructible as marble.
The café hadn’t been classy when Greta had created it, but it was now, thanks to Sally. The windows were framed in cheerful blue-and-white striped curtains, and colorful abstract paintings hung on the walls—Sally had created them in her basement in one afternoon, then had them professionally framed so they would look like genuine art. Muted lighting draped the tables. The chairs, purchased during the renovation, featured cushions so a person could sit comfortably for a long time. “Why do we want them to be that comfortable?” Greta had questioned her. “They’ll buy one cup of coffee and then occupy the table for hours because they’re so comfortable. Better they should buy, drink and leave.”
“We want the New Day Café to be a destination,” Sally had explained. “We want people to think about lingering. Once we’ve got them in the door, we don’t want them to leave. They’ll buy another cup of coffee. Or a big chocolate chip cookie to munch on. This isn’t a take-out joint. It’s a cozy hangout.”
“So, you got a business degree when I wasn’t looking?” Greta had asked.
“No. I’ve just got a lot of common sense,” Sally had assured her. It wasn’t necessarily true, but she did seem to have good instincts when it came to the café. Every improvement she’d pushed through increased profits.
Greta had given her the title of manager three years ago, and she’d drawn up a contract that entitled Sally to a share of the profits. The job didn’t pay as much as being a partner in a law firm did, but Sally and Paul hadn’t really needed the money she earned. However, working at the café was essential to Sally. It taxed her brain in interesting ways. It gave her a chance to schmooze with customers. It got her out of the house so Paul and Rosie could bond in the morning.
Assuming Paul hadn’t been spending his mornings bonding with Laura, the mistress of overheated prose.
Tina tossed her sponge into the small sink behind the counter. She had a vague look about her, her eyes unfocused, her smile enigmatic. Tina was a sophomore at the college, as Sally had been when she’d started working at the New Day. Like Sally, Tina needed money; like her, she was energetic and willing to work hard. Unlike Sally, however, Tina was not going to get accidentally pregnant. Sally was not going to let her.
It seemed odd that Sally could feel so maternal toward Tina when she was only six years older. But six years filled with marriage, a baby, home ownership, a job, widowhood and betrayal could age a person fast. Sally was feeling quite old at the moment.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Tina turned her glazed eyes to Sally. She wore her hair in a spiky short style, the better to display the assortment of studs, hoops and dangly earrings adorning her lobes. That was another thing that made Sally feel old: not just Tina’s array of earrings but her hairdo. Sally sometimes felt she’d been born in the wrong decade. She should have been a flower child. She would have loved the original Woodstock. She would have loved living on a commune somewhere, kneading bread and adding freshly harvested herbs to her vegetarian dishes, which she would serve to hearty, sturdy, unbearably sexy young men with long hair and beards, who would adore her because she was smart and gentle and nurturing.
Instead, she’d wound up with a clean-shaven lawyer, and she sold food someone else had baked.
She wore her hair long, though—usually loose down her back, but braided for work. She was pretty sure she was smart, and she tried to be gentle and nurturing, at least with people who deserved it, like Rosie and Tina.
Tina’s smile expanded slightly, the corners of her mouth edging outward. “Wanna see something?”
Sally wasn’t sure she did. But her sense of responsibility toward Tina compelled her to nod.
Tina scanned the room. Officer Bronowski was just finishing up, crumpling his napkin into a wad and pushing his chair away from the table. He was the only cop who ever came into the New Day Café after eight in the morning. The early-shift cops stopped by at opening time, and they slurped their coffee standing at the counter or took it with them in lidded paper cups. But Bronowski always arrived a little later, and he always ordered one of Greta’s prissier pastries—a wedge of carrot cake, perhaps, or a blueberry tart, or biscotti with slivers of blanched almonds adorning the top.
Paul used to say about Bronowski, “I think he’s a little light in the trousers.” Sally would defend the cop, arguing that enjoying an elegant pastry was no more an indication of homosexual tendencies than eating greasy doughnuts was an indication of heterosexual tendencies. Paul didn’t eat greasy doughnuts, did he?
Only because he didn’t want to gain weight, he’d explained. He was definitely heterosexual.
He was also dead, and since Bronowski had been the policeman who’d very sweetly, gently broken the news to her that her beloved husband—that lying, cheating son of a bitch—had left this world for the next, Sally would defend the officer’s sexuality, whatever it might be, until the end of time. She was happy to welcome him with a smile each morning and serve him whatever delicacy he wanted.
She and Tina waited until he’d donned his cap, nodded his farewell and left the café. The suburban ladies were still going strong, gossiping in high gear, and the dreary artiste in black was scribbling fervently in his notebook. No one needed their attention right now.
“Come here,” Tina whispered, motioning with her head that they should go into the kitchen.
With a parting look toward the customers, Sally reluctantly trailed Tina into the narrow room where Greta performed miracles with flour, sugar, butter and eggs. Huge canisters of ground coffee stood along one counter, and trays of unbaked pastries covered the long table that occupied the center of the room. Sally glanced over her shoulder; no one in the café seemed aware that she and Tina had ducked out for a minute.
When she turned back, Tina was untucking her Winfield College T-shirt from the waistband of her baggy khakis. She hoisted the shirt up under her armpits, peeled down the stretchy fabric of her bra and exhibited her left breast to Sally. Tattooed above the nipple were the letters H-O-W-A-R-D.
“Howard?”
“Isn’t it cool?” Tina’s smile reached full strength. “I just had it done this past weekend.”
“Why on earth did you name your breast Howard?”
“That’s not my breast’s name. It’s my boyfriend’s name.” Tina let out a giddy little sigh.
Sally gripped the edge of the counter to keep from clamping her hands on Tina’s shoulders and shaking her until centrifugal force tore the ink letters from her skin. “You tattooed your boyfriend’s name on your breast?” she asked, trying not to sound hysterical.
Tina nodded and offered another fizzy sigh. “Friday night. What do you think?”
I think you’re an idiot. I think you must have gotten into college via some special affirmative action program for dimwits. “What are you going to do if you break up with him?” she asked.
“Oh, that won’t happen,” Tina vowed with all the certainty of a young, naive imbecile. “I love Howard.”
“You love Howard.” It occurred to Sally that perhaps there were worse things than accidentally getting pregnant at the age of twenty, marrying for the sake of the child and blindly convincing yourself that you loved your husband so the marriage would seem acceptable. Etching six ugly blue-black letters permanently into your breast was definitely worse. “I don’t suppose Howard loves you enough to get ‘Tina’ tattooed on his penis?”
Tina giggled and her cheeks grew rosy. “Well, of course not. You can’t get tattooed there.”
“Why not?”
“Well, like, it’s so…wrinkly. I don’t know. And anyway, that would look so weird. Like, if you misread it, you might think it said ‘Tiny’ instead of ‘Tina.’ I don’t think any guy would want to go around with the word tiny tattooed on his…well, you know.”
“Penis,” Sally said, because uttering the word appeared to have the same effect as shaking Tina by the shoulders would have had. The girl blushed, she flinched, she looked flustered. “If he loved you as much as you think he does,” Sally observed, “he ought to be willing to put up with that humiliation.”
“Well, and anyway, I just don’t think you can do it there. Like, the needle would hurt too much.”
“This—” Sally gestured toward Tina’s breast, which she’d tucked back into her bra “—didn’t hurt at all, I take it.”
“Well, I don’t really remember. I mean, once it’s done, you sort of forget about it.”
“How can you forget about something like that? Every time you get undressed, you’ll be reminded of it.” Sally clicked her tongue and shook her head, feeling unbearably old.
“We better go back out,” Tina muttered, her smile fading. Evidently, Sally’s reaction to her tattoo was not what she’d hoped for.
But how could she have expected anything different? She and Sally got along well, but Sally was a mother. A widowed woman with a checking account, insurance and a car. Someone who might have believed in everlasting true love when she’d been Tina’s age, which seemed terribly long ago, but who’d stopped believing in it the instant she’d found those letters stashed inside Paul’s brown crew neck.
The suburban ladies were gone when she and Tina returned to the dining room, but the grim young man in black was still at his table, scribbling away. Tina glanced at the clock behind the counter and cringed. “I gotta go. I’ve got Social Ethics at ten.”
Sally remembered Social Ethics from her brief sojourn at Winfield College. It was a guaranteed A, and always solidly enrolled. She hadn’t been able to squeeze into the class because upperclassmen had had priority. If her life had taken a different turn, if she’d been able to stay in college, she would have taken it, even though she had no idea what “Social Ethics” meant. As far as students were concerned, it meant an A.
“Go ahead. It’s dead here,” Sally urged, although Tina still had twenty minutes before the class would begin. She would probably need those twenty minutes to recover from her disappointment that Sally hadn’t flung her arms around her and said, “What a fine, wise decision, to tattoo ‘HOWARD’ onto your bosom! I’m so proud of you.”
Nodding, Tina lifted her backpack from the floor under the counter. As she straightened, the door swung open and Todd Sloane walked in.
Sally grimaced. Todd was not a regular at the New Day Café. In fact, he wasn’t even an irregular. She couldn’t recall his ever having come into the café before.
He headed directly for the counter, aiming his eyes at Sally. “Friend of yours?” Tina whispered.
“No.”
“He’s cute.”
“No, he’s not.” He most definitely wasn’t cute. He was too tall, too rawboned, his hair too dark, his eyes even darker. His features might have been handsome if they’d had any sort of grace to them, but they were too harsh, too angular. His nose was big, which helped offset the sheer force of his gaze. His hands and feet were large. So were his shoulders. In fact, everything about him seemed large. She doubted he was deserving of a tattoo reading “tiny” on his penis.
What an odd thought. She’d never even thought of him in terms of sex.
And she wasn’t thinking of him in terms of sex now, she reminded himself. She was thinking of him in terms of his anatomy. Merely glimpsing him made her think, What a prick.
He moved directly to the counter, his gaze sharp and hard. Tina peered up at him, looking even more lovesick than she’d seemed when talking about Howard. More than ever, Sally wanted to shake her. If there was anything worse than tattooing “HOWARD” on your breast, it was looking as if you were thinking about tattooing “Todd” on your other breast.
She gave him a smile so chilly she felt the cold twinge in her fillings. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked.
“No.” He stared past her at the blackboard on the wall, which listed that morning’s available coffees. “Cinnamon hazelnut?” he read from the sign. “Kona?”
“The Kona is imported from Hawaii,” Sally informed him.
His frown could curdle the cream in the insulated silver pitcher on the counter. “No kidding.”
Maybe the prospect of admitting the truth put him in a lousy mood. Maybe the notion of coming clean to his best friend’s widow befouled his spirits.
Tina was still studying him, rapt and misty eyed. “Would you like a cookie?” she asked in a whispery voice.
He eyed her with mild curiosity, his frown softening. It hardened again as he turned back to Sally. “I don’t know,” he muttered.
“You don’t know if you’d like a cookie?” Tina asked hopefully.
“Go to Social Ethics, Tina,” Sally ordered her.
Slumping, Tina trudged out from behind the counter, adjusted the strap of her backpack on her shoulder and waved. “See ya,” she said, heading for the door. The legs of her pants sagged around her shoes and brushed the floor with each step.
Todd stared after her for a minute, then frowned. “Social Ethics?”
“Something you wouldn’t know anything about,” Sally retorted. If not for the letters, Todd would have been nothing more than her late husband’s pal. But with the letters he’d become Paul’s accomplice, his partner in crime. He’d become the living embodiment of Paul’s deceit, which meant she could be as nasty with him as she wanted.
“Look, Sally.” He bent close to her over the counter, so he could keep his voice down—as if the black-clad chronicler had any interest in their conversation. “I read those letters and I’m stumped. I don’t know who Laura is.”
“Liar.”
“I swear. Paul never told me he was cheating on you.”
“He told you everything.”
“Not this.”
