Love Mercy Read online

  She and her best friend, Magnolia Rosalina Sanchez, bought the restaurant three and a half years ago. It was something they’d fantasized about from the first week they met twenty years ago while working as waitresses in the very same building, back when it was called Freddie’s Fish House. A small inheritance from Love’s great-aunt Bitsy and Magnolia’s ability to squeeze a nickel had helped Love and Magnolia to buy and fix up the café. It had been a struggle from the beginning, but they’d always made a small profit. Until three months ago. Love even used some of the money she’d made when she sold the feed store after Cy died, but she’d had to set back a little to live on. Even though her house was paid off and she lived frugally, that wouldn’t last forever. The café had to start making a profit again, or they’d have to sell it.

  “What now?” she said, wishing for what seemed the millionth time in the last thirteen months that her calm-spirited husband was here to give his two cents.

  “Since when have you ever taken my advice?” he would have asked.

  “Not often,” she’d have answered, grinning. “But it’s always amusing to hear your opinion.” The truth was, he wasn’t really much better than she was at business. He’d been too much of a soft touch to make a real profit at the feed store, always giving away free dog, cat and bird food to grateful rescue groups and allowing folks credit far longer than he should have. He’d been a sucker for every sad story that trotted up the trail.

  How she missed his laid-back personality and that foghorn laugh of his, the laugh that rarely failed to make her join in, even if they’d been quarreling. He’d been totally in favor of her and Magnolia buying the café when it came up for sale. Whenever she worked the counter, he’d come in, pretend he didn’t know her and flirt outrageously. He’d leave her a twenty-dollar tip, which she always slipped right into the cash register.

  They’d met in Redwater, Kentucky, when he was on leave from Fort Knox. He bid seventy-five dollars for her strawberry-rhubarb pie at the Redwater Baptist Church Vacation Bible School fund-raiser. That was good deal of money in 1967, so it was clear he was announcing to her and the congregation his serious intentions. He was visiting with one of his training buddies, Jim Shore, whose father was head deacon at the church. Both boys were shipped out to Vietnam a few weeks later. After charming her mother, father and twin brother, DJ, Cyrus courted Love the old-fashioned way, through the mail. He wooed her with his square, neat printing, his silly jokes, his kind and thoughtful observations about the Vietnamese people and his mesmerizing descriptions of the Valley oaks, red-tailed hawks and rolling emerald hills of the cattle ranch his family owned on California’s Central Coast. They’d married two weeks after he was discharged from the army.

  Love glanced at the calendar. Thursdays were Italian day at the Buttercream. This week Magnolia was serving her famous gnocchi and homemade lasagna. Maybe if they cut down on the cheese and imported sausage in the lasagna, they could save a little money. Or they could make the portions a little smaller. Shoot, they could do that with all the menu items. The media was always saying that people ate too much. Would anyone notice?

  She shook her head. Even if no one else knew it, Magnolia would, and she’d not stand for it. Her daddy was from Alabama, but her mama was pure Italian. Magnolia had spent every summer of her first eighteen years visiting her mama’s sisters on Chicago’s Italian West Side. She’d been taught to cook and bake by her aunts Teresa, Marie and Bettina, loving taskmasters who showed her the secret to flaky cannoli and, as Magnolia called it, smack-your-daddy-good spaghetti sauce. Magnolia’s recipes were the one reason, Love believed, that San Celina County Life readers had voted the Buttercream Café as Best Locally Owned Restaurant for the last two years.

  Love turned back to the computer and stared at the unchanging figures. Maybe they could find cheaper hamburger buns that still tasted good. Or quit using the incredible maple syrup from that cute little family in Springfield, New Hampshire. It was unbelievably delicious, but was also a lot more expensive than what they could buy at San Celina’s new Costco.

  She traced a forefinger over the boat-shaped crystal desk clock next to her computer. It had been a gift to Cy from the guys at the Morro Bay boatyard when he sold his boat shortly after his second round of chemo, when the doctors said things didn’t look hopeful. That had been a hard day for everyone.

  Cy bought the battered old boat thirty years ago when their son, Tommy, was ten years old. He and Tommy spent countless hours fishing and bird-watching on that boat. They’d sanded, scraped, painted or stained every bit of the old vessel. Cy named it the Love Mercy, despite her protests or the fact that she’d ridden on it only a handful of times. She loved the ocean, never grew tired of photographing its endless colors and eclectic variations, but she preferred to remain onshore. She always claimed it was because of her eastern Kentucky genes.

  “I’m a backwoods girl,” she’d declare when anyone teased her about it. “I prefer solid ground beneath these size-eight feet.” The ocean and its mercurial moods were too unpredictable. She remembered that every time she walked by the tiny Anchor Memorial Park on the Embarcadero. The seven-thousand-pound iron anchor set into a concrete square showing the names of the men and women lost at sea reminded her too much of the coal mines in Kentucky that stole so many people from her life.

  The boat was the one subject that Cy and Tommy could always discuss when the pangs of adolescence and later, the disagreements between generations had made everything else unapproachable.

  After Tommy up and married Karla Rae Murphy and they moved to Nashville a week after the wedding, when Cy missed their son, he would take the boat out and float aimlessly around Morro Rock, watching the peregrine falcons and their chicks through his old binoculars. Love still used those binoculars to watch the ocean from her backyard, placing her fingers in the same spots worn smooth by Cy’s calloused fingers. It comforted her to put her hands where she knew his had been.

  After Tommy was killed fourteen years ago, working on the boat had been Cy’s way of coping with a grief too big for him to talk about, even with her. Love spent hours walking on the beach with only her old Nikon camera for company. The photos she took those first weeks after Tommy’s death were packed away in a trunk. Once developed, she’d never looked at the photos, though they were as fresh in her mind as the gash that scarred her heart the moment she received the phone call about Tommy’s accident from a friend of Karla Rae’s. It always hurt Love that she’d heard the news from someone she didn’t even know.

  She remembered in detail each photograph she took those weeks of walking. She could still see the loopy wave-diving surf scoters who reminded her of crazed bodyboarders, the black oystercatchers with their chisel-shaped, blood-colored bills, the frantic western sandpipers who were always running and screaming their high-pitched, teenage-girl screech—a sound that, at the time, she was tempted to mimic—and the peregrine falcons, so majestic and distant, perched high on the sheer edges of Morro Rock, looking down on them all, like they possessed the answers to any number of life’s complex questions. But the ones she found the most heartbreaking were the black turnstones: plump, tiny birds with streaks of white in their plumage. They liked rocky areas and, true to their name, spent most of their time turning over stones and seaweed looking for food. Their frantic searching echoed something deep inside her. She spent hours watching them, capturing their struggles to survive on film. Those first few months she and Cy seemed to live on separate planets, each trying to make sense of why their only child was killed by a drunk driver one rainy night in Nashville. The irony of how much that sounded like a country song was something that occurred to her during those long, solitary walks.

  She pushed her chair away from the computer, rubbing her stinging eyes. A walk. Yes, what she needed was a good long walk with Ace. Stop thinking about all the losses of her life and concentrate on the living. Maybe it would clear out the cobwebs, and she’d figure out how to keep the café going, serve their expected
high-quality dishes, not lay off anyone or cut back on portions. She’d take the Nikon and see if something inspired her. Clint would be wanting February’s photo and column soon. Then she’d head to the café and talk to Magnolia about how they could cut costs and still keep everyone happy. Wasn’t that every middle-aged woman’s lament—how do I keep everyone happy? For pity’s sake, she thought, who in the heck made us keepers of the world’s contentment?

  She was in the kitchen pulling Ace’s leash off the hook when the phone rang.

  “Love, you got to get down to the café right now,” Magnolia said.

  Love touched her right temple with her fingertips, already feeling a throbbing start. What had broken this time? Where would they get the money to fix it?

  “There’s this girl here,” Magnolia said, her voice as big and lush as the curly black hair that drove her crazy. “She says she needs to talk to you. Darlin’, she favors you some around the mouth. I’m thinking she might be one of your granddaughters.”

  One of her granddaughters? Love’s stomach twisted into a knot. Over the phone she could hear the café’s normal background sounds, a cacophony of rattling pans and loud laughter. Music twanged from the jukebox, a frenetic, vaguely country-sounding song. Love couldn’t make out who was singing, but it didn’t matter. As talented as they were, all those narrow-hipped, pretty young girls being pushed by the record companies looked and sounded so much alike. What happened to singers who’d actually lived a little life before they sang about it? Patsy Cline would be appalled. Or have a good belly laugh.

  “I offered her one of my cannoli, but she turned me down flat.” Magnolia took it real personal when someone turned down her food. “She just ordered coffee. She’s sitting there staring at the wall and drinking it.”

  “Maybe she just ate,” Love said, making excuses for the girl before she even knew whether they were related.

  “Maybe so.” Magnolia’s voice sounded doubtful. “Her arms are as skinny as broom handles. A little cannoli would do her a world of good. She said she hitchhiked here.”

  “Hitchhiked? From where?” The last Love knew, her three granddaughters and their ditzy mother, Karla Rae, lived in Pensacola, Florida, with Karla’s second husband, Pete somebody-or-other, who owned two Ford dealerships. Love hung Ace’s leash back up. “Did she tell you her name?”

  “Nope,” Magnolia said. “Believe me, I tried to squeeze it out of her, but she’s a persimmony little thing. All she said is that she has some business with Love Mercy Johnson, then she shut herself up, tight as a tick. What should I tell her? I said I’d call you but that I wasn’t about to just hand out your address to any ole person who asked. I told her that, for all I know, she was a serial killer.”

  Love smiled to herself. “What did she say to that?”

  “Not a blessed thing. Just nodded her head and held on to her banjo case like I was going to snatch it from her first chance I got.”

  Banjo case? Love tried to picture one of her granddaughters fitting her tiny hands around the neck of a banjo. Then again, she hadn’t seen them for almost fourteen years. They wouldn’t be tiny anymore.

  “How old does she look?” Love asked. She had three granddaughters: Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Faith Leann. Their names screamed out their mama’s unfulfilled aspirations. Pursuing her singing career was the reason Karla Rae and Tommy had moved to Nashville. Love quickly calculated her granddaughter’s ages; Patsy would be nineteen now, Loretta would be eighteen and Faith would be fourteen. Faith had been a baby when Tommy was killed. He’d been driving to the Piggly Wiggly to buy diapers for her when a truck broadsided his little Toyota.

  Lord, don’t let it be Faith, Love automatically sent up a prayer before catching herself. She’d stubbornly been avoiding conversations with God since Cy had died. Still, she didn’t take back the prayer, despite a slight feeling of guilt, because the mental image of a fourteen-year-old girl bearing Tommy’s sweet, round face hitchhiking on a desolate highway made her blood freeze in her veins.

  “Eighteen? Twenty?” Magnolia guessed.

  “It must be Patsy or Loretta,” she said, only slightly relieved. “I’ll walk on over. Tell her any food she orders is on my tab. Maybe she doesn’t have any money and is too embarrassed to say so.”

  “Okay, but my guess is she has one of those eating disorders so popular with movie stars and whatnot.”

  “Let’s hope she’s just broke.” Love wouldn’t have a clue about how to deal with an eating disorder.

  After she hung up, she thought of a question she should have asked Magnolia. Did the girl have red hair? If so, she would probably be Patsy. Loretta had brown hair, like Tommy. At least she did all those years ago. So many years, it felt like someone else’s life.

  She walked over to the kitchen window that looked out onto her small, grass-covered backyard. Morro Bay and the Pacific Ocean looked like a huge sheet of gray steel. So flat you could fry bacon on it, she could imagine Cy’s voice saying in his calm, even baritone that always held a soupçon of laughter.

  Soupçon. Now there’s a great word. Maybe she could work it into “Love’s View,” the column she wrote once a month for San Celina County Life, a local magazine delivered free to everyone in the county. Well, it wasn’t actually a column, she’d tell people, more of a columnette or a column-lite. Though she loved to read and found individual words fascinating, she didn’t actually like to write, so what she did was take a photograph of something in San Celina County and then write a short essay about it. The shorter the better. Frankly, she’d be happier if she didn’t have to write anything at all, just let the photograph speak for itself. Whenever she tried to explain what she was trying to say with a photo, it seemed to diminish the picture. It was like admitting she’d failed.

  January’s photo and column were done. She’d taken a picture of an elegantly graceful spider with patterns on her back that reminded Love of a Navajo rug. She—for some reason Love thought of all spiders as female—had built an intricate web at the side of the house, and Love had been observing its progress for days. Her photograph caught it early in the morning, the sun-bright dewdrops on the filaments twinkling like diamonds. In the web, an unfortunate fly awaited its ghastly fate. Her simple caption, “Bless this food we are about to receive,” was sure to be misunderstood, causing people to write in to the magazine demanding that she explain what she meant. Some people would be certain that she was somehow being blasphemous or, even worse, political (though they wouldn’t actually be able to explain why). The boys at the Rowdy Pelican saloon would give her the thumbs-up when she delivered their weekly two dozen Mexican chocolate cupcakes, appreciating her warped sense of humor. It was her shortest “essay” yet. Clint Lawhead, the magazine’s owner and publisher, would just laugh, congratulate her for making people think and tease her that it would have saved him a bundle if he’d negotiated paying her by the word rather than the 150 dollars she received for each column.

  Soupçon. It meant a very small amount. She imagined a photo of one of the café’s white soup bowls holding a teaspoon of bright red tomato soup, maybe a dented Campbell’s soup can next to it? No, too Andy Warhol. Besides, she didn’t really know what she was trying to say: that soup, which symbolized food, was too expensive? No, not a good thing to put out there when she was contemplating raising the prices at the café. Still, she liked the way the word sounded. And even better, it was a single word. It could be her shortest column ever. But the idea needed work.

  She looked down at Ace, who’d followed her to the window, wagging his soupçon of a tail, still hoping for a walk. She bent down and ran her hand along the white, airplane-shaped marking on the black ruff of his neck, the reason Cy had named him Ace. She scratched the top of the dog’s nubby butt, making him grin like a wolf.

  “If this girl is my granddaughter, she should have given me a soupçon of warning about her visit, don’t you think?” Ace cocked his head, his dark, shiny eyes giving her an intelligent look that always mad
e her wonder if he’d one day answer her in a thoughtful Timothy Dalton voice.

  When Cy was first diagnosed with lung cancer two years ago, he bought Ace from a breeder in Paso Robles. Always a planner, he told her he didn’t want her to be alone after he was gone. Ace, true to the corgi breed, was a handful from the beginning, and he’d accomplished what Cy had desired, forcing Love to go outside for walks and games of ball even on days when she would have just as soon stayed in her pajamas with the curtains closed, brooding about the unfairness of life, mad at God, uncontrollable cancer cells, drunk drivers and every happy person in the world. Yes, her husband was wise in bringing this crazy little dog into her life.

  Still and all, you old coyote, she scolded Cy in her head, I wasn’t any less sad when you left me. He isn’t you.

  “Well, flyboy,” she said to the dog. “Looks like we’ll be having us some company. If she is who we think she is, anyway.”

  How long would this girl want to stay? What did she want? Would she understand why Love hadn’t been in contact all these years? The sad truth was, her granddaughter had only heard her mother’s side of the story. Heaven only knew what the girl thought of her grandma Love.

  Karla Rae had never liked Love or Cy much, probably because they hadn’t been very discreet about their displeasure over her and Tommy’s impulsive move to Nashville.

  Tommy had met Karla Rae when she was working as a cocktail waitress at a Los Angeles hotel where he was attending a Farm Bureau convention. She’d come to California with a band, which broke up shortly after they arrived when the lead singer landed a solo gig. After knowing each other only three weeks, Tommy and Karla Rae were engaged. They married a month later under the same scarred oak tree on the Johnson ranch where Cy and Love had said their second marriage vows, shortly after his return from Vietnam. Their first legal wedding had been at the little brown church in Redwater, Kentucky, where they’d met.