Chapter 1 – GLENNA #3
Toby hands Cash the new drink. Cash says, “Thanks, bro,” and slaps his back, packing quite a wallop. Toby loses his footing for a second, but he recovers and gives Cash a very serious man-to-man chin dip. Ugh.
Cash shakes the Ellwoods’ hands and visits a few more tables. Even though I’m elbow deep in sandwich makings, I can tell when he hits the ladies who lunch. The tittering and giggling cranks to the max. I don’t judge.
If Cash Wall had never come up to me at the county art show and—in front of the judges—asked me whether my close-up photo of my grandma’s roses was “supposed to look like a woman’s private parts ‘cause I’m going after that famous lady who paints flowers and cow skulls or if it just looks like that by accident,” I might think he was funny, too.
No, I wouldn’t.
How long does he plan to hang out?
The longer he’s here, the more tense I get. My upper back is aching now. Saturdays are long days as it is. Seven to seven.
I try to focus on the sandwiches. We don’t need as many as on a weekday, and I like to experiment on the weekends. Add a little goat cheese to the turkey. Some roasted red pepper.
I shouldn’t have skipped breakfast. My stomach is audibly rumbling.
Finally, after what feels like forever, Cash Wall makes his way to the door. He pauses, polishes off his drink, and throws it into the trash like he’s shooting a basket.
“Hey, sugar!” he calls out at the top of his lungs.
Every woman’s gaze flies to him. He’s grinning at me.
“Have a great day, now, sugar,” he says and winks. And then he’s gone, hopping into the cab of his truck, door slamming, diesel engine revving as he vrooms off down the street. Before he crosses the bridge and disappears, two passing cars have honked hello.
I don’t get it.
The other Walls—I understand. The oldest brother, John, is a huge teddy bear. He moved away, but he visits a lot. He’s got a pack of kids. Kellum has the “noble law man of the Wild West” vibe. Jesse, the youngest, is adorable and gentle and shy.
Everyone puts Kellum on a pedestal—and rightfully so. He did jump off the Old Mill Bridge to save a baby from drowning. But Cash is the one people like .
I don’t know. I’m making these awesome goat cheese, turkey, and roasted red pepper sandwiches, but I know I’m going to sell out of the chicken salad—and it’s thirty percent mayonnaise, store bought, and has no flavor. There’s definitely an analogy there.
People like chicken salad, and they like Cash Wall. He’s mayonnaise.
I’m laying out the breads for the ham when there’s a shriek from the ladies who lunch. Miriam Dutterer pops out of her chair and squeals. I glance over. There’s a huge pile of sugar on the table. The screw-on lid fell off.
I grab a rag.
Sue Acheson says, “Oh, no!”
She’s holding an empty glass sugar jar upside down. The lid’s on the table with a mound of sugar.
“Oh, shit.” I sprint, dashing from behind the counter, bolting from table to table to screw on the sugar lids.
Cash loosened every single one while he was chatting people up.
The dick .
Everyone is watching me race around, laughing like it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever seen. I swear someone says, “That rascal.”
Toby’s leaning on the counter, smirking.
It’s so stupid.
There is no reason my eyes should be prickling. I deal with worse crap than Cash Wall’s dumb pranks every day. Dad’s heart. The fallout from the article about Del Willis. Juggling everything so nothing falls apart.
This is nothing. This is not the thing that’s gonna make me cry in front of everyone.
Come on, Glenna. Where’s the silver lining?
I sweep the sugar into a dish cloth and dump it into the trash. What was Sue Acheson even doing with the sugar? She’d finished her latte.
There’s gotta be a bright side.
I refill the empty sugar jars and screw the lids on as tight as they’ll go.
Now folks are finally leaving. I’ve got tables to bus, and lunch prep is only half done. Where’s Toby?
He’s not behind the counter. I bet he’s taking one of his fifteen-minute bathroom breaks.
Come on, bright side.
The best I can do is that it’s only an hour and thirty-three minutes until lunch.
My stomach growls, and I go back to making sandwiches.
* * *
I don’t get to take a long lunch because on my way out, Toby remembers he has to run down to the vape store before it closes to see his buddy Zane about band practice.
Thankfully, he takes his good sweet time, so during the afternoon lull, I’m all alone except for Wayne Daly who’s hunting and pecking away his memoirs.
I hook Wayne up with a leftover turkey sandwich for free. He really digs the goat cheese.
I pass the time visualizing shots I want to get tomorrow. Sunday is my day off, and Dad’s going to work my shift on Monday so I get a two-day weekend. I’m going up the mountain like I usually do.
I want some shots of deer, turkey, and pheasant, but I’d be stoked if I can catch a bobcat or some foxes. The leaves aren’t changing quite yet, but there’s great light this time of year. Very mellow and gold.
Of course, I’ll keep an eye out for Phat Thom, the legendary Stonecut Mountain turkey. I bet I could get five hundred bucks for a good shot in a nice frame, even if I put my name on it.
Sometimes, when the imposter syndrome gets intense, I remind myself that my photos sell really well to all kinds of people.
It’s rare that a photo I hang in the shop doesn’t sell in a week or two.
And since the pieces are unsigned, people aren’t buying to support me.
They like my work, even if right now, they don’t like me.
I daydream about Phat Thom and vengeance against Cash Wall for the rest of the afternoon. I clean up early, and when Toby starts sighing and setting things on shelves with undue force, I send him home and close up on my own.
My feet throb, and my body’s sticky. I need a shower, but I told Dad I’d pop up before I head home. He still lives in the apartment I grew up in on the fourth floor above the coffee house. I live above the newspaper. I pay rent, but he cuts me a deal.
Even though I’m pooped and my dogs are barking, as Grandma used to say, my steps are lighter bounding up the stairs. I have tomorrow off, and I don’t need to see any people at all for forty-eight hours. Pure bliss.
I let myself into Dad’s and follow the sounds of the Grateful Dead. He’s in the front room, listening to his records with his thick computer glasses on. He’s got his laptop on a TV dinner tray, and he’s squinting at the keyboard, hunting and pecking.
I kiss his bearded cheek as I flop onto the sagging couch. It’s the same one from when I was little. There are tons of baby photos where I’m conked out on Dad’s stomach while he reads or listens to music with his huge headphones.
“ Live at the Cow Palace ?” I guess.
He turns down the volume a scooch. “Close. The Closing of Winterland .”
“Whatcha doin’ on the internet?” I ask.
Dad’s gotten into trolling political blogs in his old age. He’s found his people. Mom hated listening to him rant about the Man and the establishment and the system, and now he can do it all night long until he passes out in his comfy chair.
“Pissing off the squares.” He hits enter with gusto and closes the laptop. “Get me a Schlitz?”
“On it.” I hop up to grab us two cold ones from the fridge, and while I’m at it, I stick the day’s leftover ham sandwiches onto the top shelf. I’m taking the turkey home with me. He’d like the goat cheese, but that yumminess is all mine. I earned it.
I don’t understand why Dad never left Stonecut.
He fits in like a square peg. Politically, he’s to the left of everyone except maybe Mr. Dulaney, my high school English teacher who asked us to call him Owen.
Dad has long-standing philosophical differences in opinion with most of the major players in town, including Mr. and Mrs. Wall.
He loves Indian and Thai and Ethiopian food, but he has to drive into Pyle to get it. He hates gentrification and “Mrs. Grundy,” and that’s what this town is about—flipping old Victorians to folks moving out of the city and judging each other.
When Mom was alive, they never talked about moving though, and now, even if the thought occurred to him, which I doubt it has, he’d never leave where she’s buried.
No one’s ever loved anyone more than Ken Dobbs loved Tanya Dobbs.
If I were a negative kind of person, I’d say that’s why I’ve had such low standards for my own love life. ‘Cause I know I’ll never have what they had—it’s one in a million.
But I’m not a negative person with a critical worldview and a downer attitude, so I’ll say Toby Guilfoyle was a learning experience, and I hope to one day find what my parents found—the only other Deadhead in a county full of classic rock and country fans.
“Hey, Dad?” I curl back up on the sofa. Mom would’ve bitched at me to take off my sneakers, but Dad never notices that kind of thing.
“Yes, Rabbit?”
“How come you and Mom never followed the Dead?” The band was older when Mom and Dad were young, but they were still touring.
“Oh, yeah. That would’ve been amazing.” Dad smiles fondly at the “Formerly the Warlocks” poster he has framed on the wall. My parents went to plenty of concerts before I was born, but they never did the drive a van cross-country thing. “But we had the paper, you know? We had to change the world.”
He winks, his bushy gray eyebrows waggle, and I give him the smile he’s angling for.
Even in its heyday, the Stonecut Gazette didn’t have big ambitions. It’s a local paper. Local politics. Police beat. Jobs wanted. That kind of thing. The spiciest reads are always Dad’s op-eds and the pissed-off letters to the editor in response.
My dad loves the Gazette, though. He took it over from his uncle when he was just out of college. It’s his other baby.