Bobby's Diner (6 page)

And, although he wasn’t from Arizona
(in fact he was from somewhere in the Midwest) he tried to put on a southwest
accent, like a cowboy. Helen Pyle smiled weakly and nodded in agreement with
her husband.

“Oh, but the Lord did just bless
us didn’t he?” He flipped his head
 
back
in the direction of the church and the church folk and gave a big belly laugh.
“See you next Sunday, Pastor! Bye all!” The mayor never only talked to one
person, he kept a stage close at hand. I’d only been the conduit that
facilitated a lead-in for his next line, and as he left his audience he waved
at everyone, but tipped his hat in my direction, made a smooching sound in the
direction of Gangster, took hold of Helen’s elbow and lead her away. She made
dainty quick steps as if he was pushing her too fast.

I’d only spoken with the mayor a
few times when he would happen into the diner to get lunch. He seemed
pleasant
 
enough but would talk so loudly
the other customers would stop eating and look. They couldn’t help but listen
to him. It seemed odd to me that so much volume could come out of such thin
lips.

I’ve always said Sunnydale has
only two seasons, spring and summer. And, I’ve always held there are only two
temperatures, warm and hotter-than-hell. We only get couple of days of cool
weather compared to other parts of the country or what others might think of as
cool. Very seldom do temperatures here dip below the freezing point and only in
early winter mornings. On those cooler days people don coats or sweaters, yet Mayor
Pyle always wore a jacket and it seemed he only had two. One, a bright yellow
and brown tweed jacket, he wore with a matching yellow tie. It looked as though
when he bought it, the tie was already pinned to the lapel. The other jacket
was a bright turquoise polyester number with double-stitching that he normally
wore for public speaking engagements. To
 
coordinate
 
the turquoise jacket
he’d wear a western hat and decorate his face in stripes like the traditional
Mohave Indian by finger-painting stripes on his cheeks and forehead. He thought
it gave him an authentic “look of the people.” Poor Mayor Pyle didn’t have a
lot of hair so he went in annually to some surgeon who flayed open his scalp and
inserted plugs of hair along each cut. Every year he’d have four new lines put
in. And, because his own follicles never produced new hair around the
incisions, his scalp looked
 
like a
quilting of tiny Xs where the plugs had been introduced. Everyone knew about
it. Things like that are hard to keep quiet, especially in a small town.

Pyle was a slight man and his
wife was even slighter. You rarely ever saw them together except at church and
during elections when he had to show a unified front. But, if plain had a name
its name would be Mrs. Helen Pyle. I know that sounds mean but she blended into
a crowd. For instance, if there were three people and you were asked to tell
who those three
 
were, you’d remember two
and forget Mrs. Pyle. Unless, of course, you remembered that big bag she always
carried around with her—a floral crackled leather tote. It seemed so out of
character for Helen to lug it around all day. She looked put together
otherwise. But, the tote stood out. Helen donned it proudly. I always felt the
urge to yank it off her arm, run into a locked room, and rummage through it
like a girl with her mother’s purse. Helen was versions of black and white,
grey and lighter grey, beige and cream. Helen was vanilla ice cream and she
always carried this bright swanky purse around—with its impressionistic green
leaves, red petals, and yellow stamens—like a raspberry molasses topping for
tofutti.

Of course the mayor was no Brad
Pitt himself. He had a degree from an offshore college in business
administration and served as a city manager for a few months some two thousand
miles northeast in a larger city. He used that experience to get elected here
into the
 
esteemed position of mayor.
They had bought a motor home
 
and set off
to see the every state in the union. They ended up in Sunnydale.

Mayor Pyle seemed genuinely
interested in issues of the town. But, every once in a while, he’d just sit in the
restaurant and stare. He’d come in late for lunch, just after the shift ended,
and linger until just before we started setting tables for dinner. He’d slug
down a few beers then head home. But, while he ate he would gaze out
 
the window. Maybe he envisioned a crane
rebuilding our
 
little
 
town into a larger metropolis. Sometimes he’d
wipe at his eyes and nose sitting there thinking and staring. Maybe he was sad,
sad he’d settled for a small town life, at the lack of grandeur being a mayor
in Sunnydale. Anyway, it seemed he longed for something more. He was one of
those kinds of people who appear to look at you but are really far away and
spinning forever inward, thinking of, who knows what, but definitely not
listening to you. And, after he finished speaking with you he’d say, Good,
good. Nice talking with you. Keep up the good work, words that meant zero in
relation to your discussion with him, words that easily
 
slip off the surface into a flotsam of any
meaningless conversation. When the mayor spoke he was just like the rest of the
politicians, never committed to anything but himself and talking about
everything.

I remember he’d driven up to the
diner one particular day not long after Bobby died. It was late and I was just about
ready to
 
go
 
home for my midday break. He stopped me
before I could get into my car.

“Georgette!” He rolled down his
window to yell out.

“Hello Mayor.”

“Georgette, may I have a minute
of your time?” He was getting out of his car and was smoothing down his hair
flat onto his head, it looked shiny when the sun hit it and a tiny line of
sweat beads appeared across his oversized forehead. He pulled out his hanky and
patted down his face.

“Sure. What’s up?”

“How long you been running this
here lovely diner, Georgette?”

“Hmm. About fifteen-sixteen
years, I guess. Why you asking, Mayor?”

“Have you ever thought about just
selling—getting out of it? You know, take off and relax? This place makes good
money, doesn’t it? I’m sure you’ve built up quite a healthy nest-egg. What,
with Bobby’s inheritance and all.” I had a mind to think the good mayor was
prying. But, I don’t believe his conversation was about that.

“It pays the bills and keeps
people employed, Mayor.” I didn’t know where he was going with the sudden turn
that felt like an interrogation.

“How’s it going with you and the
misses?” He said like a dirty word.

“Vanessa? Oh, fine I suppose.
We’re still working out a few bumps. Why all the questions, Mayor?”

“Oh, just my own curiosity more
than anything, I s’pose. Hey, can I still get something cool to drink and a
bite?”

“Anything for you, Mayor. Just
tell ’em I saw you outside and it’s okay by me.” I unlocked my door and got
into the car. Its interior sweltered from sitting under the unforgiving sun and
you could smell the upholstery, it was so hot. I sat for a second while I
flipped on the air to the maximum level and rolled down all the windows to help
blow the heat out. My car door was still opened when the mayor got to the
diner’s entrance. I was fumbling around with the keys, buttons and the visor
when I briefly looked up at him. At the same moment he turned back to look
 
at me. He glared. When he realized I’d seen
him, he turned his sneer into a pressed smile, tipped his hat to me, yelled, “It’s
damn hot today, isn’t it?”

And, walked inside. Looking back
on it the wheels must have been in motion quite a while before that day.

CHAPTER 8

Helen grew up in the highbrow
part of Stratford where she was raised a proper lady by her old Aunt
Birdsey.
 
Birdsey
 
had married into Weller Lumber wealth when
she was only seventeen. Birdsey helped seed a path to Helen’s interest in
culture and the arts, and in literature, especially the
 
writings of Flannery O’Connor. Birdsey,
originally from Macon, delivered tale after tale of the sweaty southern coastal
towns of Georgia. Her family migrated to the New England states when she was
just about to enter high school. She fit into the stuffy society of Connecticut
like a square peg in a round hole. With a drawl reminiscent of the place she
was raised her schoolmates chided her and laughed when she spoke. But, at her
coming out party, she was luminescent. Her southern belle upbringing had served
her well. She walked fashionably late
 
down
a curvy staircase like Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With The Wind.

Birdsey had caught the eye of a
wealthy miller’s son, Joseph,
 
a
 
big boy ruggedly handsome who played football
for the school team. The couple became the most enchanting ‘item’ and
 
this propelled Birdsey into rarified air of
the popular student and into homecoming queen status. They married as high
school sweethearts. But, try as they might they couldn’t raise the
 
large family as each had hoped. Miscarriage
after miscarriage left Birdsey’s reproductive system shredded and after much
persuading by doctors the two stopped trying.

At age eleven, Helen’s parents
were both killed while on a cruise through the Caribbean leaving Aunt Birdsey at
the helm of her niece’s guardianship.

Birdsey and Helen seemed destined
soul mates. After grueling games of croquet Birdsey and Helen would dine out in
Birdsey’s meandering English-style garden where they sipped spiced tea with
mint sprigs.

Because she missed the gardens of
Georgia, Birdsey planted flowering fruit trees, built gazebos, put in cobbled
walks threaded with moss and creeping jenny, alyssum and lobelia. Her favorite
plant however was fuchsia and the vast varieties she hung from painted pergolas
and wooden arches. After each growing season in the fall she
 
would pull out each fuchsia from its hanger
and plant them in the ground. By her fifth year, she had grown an entire garden
of
 
fuchsia reaching nearly twenty feet
high. One year Birdsey felt the garden was getting unruly and she climbed a
ladder herself to tie the tips of opposing plants together in an arch which
made the
 
place feel like a secluded
covered path. Birdsey hired workers to set down thick slabs of green China
slate stepping stones through the archway. And, then added concrete benches
 
so a person could sit beneath the tumult of
pendulous fuchsia flowers.

When Helen was a teenager,
Birdsey and she used to sit in their special garden with tea and read books together.
Birdsey was thrilled to have another female in the house and Helen was her
confidante. It was upon Birdsey’s
 
urging
that Helen became interested in writing. Birdsey arranged for private tutors
and sent her to New York for further schooling. When Helen decided to go to
college, Birdsey sent her to Dartmouth.

Dartmouth was where Helen met
Harold Pyle. His Barney-Fife-in-a-zoot-suit style attracted her attention.
She’d never met anyone like him. The gentlemen in the families around Stratford
were country club reared and knew all the right words—never acted out of
manner. Harold was different. Fun. Daring and loud. He winked at Helen and
called her “girly girl.” He overdid. His carriage was slanted and cocky. His
clothes bagged in all the wrong places. Harold’s eyes were closely set. The hat
we wore reminded Helen of a mobster’s and the oversized padding in his jacket made
him look like an trapezoidal triangle. His spats were never the right match for
his suit but it didn’t matter, Helen swooned in his company.

It was only after they’d been
married Helen realized her mistake. Harold couldn’t hold down a job, he played
cards until all hours of the morning with the boys, he drank heavily
 
on occasion and came home with the smell of
another woman on him several times. By then, Helen and Harold lived in Chicago
and were planning to move again to the slow town of Ames, Iowa. Harold’s eye
was on a move into
 
the world of
politics. He thought his smooth-talking ways fit
 
perfectly with a career in civil service.
And, when he failed at the county level there, they decided to make one more
move out west finally ending up in Arizona. After holding several odd jobs and
Helen’s refusal to make yet another move, Harold ran for mayor of Sunnydale
after the incumbent announced his retirement as a public servant. As the sole
contender for the position, Harold got the job.

CHAPTER 9

When Roberta walked in, the
restaurant was buzzing with people talking eating and rushing to get back to
work. Today’s lunch special was grilled pork set in a roasted tomatillo sauce
and barbequed, baby, Yukon Gold, potatoes on the skewer. The lunch fare’s fragrance
was tantalizing and permeated the
 
restaurant and spilled out onto the sidewalk and down the strip. Each
time a customer walked in they would tell Vanessa how good
 
it smelled. But, when Roberta walked through
the doors Vanessa got quite a different greeting from her daughter. Her face
was pinched and set into a scowl. She stood by her mother while Vanessa cashed
out the party leaving.