Chapter 6

 

Safely back at Tara, Evelyn went off to take a restorative bath and rest up for her night of singles country line dancing at the VFW. Our adventurous afternoon had definitely worn her out.

I was feeling a little lackluster myself and decided on a long nap. Bunky decided to join me in the boudoir. He insisted that I lift him onto the bed and whined until I did. He made a beeline for the pillows where he proceeded to get very comfortable on both of them. I made a mental note to suggest to Evelyn that she take Bunky with her to the tub on her next trip. He smelled more than a little like a ratty sock.

 “At least give me one of the pillows,” I said. Encouragingly, I nudged Bunky into a sharing frame of mind, which he was none too thrilled about. He groaned, then finally saw things my way.

 

I couldn’t sleep. I picked up the phone and tried Nancy again. This breather thing was really starting to get on my nerves. A quick check of the clock radio revealed that it was about Yabba Dabba Doo time. I was hoping to catch her before she went home to Dickhead.

I got patched through to Shirley, her trusty assistant.

“Hi de ho there,” Shirley said. Shirley was a little bit country, a little bit classic rock.

“Hi de ho yourself.”

“You called a second too late,” Shirley said. “She just walked out the door.”

“Rats.” A warning. Dating married megalomaniacs may cause one to use ridiculous expressions like rats. “Rats, rats, rats.”

“Nancy’s headed home, then out again.”

Shirley was Nancy’s big-time confidante. Shirley knew everything from ancient Nancy Merit history to every dirty detail of the here and now. This was a rather daunting notion which I tried not to dwell on. The best thing about Shirley was that she despised Dickhead only a hair less than I did.

“What comes after home?” I asked, although it was none of my business.

“You’re gonna love this,” she said sarcastically. “Nancy and Dickhead are having dinner with none other than Dan and Patsy Dandrich.”

Dan Dandrich was a big time Tennessee Republican politician. He wore a lot of L.L.Bean.

“Maybe Dandrich is gonna ask Nancy to be his running mate when his time comes.” Shirley giggled.

“Let’s pray it never does. And that’s not even funny.”

“You’re right, it ain’t.”

“Why is Nancy hanging out with these geeks?”

“You referring to Dickhead or Dandrich?”

“Well, both, now that you mention it.”

Shirley laughed like she meant it. “Guess where they’re headed for dinner?”

“Don’t even say it.”

“The ever fabulous Little Pigeon.”

Of all the places in town, why my place? “Shirley, make the world go away.”

She laughed again and I heard another line buzz. “Gotta run. You take care now.”

 

I thought back on the first time I met Nancy Merit. She came to the restaurant with a TV crew to do a spot on Gatlinburg’s female entrepreneurs. She wanted to do a feature on Little Pigeon, which was a great story.

 

When my Grandma Betty Claxton (also known as Gram) died, I inherited her double-wide trailer and bakery. After I got the news, my first thought was to sell everything. Surely someone in east Tennessee needed a mobile home, if not a bakery, too.

But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Gram had worked hard all of her life and she’d built a nice little business over the years. You’d have been hard pressed to find a fellow Gatlinburger who hadn’t enjoyed a slice of her caramel iced blackberry cake. Maybe it was genetics, but the notion of double-wide living had started to grow on me.

Because Gram was one the finest people on earth, her exit blew a large, sucking hole in my world and I realized it was high time to figure out what to do with the part of it that was left.

I was in Portland, Oregon, at the time, slogging through the years in corporate security for an upscale department store. I’d lost any real interest in said occupation about year one which coincided with my promotion from a plainclothes store detective to management. It was a lot more fun popping rich, neurotic housewife shoplifters than crunching budget numbers.

But one thing leads to another. Then came a bigger manager’s job, then a multi-regional position. Not that I was having fun or getting rich, but I kept marching up the ladder because I hadn’t come up with any better ideas.

 

Before my illustrious retail security career, I’d been a PE teacher back at good old Fogerty Junior High, but this had been a short run. It wasn’t the kids. They were exploding packages of hot, confused energy, not unlike myself, so we got along swell. It was all the rest of it that was dispiriting. And there is something plain eerie, not to mention depressing, about passing by your old locker every day.

I retired my grade book and whistle when I met a nice girl who actually turned out to be not such a nice girl. But before I discovered this, I’d already caught a one-way ride with her to the west coast, where I proceeded to spend a few years of hell finding out just how nice she wasn’t. But I digress.

 

When I had to make the decision whether or not to sell the trailer and bakery, I knew what had to come next–a chat with Mad Ted Weber.

Mad Ted was probably my best friend in the world, which is a somewhat frightening admission. Ted was from Groesbeck, on the west side of Cincinnati, which may as well have been Hong Kong to most Fogertians. Fogerty was twenty-five miles and one hundred years east of the Queen City, much closer in nature to Bumfunk, Kentucky, than any slightly major city.

Our paths would no doubt have never crossed if it hadn’t been for the stint at Camp Shawnee where we were camp cooks for the summer. I’d actually been hired as a lifeguard, but the camp director, a weirdnik Campfire lifer named Zippy, decided that the pool staff didn’t have enough to do.

Ted and I got along right off the bat. Ted had amazing skills. Not only could he knock off camper staples like spaghetti and meatballs for seventy-five, he created fabulous handmade sausages, incredible desserts and, maybe best of all, he could make green Jell-O come out his nose. At least in the kitchen, Ted was the mother I never had.

That summer we learned that we had a lot in common. We both loved tapioca and Racquel Welch. We both hated any song by Steve Winwood. But the glaring commonality was that we were both trying to nail a very cute, type-A counselor named Casey who looked great in her rolled-up hiking shorts, not to mention her hot pink bikini that replaced the Speedo on her days off.

As it turned out, neither of us scored with Casey, although, for the record, I did handily round third base with her one night after the canoe races. This factoid still got Ted’s goat.

 

At the pivotal point in time, Ted was living in Los Angeles, working as a chef for a chrome and fern-flecked hotel. Of course, this was in the eighties when everybody worked for a chrome and fern-flecked company. To my surprise, not only did Ted think it was a great idea to keep the bakery, he thought we should both quit our soulless jobs, take our profit sharing and become business partners.

The conversation had gone something like this:

“Ted, are you crazy?”

“Come on, we’re a great team. It’ll be just like the good old days.”

“You’re referring to Camp Shawnee?”

“We’ll expand the bakery into a nice, little goldmine of a restaurant.”

“What do I know about the restaurant business?”

“Nothing. But you have the real estate. And now you have me.”

“I’m not sharing the double-wide.”

“Fine. Be that way.”

“I don’t know, Ted.”

“Get real. Look at us, both working jobs we hate, dating sub-standard women. We’re pathetic.”

“I’m not even dating her anymore.”

“Come on then. Let’s get off the fucking west coast. Let’s go be hillbilly entrepreneurs.”

“Somehow, it does sound right.”

The rest is history.

 

A few years back, when Nancy Merit had first walked into the restaurant, I couldn’t believe how attractive she was in person, not that she didn’t look just fine on television. Her producer gave us a few instructions and we all went back to the kitchen where the camera rolled and Nancy asked a raftload of questions. I tried to make up intelligent sounding answers while Ted pan-fried some beautiful trout a local fisherman had just brought in. 

I’d heard rumors that Nancy Merit was a lesbian at heart and after the taping, as I studied her and her charismatic act over glasses of wine and those sizzling trout at our best creekside table, I thought that someday I’d like to find out for myself.

 

“Now where was I?” I said to Bunky. But my mother’s dog just kept on snoring. He’d edged his way onto my pillow and I noted with disgust that he was drooling on it.

I reached for the phone again and called Nancy’s home number. She picked up the phone on the first ring. For the record, she sounded great.

“Kitten?” I purred.

There was a pause, then, in a low, secretive voice she said, “Are you fucking nuts? Don’t call me here.”

“Then meet me at Sparkie’s Lounge in fifteen minutes, the dark table in the corner. And wear your Victoria’s Secrets.”

“Where the hell is Sparkie’s Lounge?”

“About three hundred and twenty five miles north of you.”

“I’m hanging up now.”

“Come on, Nancy. You’ll love Sparkie’s. He makes a fantastic Tequila Sunrise. And no one makes a fantastic Tequila Sunrise anymore. There’s a neat buffalo head over the bar. Bring Dickhead along, and Dan and Patsy. We’ll feed them to the buffalo.”

She sighed. “You’re incorrigible. Bye.”

“Call me?”

Click.