Maybe it was not making the pilgrimage up that driveway (if only to remember the way things used to be). Or maybe it was trading the beach and Fry for Mamselle’s and Shepherd. One thing was sure: By the time I got to the restaurant, my afternoon felt like an old balloon, with hardly any color or air left in it. I didn’t worry about folding the emerald-green napkins into neat swans, and I hardly noticed whether I spelled “foie gras” right. It would all lead to the same place, no matter how fast or slow I went, no matter how careful I was. Shepherd would get that tight, angry look and then explode. Sooner or later.
Tonight I guessed it would be sooner. Marsha had called in sick, and she was just about the only one who could replace the tape in the bar register when it ran out. Shepherd, leaning over the coil of paper, had already used some of his best swearwords, and since my station was right next to the bar, I figured it was only a matter of time before I gave him an excuse to practice the rest.
It was early and only a few tables had been filled, so mine were all empty. (I got customers only when Shepherd was desperate.) So yes, I was almost relieved when he sent me into the kitchen to wash dishes. I knew he didn’t have time to stand around in there, waiting for me to break something. The bad part of kitchen duty, though, was that now he could conveniently forget where I was and never seat anyone at my tables at all.
Still, Manny was glad to see me; and he knew I was better than pushing soap around a plate. “Would you help with the Caesar, sugar?” he asked as soon as I walked in the room, which was already steamy from the sauces and reductions he was heating up. He must have come to work late again, because I could see he was way behind on prep. He was stirring two concoctions in frying pans and racing among three chopping boards full of half-sliced veggies. He was a big man, but he could move gracefully when he had to. Now he wore the inspired, sweaty look he always got when he was under pressure.
I took my apron off so it wouldn’t get dirty, and sat by the long metal counter, mixing oil and mayo, the base for Manny’s low-rent salad dressing. “Eggs are too expensive,” he always said. “We don’t use anchovies, so why not go fake all the way?”
When one of the busboys came to tell me I had a party, I was just pouring what I’d made into a pitcher. I stopped it up, then rushed into the dining room and headed for the white-haired gentleman Shepherd had seated all by himself in the middle of my empty station.
At first, I couldn’t believe Shepherd had actually given me a customer before filling up the other stations. So what if this diner was a senior citizen who probably hadn’t changed his tipping rate in forty years? So what if it was a party of one? But then I realized that, like all my father’s favors, this one was helping him, not me: Since Marsha was out sick (or home free, depending on how you looked at things), that left just me and Laynelle. And if he’d put this old guy at one of Laynelle’s tables, it would have slowed her down with the four- and six-tops.
Still, a customer was a customer. I was halfway to the table when Shepherd’s high-voltage snarl made me turn around. “Where’s your apron?” He was on me in seconds, covering the distance between us so fast, I barely had time to look down and realize I’d left my apron in the kitchen.
It wasn’t even seven, and there were only a few diners in the whole place. But naturally, each one of them looked up. Wouldn’t you? I mean, here’s a man in a tuxedo, the same man who spoke in a soft, perfume-ad voice when he showed you to your table, who’s now going postal. Yelling. Screaming, actually. “How many fucking servers are in here without a uniform, Sarah?”
I didn’t answer. What was there to say?
“How many times have I told you? How many times are you gonna come in here disrespecting me, the staff, and the customers?” Shepherd seemed to have completely forgotten the customers himself. It wasn’t like him to make a scene in public, not at work, anyway.
Manny coming in late had probably set him off. And Marsha waiting until five o’clock to tell him she wasn’t coming in at all. In the end, though, it didn’t matter who had stoked his fire. It was still me taking the heat.
“You got nothing to say?”
Once he was under way, there was no stopping Shepherd. But I didn’t have to stand there, did I? All hot and hurt, like that busboy with dropsy?
“Get out of here, for crying out loud.” He grabbed my wrist and pushed me toward the kitchen. “Just get out of my sight.”
Which is exactly what I decided to do. If he could fire his waitress, I could fire my father.
“I have something to say.” My lone customer stood up now and came toward us. “And I’d like to say it to you in private, young man.”
When I tell you that the diner who took Shepherd by the arm and walked with him out of earshot was Rufus Baylor, you won’t be half as surprised as I was. Somehow, I’d never dreamed our famous poet would hang around Whale Point any longer than he had to. But there he was, the day after our class, rising up out of his seat and turning those eyes on Shepherd. Leaning down to him, into him, as if they had secrets to share.
In that moment, Baylor looked like a knight in shining armor to me. He was an old man, yes, and his jacket was a little short in the sleeves. He had left his cane by his chair, and I worried about whether I should get it for him. But none of that changed the fact that, when he led Shepherd off toward the front door, when the two of them disappeared, arm in arm, behind a giant potted fern, Rufus Baylor was most definitely and undeniably the Greatest One of All.
* * * *
When Shepherd came back, he was different somehow. Sure, he was extra polite to my party of one, totally stealing my thunder and waiting on the man himself. But even after Rufus Baylor left me a 50 percent tip and drove off in that weird jalopy of his, our new poetry teacher’s influence lingered on. For one thing, the talk he’d had with my father definitely lowered the decibel level. How else could you explain that, for the rest of the night, Shepherd barely yelled at me or anyone else? Unless you count the incident over the dropped soufflé, but since that was only a six on the Richter, I don’t think you should.
“What do you know?” All the way home, Shepherd couldn’t stop talking about his new celebrity BFF. As soon as he’d closed both registers and carefully nosed his precious, polished-until-it-looked-like-it-was-covered-in-plastic Mustang out of the employee lot, he was off and running. “I just chatted up the most important guy in town!”
I guessed it wasn’t the time to point out that said chatting was thanks to me, so I just listened. “He’s staying up at the Hendricks’. They’re in Montreal or some damn place for the summer.”
Rufus Baylor, Poet Laureate, was living in town! Now that I thought about it, that made sense. He couldn’t magically appear out of nowhere for each class, then disappear again until the next. He had to eat and sleep and laugh and talk somewhere between classes, and as it turned out, that somewhere was right around the corner.
The Hendricks were an elderly couple who both used to teach at UNC. Her had once done a feature on student life in North Carolina, so my mother had been assigned to interview them. She’d taken me along, but I was too young then to remember the visit. What I did remember, though, is that we walked over. Walked!
“I think Rufus went to school with them. Something like that. Says he doesn’t want to stay in a hotel.”
“Rufus?!”
“Yeah.” My father sounded smug, proud. “He asked me to call him that. Said it made him feel like home.” We pulled up in front of my house, but Shepherd was still on fast-forward. “He said we have stuff in common, stuff we didn’t even know about.
“He’s quite a guy, that poet of yours.” He didn’t turn off the ignition, but he didn’t reach over and unlock my door, either. “He’s got it upstairs, for sure. And not in a show-off, book kind of way, either. He’s had a life.”
I figured it was a safe bet that anyone who’d made it into their eighties had had a life. Still, it was best to let Shepherd circle around whatever he wanted to say until he decided to say it.
“How about you and me talk some more tomorrow after work?” He glanced at the house, as if my mother were watching. Shepherd had a strict policy: Avoid Katherine Wheeler if you owe her money. And he always owed her money.
“What do you say? I’ll take you for ice cream after we close up?”
Whoa! What? Maybe you can imagine the internal double take I did when Shepherd invited me for ice cream, the mental WTF that boomeranged in my chest. I mean, if you overlooked the fact that my father had forgotten I was allergic to milk, didn’t that invitation sound almost friendly? Almost like someone who cared?
I was too stunned to talk, too tired to process what had happened. So I just nodded. Then I unlocked my own car door and ran for the house. As soon as I got inside, I went straight to my room. Without checking my cell and without stopping in the kitchen to see if Aunt J. had left me something from dinner. Upstairs, I didn’t take my tip money out of my pocket or even brush my teeth. I just fell into bed. I wasn’t sure why Shepherd wanted to talk. Or what we could possibly have to say to each other. But as I drifted to sleep, one thing was certain. I was the newest member of the ever-expanding Whale Point chapter of the Rufus H. Baylor Admiration Society.
* * * *
You would have been, too. Especially if the next night, your father managed to get through an entire Saturday dinner service without blowing a gasket. Well, almost. He kind of lost it when a deuce Laynelle was supposed to serve walked out. He knew their long wait wasn’t her fault, though, and he couldn’t blame Manny or me, either, since it was Shepherd himself who’d sent the wrong customers to the bar while he seated a couple who’d just arrived.
Instead, he had a private meltdown, like a volcano rumbling and steaming away all by itself without hurting anyone. I watched him from across the dining room, looking out over the sea of diners talking and eating, oblivious to the explosion brewing. I watched him slam his fist against the stack of recycled wine barrels he used as a host stand. Hard. But miracle of miracles, the wood didn’t split or fly across the room. And after that? Shepherd shook his head, rubbed his sore knuckles, and simply carried on for the rest of the night. No yelling, no dumping on his favorite victim. Just, “Sarah, that four-top needs a refill.” Or, “Don’t forget to wipe those tables down.” Nearly normal.
And believe me, I knew normal—I’d studied it. When I was little and spent the night at other kids’ houses, I used to watch daddies. As if they were an exotic species, some sort of strange bird whose habits and plumage needed to be listed, memorized, saved for future reference. When I visited Sandy Lee Mercer, and her daddy teased her about liking red, when he hugged her and told her she’d grow up to live in a house with a red roof, drive a red car, and dress all her children in red, I took notes. At Maryann Woods’s house, when her daddy came home and pretended he was too hungry to wait for dinner, when he said he’d have to eat her, instead, and the two of them play-wrestled on the living-room rug, I filed it away.
Daddies were live-in, fathers not necessarily so. Shepherd, as my mother made repeatedly clear, was a biological accident that had happened to me and her. We had to live with the consequences, but we didn’t have to like them. And we certainly didn’t have to like him. If there had been an Olympic event for speed swearing, Shepherd would have won a gold medal. Most Feelings Hurt in a Single Day? Shepherd had set records that would stand for years. Snarkiest Remark? Lowest Blow? Cheapest Trick? Shepherd was the titleholder, hands down. But when it came to nice, he wasn’t even on the field.
I’d learned a long time ago, then, not to want my father around, not to confuse him with someone who might tickle, or hug, or play. But guess what? A few minutes after the staff had left and Mamselle’s went dark, there we were, Shepherd and me, in a booth at Shake It Baby. Just like a regular, everyday, normal father and daughter. Except that Shepherd wasn’t looking at me. Which was okay, because I wasn’t sure I wanted him to see me not looking at him. Baylor might have written a poem about us, another one that could go on and on: Shepherd not looking at me, not looking at him, not looking at . . . You get the idea.
I’d ordered a soy smoothie and Shepherd had something in front of him that was about three feet high, smothered in pistachios and whipped cream. Not that he’d eaten any of it. “Did you know he ran a farm once?” he asked.
“Baylor?” I unwrapped a straw. “You mean with horses and cows, stuff like that?”
“Yeah.” Shepherd caught my eye for a second, then looked down again. “What? You think poets are born that way?” He stirred the goop at the bottom of his bowl, but didn’t lift his spoon. “You think his parents took one look at their baby, and said, ‘Well, I’ll be damned. We got ourselves a poet!’?”
This was the Shepherd I was used to, the Shepherd who made me feel like a jerk. What were we doing here, anyway? Besides forcing two sleepy waitresses in grass skirts to leave their conversation every few minutes and ask us if we needed anything? When Shepherd ordered coffee, one of them carried it over while the other sat down in a corner and rubbed her feet. (Which would have cost her her job at Mamselle’s, for sure.)
“So he had this farm,” I told him. “So what?”
“He had this one particular horse, see.” Shepherd was careful now, trying to remember what Baylor had told him. He stared at the hula girl painted on the wall above our table. She was wearing a grass skirt like our waitresses, shaking a milk shake and her booty at the same time. “Actually, it was more like a pony,” my father corrected himself. “Some pretty little white-footed thing that was running with a herd of wild horses he penned.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Just that little pony horse presented certain problems that only a guy who knew what he was doing could work through.
“You couldn’t be too gentle, otherwise she’d never learn.” He was actually looking at me now. “But on the other hand, you needed to go easy, let her have her head sometimes.”
I shook my own head, and would have laughed out loud if I hadn’t been so surprised. “Oh, my God, I don’t believe it,” I told Shepherd. “Now I’m a metaphor?!”
“You’re a what?”
“I’m a horse! I’m a freaking horse!” Finally I did laugh. But Shepherd was dead serious.
“Baylor says you got spirit, in a good way. He says you need someone smart enough to see how to bring it along.” His ice cream had started to melt, but he didn’t seem to notice. He leaned across the table and lowered his voice—another surprise, since I’d never heard him whisper to anyone but big tippers.
“You know, I wasn’t always easy to handle when I was a kid. And coming down hard on me just made me fight back more.” He took his first bite, buying time. “My old man came down so hard, I left home when I was fifteen.” Another bite, a quick look at me. “Frankly? I think your mother can be a little too rough on you.” I checked his eyes, before I looked back at my straw. Shepherd was for real.
“All this med-school stuff? It’s not about you, Sarah; it’s about her.”
ME
(Speechless)
MY STRAW
Tssthththssssss. TssthssssSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.
SHEPHERD’S SPOON AND DISH
Crreeen. Currreeen. Citcitcit.
SHEPHERD
Did you know she was dating a doctor when she met me?
ME
(Still speechless)
HULA GIRL ON THE WALL
There’s an island across the sea, beautiful Kauai, beautiful Kauai. . . .
SHEPHERD
Yeah. Some big deal-cancer doc.
HULA GIRL
Where my true love is waiting for me, beautiful Kauai, beautiful Kauai . . .
I felt cold all over, and it wasn’t just the smoothie. I already knew I’d ruined Mom’s life, but I didn’t know that life had included a romance, one that might have lasted more than a few months.
“Or heart, something like that.” Shepherd made eye contact again. “She never told you?”
No, she never told me.
“She said he was no fun, said he didn’t know how to make her laugh.”
“And you did?”
“Hey, your mother and me? We had something going. We were good for each other, you know what I mean? We were okay until . . .”
I knew what he meant: until Sarah the Surprise.
“Mr. MD? He was the happy ending that got away. ‘I could have been a doctor’s wife.’ She must have said it a thousand times. ‘I could have had respect.’
“Respect? What is it with your mother and respect? That and a nickel, right?”
One of the waitresses, her skirt rustling, brought the check now, and the coffeepot. Shepherd grabbed the bill from her hand and waved the coffee away. “Anyway, between a high school dropout for an ex and a JD for a daughter, it doesn’t seem like respect is in the cards, does it?”
I guess it was the sly smile he gave me. The way he lumped us together as fellow failures, out to rain on Mom’s parade. Suddenly I’d reached my Shepherd quota—for the day, for the week, for the foreseeable future. “Look,” I told him. “I’m really glad we had this talk and all. But there’s still another week of school, and I’ve got homework.”
“So, Sarah.” Shepherd leaned across the table again, missing a hint no one else could have ignored. “Do you ever write poetry in school? Rufus says you have a real ear.”
He let that compliment hang in the air for a while. A world-famous poet thought I had an ear?!
“He also says he’s jealous of me.” The whisper was back: “Between you and me, Sarah? I think there’s such a thing as being too famous. Rufus is, like, Exhibit A. Here he is, a household name, and he’s jealous of a nobody like me.”
“Rufus Baylor is jealous of you?!!”
“That’s what the man said.” Shepherd shrugged. “The point is, this classy, world-famous guy tells me he’s made mistakes, lots of them.
“I tell him he hasn’t exactly got a monopoly on screwing up, but he says the difference between him and me is I can still fix things.”
I tried to remember what I knew about Baylor’s life, but it wasn’t much. I wished I’d been curious enough to research the real family that had once lived in “my” cottage. But I’d preferred the made-up one I’d put there, instead.
“Listen, what I’m trying to say is, I only got one kid and it’s you. I can’t give you the stuff your mother wants me to, but I can give you stuff she can’t.”
“Have you just found out you’ve got three months to live?” I was only half joking, but Shepherd ignored me.
“Baylor—er, Rufus says you’re too smart to do what other people tell you. He says I’m the same way. And when we dig in our heels, we may have a real good reason, you know?”
“What on earth are you talking about, Shepherd?” I looked straight at him now. And guess what? He was looking straight back.
Mea Culpa
I forgive the wind, I know why it rattles the gate.
I love the lunging owl, the lance-eyed hawk,
whose flights bring death and pain.
In downward spirals, fits and starts,
all of us fall because we’re alive
and rise to stay that way.
Distance grows the heart, not fonder, but too late.
I’ve missed the hurt, the heft of your wounds,
your blood is dried to crusts of shame.
In comings and goings, ins and outs,
each of us moves toward a home we miss
but that we cannot name.