Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [8]
“I am not!”
“Or insinuating.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
“He gave it to me.”
“Why didn’t he give it to me?” Ellie wants to know.
“He gave it to you,” Angie says, her voice flat and disbelieving.
“Why don’t you believe me?”
“He didn’t say anything to me about it.”
“Why would he? It’s not your watch.”
“Let’s just drop it.”
“Do you want the watch, Mom?”
“No.”
“Why does Alice always get the good stuff?” Ellie asks.
“Shut up, Ellie.”
Which is when, thank you Marge in the Coke-bottle glasses and the Elvis Presley updo, the food arrives.
February 5th
Gram, a.k.a. Penelope Pearl Bird, or Penny to her many friends, owns the last remaining café in Belknap. When Grampa died six years ago, Gram sold her house out on Plank Road, bought one of the old Victorians at the Four Corners, moved into the apartment upstairs, and resurrected Belknap’s one and only coffee shop. She roped her sister Charlotte, who was also recently widowed, into helping her. They call it The Bird Sisters and are open for breakfast and lunch, six a.m. to two p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.
Angie was predicting the worst from Day One, thought it would be too much for Gram, thought Gram was throwing her money away. According to Angie, all kinds of dire emergencies were going to crop up, from a leaky roof to poisoning patrons. But Gram would retort that she’s got her son Eddie and her son-in-law Matt for the roof and anything else that involves carpentry, plumbing, or electrical, and as for the food poisoning, Gram says nobody ever died from eggs, toast, and coffee.
And what do you know? Gram has the touch: she’s a savvy businesswoman, and she’s having fun with The Bird Sisters. There is no one in Belknap she hasn’t met. Most people come in at some point or another needing a cup of coffee and someone to listen, which is Gram all over. Some people have taken to calling her the mayor of Belknap.
It was more fun, of course, before Aunt Char died last year. The Bird Sisters closed its doors for a month while Gram worked out whether she could go on without Char. Gram needed time to reassess and recover from that long string of losses: her husband, James; her kid brother, George; her brother-in-law Bobby; and her beloved sister, Char.
Ask Gram about Char and she’ll say, “Oh, Char was the pretty one,” or “Char was the smart one,” like Gram isn’t pretty and smart? But Gram has this open-hearted way with the people she loves. Some people focus on your flaws, but Gram focuses on your best feature, or tells you that she actually, honestly likes your supposed flaw. Gram’s highest forms of praise are “He’s a real gentleman,” or “She’s true blue.”
As an example of the loving your flaws thing, Aunt Char was a whistler. She’d even whistle classical music. Drove her husband, Bobby, completely bats, but Gram loved it. She’d brag to customers: “My sister, Charlotte, can whistle Schubert’s ‘Trout Quintet.’ ”
“Just try it,” she’d challenge anybody who laughed.
When Gram reopened she tried to do it all herself, relying on her two short-order cooks, Ginny and Dave, to carry plates now and then. Luckily, Sally Perkins walked in the door one day, ate the best breakfast of her life, so she says, tied on an apron, and never left. Sally’s a divorcée from down by the lake. Her kids are grown but still going through their troubles right in Sally’s neighborhood, sometimes right outside Sally’s backdoor. Her husband’s still in the neighborhood, too. Some people say he’s trying to make amends. Sally says, what that man broke cannot be fixed.
Sally’s a little short and a little stocky, but curvy, too, and she likes to accentuate the positive. She’s also got that bottle blonde, tough broad thing going on. And it’s like she does backward flirting, giving guys such a hard time they can’t believe it, but they keep coming back for more. People from out of town assume Sally and Gram are sisters.
Gram always says, “We’re like sisters, but we’re not the original sisters.”
Playing on the Bird theme, Gram has birdbaths and bird feeders galore. There’s suet hanging in the oldest apple