Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [75]
Randeane thanked him. “Cream and sugar?”
Ray, who was normally a polite man, said, “The coffee could stand a little fixing up, I guess.”
Randeane put her pencil in her pocket and said, “People love our coffee. It’s fair trade. Everyone loves our Viennese Roast and our French Roast and I believe people come here for our coffee.”
Ray said, “I hate to disagree, but they come for the pastries or the atmosphere or because of you but they don’t come for the coffee.”
“I beg your pardon,” Randeane said.
Macy laughed and said, “Wow, Ray.”
“I’m just saying, people don’t come for the coffee.”
“I’ll make you a fresh cup.”
Randeane brought him another coffee and Ray drank it. It wasn’t great. Macy ate a little bit of her scone and she sighed. Two high school girls sat down at the table next to them.
“I’m not retarded,” the skinny girl with pierced eyebrows said.
“I know. But, duh, you can’t go for a job interview looking like that.” The other girl was chubby and cheerful and in a pink uniform.
“Fine,” the skinny girl said. “Fix me.”
Macy and Ray watched the two girls walk hand in hand into the ladies’ room.
“Girls are good at friendship,” Ray said.
Macy shrugged. “I guess. I was thinking about my mother when you came in and saw me crying,” she said.
“My father was a no-good fall-down drunk,” Ray offered. “My mother was as useless as a rubber crutch. But sometimes I miss her. That’s the way the dead are, I guess. They come back better than they were.”
“We weren’t close,” Macy said.
She’d been sitting in the kitchen just two days ago, thinking about gumbo and looking for filé powder, when the phone rang. Her mother said hello, she was just passing through and wanted to see Macy. She didn’t say hope to, or love to, she said, “I want to see you, kid. I’m in New Britain. There’s a place just off Route 9. It’s called the Crab Cake. Meet me there.” Her mother wore skinny black jeans and a yellow blouse and high-heeled yellow boots. She had a scarf pulled over her black hair and she sat in a booth, smoking, and when Macy came in, her mother didn’t get up.
“Don’t you look fat and happy,” her mother said.
Macy sat down.
“Surprised?”
“I’m surprised,” Macy said. It had been her plan that no one in her real life, meaning Neil and Neil’s family, would ever meet her mother.
“I bet. Well, I thought it was time you and your old mother had a chat.”
It didn’t take very long. Macy called her mother “Betty,” which was her given name, and Betty called Macy “Joanie,” which was hers. Macy’s mother accused Macy of running away and Macy said that if she hadn’t run away she’d be a fucked-up coke addict like her mother or worse. Betty said she had done her best and Macy stood up at that point. She said, Don’t tell me that. Macy’s mother said that they should let bygones be bygones, that she’d dumped Brad’s mean, sorry ass anyway, years ago, and see how Joanie had turned out fine. She said she was on her way to Miami and if Joanie could spare her some traveling money, she’d get right into her car. Macy had four hundred dollars she’d put aside from housekeeping money and three hundred she’d gotten as a bonus from her company, another hundred she got for a winter coat she’d returned, and twenty bucks that she’d found in Neil’s pants when she took them to the laundry. She’d put it all in an envelope before she got in her car to drive to the Crab Cake and she handed the envelope to her mother, who counted it.
“That’s all I have,” Macy said. “We’re not millionaires.”
Her mother was cheerful, the way she always was when things were not as good as she hoped, but not as bad as they could be.
“You weren’t hard to find,” her mother said.
“I wasn’t hiding,” Macy said, and her mother smiled and put out her cigarette.
“Well, good. Then you won’t mind if I come around again, when I’m passing through.”
“You come to my house and I’ll shoot you myself. I’ll say you snuck in and I shot you in self-defense, thinking you were a burglar. And I will cry my heart out to have killed my own poor, crazy mother,