Worst.Date.Ever Read online

  A century earlier, Mary had been a forgiving woman, offering food for the hungry at her restaurant back in the gold mining Wild West days. Her reputation for kindness gained her the ultimate respect of the harsh men in the Montana climate. Before it was abandoned, the restaurant had been a hotel, pool hall, brothel, and museum.

  After her library research, Alice went back to Mary’s old restaurant. Inside, it was dark except for the streetlight pressing its face against the front window. Suddenly, Alice heard the drafty wind turn into a voice.

  “I knew you’d come by,” said Mary, momentarily startling Alice. “Best huckleberry pie in these parts.”

  Mary emerged from the shadowed carcass of the old bar. Alice remained calm. Somehow, she knew she was supposed to be here.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Mary. “You don’t speak. All the better ’cause I talk too much. You see, Alice, we’re partners here. And we’re gonna get along like beans and bacon.”

  Alice couldn’t help but smile. That first magical night together, Mary told her the story of the long toothpick. Afterwards, still surrounded by the utter darkness of Mary’s hundred-year-old restaurant, Mary delicately fed Alice a huckleberry with her fingers. And with that intimate communion, without uttering a word, Alice completely accepted Mary into her life.

  “Men,” said Mary. “They put the ‘queasy’ in cuisine.”

  Alice thought about what she was doing to Basil. She thought about forgiveness. Her childish thoughts came back to play in her head. Even her name. She was forever one letter away from being Alive.

  Alice watched Basil’s expression but she was already fixated on something else that night—Caesar’s hands. It had been in the elevator of the Harkin Insurance Building in Philadelphia, on her way to a sous chef interview at an exclusive restaurant, where she first made contact with Caesar’s hands. He had been standing next to her in the crowded elevator when three people got on at the 18th floor, and he had been forced to move so close to her that his hands brushed up against her hip. She had looked down and fell apart at the sight of those muscular hands and the black curly hair between his wrist and knuckles. When she was able, she had looked up at his green eyes but all she saw were his strong hands. She had frantically searched the rest of him. He was a bit of a pretty boy, primped and coiffed, but his hands were all she had seen. It was a shame, she thought, that the rest of him hadn’t matched up.

  Caesar had been saying something but she was too flustered to listen. He’d said good-bye and got off on the twenty-third floor. A few days later, she’d bumped into Caesar again. He couldn’t quite place where he had met her but, of course, had become fascinated by her when he discovered she was a deaf-mute. Caesar had asked her out and she nodded in agreement, her eyes swimming towards the shores of his hands.

  He had rattled on that night in her apartment about how beautiful she was. All the while, she’d remained silent, entranced with his gorgeous hands, waving around like a symphony conductor. She’d known the exact moment it had occurred to him that he could say anything he wanted to her and she couldn’t hear. They had been on her couch. Caesar had described in great detail what he wanted her to do for him. Sexually. In response, she had gotten up and began cooking.

  After Caesar had eaten dinner, it was clear that he had expected Alice for dessert. Still, she shook her head. He had leaned against the wall by the front door as if it was constructed just for him, just for this moment, and looked at her with a well-rehearsed confidence. “Next time, I will have you,” he’d said.

  Alice had opened the front door and rested her right hand on the door jamb, signifying that Caesar needed to go. He’d moved, but stopped in the doorway, daring her to refuse him again. Alice had sighed deeply and shook her head quietly and with purpose. The menace in his eyes came quickly. He had slammed her front door and stormed off. The door had crushed her right index finger, destroying her cooking promise and her beauty forever. She hadn’t screamed or cursed. She’d walked the few blocks to the emergency room and lost her finger, never uttering a word.

  Now, Stagecoach Mary reached out to Alice and told her to put away the angry memories, to move on with her life. The connection between those two women, bridged across a century, was immediate and visceral to Alice. Mary loved telling the story of her guitar toothpick, so when Alice finished thinking about Caesar, and as Basil droned on about his job, she thought, “Can I hear it again? One more time?”

  “You bet, child,” said Mary.

  Back in 1863, Julian Santos traveled from Spain to Massachusetts in order to gain a better life as a singer. When the Civil War affected his opportunities, he did what many young foreigners did. He went West. Ultimately, he landed a job as a bartender in Cyrus’s Saloon, a shady and disreputable bar in Bannack, Montana. His only possessions were a comb, a grainy picture of his mother, and his guitar. He took that gleaming wooden instrument everywhere he went. Julian’s grandfather had made the guitar for him when Julian turned fifteen. The strings, the shape of it, the weight of it, were as familiar to Julian as his own hands.

  One night, as Julian was performing for some drunken miners with gold dust to spend, the usually noisy saloon went quiet with a shudder. In walked a black stagecoach driver—two hundred pounds, a rifle in one hand, a pistol and a Bowie knife tucked away in her belt, puffing a cigar and wearing a scowl.

  Everyone knew not to cross her. Even from five counties away, people had heard of Stagecoach Mary.

  She was the only woman in town who was allowed to drink or even enter the saloon. She sat down by herself, which was typically her nature, opened a bottle of whiskey and began a deep and personal relationship with it. It took two and a half songs for Mary to notice the foreign singer. She was just not accustomed to noticing men.

  “So Julian comes up to Ol’ Mary and asks me to take a drink with him. I holds up my half-empty bottle of snake juice and tells him I’s plannin’on killin’ the rest of the night by myself. But he jest looks at me, all serious. Leans over and tells me, all soft in my dusty ear, that he could drink my eyes in. Well, darlin’, Ol’ Mary nearly lost herself a lung in that saloon from laughin’ so hard. What the hell this crazy Spaniard be talkin’ ’bout? Drinkin’ in my eyes, like my face is a damn prairie and my eyes are gulches. So, this Julian’s pretty embarrassed right about now, especially since they’s all lookin’ at me laughin’ at him. Pretty soon, they starts to laughin’ themselves. Girl, it spread like wildfire on dry brush.”

  “What happened to Julian, Mary?” Alice already knew the answer.

  “Well, child,” smiled Mary. “He walked off, all red-faced. A couple times later, you know, over a few weeks here and there, Julian tries to tell Ol’ ugly Mary that he loves me. Starts talkin’ ’bout my eyes, my soul, my goodness. I don’t know what the hell he’s goin’ on about except I keep tellin’ him that he’s got himself the wrong Mary or some kinda’ brain fever. This Mary here is black as burnt wood and got a face that’d make a horse get up on two legs and jump off a steep rock. So, each time he comes for his courtin’, I sends him away like it’s all a big mistake and he heads away sulkin’.

  “Now, one night while I’m deliverin’ mail to Virginia City, I get word at one of the stops that Julian done hung himself, all on account of his lovin’ me and bein’ rejected. Well, all I could do was start to cry, but the boys, they all start lookin’ at me. So I turned that cry into a mighty laugh for poor Julian.

  “Them boys took up the laughter with me. I seen some poor, horrible sights in my day. Menfolk is the ugliest things.”

  “I know, Mary,” Alice motioned quietly. Basil stirred and got up to use the bathroom. Alice wondered if he’d be coming back. She stared at the wall and thought about Stu.

  After Caesar in Philadelphia, Alice had met Stu, who took her down to New Orleans. Alice got a job as saucier at a trendy restaurant in the French Quarter next door to an old-time pharmacy. The pharmacist had
flirted with Alice several times until he realized Alice was in love with Stu. Pale, tall, pudgy, and a sloppy dresser, Stu had looked like a giant ear of half-husked corn. After a long romance, Stu had actually promised to marry Alice.

  When Alice realized that she loved Stu, she’d emitted sparks of joy to all who came in contact with her. She’d stop to help kids carrying groceries. She’d invite the homeless into the restaurant after it closed so she could cook for them.

  Alice had worked these small miracles thinking that this was why people were happy. People were intended to fall in love and spread joy around like the opposite of a plague.

  “You were so blinded by love that you couldn’t see this lunkhead slowly slipping away. He didn’t love you. He was in love with love,” advised Mary.

  They continued to plan the small wedding, mostly for the benefit of Stu’s parents. Alice had no family and was excited to finally own one. She’d thought it odd when Stu told her to meet him at the church for the rehearsal rather than taking her there himself.

  When Alice had showed up for the rehearsal, she discovered the church was empty.

  She’d stared at her lonely altar for a few hours, wondering if Stu and his family were just late or if she had truly been left behind. Then, the priest’s cat, the one that ran from everything when people came to the rectory, walked up to Alice, sensing her profound pain. The cat started rubbing the side of its long body against Alice’s ankles, circling her over and over, reminding Alice how she kept coming back to the same place in her life no matter how far she traveled, despite how much wiser she thought she had grown.

  “You should have kept the cat,” said Mary. “They’re good for comfort when the blue demons come.” Then, after considering Alice a bit more, she added, “In fact, you should have taken two of them, like aspirin.”

  After that, Alice’s eyes had turned cold and held the loneliness of a prairie moon. She walked around and signed to no one in particular, cursing the heavens for creating this need of hers, this need for men. Need for men? Like the opposite of a vampire, she would seek them out and give her lifeblood to them.

  Later, the scream echoed in her head, “Can’t you make him so he won’t hate me? So that he won’t beat me, he won’t pay me off not to tell his family that we slept together, he won’t lie when he says he loves me, he won’t appear sane when he’s not, he won’t ask me to marry him when he has no intention to!”

  After Stu, for reasons of her own, she briefly dated the pharmacist next door to the restaurant.

  Cooking became her life. Her lack of a right index finger kept her from top-quality work but she made do. And she continued to not speak. She even created a signature dish that brought her some attention: grilled capon. She thought it was appropriate. Capons were castrated roosters.

  Cooking suited her, for it allowed quiet meditation. It also meant that she could think and rethink her problems, over and over, letting them simmer. As long as she stayed in the restaurant kitchen, her life, her self-imposed exile from the world, worked out fine. She’d intended to live out her life cooking and traveling around from city to city, constantly on the run from intimacy. Until, of course, the day Alfredo had walked into her kitchen.

  He had swept her off her feet and drove her to San Francisco. Alfredo was rich, beautiful, and romantically foreign. He also wouldn’t stop talking. When he’d grasped the implications of her silence, he really began to get some things off his chest. Families, fears, past women, all came up in a stream of consciousness. How he’d really pitied women, their frailties, their inappropriateness for this savage world.

  It was Alice who had begun pitying Alfredo, thinking she could help him, save him, turn him around. In Nevada, he’d started talking very frankly about what he thought of Alice, her faults, her physical imperfections.

  One week of living with Alfredo and his ranting in San Francisco was all she could take. She was online at her bank, contemplating how to break it off when the teller informed her that her account had been closed that morning by Alfredo. He had taken all her money and disappeared. She’d surprised herself by pursuing him. She had worked too hard for her savings, and it was all she had left.

  He’d had the gall to open a restaurant with her money. Finally confronted, he’d told her that the time he put into their relationship was fair exchange for the money he had taken. The next day, he’d burned the restaurant to the ground and collected on the insurance. And again, Alice had stayed silent.

  Basil came back to bed and whispered his most intimate fears and dreams in Alice’s ear, quiet as a prayer. She realized she was the closest thing that he would ever come to a church. This bed was the altar where he chose to make his confession. Alice wondered if she was capable of giving Basil absolution. In a way, his confessional to her was a fitting end to her relationship with men. This was the final excursion into their hearts before she launched towards uncharted waters.

  In her mind’s eye, she saw her own confession. She thought of mercy for Basil. Then suddenly, her past swept up and covered her present situation like a fine cotton bed sheet being stretched out for the first time.

  Basil shifted, and Alice focused on what he was saying. His speech had not been affected yet. She glanced past Basil at Stagecoach Mary and thought of her mother, who died shortly after finding out that Alice’s father had a child with another woman, a child he’d had while still married to Alice’s mother.

  “I think someone needs to stop listening to this no-account pisspot dribble on ’bout his sad life and hear the end of my story,” said Mary.

  Alice reflected for a moment. Ashamed at getting this sweet ghost upset, she looked up from Basil and pleaded, “I’m sorry, go on.”

  “All right then. So, I gets back to town and sure enough everyone’s talkin’ ’bout poor Julian and how he done kill himself and the circumstance surroundin’ it. Cyrus, his boss, comes up to me as soon as I get into town, like he was waiting for me. He hands me Julian’s guitar. Says Julian told him he wanted me to have it. Funny thing, though. When he hands me the guitar, Cyrus gets all serious and tells me Julian had a last wish. I says to Cyrus I imagine it was getting’ buried proper or being sent back to Spain. He tells me Julian wanted me to learn to play his guitar.

  “Now I starts to feel bad for Julian and even think that I treated him wrong. Maybe, I’m figurin’, he seen somethin’ in me I can’t see myself, like maybe he had a special mirror. Cyrus goes on ’bout how he’ll teach me to play Julian’s guitar on Thursday night. Now, he knows that Thursday’s the night I deliver gold dust to the miner’s court over at Rockslide, but Cyrus starts wailin’ ’bout how he ain’t gonna’ get into heaven on account he can’t fulfill a dyin’ man’s last wish. I says fine. I’ll learn guitar Thursday night before I head out.”

  Mary became quiet for a moment. The image of this black angel crackled in Alice’s eyes like a campfire.

  “Alice, Mary here ain’t never been much for gettin’ attention but, I gotta’ say, for once it was nice. Too bad it was comin’ from a dead man. There ain’t never been anythin’ wrong with sweet Julian, I tells myself, except I kept sendin’ him away. Sent him to die is what I did. Well, Thursday night comes along and I park my horses and coach in the back of Cyrus’ saloon. Turns out Cyrus don’t know a damn thing about guitars. We’re in the back room of the saloon and he’s tellin’ me to hold the guitar like a cello and even I know better than that. Julian’s luscious instrument sounds like we doin’ surgery on a goat.

  “Meanwhile, I can hear two things happenin’: a fight’s breakin’ out between Arizona Pete and Red Yeager in the main parlor, and, outside, my horses are gettin’ nervous. I take great pride in knowin’ my horses and they only make that kind of noise when wolves or men are sneakin’ around.

  “So, I march through the parlor, since there ain’t no back door, avoiding the fight, and go see about my horses. I’m holdin’ the guitar in my l
eft hand on account that my right hand is my shootin’ hand. I still remember what a cool, clear night it was, the stars spread out like someone flung a veil of diamond dust into the air. As I reach for my pistol, I see Julian in my coach lookin’ through the mail, lookin’ for the gold dust delivery.

  “He’s got a gun in his holster but he ain’t that quick. Julian looks up and sees me. He knows, and I know, that he didn’t give a damn about Ol’ Mary, just wanted her gold dust. Fooled the whole damn town, too. Cyrus and him probably plannin’ to leave tonight.

  “He knows I’m good with a gun and he seen me kill some road agents tryin’ to rob my coach. Still, he takes out his gun but he’s nervous and holdin’ it all wrong like he’s cradlin’ a baby. He can’t hold a gun and I can’t hold his guitar which should make us about even. Only we ain’t close to being even. My only problem is the gold dust and letters I’m carryin’ in my coach. If’n I shoot Julian in my coach, blood’s goin’ to get everywhere, which ain’t fair to the people expecting these things. So, I walk real slow towards him. He says he wants his gold.

  “My left arm ain’t my strongest arm but it did good enough. I crashed that guitar across poor Julian’s face. The guitar that his grandfather made for him. Now I gotta’ tell you, Spanish wood ain’t very stable ’cause that wood splintered and shattered everywhere. I kept one of the splinters of guitar wood as a souvenir. Used it as a toothpick. Julian talked kinda’ funny after that. I’d bring him a huckleberry pie every Thursday night when I’d visit him in jail and I’d ask him to tell me about my pretty eyes again.”

  Alice breathed deeply and watched Basil. He was dead. Finally. She got up and padded over to the kitchen. From her pocketbook, she took out the small vial of meprobromate and placed it on the floor in front of Basil. She was glad that something productive came out of dating the pharmacist in New Orleans. He had told her how the meprobromate, if taken in extended, large dosages, would slowly turn your stomach to Play-Doh. It was her own recipe: meprobromate and scotch stirred with her guitar toothpick. She had made it for Basil on each of their Thursday night dates. Stagecoach Mary grinned and said, “Come on, girl. You know you did the right thing.”