Lunch with the Do-Nothings at the Tammy Dinette Read online

  Copyright © 2017 Killian B. Brewer

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 13: 978-1-945053-13-9 (trade)

  ISBN 13: 978-1-945053-28-3 (eBook)

  Published by Interlude Press

  http://interludepress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and places are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, either living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

  Book Design and Cover Illustrations by CB Messer

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Dedicated to Southern women of a certain age,

  be you belles in heels or hell on wheels.

  I’d name names, but my mama raised me better than that.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Marcus Sumter had always been good at reading the signs.

  With a mother like his, he’d had no other choice.

  For as long as he could remember, usually in early summer, his mother would throw all of their belongings into the bed of her old, red Chevy pickup truck, strap him into the passenger’s seat, and give him the usual spiel.

  “Baby, it’s time to move on.”

  They would pull into the parking lot of the last diner where she had been waitressing, and Marcus would wait in the truck and reread his book about sailors that he’d stolen from the library in some town he couldn’t remember. He liked the stories about life on the high seas and the pictures of the handsome men in tight white pants. While he read, his mother would tell the owner to “shove it” after picking up her last paycheck. She never turned in her uniform or name tag. She’d need those again.

  “Now, Mama’s going to drive, and you’re my co-pilot, my navigator. You have the very important job of reading the signs that tell us where to go. And watch for cops. Lord, the last thing Mama needs is to meet another cop.”

  “What about a map? In my book, the navigator reads the maps. Or are we going to follow the stars the way pirates did?”

  “Oh, sweetie, we don’t need a map. All we need is a sense of adventure and a desire to go. And we don’t need stars neither. The good people of Georgia done put signs all over the place to tell us how to get there. Now, what’ll it be this time? North or south?”

  “South, Mama. Let’s try south.”

  First, it was literal signs. Stop. Speed Limit 65. Rest Area 1 Mile Ahead. And the most important sign: Waffle Barn Next Exit. That sign meant employment for his mother and possibly getting off the road for a year or so for Marcus. Luckily, Georgia seemed to have at least one Waffle Barn at every exit, so opportunities were limitless. It was just a matter of deciding which town to try next.

  “Look, Baby! Buena Vista! Ooh, that sounds pretty. Let’s try there.”

  Marcus had quickly learned the towns were never as pretty as their names suggested, but at each city limit sign he would hold his breath. Maybe this would be the town where they would park the truck and finally stop and stay. His mother would find a cheap apartment, get a job at the diner, and register Marcus in the local school. Since tip money didn’t allow for after-school babysitters, the diner became Marcus’s second home as he sat on a stool at the counter with his heels swinging several inches above the footrest and watched his mother weave her way between the booths and tables with a large tray of waffles and coffee balanced on her shoulder. When they would drag into the apartment after a long shift, his weary mother would slip off her shoes and her smile, collapse in a chair, and talk about what a “sonofabitch” the day had been, but while she was working, his mother seemed to Marcus the picture of grace as she flitted from table to table, flirted with customers, sang along to the jukebox, laughed as she called orders back to the cook, and never once dropped a plate or her smile. He learned all the words and rhythms of the same old songs that played on every jukebox in every joint. Tammy Wynette, Patsy Cline, and Loretta Lynn became wise older aunts who would give him advice while he did his homework sitting on a stool at the counter or would sing him to sleep as he curled up in a booth in the back corner.

  He learned the rhythms of the diner crowds also—old people taking advantage of the early-bird specials in the evening, horny teenagers on cheap dates in the early night, and drunks and cops watching each other warily in the wee hours. As he grew older and his feet no longer dangled above the footrests on the stools, he began to hop from the stool and wander to the grill behind the counter. He learned to make the greasiest of food when a few of the short-order cooks would bring him into the kitchen and teach him their skills in a misguided attempt to impress his mother. By the time he was eighteen, Marcus could flip an omelet as easily as other boys his age could swing a bat. While they learned useless things like algebra and history, Marcus learned the signs of the exact moment to remove bacon from the griddle before it burned or when a steak was in that delicate stage between medium and medium well.

  With age, he began to be good at reading his mother’s signs too. Just as he knew that Tammy Wynette would stand by her man, he knew his mother would continue her search to find her man. First, she would flirt with the policemen who sat at the counter in every town.

  “Baby, Mama is going out with that nice officer from the diner tonight.”

  Marcus never learned their names. He wasn’t sure his mother bothered to learn them. When she had worked her way through every unmarried (and a couple married) men on the force, she would move on to whatever greasy man was working the grill during the day shift. “Baby, you’re going to stay with the nice old lady next door tonight. Whatshisface from the diner is taking Mama out dancing tonight.”

  When she grew bored with him or he grew rough with her, her drinking would start again.

  “Baby, run down to the jiffy store and get mama some Marlboros and a two-liter of coke. I need something to mix this bourbon with.”

  A few days later, she’d call weakly to him from her bed.

  “Baby, call the nice man up at the diner and tell him your mama ain’t feeling too good. I can’t be slinging eggs when I’m feeling like this.”

  Marcus would make the call, bring his mother another drink, and then begin silently packing his things into his duffel bag. He knew what would come in the next few days.

  “Baby, it’s time to move on.”

  This pattern continued until the summer after his eighteenth birthday when they had piled into the truck and Marcus had chosen “north.” As they sped up Interstate 75 toward Atlanta, exit after exit passed. His mother had been unusually quiet and showed no signs of stopping. With each exit Marcus would point out, she’d just shake her head and grunt, “No, Baby. That town don’t sound right.”

  Halfway through the city of Atlanta, she had pointed out a Waffle Barn sign, flipped the turn signal, and began pulling off at an exit.

  “Ooh, Cheshi
re Bridge Road. That sounds lovely. Kind of queen-of-England sounding, ain’t it?”

  “Whatever, Mama.”

  “I’m going to pull into the diner and go see about a job. You run over to that gas station and get Mama some smokes.” She shoved a wad of bills into his hand and eased the truck into the parking lot.

  Marcus hopped out of the truck and ambled over to the store. After grabbing a pack of Big Red chewing gum for himself and asking the man behind the counter for the pack of cigarettes, he pulled the wad of bills out of his pocket and noticed it was five or six one hundred -dollar bills. “Oh, shit.” Leaving the cigarettes and gum behind, he ran back down the sidewalk toward the diner. He stopped abruptly when he noticed his duffel bag sitting discarded on the sidewalk by the diner’s front door. His mother’s old, red pickup truck was nowhere to be seen.

  Yes, other than that one time three years earlier, Marcus had always considered himself good at reading the signs, so he was shocked he had missed the large black and white one that had been staring at him for almost two years from the end of his shady, suburban Atlanta street. As he flipped down the driver-side sunshade to take another look in the mirror at his blackened eye, a glint of sunlight off the sign caught his attention.

  Avoid Dead End in Cul-de-sac.

  “Now you tell me,” Marcus said aloud. With a sharp laugh, he flipped back the visor and rolled down his window. Sticking out his arm, he raised his middle finger at the sign and stepped on the accelerator. As the tires squealed on the pavement, he shot out onto the main road and began speeding toward the interstate. In the rearview mirror, the sign quickly disappeared behind him. He shifted his focus back to his blackened eye and let out a long sigh.

  “Baby, it’s time to move on.”

  Chapter One

  Marcus sat on the curb outside of the emergency room exit and dropped his chin into his hands, not really sure what to do with himself next. For his trip south to have started out so smoothly, things had gone south pretty quick.

  The three or so hours he had spent racing down Interstate 75 had gone by with little of note or bother. A stop in a rest area or two to pee and curse his kindergarten kidneys, a brief swing into a Waffle Barn for lunch, and the next thing he knew he was easing the tiny yellow Fiat off the road and under the large green exit sign that stated Marathon/Hwy 134. Marcus was amazed at the beauty of the twenty miles of country highway headed into the town. Though his father had grown up in this part of the state, it was an area Marcus and his mother had never ventured into much in their ramblings. She had claimed the mosquitoes and gnats made it not worth the bother to wander into what she called “the swampy wasteland.” But as the countryside whizzed by, Marcus was surprised to see not boggy marshes full of alligators but mile after mile of rolling farmland covered with row after row of tilled soil from the spring planting. Enormous silver sprinkler systems spanned the fields, and twice he had to swerve to the wrong side of the road to avoid getting drenched by an errant spray of water. He did see an occasional murky pond dotted with lily pads and with cypress trees growing right out of the water, but as a whole it was just pine trees, fields, and a couple of small, white churches with cemeteries beside them.

  At the city limit, he was greeted by a large sign with crepe myrtle trees painted along the edges and tall pink lettering that read: “Welcome to Marathon, Georgia! Population 11,502.” Underneath, in a fancy, white script, was written, “The name sounds like running away, but we know you’ll want to stay!” Marcus had rolled his eyes and drawled, “Don’t count on it.”

  Just past the sign, the highway narrowed from four lanes to two and the roadside became littered with brick ranch houses behind large green lawns dotted with azalea bushes and dogwood trees. A few houses had children playing in the yards, and Marcus slowed his speed to something more appropriate for in-town driving.

  “No need to start the day with a speeding ticket,” Marcus said aloud to himself. “Shit!” He swerved to avoid a yellow dog that had run out of one of the yards straight for his tires.

  Heart racing, he pulled onto the gravel at the edge of the road to calm down and watch the dog trot back into his yard. Marcus brought up the GPS on the screen in his dashboard and began scrolling through the options. He retrieved the law firm’s envelope from the passenger seat and entered the street address. “Now how does this thing work?” He pushed the button marked “drive” and waited.

  When Robert had bought him the Fiat, Marcus had thought the built-in GPS was an absolute waste of money. In the time before he had the car, he’d used Atlanta’s buses and trains to maneuver his way around the city and had learned how to get just about anywhere he needed to go. Also, his time on the road with his mother had given him a natural instinct for navigating the highways and byways. Until this moment, he had never bothered to turn the thing on.

  “Proceed one mile and turn left onto Main Street,” a soothing woman’s voice announced over the car speakers.

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” Marcus said and lifted his fingers to his brow in a mock salute. He tossed the envelope back onto the passenger’s seat and checked his rearview mirror before easing out onto the street. As his car bumped over the edge of the pavement, the envelope slid from the seat onto the floorboard below. “Shit,” Marcus muttered as he leaned over to try to reach the paper while keeping an eye on the road ahead. He fumbled blindly with his right hand but couldn’t find the envelope. He glanced down and grasped the edge of the paper with his fingertips. As he raised his eyes to the road ahead, he saw a massive, red car heading straight toward him.

  The next thing he knew, he was waking, head pounding, on a cot in a sterile-looking white room. He felt a bandage across his forehead and another wound tightly around his wrist. Looking around the room in confusion, he discovered an elderly woman with bluish-tinted hair and a pink-and-white-striped dress sitting in a chair across the room flipping through a magazine. When he cleared his throat to get her attention, she informed him that he was in the Marathon General Hospital Emergency room, that he had been delivered here by ambulance from the accident scene, and that he was not, in fact, dead. After retrieving a doctor to declare him fit to leave, she helped him into a wheelchair, had him sign some papers, and then wheeled him out the exit and to the curb. Marcus turned to inquire about a cab, but the woman scurried back through the automatic doors with the wheelchair and disappeared. Unsure what to do next, Marcus plopped on the curb and pulled out his phone to look up a cab company. When he turned on the phone, he saw the message: Eight missed calls from Robert. Then a low-battery warning beeped before the phone shut itself down. He dropped the phone in disgust, rested his elbows on his knees, and propped his chin on his hands. After trying to will away the throbbing in his head, he stood to go back into the hospital and look for a pay phone. Just as he turned to enter, the sound of tires screeching to a halt on the pavement behind him made him spin around.

  An older, dark blue Buick idled in the parking lot in front of him. The passenger’s side window rolled down.

  “Marcus? Marcus Sumter?” a woman’s voice called through the open window.

  Marcus took a few careful steps forward and peeked inside the window. “Excuse me?”

  “Yes,” the woman said with a satisfied smile. “You’re definitely a Sumter. Spitting image of your daddy. Got that unfortunate red hair all the Sumter men have.”

  Marcus stared at the woman smiling at him from behind the steering wheel. Silver hair cut in a stylish bob framed the sharp angles of her face, which was mostly hidden behind red sunglasses with rhinestones at the temples. She wore a soft blue button-down blouse with the collar turned up. A tennis bracelet sparkled as she drummed her hand on the steering wheel.

  “Um, do I know you?”

  “Oh, honey, get in the car and I’ll explain everything. The longer I keep this window down, the less my A/C will work. If I let too much humidity into this car, my hair will absolut
ely deflate, and I don’t have time to go to the Cutting Up today to get it fixed. Now hop in, and I will take you where you need to be.”

  “But, my car and my things…”

  “Are probably being towed to Murphy’s auto shop. We can deal with that later. But, first things first, I’m going to need you to quit staring at me and get in the durn car.”

  Marcus looked around the parking lot. “Oh, what the hell,” he mumbled as he yanked open the door. He slipped into the passenger seat and pulled the door closed behind him.

  “That’s better,” the woman said and smiled at Marcus as she turned up the air conditioning in the car. “Can you believe this heat this early in June? Course, it’s like this all the time down here, so I don’t know why I’m surprised. Heck, I was halfway through menopause before I realized I was having hot flashes, and it wasn’t just the weather. I can’t believe Myrtle made you wait out on the curb. I told her I was on my way. She could’ve let you sit in the air-conditioned lobby at least.” The woman shook her head and drove toward the parking lot exit. “Of course, when you spend all your time being a busybody tending to everyone’s business, I guess you don’t stop to actually think. I swear that woman—”

  “I’m sorry,” Marcus interrupted her. “Maybe it’s the bump on my head, but I’m confused. Who—”

  “Myrtle. Myrtle Hawkins. That woman in the pink-striped dress?” The woman flipped on her turn signal and pulled onto the road. “She’s one of the volunteers at the hospital. Pink Ladies, they call them. She says she does it to feel useful, but I think she does it so she can have her nose squarely in everybody’s business. Nobody comes or goes in that hospital without her knowing it and telling everybody about it. It’s a real pain in the rear when it comes to privacy, but I do admit it makes it convenient for knowing who needs prayers, or a casserole, or when to buy something new to wear for a funeral.”

  “Yes, but who—”