The Clanton square had three cafes, two for the whites and one for the blacks. The Tea Shoppe crowd leaned toward banking and law and retail, more of a white-collar bunch, where the chatter was a bit heavier - the stock market, politics, golf. Claude's, the black diner, had been around for forty years and had the best food.
The Coffee Shop was favored by the farmers, cops, and factory workers who talked football and bird hunting. Harry Rex preferred it, as did a few other lawyers who liked to eat with the people they represented. It opened at five every morning but Sunday, and was usually crowded by six. Ray parked near it on the square and locked his car. The sun was inching above the hills to the east. He would drive fifteen hours or so and hopefully be home by midnight.
Harry Rex had a table in the window and a Jackson newspaper that had already been rearranged and folded to the point of being useless to anyone else. "Anything in the news?" Ray asked. There was no television at Maple Run.
"Not a damned thang," Harry Rex grumbled with his eyes glued to the editorials. "I'll send you all the obituaries." He slid across a crumpled section the size of a paperback. "You wanna read this?"
"No, I need to go."
"You're eating first?"
"Yes.”
"Hey, Dell!" Harry Rex yelled across the cafe. The counter and booths and other tables were crowded with men, only men, all eating and talking.
"Dell is still here?" Ray asked.
"She doesn't age," Harry Rex said, waving. "Her mother is eighty and her grandmother is a hundred. She'll be here long after we're buried."
Dell did not appreciate being yelled at. She arrived with a coffeepot and an attitude, which vanished when she realized who Ray was. She hugged him and said, "I haven't seen you in twenty years." Then she sat down, clutched his arm, and began saying how sorry she was about the Judge.
"Wasn't it a great funeral?" Harry Rex said.
"I can't remember a finer one," she said, as if Ray was supposed to be both comforted and impressed.
"Thank you," he said, his eyes watering not from sadness but from the medley of cheap perfumes swirling about her.
Then she jumped up and said, "What're y'all eatin'? It's on the
Harry Rex decided on pancakes and sausage, for both of them, a tall stack for him, short for Ray. Dell disappeared, a thick cloud of fragrances lingering behind.
"You got a long drive. Pancakes'11 stick to your ribs."
After three days in Clanton, everything was sticking to his ribs. Ray looked forward to some long runs in the countryside around Charlottesville, and to much lighter cuisine. "
To his great relief, nobody else recognized him. There were no other lawyers in the Coffee Shop at that hour, and no one else who'd known the Judge well enough to attend his funeral. The cops and mechanics were too busy with their jokes and gossip to look around. Remarkably, Dell kept her mouth shut. After the first cup of coffee, Ray relaxed and began to enjoy the waves of conversation and laughter around him.
Dell was back with enough food for eight; pancakes, a whole hog's worth of sausage, a tray of hefty biscuits with a bowl of butter, and a bowl of somebody's homemade jam. Why would anyone need biscuits to eat with pancakes? She patted his shoulder again and said, "And he was such a sweet man." Then she was gone.
"Your father was a lot of things," Harry Rex said, drowning his hotcakes with at least a quart of somebody's homemade molasses. "But he wasn't sweet."
"No he was not," Ray agreed. "Did he ever come in here?"
"Not that I recall. He didn't eat breakfast, didn't like crowds, hated small talk, preferred to sleep as late as possible. I don't think this was his kind of place. For the past nine years, he hasn't been seen much around the square."
"Where'd Dell meet him?"
"In court. One of her daughters had a baby. The daddy already had a family. A real mess." He somehow managed to shovel into his mouth a serving of pancakes that would choke a horse. Then a bite of sausage.
"And of course you were in the middle of it."
"Of course. Judge treated her right." Chomp, chomp.
Ray felt compelled to take a large bite of his food. With molasses dripping everywhere, he leaned forward and lifted a heavy fork to his mouth.
"The Judge was a legend, Ray, you know that. Folks around here loved him. He never got less than eighty percent of the vote in Ford County."
Ray nodded as he worked on the pancakes. They were hot and buttery, but not particularly tasty.
"If we spend five thousand bucks on the house," Harry Rex said without showing food, "then we'll get it back several times over. It's a good investment."
"Five thousand for what?"
He wiped his mouth with one long swipe. "Clean the damned thing first. Spray it, wash it, fumigate it, clean the floors and walls and furniture, make it smell better. Then paint the outside and the downstairs. Fix the roof so the ceilings won't spot. Cut the grass, pull the weeds, just spruce it up. I can find folks around here to do it." He thrust another serving into his jaws and waited for Ray to respond.
"There's only six thousand in the bank," Ray said.
Dell dashed by and somehow managed to refill both coffee cups and pat Ray on the shoulder without missing a stride.
"You got more in that box you found," Harry Rex said, carving another wedge of pancakes.
"So we spend it?"
"I been thinking about it," he said, gulping coffee. "Fact, Fs up all night thinking about it."
'And?"
"Got two issues, one's important, the other's not." A quick bite o............