HUNTER LAKE 8/100 DOTTIE

HUNTER LAKE 8/100

 

Dottie walked out to the back of the Valley View Café, she leaned against the alley wall and took out a pack of cigarettes and lit up. She sighed as the smoke curled up in the quiet afternoon sunset. Her phone buzzed, “Mark.” It was her teenage son.

Her lone figure cast a long shadow on the concrete alley that stretched from a railroad to Cemetery Hill, on a dry Spring day of another year in a prairie town that time forgot. She inhaled again and this time felt the burn reach down into her chest to a heart that never forgot.

Her voice melted as she answered “what’s up.”

As she listened she remembered another voice, one filled with promises of escape to a better place, where she could leave the small town that she felt disappear beneath her like quicksand. A man whose eyes held her gaze and eventually consumed her like a fire consumes oxygen. She felt no needs when she was with him, as though all the troubles of the world disappeared with every breath she took. Fifteen years ago to the day, when he walked into the Café. She was only fifteen at the time, the same age as her son, too young to feel consumed by that kind of love and so young there was no other way that love could ever take her.

Here she was, standing in the alley, her home and Mark’s was a small apartment above the little restaurant, furnished with metal cupboards and a metal kitchen table, a pull down bed in the living room and two small closet sized bedrooms and bathroom with a shower. She woke up that morning the same way she had done for the last 15 years, when she decided to keep the baby and commit her life to the life inside of her as a sacred promise to life itself. She would never give the baby up, even though it meant legal emancipation from her family, getting a GED degree on line and working for substandard wages and tips in a place that never seemed to be able to make anything but enough money to keep the doors open.

“Sorry, yes I’m listening, what did you say about Ivy?”

Tears rolled down her face, as she listened she heard thoughts she had never expressed to anyone. He was saying words she had wanted to share with her parents, she wanted them to love her and listen to her, to help her make sense of all of it. “We’ll take the baby but no one can know you’re the mother.” They had said that to her. It wasn’t what Mark was saying, but there was something about his feelings about Ivy that reminded her.

“Listen, I gotta get back, I want to listen, let’s talk it over tonight.”

She pulled out some Binaca and sprayed her mouth and then some spearmint gum, sprayed a little lavender on her black polyester shirt dress and black apron with pockets for change and a green order tablet and pencil. There were too many grease stains to tolerate a pen. She stuffed the pack in her hiding place behind the alley light switch and opened the kitchen door to walk back into the restaurant. Today the cook was gone, so she doubled her work as cook and waitress, making it look like the place was staffed. She grabbed a fresh pot of coffee.

The Bunco group was in the middle of the Gala discussion as she walked back. “Oh, good Dottie’s back, more coffee, and any of your special Sandies, I love your sugar cookies Dottie.”

Suddenly the ladies looked at each other, as though they thought of the same idea at once. The chatter stopped. Dottie poured coffee for each of them, and brought out a full plate of the sugar cinnamon cookies and placed them at the center of the table.

After Dottie went back to the kitchen to check on the stews and soups, Mabel whispered. “Do you think she could cater dessert? She’s not a kid anymore, and she’s so good, did you taste her red velvet cake with white mountain frosting?”

“You know she had a kid out of wedlock.”

“That was fifteen years ago, who cares now.”

“but who’s the dad, someone from here?”

Mabel’s eyebrow raised. “We’ve been over this, gotta be someone from out of town, I would know if it weren’t.”

“It’s a good kid, I mean not the type I want my kids around, but not a trouble maker.”

“Did you see him get the winning home run for the State Baseball Tournament.”

“Well, yes.”

“You all agree?”

“I’ll talk it over with the Mayor tonight.”