The Noel Stranger Read online

  I looked down for a moment, then back up into Carina’s sympathetic eyes. Tears suddenly filled my own, as the words I’d been thinking for weeks spilled out. “Why wasn’t I enough for him?”

  “No one could be enough for him,” Carina said, sliding her chair closer. “Some people just have holes they can’t fill. That’s hard for you to understand because you’re not that way. Clive was insatiable. He always wanted more. That’s why he was always running for something bigger. He wanted more people to love him. He didn’t understand that one person’s love is better than a thousand people’s approval.”

  I started crying more, and she put her arms around me. “Oh, honey. This will pass.”

  When I could speak I said, “Are you sure?”

  “It will pass if you let it,” she said. “Think about what I said about changing things up. I think it will help.” She looked into my eyes. “Will you?”

  I nodded.

  She smiled. “Good girl. Now when are you coming back to work?”

  CHAPTER

  Four

  Sometimes our past follows us like toilet paper stuck to the heel of our shoe as we walk out of the bathroom. And we’re always the last one to see it.

  —Maggie Walther’s Diary

  I didn’t have an answer for her question. I felt guilty leaving Carina alone during the busiest time of the year. Ironically, it’s the exact same thing that had happened to me just before my company’s previous owner passed the business on to me.

  But my absence from work was more than just isolation. It was confusion. The catering business, my broken childhood, and Clive were all complexly tied together in a knot. I felt like I was trying to find my way through a confusing labyrinth that just kept taking me back to where I had started.

  Where I had started. I was born and raised in Ashland, Oregon, just sixteen miles north of the California border. It’s a peculiar place. Today it’s extremely liberal—so much so that some of the neighboring communities refer to it as “the People’s Republic of Ashland.” They’d probably like to forget that their city fathers once held Klan parades downtown and advertised themselves as a haven for “American citizens—negroes and Japanese not welcome.”

  But times change and so do people and locales. The scenery is beautiful there, mostly woods and mountains. Sounds like an idyllic place for a little boy and girl to grow up. My childhood should have been idyllic, but it wasn’t. My childhood was ugly.

  If I had to sum up the reason for my pain in one word, I’d say, “My father.” (Okay, two words.) My father never should have had children. Of course that means my brother and I wouldn’t have been born, but sometimes I’m not sure that would have been such a bad thing.

  My father never should have even gotten married. I don’t know why he did. He was always cheating on my mother. I couldn’t tell you how many times he cheated because I don’t know if he ever wasn’t. Sometimes there were fights; most of the time I just saw the pain and resignation on my mother’s face. I could never understand why my mother didn’t just leave. Eventually she did, just not the way I thought she would.

  The end of their union came during my fourteenth year. My mother went in to one of those surgical centers for a routine colonoscopy. She developed complications and died. I still remember the look on the doctor’s face when he told us. I didn’t believe it until I saw her breathless body. I remember feeling angry at her for not taking me with her.

  I’ve learned that everyone handles grief differently. My brother, Eric, just disappeared, first within himself, then, years later, physically. I don’t know how my father handled the loss of his wife; the only emotion he ever shared was anger. I suspect that, among other things, he felt guilt. Maybe I just hope that he did, like a real human would. But I think he also recognized the opportunity—not that my mother kept him away from other women—but her presence kept other women away. At least the kind with a scrap of dignity. I could never figure out why my father wanted women so badly, then treated them so badly.

  As far as our home life, my father pretty much just checked out. Six months after my mother’s death, my father sued the doctor and clinic for malpractice and got all sorts of money. He bought himself a really big boat, the kind that could cross the ocean. I still had to beg him for grocery money.

  I wanted to go to college, but I knew my father wouldn’t pay for it. I asked him about it once and he said college was indoctrination, not education, and that he had already taught me all I needed to know about the world.

  I learned young that whatever I wanted in life, I would have to get for myself. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I developed young, so I always looked older than I was. Everyone assumed I was twenty when I was barely fifteen. My first job was as a server at a local café. Every day old men hit on me. Looking back, I suppose they weren’t really that old, probably in their thirties and forties, but they seemed ancient to me.

  When I was a senior in high school, Eric ran away. He left me a note that read, “Good-bye, I’m sorry.” That was it. No address, nothing. I didn’t need to ask why. It was the same reason that I wanted to leave home, except my father was even worse to him than he was to me. It seemed to me that with Eric, my father was constantly trying to prove that he was the alpha dog.

  Two weeks after I graduated from high school, I moved to Utah. It wasn’t the kind of place I thought I’d end up. In fact, up until six months before moving there, I knew nothing about the place. It was just one of those peculiar twists of fate that pulls the seat out from under you.

  One day I was talking to one of the truckers at the café—we had tons of them—who was hauling a load of lumber to his hometown of Salt Lake City. I asked him what Salt Lake City was like. He said he liked it. It was bigger than Ashland, smaller than Portland. He said there was the University of Utah, which would be cheap once I got residence, and in the meantime there was a lot of work there. The cost of living was low and the people pretty much left you alone, except the Mormons, who would probably bring me a loaf of home-baked bread and invite me to church. Best of all, it was seven hundred miles from my father.

  With Eric gone, I didn’t really have anything holding me in Ashland. I had a cute boyfriend, Carter, but I wasn’t in love or anything, and even though he talked about marriage (which I always thought was a little bizarre for an eighteen-year-old), I knew he wasn’t someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

  I wasn’t afraid to leave home. After what I’d been through, I don’t think I was afraid of much. I was, by necessity, frugal, so between my waitressing and tips and the occasional babysitting, I’d saved about five thousand dollars, which my father never knew about. Even with all his money, I have no doubt that he would have cleaned me out if he did, then justify his action as another one of his life lessons.

  About a month before graduation, I started looking around for someplace to live in Utah. I came across a want ad posted by a young woman looking for a roommate. Her name was Wendy Nielsen. She had just quit her job working for a catering company and even though her rent was only three hundred and seventy-five dollars a month, she couldn’t afford it.

  The place looked nice online. Then I asked her about work. I had some cooking experience at the restaurant and had done almost all the cooking at home, so I asked if there was an opening at the catering company she’d just left.

  “There’s always an opening,” she replied. “The owner’s a witch. She runs everyone off. She’s like barely five-foot and she has a massive mole on her left cheek. Her name is Marge.”

  I hesitated a moment, then said, “She named her mole Marge?”

  Wendy laughed so hard she had to run to the bathroom. We were friends before we even met.

  Wendy was right about the catering job. They were hiring. Perpetually. Not only were the wages good—$18.50 an hour, which was more than double what I’d ever made before—but I also got tips. Sometimes big ones. And there were insurance benefits.

  “It’s not worth a hundre
d dollars an hour,” Wendy told me. “It’s psychological abuse. You’ll end up paying more for a good therapist.”

  “Do they have mental health benefits?” I asked.

  The thing was, I wasn’t really afraid of anyone, and I needed better money than I was going to make waitressing. I figured I could do anything for a year. Catering certainly wasn’t something I had planned on making a career.

  Actually, at that point I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, as I had been more focused on what I didn’t want it to be than what I wanted it to be. The job was just something I could do while I made up my mind.

  It was also perfect timing for me, since I couldn’t go to school until I had established residency and could apply for a grant. I was one of those kids in a bind: my father had too much money for me to get student aid, but he wasn’t willing to give me any of it. I was stuck.

  Wendy had understated the pay but not her former employer. Marge Watson burned through employees like cars burn through tires at the Indianapolis 500. She was professional enough to never scold an employee in front of a client, but that was about the extent of her self-discipline. She’d eat employees for breakfast. She was good at it, and since most of her employees were young kids who had never worked before, they never lasted long.

  Her personality didn’t faze me. Compared to my father, she was a kitten. And unlike my father, she couldn’t hit me—though Wendy told me that she did slap an employee once. The employee sued, and the slap ended up costing Marge thousands of dollars. She never hit anyone after that.

  Still, I knew it was only a matter of time before she came after me, so I waited for my turn, not with fear but with curiosity. I wondered what I would do.

  Outside of me and the revolving door of part-time employees, there were two Mexican women who also worked full time: Frida and Eiza. Marge wasn’t nice to them either, but they never seemed to mind her rants. I wasn’t sure if it was a cultural thing, if they needed the money too much, or if they just didn’t really understand what she was saying, as neither of them spoke English very well.

  Finally my day came. I had a confrontation with a trust-fund bridezilla who had had too much to drink and suddenly insisted that she had ordered a four-tier wedding cake instead of a three. I wasn’t sure if she thought I was going to quickly bake her a new tier or what her endgame was, but I just brushed her off.

  Then she shoved me. She shouldn’t have done that. I threw her up against a wall and, with my forearm across her throat, said, “You touch me again and your wedding pictures will look like something out of a Stephen King movie.”

  When I let her go, she ran out crying. Of course the bride’s mother went ballistic on Marge, who of course then came after me. Marge was blue in the face and yelled at me until I thought she might burst a blood vessel. I just looked at her, unaffected. I think she thought I would quit, like everyone else did, but I was going to make her fire me so I could collect unemployment if I had to.

  Neither happened. When she finished her tirade, I said calmly, “You should try Prozac. And breath mints.” Then I walked out the back door.

  As I was about to get into my car, Marge poked her head out the door and shouted to me, “I am on Prozac. Don’t be late Monday.”

  Marge never got mad at me after that. I was probably the first employee who had ever stood up to her and, in so doing, had earned her respect. It was almost like she was testing me— like at the end of the first Willy Wonka movie. The good one.

  When I started, Just Desserts only did weddings and an occasional bar mitzvah. (Utah, due to its religious culture, has a myriad of the former and a dearth of the latter.) Then people began asking us to do their company parties and corporate catering. As we expanded, Marge taught me everything she knew about the trade.

  After that first year, Marge offered me a sizable raise to delay college and work full time for the company. I’m not really sure why Marge started the company to begin with, other than she was fiercely independent and didn’t like the idea of living in her husband’s shadow. Her husband, Craig, was the CEO of a local plumbing supply company. I only met him a few times, but he was a good-looking, clean-cut man, always perfectly coiffed. One of those shiny people like Clive. He and Marge were about as compatible as mayonnaise and maple syrup.

  I have no idea what brought the two of them together. He was soft-spoken, kind, and respectful, and Marge was Marge. She treated him like dirt. I always felt sorry for him.

  Peculiarly, I had worked for Marge for more than a year before I found out she had a daughter. Tabitha. Not surprisingly, they didn’t get along. From what I gathered, Tabitha wanted to be a playwright and lived, with a credit card from her father, in New York City, working backstage on off-Broadway productions.

  As time passed, I realized that I was Marge’s only friend. I also sensed that she was getting bored with the business, as she gave me more and more responsibility until I was pretty much running the place. (Kind of like what I was presently doing with Carina.) After two more years Marge doubled my salary and made me the chief operating officer, which meant I still did the same thing, I just got paid for it.

  Then, one snowy February morning, Marge called me as I was getting ready for work. Her voice was hoarse and a little stiffer than usual.

  “Craig’s gone,” she said.

  “Gone where?” I asked.

  “He had a heart attack while he was shoveling the walk. He’s gone.”

  She was so stoic that I wasn’t sure how to respond. “I’m sorry.”

  “I won’t be coming in,” she said.

  I didn’t see her for almost nine weeks. Then, two weeks after my twenty-third birthday, Marge asked to meet me for lunch at her favorite restaurant, a local bistro run by German people who were as rude as she was.

  I got to the restaurant a few minutes early. Marge still hadn’t arrived, so the hostess sat me and brought me a drink. Ten minutes later Marge walked in. I almost didn’t recognize her. I couldn’t believe how much she had changed in just a short time. She’d already been skinny, but now she looked gaunt, her skin tight on her cheeks, which made her look old. Her hair had turned completely gray. I don’t know if the stress of her husband’s death had gotten to her or if she had just stopped coloring it. Maybe both.

  “Have you ordered yet?” she asked, sitting down. I thought it was a strange thing to say to someone you hadn’t seen in over two months.

  “No. I was waiting for you.”

  “Who’s your waitress?”

  I pointed to a young, flaxen-haired woman setting drinks at another table. “Her.”

  “You,” Marge shouted to the young woman. “We’re ready to order now.”

  “I’ll be right there,” the waitress said, looking somewhere between annoyed and stunned. A moment later she walked over. “Are you ready to order?”

  “I just told you we were,” Marge said. “Now get out your little notepad there. We’ll have the red hummus appetizer to share, then I’ll have a bowl of the sweet potato soup, and tell the chef that if he puts too much turmeric in it this time, I’ll make him eat it.”

  The server let out a short sigh, wrote down the order, then turned to me. “What can I get for you?”

  “May,” Marge interrupted. “What may I get for you. You’re a professional, honey. If you’re going to work with the public, you need to speak their language.”

  The woman flushed. By then I was not surprised by Marge’s utter lack of social finesse, but I still felt bad for the young woman.

  “What may I get for you?” she asked, noticeably softer.

  “I’ll have a spring salad, with the dressing on the side,” I said. “Thank you.”

  She gathered our menus. “All right, I’ll be right back with your appetizer.”

  After she was gone, Marge said, “I’m sorry I missed your birthday.” That was one of the surprise quirks of Marge’s personality. She kept track of all her employees’ birthdays and, no matter how tenuous their emp
loyment, would commemorate them by coming in early to bake one of her raspberry almond cakes.

  “It’s okay. You’ve had a lot on your plate,” I said.

  She sighed deeply. “I didn’t realize how heavy the grief would be.” She seemed annoyed by this, as if her husband’s death had been more of an inconvenience than she expected. “I’ve felt crazy.”

  “I thought the same thing when my mother died.”

  “I have a present for you.” She reached into her purse and brought out an envelope, which she handed to me. I hoped there was money inside. There wasn’t. There was only a birthday card with one of our business cards with my name on it. All the card said was Happy Birthday.

  I didn’t really understand why she was giving me one of my own business cards.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You didn’t read the card,” she said.

  “I read it.”

  “I meant the business card. Read it.”

  I looked back down and saw Just Desserts. Maggie Walther. Owner.

  Owner. I looked up at her.

  “I don’t want to do this anymore,” she said.

  Her comment was a little odd since she really hadn’t done anything with the business for months. “Do what?”

  “The business. It’s time I retired. I hate our clients and I have no desire to spend the rest of my life freezing my bones in Utah. I’m moving to Sun City, Arizona.” I didn’t know there was such a place but it sounded nice. “There’s no one else who could run my business.”

  “What about Tabitha?”

  “Oh, please.”

  “You could sell it,” I said.

  “To who? Some moron who would run it into the ground after I’ve put my best years into it? And then I’d have her calling me every time she had a problem. You know I don’t need the money. Craig left me with more than I can spend. Besides, you’re more a daughter than my own daughter.”

  It was the sweetest thing she had ever said to me. Maybe to anyone. “Thank you.”

  “You’re the only thing that has made the last few years remotely tolerable.”