I used to run a simple operation: a pizza/burger/fries/hot dog sort of place with little seating and a lot of grease. It was called The Dog House, like, I'm sure many similar places are called. I know it's not an original name, okay?
Anyway, my daughters got through school on what this place brought in and after they graduated they came to work part-time for me, along with my youngest boy, Jared, who's a senior at White Chapel Christian Academy. Sydney, my older girl, is an insurance actuary but she always came in on weekends to help out. My younger one, Tabitha, went to community college and lived nearby, coming in to work most evenings. But a few years ago, after my back started going out on me, they started talking to me about letting them take on more responsibilities, like the accounting and the inventory and things like that and before I know it, they're starting to change the whole damn place, putting in all these new butcher-block tables and tall wooden bar chairs. Used to be just a few benches along the walls where people could wait for their food. Usually guests didn't linger. But Sydney starts talking about how lingering can be profitable, and I'm like, ok, so we start talking about expanding the menu. I tell the girls as long as the staff can handle it, I'm okay on all their decisions. My younger one graduated in business and the older one is taking night school now and caring less and less about her insurance job.
Before I know it, we're serving coffee. Croissants. Green salads and herbal tea. Somehow all my friers got replaced with smaller burger and pizza ovens with the revolving grills that can also spit out bagels and other grilled sandwiches. They talked to me about healthy food like I had no idea.
Saturated fat is immoral, dad.
So we start serving tuna salad and grilling the burgers instead of frying them. We start offering fresh fruit parfaits and bottled water and little greek salads in little plastic containers. We start frying our fries in peanut oil and I lose three or four of my customers due to a damn food allergy.
Now I'm serving turkey and provolone on a fresh croissant with fig jam and a slice of Granny Smith Apple. And you know what? the same people come in. They come in because they have nowhere else to go where the owner will allow them to sit for hours on end. The only other place is the Exxon Dunkin Donuts off 526. So they come here and they reluctantly munch on their scone or their mandarin orange salad and my daughters pat each other on the back and say well done, we're keeping this town healthy.
I do miss the smell of the place, though.
People come here to drink bottomless fountain Cokes. They come here to share absurd milkshakes and a concoction of ice cream entitled "Everything but the Kitchen Sink" (my daughters can't stop me from serving ice cream. Not yogurt. Ice Cream) which is so huge that the only party I've ever seen complete it was a half dozen football players from the baptist college down the way. People come here to hold hands and play music on the jukebox and talk and slow dance (sometimes) and talk about the game or talk about the show or talk about the weather.
People come here to talk. And the worst ones are the old folks. They seem to know everything. About everyone. And they are merciless. They come in here every day; the regulars of this strange little town, the elderly who have no golf courses, no pools to sit by. They come in droves, they come in pairs, they never come alone. Never enjoy a book or a magazine. No, they order their chamomile and their cream soda and they talk, they talk about what the world is coming to and how family values are going down the shitter and it always starts the same way; some teenager or group of teenagers or some woman or some group of women walks by the large picture window; too much makeup or not enough clothes ; hair too black or jeans too ripped, skin too pale or too black or too tattooed and suddenly these people remember that life is not what they were promised and there is no better example of this than in a roving band of miscreants.
However, it is nearly Christmas and the old women sitting in a booth near the counter have other things to talk about than their usual dismay with the changing times. They're not even discussing their children and children-in-law, their grandchildren and all the choices they've made laid up on the table for approval. They had already done that around Thanksgiving. This year, it's the Hurts. All year it's been the Hurts.
The old man, Mathis, he's got emphysema, and maybe a few months. The old women say he still retains ownership of the White Chapel Inn, even though it's his son, Nathan and his wife Cecilia who really run the place. But as depressed as everyone is about Mathis (he really is a great guy, the family's been in this town a long time) they still have other things to say about the family that are anything but sensitive. Anything but giving.
Last Sunday at church Nathan said that his son Gabriel (whom we we all know to be more than just estranged), would be visiting for the holidays and for support through this difficult time. He asked for prayers of support and clarity and that everyone would make Gabriel feel as welcome as possible. The prayer was long and stagnant and I remember I couldn't stop thinking about Nathan's testimony some five years ago now.
Everyone knew that Nate had been a mean drunk and would've been locked up for the rest of his good years if it weren't for the Lord's intervention. And did the Lord intervene. The change has been nothing short of miraculous; from sinner to saint, I mean it. Nathan's story is too saturated with divine grace to allow room for personal opinions about the man.
Everyone knew his son might as well have been dead for all the good he was to him. Nathan spent nearly enough money looking for the kid to bankrupt the whole inn but his drinking was getting pretty out of control and the money ran out. Everyone was contributing as much as they could, the whole church, even though Nathan wasn't a member or even a believer, but that ran out, too. And of course, there was his wife. A whole other set of problems. Most people in town are pretty sympathetic and basically too yellow to actually bring her up.
Except for this particular pack of cotton candy-haired old women. Four of them, discussing something that, as far as I could tell, was actually new and shocking. It had been a big year for the family.
The young one, Matty, about seventeen, just got out of that juvenile facility upstate, all filled up with the Lord last June, let out early because of good behavior and due to his grandfather's declining health. Mathis has always been close with those boys.
One of the women, Linda, says that Gabriel coming home is a good thing, a sign of progress and unity in the family. She has not quite gotten over her church talk and the others are more than a little irritated by it.
"Well he's only in town for his grandfather. I doubt he came back for that father of his..."
"Probably just to see how much he's getting in the will."
"Not everyone cares only about money, Margaret."
"I'm not saying everyone, but the boy's been gone so long they're like strangers now. It ain't because he cares."
"Can you blame him? Getting slapped around every other day?"
The one named Margaret, wears her powder-blue sweater with an all-over winter ice skating scene knitted into its pattern. She made it herself. The woman across from her, Claire, wears a red sweatshirt with a similar scene screen printed. Her skaters are white, smiling polar bears. She sits up straighter because she and Claire are usually competitive.
"It's been years and people have been forgiven for much worse, so if that's the reason, then I'm not breaking my back to make this young man feel welcome. His father's a deacon now for goodness sake."
"Well have they been keeping in touch?"
"Wasn't the boy in a motorcycle accident some years back? Pretty bad one I heard. Nathan flew to Milwaukee or lord knows where to pay his hospital bills."
"Good gracious..."
"And he still hasn't come home to see his family? That's not right..."
"He must be in a real pickle if he's coming all the way here," Margaret says, "he probably owes a loan shark or something..."
Margaret says 'loan shark' like something she read out of a book, like she's thrilled to be using such a term in her own life. The others tease her with high cooing and airy slaps of mock-scolding, but they agree with her. Gabriel's departure slashed the family open, everything visceral and nasty dropping out to be seen by everyone, and once people started paying attention again, they didn't look away. Mathis' smoking increased and he had a few heart attacks not long after the boy disappeared. Now he's dying at 76. Cecilia lost what little control she had and started wandering the woods at night and has to take fifty pills a day to stay in the house.
At first, of course, right Gabe disappeared, Nathan nearly lost it from the stress, from the police poking around his house and never really acting on their worst suspicions but having them anyway, which was bad enough. It helped his case that Gabe had a history of running away, sometimes for days at a time, only coming back home usually starving and often worse for the wear. It would have been a shocking case in any other household. He broke under the pressure and he broke publicly, with that car accident that could have easily killed Matty, too ("the man should have gone to prison," the old ladies are saying), then retreated to this clinic in Greenville to get cleaned up and everyone, all of us just watched, transfixed, too fascinated to praise or criticize. We had all seen the man try and fail, try and fail, and now go off the deep end, but this time it was different. When he came back from Greenville after just 90 days of treatment, he was a different person. He was a christian. And in the sense that we weren't. In the sense that the Lord descended upon him and took a hold of his heart, spontaneously and at his most desperate time. None of us were born-again, not at that level. Nathan got up in front of the church and everything, gave his testimony and told us all what we already knew but with the purpose of showing us how he came to lay his sins at the foot of the Cross. Nearly everyone in the congregation wept, and moreover, believed him. We all believed, in a moment, that this was the real deal. It had a big impact on the church; a pretty big morale booster.
Nathan transitioned the family into the church community about six months after he came out of the facility, when Matty was nearly nine. The boy still wasn't talking. Not a word. The car accident had occurred right before his eighth birthday, and had done nothing to shake him out of whatever it was that had him so rattled. I heard more than a few people say that the police had based their entire investigation upon the signs of PTSD in Matty after Gabe's disappearance, that it had factored in even more than the abusive relationship Nathan had with Gabriel, and of course, Nathan's alcoholism.
We all have problems; that's the core belief of this whole place. All of us are born-again. All of us have come to know the Lord at our most desperate point, and most of our desperate points are pretty damned desperate. Waking up on the side of the road with no shoes and no wallet sort of desperate. The last thing in the world Nathan could have wanted was a son who took after his former self, a son who walked the wide path. But Matty had always been troubled; too skeptical to come easily to faith. One of the women, Charlene, says that a boy with a father like that isn't really going to have the most positive image of God. The church did its best to minister to him but he had this way of smiling at you, this narrow-eyed knowing way that made you feel like the butt of a joke.
He was peddling drugs at twelve though we didn't know this until later, and he continued to do it even after his father transfered him to the Christian school in his freshman year of high school. Prior to that, Matty could barely keep himself in a slew of public schools let alone a private institution. The board let him in even though he himself hadn't claimed any belief in Jesus, (which was merely a legal stipulation) and he continued his illegal business there, too, ensnaring too many of our good youth in the process. It took a lot of us to finally talk Nathan into taking the final step, of signing him over to Camp Warren. He had needed more help than any of us could give him, and parishioners had had problems such as these before; circumstances that were out of their control, beyond them. Camp Warren came highly recommended. It was in fact, the very first suggestion that Rusty had when Nathan and Cecilia approached him. They thanked him in front of the whole church a few weeks into Matty's treatment. The place was only a few hours away, not even out of the state, and by then the Hurts were so tired and sick they would have done anything Rusty said. Beside, if someone didn't know better, they'd think Camp Warren was a vacation spot, a school for the gifted. All in all it could have been worse for the kid.
But the hand of blame always falls on Nathan. For Gabriel, for Matty, even for Mathis. There is comfort in pinning it all on one person. Such comfort. Margaret says, "what is the mark of a man's quality if not those he's responsible for? Look at his wife! Look at his kids!"
The conversations go on like this all day, and then, somehow, upon the arrival of darkness, they stop; the shifting of eyes, the suspicion and the misgivings too much for these old mouths and their talk, all too afraid of what might happen if the next street corner gives way to the very person they tore apart with their words, the face they block out of their minds while the gossip hovers; as real and as sinister as their deepest dread could make him; maybe more. No one really wants to think of their neighbors in such a way.
