Faith was Katy now, and she was dead? Maybe she had changed her name to Katy because she realized the utter hypocrisy of being called Faith while, at the same time, being utterly faithless. Maybe the irony was too much, even for her. I said her new name aloud, just to try it out. “Katy.” If I learned to call her that, maybe it would help me maintain the distance I had managed to create between my hurt back then and my new life now.
Dead or alive, I was still a long way from over what the woman had done to me. She had wiped me out—emotionally, financially, and any other “ly” word you care to mention. She had made off with all our savings, maxed out our credit cards, and then filed for a divorce claiming spousal abuse. She had been allowed to stay in our condo on the condition that she keep up the maintenance and payments. She didn’t, keep up the payments, that is. When she finally got around to selling it, the court decree ordered her to split the proceeds with me. Naturally, that didn’t happen, either. Instead, she and my good friend Rick lived in our unit rent free for months without making any of the necessary payments. They moved out only when they were evicted, having lost the place to foreclosure. In other words, I didn’t get a dime.
And then, to add insult to injury, Faith and my mother stayed in touch. More than in touch. They were pals. Even though the ink on the divorce decree was barely dry when Faith and Rick married, my parents nonetheless attended the wedding. Talk about feeling betrayed. Had I still been in Chicago, I think my head would have exploded, but by then I had taken my sad story to my grandmother—my mother’s mother—and thrown myself on her mercy.
My grandmother, Agatha, and her daughter, Maggie, could not be less alike. My mother is your basic self-centered shrew. Grandma Hudson, on the other hand, was a wise and loving person—a giving person. She and Gramps had moved to Sun City years earlier, while I was still in school. A few months after they bought a place there, Grandpa took sick and died. Once he was gone, Grandma Hudson announced that she had no intention of sitting around waiting to die. Instead, she went looking for a business to run.
When she bought the restaurant, it was already called the Roundhouse. Having been badly managed, it was a run-down wreck, just up the street from the railroad tracks. She was able to buy it for a song because the previous owner just wanted to get out from under it. At the time, Peoria, Arizona, was a sleepy little burg miles from its boisterous neighbor Phoenix.
Grandma Hudson fixed the Roundhouse up and ran it by herself for ten years. She and Gramps had paid cash for their duplex home in Sun City. Once she bought the restaurant, she rented out the Sun City unit, reserving it as her “toes up” house when it came time for that. Instead, she chose to live in the two bedroom apartment above the restaurant.
By the time Faith finished cleaning me out and I came dragging my weary, demoralized butt to Arizona, Grandma Hudson was eighty-three years old. She took me in as a full partner in the business and let me share her upstairs apartment. Grandma hung around long enough to teach me the ropes before finally turning me loose while she went back to her place in Sun City to relax and retire. The problem is, she had no idea how to go about doing that. Once she hung up her apron and quit working for good, she only lasted three months. When she died, she left me as sole owner of a house I was too young to live in and a bustling restaurant in the middle of what was fast turning into a thriving community.
Matty stuck her head into the kitchen and startled me out of my unseeing stupor. “You might want to take a look at those hamburger patties,” she warned. “They’re starting to look like charcoal, and they smell worse.”
She was right. While standing there lost in thought with the spatula in my hand, I had let the two hamburger patties burn to such a crisp that I’m surprised the smoke alarm didn’t go off. I grabbed them off the grill, tossed them into the garbage, and started two more.
Pay attention, I told myself firmly, but that proved to be almost impossible. Once that initial order of chili burgers was up in the window, I called Rocky, the evening cook, and asked him to come in a couple of hours early, so I could deal with the cop issue. Serving decent food is my livelihood. I couldn’t afford to turn out slop just because someone was under the mistaken impression that I had knocked off my ex-wife. Fortunately, Rocky lives just over a mile away, so he was there in no time.
Twenty minutes after returning to the kitchen, I walked back into the dining room where the pair of visiting cops had yet to break down and order some lunch.
“How about if we go into the bar,” I suggested. “Early afternoons are quiet in there. We’ll have a little more privacy.”