Cream Puff Read online

  “Most are,” she said, stroking its fur. “Cats are often misunderstood. They’re really just mirrors of how they’re treated. Much like some people, don’tcha think?”

  “Hmm,” Charlie said. “Guess I never really gave it much thought.”

  “You should, Charlie,” she said.

  The comment sounded like an expression of concern from an old friend.

  “I will,” he heard himself say.

  Still stroking the now-sleeping cat, she nodded toward the little bag on the counter.

  “Don’t forget your wire…and thanks for stopping in.”

  He hoped it wasn’t obvious on his face, but he liked her. Why couldn’t he have ended up with someone like that, he thought; someone with intelligence, good humor, goodwill. Guilt rose up then as it always did. You’ve been married fifty years, for Chrissake. No fool like an old fool, he believed the saying went.

  A brown paper bag sporting black pinstripes lay by the register and he reached for it just as his headache returned with a vengeance. The blood suddenly rushed away from his brain and Charlie swooned. He groped for the counter with his free hand and found nothing but air. Eyes closed, he pitched backward, knees buckling, and braced for a bone-breaking fall.

  In an instant, all was dark.

  Chapter Four

  His next sensation was one of standing on legs that were still a little wobbly. Incredibly, there was no pain. No broken hip, no cracked rib or lacerated face. He couldn’t even remember hitting the floor.

  When his eyes opened, he was standing on the curb outside about halfway down the block at the spot where he had first seen the cat. Charlie felt like a man who’d fallen asleep and then woke up balancing on a high wire a hundred feet in the air. He bent forward and grabbed his knees to keep from falling.

  A deep breath helped to steady him and he welcomed the bite of cool air in his lungs. The hacking cough that followed hurt like hell. At least it made him feel more alert, and to his surprise the throbbing in his head was gone. He barked out the last of the cold.

  A hand touched his shoulder. “Say, man, you all right?”

  “F-fine,” Charlie said.

  “You sure?”

  Charlie stood tall then, with his hands at his lower back. “Yes, thank you.”

  The young man stepped back and rejoined his girlfriend. They had probably been window shopping for an engagement ring or baby clothes or whatever, and the guy was just trying to help. Charlie thought how pathetic he must have looked as the couple continued down the sidewalk in the direction of…the craft store.

  He couldn’t see it from here, but knew it was just a few doors down on the left. For the life of him, though, he couldn’t recall ever leaving the place.

  Ahead of him, the Good Samaritan and his girl resumed their previous conversation as they continued down the walk. Charlie looked around expecting to see a gray-and-white cat appear, but the animal wasn’t there. Instead, other late afternoon shoppers meandered back and forth between the businesses along the promenade and their cars at the curb.

  Shoppers just like him.

  Only they weren’t like him. They hadn’t had the mother of all migraines surprise them inside a store and blackout only to awaken half a block away from where they last remember being. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples once more, but when he looked ahead for the young couple again, they had apparently continued on to the next block and had disappeared from sight.

  Might as well continue in the same direction, he thought.

  He had to know what happened. The lady running the shop would be able to tell him. Name started with an “E”, didn’t it? Elizabeth. No…Liza…Isabelle. Yeah, that was it.

  It might be a bit embarrassing, but he had to know how he’d managed to walk out of her store and make it this far without remembering a thing. Because next time, he could wake up standing in the middle of the highway at rush hour with an eighteen-wheeler bearing down on him and just enough time to scream.

  And it wasn’t like this was the first time this sort of thing had happened.

  ****

  While in the Army, he’d been stationed in Germany when he and a few other soldiers had decided to check out the local sites one weekend, have a few drinks, maybe even get laid. They drank large quantities of the strong local beer that night and he somehow ended up in the bedroom of an attractive woman. He didn’t know her name or how he got there, but he could remember her face coming closer, lips parted, and nothing more.

  The last thing he recalled of that evening was arriving back at the base in a taxi with his drunken pals; all of them joshing and jeering him as the butt of some joke. They eventually let him in on it: the woman had been a prostitute, and they’d all pitched in money to take care of little Charlie.

  “Well, thank you all to hell, guys,” he’d said.

  They roared with laughter.

  The next few days passed painstakingly slow. Waiting to find out from the base clinic whether or not he’d contracted an STD was less frightening than his not being able to remember the encounter with the woman at all. It was maddening to discover you were capable of doing things without ever knowing, and he knew darn well it wasn’t the alcohol that had erased his memory of it. What if he had hurt her?

  The blackouts were scary that way.

  They had happened off and on over the years with no rhyme or reason as to the cause. By some random act of fate, no one had ever witnessed one of Charlie’s episodes—not a single one. And he had never told a soul.

  The cause of the blackouts may have been genetic, he believed.

  Of his father’s four brothers, all were dead before the age of fifty. Each had died of a different malady and their illnesses were all unique. Even his guardian, Uncle Jeff—a former bodybuilder and pretty fit guy—wound up dropping dead in the food court of their hometown mall one sunny afternoon.

  After ignoring stomach pains for months, the man had been enjoying a cheeseburger when a blood clot hiding somewhere beneath his collarbone broke free. Before he could take another bite, the clot travelled north and slammed into a small artery in his head like a freight train. Uncle Jeff died face-down on a bed of fries.

  It was never known if his uncles or his dad suffered blackouts. If they had, they kept it to themselves.

  Crappy thing was his Uncle Jeff had been under treatment for blood clots. Fat lot of good that did. Charlie had sworn then and there that he would never see a doctor about the blackouts. Maybe it was the same thing Jeff had, maybe not. He didn’t care either way.

  To Charlie, the idea of impending death was a lot more frightening than death itself and he just didn’t want to know anymore. Where others trusted modern medicine for their answers, he felt it just meant more treatments that often sped the path to death anyway. Who wanted to spend all their time thinking about dying?

  What caused the blackouts wasn’t important anymore. He just wanted to find out what happened during.

  ****

  Still putting one foot in front of the other, he found the last jewelry store already dark. The woman who ran the dress boutique was flipping the sign on her door to CLOSED as well. She smiled and waved as he passed.

  Charlie glanced at his watch and scanned the sky. What, he wondered, had happened to the time? And how’d the sun get way the hell over there?

  All of the stores would be closing soon if he didn’t get a move on. Even the guy that ran the little hardware store was totaling-out his register.

  He felt something wasn’t quite right as he neared the craft store at the corner. The sensation overwhelmed him even before the storefront came into view. Charlie froze.

  The previously bright ivory siding was now weather-beaten, brown, and broken; the paint separating from the dry wood in brittle curls that looked ancient. The antique metal door handle was almost unrecognizable as a doorknob at all and overcome with rust. The Callo’s Curios sign was gone, too.

  Nothing but a few jagged pieces of broken glass remain
ed of the crystal clear display window that had been there before. No purple and gold curtains adorned the interior. The late afternoon breeze was stiffening behind him, forcing cobwebs inside the abandoned store to dance from the ceiling.

  He tried the door. “Hello?”

  His voice echoed through the empty shop as he leaned his head through the opening. The once warm store was now a hollow shell. The aisles of tall shelves were gone and all that remained was one huge open space and the little counter where the register had been. No beaded curtain draped the storage room entrance and the space beyond looked just as vacant. He rubbed his eyes and looked again.

  There was an accumulation of filth on the tile floor, mold around the baseboards, and crumpled aluminum pot pie tins piled in a corner next to a used can of Sterno; some homeless guy’s refuge against the weather. They rattled against each other as the uninhibited breeze tossed them about, sounding like rain on a tin roof. The place looked like it had been empty for a hundred years.

  Charlie backed away.

  Am I really that tired—enough to dream in broad daylight? Dying suddenly didn’t scare him at all. What did was the thought of losing his mind.

  Still staring at the decrepit storefront, he almost backed out into the road just as a moving van was passing in the street behind him. The driver laid on his horn. Charlie stopped in time, but had to duck to keep from being decapitated by the big truck’s side-view mirror. He crouched at the curb with his heart hammering in his chest. Jesus.

  That was it, he thought. When this whole anniversary-slash-wedding thing was over, he was going to take better care of himself. Stress—that’s what was causing all this; making him think his cheese was falling off his cracker. He’d start by getting more rest.

  Enough of this nuttiness. Charlie turned away and crossed the street to explore the shops on the other side of the promenade before they closed, too. There had to be something right for Pearl in one of them, and Ruby would just have to settle for the best darn wedding cake around.

  When next the wind blew, his hands disappeared into his coat again and he cursed himself for forgetting his gloves. That’s when he felt it. In one of the pockets, a paper bag crackled against his fingers and he felt the form of a small spool. He didn’t have to see it to know it was wrapped with gold crafting line.

  Very strong wire, Isabelle had said. The memory of meeting the woman in the homey craft shop was as clear as a bell. But how could that be, he thought, when the store was nothing but an empty shell?

  The lack of sleep had his mind playing tricks on him, that’s all it was. But then he stopped, took out the spool, and squeezed it in his hand hard enough for the wire to bite the skin of his palm. This wasn’t a trick. He tried to ignore the inner voice that asked him if he was sure.

  Please, God, let me hold it together and get through this.

  Charlie put the roll back in his pocket. Not wanting to dwell on where it came from, he looked around. Most of the stores were closed or closing and the shoppers had thinned out. He told himself there would still be time to find Pearl’s gift as he headed back to where his own car was parked. A biting breeze bullied him the whole way, nipping at his ears as he went.

  Chapter Five

  “Where the hell have you been?” Pearl said.

  The horn-rimmed reading glasses were halfway down her nose, anchored by the little beaded chain that kept them from falling off her face.

  “Don’t you ignore me, Charlie LaRue,” she said, putting down her book of find-a-word puzzles and pointing at him with her pencil. He thought it somewhat amusing that she never trusted her skill enough to use a pen.

  “I’m not, hun.” He opened the closet to hang up his coat. “I was just shopping for a few things.”

  “You could’ve told me you were leaving. It’s not safe for a woman to be alone like that for so long.”

  For reasons Charlie could never understand, his wife acted as if they lived in south-central Los Angeles rather than the neighborly confines of rural Louisiana. Pearl seemed to think she was the potential target of every rapist in the world. Unless local criminals had a thing for really big women, he wasn’t all that worried.

  “I wasn’t gone that long.”

  He headed to the kitchen for a sandwich, but she wasn’t about to let him off that easy.

  “Did you get my puffs?”

  “No,” he said over his shoulder, “but I’m going to the bakery later to work on Ruby’s cake. I can bring you back some.”

  “Couldn’t have stopped by there on the way home…” she muttered under her breath.

  He sighed. “I’ll bake you a fresh batch, honey. I promise.”

  “Guess that’ll have to do.”

  In the kitchen, Charlie opened the refrigerator for some ham and mayo to go on his sandwich and spotted one of the familiar white cardboard boxes on the bottom shelf with The Baker’s Dozen logo on the lid. He flipped it up.

  A moment later he stood at Pearl’s side with a small plate. She flinched when she noticed him there and dropped her puzzle book. One leftover custom-made cream puff filled her view, dusted with powdered sugar and promising the joy of unseen custard. Her eyes went wide, then dimmed.

  “Thanks, I guess,” she said, grabbing the pastry from the plate and turning away. “Don’t think this gets you off the hook, though,” she said through bits of golden dough.

  “Of course not,” he said, and returned to the kitchen and his sandwich. He ate alone, cleaned the dishes, and headed back to the living room. “I’m going to—”

  He was about to tell her he was going to lie down for a while when he noticed she was out cold. Chin down, eyes closed, chest barely rising and falling; Pearl was always a heavy sleeper. He often had to look close to make certain she was even alive.

  Charlie bent down with some difficulty and picked up the puzzle book that had slid down her crumb-covered pants leg to the floor. Placing it on the end table beside her chair, he couldn’t help smiling as she snorted in her dreams. He used to love watching Pearl sleep.

  In silence, he slipped away to the bedroom for a nap of his own. It was only six o’clock and there was still a little daylight peeking through the blinds, but he was tired, stressed, and didn’t care if he slept until late the next morning.

  ****

  Charlie awoke in darkness and for a moment didn’t know where he was. It was darker outside than it should’ve been, but he realized with the sounds of Pearl snoring nearby that he was home and in his own bed. He hadn’t even heard her come into the room (and that was saying something).

  The twin beds had been her suggestion over thirty years ago when she had claimed he was hogging their queen-size, but more likely had to do with the affair she was having with the assistant manager of the Food Mart. Sheʼd had more curves than weight back then and the grocery man apparently had a thing for full-figured, lonely housewives. The tryst didn’t last long (the guy got promoted and moved away to run his own store over in Bossier City), but it took the last bit of passion Charlie had for his wife when he found out about it.

  Even then he couldn’t bring himself to leave her. They never spoke of it, and she knew that he knew, but neither would bring it up and in time the whole thing lost its sting. Separate beds just became the norm they both preferred.

  The red LED on his nightstand read 4:05 a.m. as he rubbed his eyes. Despite protesting knees, Charlie managed to slip from the room without waking her up. He took a quick shower, threw on work clothes, grabbed his coat, and headed out. Getting older might have its downsides, but even in autumn the early morning always made him feel younger and the drive into downtown was peaceful. He still hadn’t found the right anniversary gift, but he would have time this afternoon if he got the cake out of the way as soon as possible.

  That reminded him that he forgot to give Pearl the jewelry-making wire he’d bought. If nothing else, it might put her in a better mood for the day. He was only a block away from the bakery when he felt the bulge in his jacke
t pocket and wished he’d left it for her to find. To feel the crinkling bag creeped him out. How could it be there, when the store he bought it from wasn’t?

  Stop it. You’re still tired and not thinking clear.

  It shouldn’t exist.

  Stop.

  Charlie rolled down the window. Without another thought, he jerked the bag from his pocket and hurled it into the darkness that was beginning to lighten in the east. Out of sight, out of mind, he thought. Litterbugs typically pissed him off, but he told himself this was justified. His mental health depended on it.

  Another benefit to the early hour was that no one saw him toss it, and he didn’t care where it landed. Pearl would just have to do with the beading supplies she already had. This whole thing was caused by him trying to do something nice for her anyway.

  No good deed goes unpunished, he thought. The clichés just kept coming, and still in his father’s voice.

  Shut UP.

  Charlie flipped on the radio, found something he liked, and kept it cranked all the way to work. The music cleared his mind enough to make the rest of the drive pleasant and allowed him to focus on what still needed to be done with Ruby’s cake. He pulled into the lot around back a few minutes later and was greeted with the aroma of fresh bread as he stepped out of the car. He was not surprised to find Kat already on top of things.

  “Mornin’, boss,” Kathy said with her hands full of dough as he came in the back door.

  “Morning, Kat.”

  A stout woman with a great work ethic and an even bigger heart, Kathy Cable had come along at a time when he really needed help. She’d been a godsend for both him and the bakery. An experienced pastry chef in her own right, she was full of life and energy every day.

  Tommy’s death had been a lot for Charlie to handle. That’s when Kathy showed up and helped turn things around; taking the reins of The Baker’s Dozen and keeping everything running while Charlie dealt with his own grief and a difficult wife. Like him, she felt it a privilege just to work there each day.