“Come in, come in,” Mac said, flapping his hands wildly. “Come in, plenty of room for everybody.” He’d set up four resin chairs in an awkward semicircle around his desk. Classy, Frank thought.
Alonzo Cryder was already seated, but he rose and extended his hand when Frank, Arla, and Morgan entered the room. Frank had been mostly correct in his sight-unseen assessment of Cryder when they’d first spoken over the phone—the rubbery jowls, the tight oxford shirt. But Cryder was a short, round-shouldered black man, with hair cropped unnaturally short and treated with some sort of glittering gel. He wore expensive-looking glasses and a tie. He crinkled his nose repeatedly, sniffed as though he was fighting a sinus condition.
“Good afternoon, everyone,” Cryder said. “Mrs. Bravo,” he said, taking her hand. “It is a pleasure to meet you. A
pleasure
.” Arla narrowed her eyes, sat down.
“My Lord, it’s hot in here, Mac,” she said. “Don’t you have the air on?” She picked up a file off Mac’s desk and fanned herself with it.
“I’ll set it lower, Arla,” Mac said. He stepped into the hallway, bellowed for Seth to adjust the AC, then stepped back into the office.
“Now—” he said.
“Thank you for coming,” Cryder said, smiling and nodding at Arla.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Although I will tell you I did not have any choice.”
Cryder laughed, a crowing sound, raw.
“That’s funny,” he said. He sniffed.
“Good stuff,” Mac said, laughing.
Frank looked at Morgan, rolled his eyes.
“And Mr. Bravo,” Cryder said. “
Frank
. I know when we first spoke on the phone you felt a little taken aback by our offer. A little hostile, in fact, if I may say. But I do hope this personal meeting will offer us all an opportunity to mend fences, to start over in good faith.” Cryder sniffed.
“Mr. Cryder, we don’t have a lot of time,” Frank said. “Morgan and I need to get to the restaurant. Can we go ahead and discuss the particulars?”
Mac drummed his fingers on the desk.
“Absolutely, Frank, absolutely,” Cryder said. “It’s really very simple. Mrs. Bravo,” he said, turning once again to Arla and leaning forward. His voice had dropped an octave, and he peered at her meaningfully. He might have been ready to propose to her, Frank thought disgustedly. “My company, Vista Properties, would like to buy your home
and
your restaurant.” He turned to look at Morgan. “And, Mr. Moore, we would like to buy your parcel, as well. Now,” he continued, looking from Arla to Morgan importantly, “we are aware that you have owned these parcels for quite some time. And we know this might feel like a very big step—”
“Not for me, it don’t,” Morgan said.
“—and that’s why we want you to have every piece of information we can provide. We want you to be able to make an informed decision.”
“Only one piece of information we need,” Morgan said, “and that’s how much?”
“Well,” chuckled Cryder. “Isn’t that the million-dollar question?”
“I don’t know,” Morgan said. “Is it?”
Cryder laughed again. All this laughing was making Frank sick. He didn’t see what was funny. Arla’s hands shook on top of her handbag, and he felt a pang. He wanted to put his arm around her shoulders, but it was not that kind of place, and they were not that kind of people.
“Let’s cut to it, Mr. Cryder,” Morgan said. “We need to know the deal. You want to buy our land? Mine and the Bravos’? They’s three pieces of property.”
“Indeed.”
“And we may not all want the same thing.”
“Understood.”
Morgan looked pained. He turned to Arla, started to say something, then stopped. He turned back to Cryder.
“Like me, for example,” Morgan said. “I’m interested in your deal, Mr. Cryder.”
Cryder nodded, smiled.
“But I can’t say the same for Mrs. Bravo,” Morgan said. Cryder stopped smiling, and the room fell silent. Arla, inexplicably, looked small in the office chair, her shoulders slumped.
“Mrs. Bravo,” Cryder said. “How do you feel about the prospect of selling your house, and your restaurant, to Vista Properties?”
Arla looked at him.
“I feel shitty about it, Mr. Cryder,” she said.
He cleared his throat. “Could you be more specific?”
“No. I don’t believe I can.”
Frank smiled.
“And your husband?”
“What about him?” Arla said.
“What are his thoughts about selling?”
“I wouldn’t know, Mr. Cryder.”
“I see,” he said. He sniffed. “Are you aware, Mrs. Bravo, that we are prepared to offer you a significant sum of money for the properties?”
“That’s what I hear,” Arla said.
“Are you interested in knowing the amount?”
Arla sighed. “I think that’s why we’re all here, Mr. Cryder.”
He nodded.
He pulled a sheaf of papers out of his briefcase and slid the stack across Mac’s desk. Morgan leaned forward. Arla remained straight-backed, staring impassively at Cryder. “Just spit it out, Cryder,” Frank said, surprising himself and everyone in the office with the timbre of his voice. He hadn’t meant to sound quite so angry.
“Eight and a half million,” Cryder said. “For all three parcels. You’d split it accordingly.” He nodded from the Bravos to Morgan.
Frank felt the energy change in the room, but before he could even glance in his mother’s direction, Mac interjected.
“That’s bullshit,” he said. “That’s just insulting.”
Arla’s knuckles had tightened on her purse, and Morgan’s face was taut, his eyes wide.
“That’s our starting offer,” said Cryder, and he nodded knowingly at Mac.
Mac shot Frank a glance that told him to keep his mouth shut.
“But let me ask you something, Mr. Cryder,” Morgan said, finally regaining his voice. “Do we all have to sell together?”
Cryder chuckled. He pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, nodded jovially. “Well, of course, Mr. Moore—Morgan? May I? Of course. The properties are useless to us alone. We can’t build half a marina, can we?” Frank noted that Cryder had dropped the pretense of his boss acquiring the properties for a family retreat. He’d discovered, no doubt, that word traveled fast in Utina, and that the plans for the marina would be outed soon enough. “It’s all or nothing, folks,” Cryder said, and he laughed again. He might have been at a comedy club, it was all so amusing, it seemed to Frank. “We sure hope we can all work together on this.”
Arla’s hands still shook. Through the window behind Cryder’s head, Tip Breen stood framed in the door of the Lil’ Champ, looking sorrowfully out toward the water, and a fat rogue cloud slid in front of the sun, erasing the long shadows of Seminary Street.
All or nothing.
The lunch counter at Sterling’s Drugstore was crowded, but Frank managed to find three seats together at one end, where he, Arla, and Morgan could see both into the kitchen and straight out the front door. The counter—a long, speckled Formica surface with chrome edging along the front—was at the rear of the drugstore, past the aisles of cold remedies and Ace bandages, feminine hygiene products and FiberCon. They sat down together, Arla in the middle, and Frank looked around.
He’d worked here at Sterling’s as a teenager, before Will died, before Dean left Utina and Arla bought Uncle Henry’s. Frank had worked the lunch counter, busing the empty dishes and used silverware, plates slick with the residue of cherry pie and meat loaf, mangled French fries smeared in runny puddles of ketchup. He’d worked his way up to the grill, flipping burgers and sizzling onions on the stovetop, shredding hash brown potatoes, brewing pot after pot of dark acidic coffee. That was back when Sterling’s had still been owned by Vaughn Weeden, Mac and George’s father, who’d long since retired and now spent his days watching Judge Joe Brown and listening to the grass grow outside his three-story Victorian in South Utina. Sterling’s and its accompanying lunch counter were currently owned by a compact, hyperactive woman named Cathy and her less-than-compact partner Magda, a voluptuous Portuguese beauty who was once the object of unrequited love for most of Utina’s male population until the realization eventually dawned, en masse, it seemed, that Cathy and Magda were partners not just in business but in life. “Whadda waste,” the men said, looking longingly at Magda’s thick black ponytail, pulled up in a hairnet while she worked the breakfast counter, and then they’d fall silent, victims for a few moments of the unavoidable mental images of Magda and Cathy after lights out. “Lord have mercy,” George Weeden said more than once, scratching his head.
Today, Frank regarded the lunch counter. It wasn’t much different from his bar at Uncle Henry’s, the same long lines of demanding patrons, the same bustling back and forth behind the narrow counter, the same slopping and mopping and faint smell of bleach on worn gray rags. The only difference was that these patrons weren’t drunk. But
Jesus
, he thought, remembering his high school days here at Sterling’s, was he doomed to spend his entire life slinging food and booze for the uninspired, unambitious, unwashed citizens of Utina?
Cathy stood in front of them across the counter, bouncing on the balls of her feet. Her hair was cut in a tight, curly cap. “Know what you want?” she said. She tipped her head and looked at them impatiently. Sterling’s lunch counter was not a place to linger over the menu.
“Just a burger,” Frank said quickly. Cathy’s eyes darted to Arla.
“Oh, let me see . . .” Arla began. She rummaged in her purse for her glasses. Cathy’s eyes jumped to Morgan.
“Meat loaf platter,” Morgan said. Cathy snapped up Morgan’s and Frank’s menus, put them in a wire rack behind the counter, and returned to hover in front of Arla.
“Do you have any specials today?” Arla said.
Cathy looked at Frank.
“No specials, Mom,” he said. “Come on, just order something quick. Order a tuna melt. You like tuna melts.”
“I don’t know if I want a tuna melt today,” Arla said.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Morgan said. “Just need to see a man about a horse.” He got up from his stool and moved toward the men’s room.
“Tuna’s good,” Cathy said.
“Well, I know it’s good,” Arla said. “I just might want to try something
different
for a change.”
Cathy went away, came back, bounced some more, looked over her shoulder. Magda had Frank’s old place at the griddle. She moved powerfully, aggressively, sliding the spatula under each hamburger patty and flipping it higher in the air than was really necessary, Frank concluded. He watched as her breasts slid back and forth under her T-shirt. Damn.
Arla sighed. “Oh, all right,” she said. “I don’t know if I really want anything different. I guess I’ll just have the tuna melt after all, Cathy.”
Cathy strode toward the grill and barked the lunch orders to Magda, who gave her a thumbs-up and threw another burger on the grill. Efficiency. Frank had to admire the efficiency. These two could give him and Morgan a run for their money in a kitchen.
“Don’t be like me, Frank,” Arla said suddenly. “Don’t be afraid of change. Don’t be crippled by fear.
Crippled,
” she said. “Ha! That’s a good one.”
Frank was debating how to process the comment when a bell jangled on the front door, and Doreen Bailey walked straight up the stationery aisle toward the lunch counter.
“Oh, Lord have mercy,” Arla said.
Doreen had been a teller at Utina’s People’s Guarantee Bank for as long as Frank could remember, though she and Arla went even further back than that. At eighteen, Doreen had been married to Dean’s brother Huff, and she’d been soundly humiliated by Huff’s unremitting philandering before he earned his extended sentence for theft and battery. She’d divorced Huff before the warden had finished the strip search. And since her liberation from the Bravo family she’d done everything humanly possible to berate, begrudge, belittle, and beleaguer the Bravos who still remained in Utina. “It was a long time ago,” Arla had reminded Doreen on more than one occasion. “I think maybe it’s time for you to move on.” And indeed, Doreen had remarried. Mr. Tom Bailey was a cloying, mousy man with about as much likelihood of engaging in an extramarital fling as a pig has of flying, given the fact that no woman, save Doreen, would have him. Doreen had raised two stocky, simple daughters and had enjoyed a stable if small-minded career as head teller and closing officer in Utina’s one and only financial institution. But she’d never forgotten the pain Huff Bravo had caused her. And she didn’t intend to let anyone else forget it, either.
“Hello, Arla,” she said now, maneuvering her considerable girth past an end cap of Maybelline compacts and approaching Arla and Frank at the lunch counter. “How you doing these days?” She forced a thin smile that came out more like a grimace. “How’re the
Bravos
?”
“Fine, Doreen,” Arla said.
“Mmhmm,” Doreen said. “And Sofia, how is
she
?” She raised her eyebrows knowingly.