by Virginia Watts

Short Story published by Five on the Fifth

Psychologists claim the color red makes you hungry. Cora Henson knows that’s bullshit. A stomach is either full enough or careening toward growling empty. Staring at a color won’t change that.

Florentino’s Italian Restaurant has been embracing the theory anyway since 1948. Over the years, any updates were really repeats. Crimson booths in the bar. Crimson drapes in the dining room. Crimson seat covers, napkins and wine goblets. A crimson candy dish of taffy pink After-Dinner Mints beside the register.

The weekend job waiting tables during community college has done a lot for Cora’s challenges with the scale underneath her mother’s bed. She’s down eighteen and a half pounds so far. You scrape off enough cold plates of congealed linguini and clams, leaky towers of lasagna, blobs of imperial crab filling, fat from steak ends, and bits of peanut butter pie into a bus tub and food loses its charm pretty fast. Cora can’t remember the last time her mother said anything about Cora’s eyes being bigger than her stomach.

It’s early for dinner service. 5:30. Only three tables seated. Cora tried to discourage the middle aged couple seated at Table 8 from ordering tossed salads to start, but those two didn’t want to hear it. Informed Cora they begin every evening meal with something green.

“Well, there’s nothing green and decent around here and only one kind of salad dressing,” Cora had warned them. Cora is a bluntly honest person. “Our manager Oscar Florentino, yes, he’s an authentic descendant, highly recommends our famous marinara sauce. Maybe stick to an entrée featuring that?”

“We will have two tossed salads with House Italian,” the man responded.

When Cora delivered the salads, the woman’s nostrils flared. Florentino’s House Italian has enough garlic to eradicate the whole vampire race.

“Bon Appetit,” Cora said, wincing.

Cora is also steadfastly anti-garlic. Last weekend, Oscar pleaded with Cora to dial back on her vampire vibe while serving customers in his crimson establishment. “You look like the bride of Satan, Cora. Jesus! People don’t want to eat food served by someone who looks like she’s been dead for centuries. Lose the soot eyes. No more spider chokers. Let your fingernails breathe. And go out and stand in the goddamn sunlight once in a while, would ya?”

“I think there might be a legal case for discriminatory practices somewhere in that laundry list, Oscar.”

“Do it or you’re fired. I mean it this time. Go get a job across the street at Tittle’s Shoes. He’s hiring. You can fit Buster Browns on the stinky feet of all the spoiled kids who live around here now.”

“You grew up in this town,” Cora countered. “You were once a spoiled kid with stinky feet.”

“Not like these children,” Oscar said. “Different back then. That was before the Med Center and all these doctors. Before the lawyers moved here to save the doctors’ asses when they pull out the wrong kidney or something. This offspring gets whatever they want! Fancy, geared bicycles. A basketball hoop in their driveway. They even have better sneakers than I do now and ever did. Not sure about my feet, though. As I recall, they did stink. I can tell you they sure do now. There’s a fungus among us!”

“You never fail to disgust me, Oscar.”

“Let’s keep it that way.”

Cora arrived for work today looking the same as always with the addition of some greyish blue lip color. Oscar won’t back up his habitual threat to can her. For one thing, he was wildly in love with Cora’s mother back in high school, according to Cora’s mother. Also, Oscar has never fired anyone, even when he should have, in thirty-six years of managing the family business. He has a pillow cushion heart.

Cora pretends not to notice how Oscar and a lot of other people look at her. They can’t help the pity. Cora inherited her mother’s pale hair and skin, olive green eyes and her cute, pug nose, but not her mother’s tall, slender frame. Cora is built like her father. Barely over five feet tall and extremely wide-hipped if you want the short version. When Cora looks in the mirror, she sees a human bowling pin.

Cora leaves the restaurant now through a side door that leads to the narrow alley between Florentino’s and the Post Office for the town of Copper Canyon. It’s impossible to miss the smell of Oscar’s sour, imported cigarette, even in the center of the dining room. He’s on break, leaning against the Post Office’s red brick, eyes closed, exhaling white smoke though flared nostrils like a dragon. One bloodshot eye pops open. Regards Cora. A frown yanks down his thick, grey mustache.

“What is it, Daughter of the Night?”

“Freddie says to tell you Livia is at the kitchen door. She says she needs the support money two weeks early. If you don’t hurry up and give it to her, she’s going to sing the greatest hits of Tom Jones in the middle of the dining room again.”

Oscar snaps the eye shut. Takes another deep drag. Livia’s impromptu concert last month had emptied the dining room, though the drunk guys around the corner on bar stools clapped and roared for more. Cora clears her throat, gives her boss a musical wake up call.

“What’s new, pussycat?”

“Ah, fuck! Cora, stop it,” Oscar groans. “That guy is the only loser I know who can sing all day about a pussy and get away with it.”

Oscar pitches his butt toward the trash cans and heads inside.

Back inside at Table 8, things are shaping up as expected. The couple’s barely touched salads have been shoved to the side of their table. From behind the doors leading into the kitchen, Livia’s native Italian begins flying like hot bullets. Cora grabs the water pitcher and fills empty glasses in the dining room as a distraction. The man at Table 8 waves her over.

“Would you care for some more House Red?” Cora asks as sweetly as she can.

“Is everything all right?” The woman asks. For a split second, Cora thinks the woman is referring to Cora herself, the adopted Luciferian persona or the serious muffin top, more like a loaf top, resting on the waist band around a comfortable pair of stretchy black slacks. Maybe the woman thinks Cora should be working at a bicycle shop instead.

The woman is the classic Copper Canyon Country Club type. Tennis player or long distance runner or both, frosted blonde bob, French manicure, professionally contoured eyebrows, a diamond hunk spinning loose around her ring finger, the ever-so-classy and understated pearl stud earrings handed down from some moth-balled auntie. She has a nervous tick of spinning the iridescent orb in her right ear around and around. Those earrings are stunning, though, like miniature full moons.

“Is everything all right?” The woman asks again.

“What do you mean?” Cora answers, a half smile floating over her ghostly lips. “Well, that’s quite a commotion back there,” the woman says, tipping her slender chin once in the direction of the raised voices.

“That’s normal. That’s how they always are. Honestly, it’s their own personal form of foreplay,” Cora says, raising all four eyebrows seated at Table 8.

“Actually, I believe I would like more wine,” the woman says curtly, gathering herself, settling her peachy lips into a hyphen mark.

The man leans back in his chair, folds his arms over his chest, regards his server with renewed curiosity. A middle-aged John Boy from Walton’s Mountain not missing the oversized mole on his left cheek. He should really have that looked at. Has the appearance of a real malignancy, that one.

Oscar’s nephew Anthony shuffles past with the bus tub. Cora snatches the rejected salads and dumps them.

“You know,” the man begins. “You should inform your manager, Mr. Florentino, that he should be more precise when describing his wine selections. What type of wine is this? I mean, you must understand, or I am assuming you understand, that a so-called “House Red” could be anything. A Chianti. A Merlot. A Cabernet. A Burgundy, though Burgundies are usually French, I believe. Isn’t that right, dear?”

Cora would like to snatch the man’s sparkling clean, round wire glasses off his boney nose and stomp on them. The woman looks up at Cora, a thin bead of sweat glistening above her top lip. She narrows her set of baby blues into a fairly convincing glare, though the look as a whole lacks the frightening part.

“Perhaps you should ascertain the provenance of the wine before we agree to more, and please inform the manager that we also request a more peaceful dining decibel.”Cora snorts like a pig. Though she didn’t mean to snort, she feels delighted.

“Don’t worry. Soon they will be naked and it will get quiet again,” Cora says. “I’ll be right back. Let me check with our bartender Matthew for a more elucidative explanation of the House Red. By the way, did you enjoy the salads?”

“Well, now that you mention it, they were entirely subpar,” the man answers grumpily.

“Yepper,” Cora says.

Oscar is right about what’s happened to Copper Canyon. It was different when Cora was younger too, when everyone did roughly the same thing, earned the same living in the steel mill. It was easier then to see the beginning and the end of life and all the points you needed to climb to in between. And maybe if the steel mill had never shut down, Cora’s dad would have stayed. He left Copper Canyon after his final shift. Cora was six and a half. Her parents were never a couple. Cora was a high school pregnancy scare that came true, but at least when Justin Henson was around in the flesh, she got to see him. He would take her to Dairy Freeze or a movie. Buy her a doll on her birthday.

The construction of the large, regional medical center a few years later continued to sour the pot. New faces flooded the area steering upscale coupes and SUV’s instead of Ford and Chevy trucks, demanding colossal stone houses with private pools and iron mailboxes with equestrian riders on top. An unsettling current veined across the contented heart of Copper Canyon and worked its damage.

Florentino’s didn’t change though. Didn’t bend. Didn’t even flinch. Not the décor. Not the menu. Not the employees. Newcomers flock to the place, acclaiming it a throwback to simpler times.

Cora makes her way towards Matthew’s hulking frame at the end of the bar. Glass shatters in the kitchen. Livia screams.

“Hey, Matthew,” Cora says. “You might want to go into the kitchen about right now.”

Matthew stops filling a frosted mug at the brass beer tap, lifts his head.

“Ah, Christ,” he says good-naturedly, stomping his way around the side of the bar.

“Little Miss Good Samaritan, Cora. When will you learn we just want them to kill each other and get it over with.”

Cora smiles. Taking Matthew’s place behind the bar, she opens the cabinet where he hides the expensive stuff. She selects something red and dusty, takes a few deep gulps from Matthew’s Budweiser can and trudges back to Table 8.

John Boy lifts up his little round glasses to study the label.

“My, well, this is a fine wine indeed,” he says. “You know, I thought it was a Felsina Chianti, just didn’t expect this place to have a bottle of it. Earthy. Hint of wild berry. Definitely Tuscan. That was obvious. Another glass, Martha?”

“Please, and, what is your name again, Miss?” The woman asks.

“Fatty,” Cora says.

The woman blinks, looks across the table at her companion for direction or a savior, hard to tell.

“Is that a joke?” The man demands, sliding his chair back as if he intends to stand up and face Cora, pug nose to ski slope.

“No, it’s my nickname. A pet name, if you will. Everyone calls me ‘Fatty.’”

“I will not call you that and neither will my wife,” the man insists. “It’s unkind and you certainly are not fat.”

“Okay, Liar,” Cora says. She wouldn’t cross-her-heart-and-hope-to-die swear to it, but the woman’s giggling sounds pretty darn legit.

“Martha? Martha…,” the man says, wide-eyed, interrupted by Livia who erupts from the kitchen, her head, shoulders and blouse doused in red. Matthew is behind her, pressing the middle of her back in the direction of the front door.

Soon, the dining room is quiet and almost back to normal except for the marinara sauce trail on the simulated, beige Tuscan tile floor beginning at the kitchen door, running past the ramp leading to the sunken dining room, past the cash register, the mints, and disappearing under the front door.

“I’m a real jokester but actually, my real name is ‘Carnival,’ a reference to the locale of my conception,” Cora says, reappearing again at Table 8. During the melee, she made her way back to the bar, put the dusty bottle back in storage and refilled the couple’s wine goblets with the House Red. The box is stamped “Chillable Red,” but otherwise lacks enlightening information regarding its origin.

“Well,” Martha says, cocking her head, considering. “That’s a lovely name, really, when you think about all the wonderful connotations that come to mind when one thinks of local, community held carnivals. Ferris wheels and merry go rounds. Giant, rainbow lollipops, hot pretzels, hot dogs and kraut. Funnel cakes and cotton candy. Where did they do it?”

“Martha?” John Boy croaks.

“Port-A-Potty,” Cora tells her.

“I thought it was Port-O-Potty,” Martha muses.

“Let me check on your entrees. By the way,” Cora says, leaning over to whisper in the woman’s ear. “If you want to see whether your pearls are real, like from actual oysters, scratch them on your front teeth. I read in Seventeen Magazine that they’re supposed to be gritty.”

An amused smile from the woman and a whispered response, “By the way, before displaying a sample bottle of your House Red, remember the invention of the feather dust.”

In the kitchen, Fred is busy running hot water through a massive, silver colander of cooked pasta, making sure the entree plates for Table 8, 14 and 18 will be free of glass slivers. The aftermath of another of Livia’s hailstorms is not as bad as usual. Most of the pots on the industrial stove are still there, lids cocked and bubbling.

The couple at Table 8 profess the marinara sauce to be the best red sauce they have ever tasted. The woman takes it upon herself to order two servings of cherry-topped cheesecake. John Boy objects, asks for his to-go. From the grimy window in the kitchen door, Oscar and Cora watch as Martha hacks her slice into four bites and devours it, cherry topping dripping from the corners of her mouth and down her elegant chin.

“I’m not leaving a tip,” the man announces to his wife. “That girl was insolent and strange, not to mention crude and insulting. It was like she was playing a game with us. How about her suggesting your earrings were fake? I heard her. She knew I could hear her. That takes a lot of nerve.”

“I thought she was quite attentive,” the wife says. “And her vocabulary was stunning.”

“But that ‘Fatty’ thing,” the man insists. “What a bizarre thing to say.”

“Have you forgotten the name people used to call me when I was a growing up?”

“Don’t say it, Martha. It upsets you.”

“Doesn’t upset me. That’s like saying we should only remember the parts of history that weren’t upsetting. Maybe it upsets you, but it most assuredly does not upset me anymore,” Martha says, and in a decibel loud enough to be heard by the other diners. “Hello, I am Martha. You can call me blubber butt.”

“Shhh! That was a long time ago and look at you now. No one would guess in a million years and anyway, I am sure you were a nice person, even when you were, well, not at your best yet. And look, this little brat here is going nowhere. She’s a freak. See this shabby, run down place? This is the best she’ll ever do. And what on earth were you getting at with that comment about the feather duster?”

“Forget it. Give me the check. I’ll pay while you start the car,” the wife says. “Anyway, I need to use the Ladies Room.”

Oscar watches as Cora approaches the table where the woman remains alone, polishing off her husband’s cheesecake, scraping the Styrofoam take-out container with a teaspoon. Swish. Swish. Swish. The woman presses her napkin, folded into a perfect red square, into Cora’s upturned palm and smiles.

“Where did you get pearl earrings, Cora? What the hell!” Her mother barks when Cora walks into the brightly lit kitchen. Her mother, sitting at the island, drinking black coffee from the pot at 11:30 p.m., puffing menthols, completing by cheating, the crossword puzzle in the local newspaper. She’s wearing sweaty shorts, a sports bra and muddy running shoes.

“People’s Drug Store. $2.99. Plastic, mother dear. Fooled you again.”

In the top bunk over her snoring little sister Cassy, Cora touches earring to enamel. Sandpaper. She chuckles and falls into a peaceful, hopeful place.

During the night, John Boy sleeps like a baby and Martha has no fucking idea how. She shoves him. Gives his calves a few, hearty kicks under the covers, but his snores are as rhythmic as his heartbeat.

Outside, the sirens keep on coming. Someone must have called in backup from all the other little towns around Copper Canyon.

Martha tiptoes down the front staircase and peers out into the inky night. There is an orange corona pulsing in the heavens over the center of town.

She unlocks the front door, walks barefoot on the sharp summer grass. The air fragrant with fire, she inhales, admires the distant dance of smoke, the big-hipped gypsy girl jingling her coin, swaying her hips. That girl is hypnotizing the whole world.

The orange corona deepens now from scarlet to ruby to blood red. Martha is suddenly famished for towers of noodles and buttered rolls, banana cream pie this time decked out with a half foot of stiff, sweet whipping cream.

The Fire Chief of Copper Canyon calls it off at 1:26 a.m.

A small circle of exhausted men in heavy coats stand and bow their heads as the last of Florentino’s implodes to ash and ember.

Copper Canyon will never be the same.

Copyright © 2020 Virginia Watts. All rights reserved.