The-Hummingbird-s-Cage(42)

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Don’t look so distressed, Joanna. I made it home just fine.”

“I see.”

“Besides, simple isn’t the same as simplistic. Don’t get me wrong—some days all I want to do is drop everything and head out for some far corner of the earth.”

“Why don’t you, then?”

He grinned. “Who says I don’t?”

I looked at him then, full on. There was humor in his eyes, but there was earnestness there, too. Did he really get a wild hair some days and strike out for far-flung places? And if he did, did he book a plane ticket or just click his heels together like Dorothy and let out something like, There’s no place like Nepal?

All at once Simon broke into a laugh that made me blush. Then he turned to head back to the grill.


*

I was ringing up a customer when the man muttered, “Oh, my Lord.” He was gaping over my shoulder through the front windows, and I turned to look, too.

The prettiest car I’d ever seen had just pulled up—a two-tone convertible, powder blue and white, stretching from a chrome hood ornament to what looked like chrome missiles mounted on the rear fender. It had whitewall tires with polished rims. The soft top was down, and the noon sun set the white leather seats to shimmer.

Simon came out front to look, too, and gave a long whistle. “That,” he said, “is a 1956 Cadillac Eldorado.”

The car door swung open and the driver stepped out—a tiny black woman in a lavender suit and red kid gloves. A red silk scarf was wrapped around her head, its ends dangling down her back like two giant rose petals. She removed oversized white sunglasses to glance at the café sign, then headed inside. She took a seat, stripped off her gloves and untied her scarf to reveal a cap of smooth, marcelled hair.

“Honey, you got sweet tea?” she asked, picking up a menu. Her voice was high-pitched and Deep South.

I brought the tea, and the woman ordered pork chops and fried apples. When I gave Simon the order, I asked if she’d been in before.

“Nope,” he said. “I’d remember the car.”

Simon brought her plate without waiting for me to retrieve it. Then he stood beside me for a better view of the convertible.

From what I could see, it had no dents, no scratches, no markings of any kind. As pristine as if it were still sitting on a showroom floor.

“Not a speck of dirt,” I murmured.

The woman gave me a puzzled look.

“Take a load off, honey,” she said, nodding at an empty chair at her table. “I know how it is, on your feet all day. My name’s Lula. You had lunch yet?”

Soon Simon was back at the grill, frying up more pork chops and apples while Lula told me about her home in Mississippi.

“Natchez—on a bluff over the river, up from New Orleans,” she said. “I was a hotel maid there from fifteen on—and they worked you. Big white house, portico two stories high, big ol’ columns, acres of lawn.”

“Like a plantation,” I said.

“Used to be, long time since,” said Lula. “Family fell on hard times and sold it for a hotel. One night a car pulled up like what I got now, and out they stepped—him in black tails and her in yellow satin—lookin’ like somebody. Swore to God one day I’d get me a car like that. See what there was to see in this world. Stay in fine places, too.”

Simon arrived with two more plates and joined us.

“What if you break down out there on the road?” I asked.

Lula leveled her eyes at me over her tea glass. “What if I don’t?”

And in a flash of certainty I knew that the Eldorado outside would never break down on her. It would take Lula wherever she wanted to go, with never a blown tire or a boiling radiator. It would never run out of gas. And should she ever want to drive to China one day, or whatever destination she might fancy, somehow it would get her there.

“You still have people back in Natchez?” I asked.

“Not for ages,” said Lula. “My grandmother, she raised me. We lived in a shotgun shack outside Dunleith till she passed. I took on my two brothers and went to work. Otis, he up and died—wasn’t but seven at the time. Been seizin’ up all his life, and one day he just grabbed ahold of his head and dropped. My brother Lester, he took to the bottle. Gone a long time. Heart give out.”

She shook her head. “I’d say wasn’t nothin’ of family left in Dunleith but what they planted in the old Baptist cemetery, but even that ain’t there no more. A few years ago, they up and moved it.”