Page 2 of Can You Stand the Rain?

“Is Gramps here?” Joy asked again because she knew Helen knew better. Even when Joy was a struggling waitress at Maylene’s just a year ago she didn’t run around telling anybody about her business. And she certainly wasn’t about to start now.

But Helen knew the signs. “Marriage on the rocks already? But okay. You don’t wanna talk about it. I get it. And yes, Gramps is here. When is he never not here during lunch time? He’s always here for his breakfast. He’s always here for his lunch. Seven days a week, three-hundred-and-sixty-five days of the year that man be here for breakfast and lunch. For as long as I can remember. Sometimes he shows up for dinner, too, when Elise don’t wanna cook. That’s been more recent though. But yeah, he’s here. He’s at his usual spot.”

“Thanks,” Joy said in a voice that didn’t sound grateful at all as she left the hostess and made her way into the belly of the restaurant. Many of those workers she passed by knew her, because many of them had been working there for decades, but they acted like they didn’t see her. She got out. She made something of herself. She did something they probably knew they’d never do. And resentment crept in.

But even when she worked there, she wasn’t there to make friends. She was there to earn a paycheck. Now she was there, not to check on Gramps, but to seek his advice. He was the only human being on earth, other than William, that she turned to in times of trouble. Since William was the trouble, she couldn’t turn to him.

Gramps, who sat in a window booth eating breakfast for lunch, saw her before she saw him. He saw her when she first drove up and parked her car. He saw her when she put on those shades to shield her crying eyes. Although they weren’t biologically related, and she took to calling him Gramps when she was a child and he would help feed her and take care of her when her mother and absent father dropped the ball, he knew that child just like he knew the back of his hand. She was in pain. Even the way she walked, as she finally saw him and hurried to his booth, made that clear.

His heart swelled with his own pain, for his own reasons, as she approached him.

CHAPTER TWO

“Hey Gramps,” she tried to say it cheerfully as she hugged his neck, but she couldn’t quite pull it off. She plopped down on the booth seat in front of him. “Why do you always have biscuits and gravy and bacon and eggs for breakfast and lunch?”

“Because I like biscuits and gravy and eggs and bacon. What I look like ordering something I don’t like? And there ain’t nothing else here I like. You people can barely cook this.” Then Gramps smirked. “I forgot. You no longer work here. Unless something’s changed.”

Joy didn’t respond.

“And take off them damn shades in this restaurant. Acting like you Ray Charles. I taught you better than that. What’s wrong with you?”

There were upsides and downsides to coming to Gramps for advice. The biggest downside was that, although she was twenty-six years old, he still treated her like she was a child.

But she never disrespected him ever. She remembered how she would have starved had he not helped her when she was little. She removed her shades.

When he saw her still-teary, hazel eyes, he continued eating as if he didn’t see it. Although he plainly did.

“I see that bump on your head has gone down,” Joy said to him. He’d had a bad fall four weeks ago. Against William’s wishes, she rushed to Bridell even then.

“I told y’all it was nothing,” Gramps said. “Had me in that hospital so them damn doctors could make all that money just to tell me I was fine. Gave me some Vick’s Vapor rub, told me to rub it on my knot, and charged Medicare a hundred thousand dollars.”

Joy managed to smile. “Them people didn’t give you no Vick’s Vapor rub for no bump on your head, so stop lying, Gramps.”

But Gramps knew her return visit had nothing to do with him and his knot. “Where’s William?” he asked her.

Joy hesitated. She could never bullshit Gramps. “He’s in Chicago. Or maybe he left for New York by now. He’s always going to New York.”

“He was doing that before you married him.”