The Story Of A Man, A Woman, And The Restaurant They Loved By Tom Fitzmorris Forward to Pages 16-30. Book 1, Page 1 Dream. "Quite a career jump," people always tell Jerry Wells. "Veterinarian to restaurant owner? Why was that?" His answer has only a little bit of truth, but it ends the curiosity immediately. "I know all about cutting meat," he says. "Really? How--oh, I guess you would," they say. Then they change the subject. The real reason Jerry opened Katz's Best Of Restaurant is even nuttier than that. It's so absurd that he got tired of explaining it, so he came up with that other line. What happened was that he fell asleep in his office one afternoon, with the song "Three Little Words"--sung by John Pizzarelli, as he remembers--playing on Napster. He then had a dream that he was in a diner called "Three Little Words." In the dream, he asked the lady behind the counter what the three little words were. She said, "Best Of Restaurant." She explained, with a hint of disdain, that the place had no original dishes at all, and that the only thing the chef knew how to do was duplicate the best dishes of other restaurants. As the scenes changed in the dream, Jerry--now seated at a table--asked the waitress if they had deviled eggs remoulade the way they used to make them at Maylie's. Jerry doesn't know why that dish came up, because he only went to Maylie's once, and on top of that the restaurant has been closed for twenty years. "I'll bet he can do that, yeah," she said, and went into the kitchen. She didn't come back. Jerry sat there and thought about the idea of such a restaurant. In the dream, it sounded brilliant. Jerry drifted up from slumber at that point, but his thinking about the Best Of Restaurant continued. He reached for his pen and began writing down dishes the restaurant would have. Oysters Rockefeller like Antoine's. Bananas Foster like Brennan's. Crabmeat gnocchi like August. Spinach salad like Zea. He was still doing that when a lady entered his veterinary office, holding an exceptionally limp, dirty cat. "I rolled over my cat with my SUV!" she said, a little too loud. Jerry took one look and knew the cat was dead. How about smoked soft-shell crabs like they do them at Christian's? he thought. "Is there anything you can do to help my cat?" the lady asked. "Oh, my," Jerry said. "When a cat gets run over by a heavy vehicle, it sustains so many internal injuries that even if it were alive it would be best to put him down." The lady said nothing, and stared at the cat, stroking it. How about the hot-and-sour soup from Trey Yuen? Why couldn't the Best Of Restaurant serve all kinds of food? "Yes, but could you please try? I'll pay whatever the cost if you can help her." Her face streamed with new tears, and she started gasping. Jerry knew a distraught pet owner could accept this kind of news better after her frantic state returned to normal. So he agreed to do what he could. He took the cat from her arms. It was already beginning to get cold. "Call me tomorrow and we'll talk about it," he said. She left the office as quickly as she had come in. Jerry carried the cat into the back of the building and dropped it into the reach-in freezer. It was about forty-five minutes before closing time, but this was quite enough for Jerry, and his assistant had taken the afternoon off. He turned off the lights, locked the door, and left early. Jerry's mind stayed on the restaurant all the way home. His musings about dishes moved to chefs who might want to partner on it. Color schemes. Waiters or waitresses? Sunday brunch?  Wine list? Jerry was thinking about possible locations when he had to hit the brakes hard to stop for the light on Claiborne at Carrollton. He stopped between the two sides of Carrollton, next to the neutral ground where the St. Charles streetcar line ended. The maneuver took his attention away from his musings. And then something else caught it. On the corner just ahead, Jerry saw that the big old neon marquee over the entrance to Roquette's Pharmacy was gone. The building--an old, tilting, narrow, stucco-walled store originally built as a K&B--was on Jerry's list of Personal Historic Sites. Roquette's soda fountain had been a stop on Jerry's bus ride home from high school. He put down hundreds of cheeseburgers, thousands of French fries, and gallons of cherry Coke at that counter. He hadn't been there lately. A sign on the door said he never would again. He could barely read it from the car, so he drove around the block, parked, and went up for a closer look. "Closed. Prescription Records Now At Walgreens." The windows were papered over, but through the door he could see the old fountain, the counter, the tiled floors. He recognized it instantly. It was not merely the site of all those burgers and fries of forty years ago. It was the diner in his dream of an hour so ago. It was the Best Of Restaurant. Book 1, Page 2 Crazed. Julie Wells struggled with the upholstery fabric. A few days ago she bought it because she thought would look good on the old sofa. She'd made clothes for a long time, and believed that making clothes for a piece of furniture wouldn't be hard. But, it seemed, it was, and it was frustrating. She was red in the face, sweaty, and hairy, her bangs covering most of her field of vision as she tried to pull the damn fabric over the sofa arms. Jerry entered the house through the back door--with the dogs. Dogs! The last thing Julie needed. "Jerry, I need your help!" she shouted. That sentence was one Jerry had heard many times in their nineteen years of marriage, and he knew what it meant. Eggs to walk on. He slipped around the back of the sofa and started tugging on the fabric. "Not there!" Julie said. "Over here!" "Wait," Jerry said, and jumped up. "I have the perfect tool for this." He came back with three short pieces of black plastic. "You use these to change a bike tire." They slipped in one, then another, and the third, and the fabric was almost on. "Hold on!" he said, ran into the kitchen, and returned with a wooden spoon. He slipped it in between Julie's straining hands, and they heard a soft pop and the fabric wrapped around the bottom of the sofa. It was tight and immovable. "Good job!" said Jerry. "Tell me you washed your hands," Julie said. "How many dying dogs did you fool with today?" "All healthy dogs without worms," Jerry said. He didn't mention the squashed cat. "But who cares. Wait until I tell you what we're going to do!" Julie fell back off her knees and sat on the floor. She brushed away her hair at last. "What now?" she said. "We're going to open a restaurant!" said Jerry. His grin looked ridiculous. Julie stared generally in the direction of Jerry's face, but her eyes were focused on a point some ten feet behind him. Then she tilted her head down and shook it to get the hair out of her eyes. "What?" she said. "You know the old Roquette's Drugstore on Carrollton and Claiborne? It's closed. Empty. Carrollton and Claiborne. The center of the known universe. Roquette's. Great old tiled floor. High tin ceilings. Long and narrow. What a place for a restaurant!" Julie just nodded. Jerry knew the nod. It meant, "What makes you think that you could run a restaurant?" Jerry answered this unspoken question by delivering, for the first time, what would become his most famous line in the restaurant's early days."I know how to cut meat up," he said. "That's disgusting!" Julie said. "Don't ever tell anyone that, or they'll think you serve dog meat! Wait. Hold it. I'm telling you that as if this is actually going to happen." "It is going to happen," Jerry said, and began describing the dream he'd had in the office. Her look said that this was a mistake, and for a moment he wondered whether his inspiration may, in fact, be loony. "The Best Of Restaurant?" Julie said. "You need a better name than that for reality. How about Roquette's, since everybody knows that?" "But wait, you haven't heard the menu concept," Jerry said. "See, all we'll sell are the best dishes from other restaurants. Give them credit, say we're trying to come as close as we can to the original. I'll bet something like that will pack the place." "What if they won't give you the recipe? What if they sue you?" Julie said. "Why are you women always looking on the dark side?" "Oh, right, I forgot," Julie said. "Wait, I have a name for your restaurant. How about Misogynist Bistro?" Book 1, Page 3. Neutering Dinner. Julie listened to Jerry rave on about his restaurant all evening, right into bed, where she fell asleep while he was still talking. She had her own dream about the place--something about a lady coming in and having dinner while Jerry neutered her dog. It was funny enough to wake her, and left her chuckling. The room was now dark, and Jerry was asleep. Two-twenty. Julie lay there for a long time, thinking about Jerry's restaurant fantasy. Actually, it sounded like more fun than being a veterinarian's wife. That was rarely good for anything more than starting a conversation that would inevitably lead to how a beloved pet died. Julie always felt sympathy for such stories--she'd had her own departed dogs--but sympathy is not a mood you want to emerge when you're trying to have a good time with friends. On the other hand, a restaurant would mean giving up a pretty good business for a risky one that Jerry didn't know much about. Julie liked the idea of owning a fun place, but she hated the idea of a dent in the family income. It might slow down her buying and selling of houses, or even stop it. She hadn't made much doing that, but it interested her greatly. Two-thirty now. And there was that stupid name. The Best Of Restaurant! It's barely literate. The name a recent immigrant from Albania might think of. Julie tired to think of a different name for the place. She had none in mind when she fell asleep again. Jerry arose before dawn feeling the same white heat of motivation he'd gone to bed with. He made cafe au lait (this for sure would be on the menu, but should it be the Café du Monde or the Morning Call that he would credit?). He turned on his computer and started working on a logo. He wasn't much good at graphics programs, so he spent almost an hour trying to figure out how to use the software. Then another hour looking through the hundreds of fonts. He would have been late to op0en his office if Julie hadn't alerted him to the hour. "Mrs. Lancaster is here for her cat," said Peggy, his assistant, when Jerry entered the veterinary office at a quarter to nine. "Mrs. Lancaster?" he asked her. "What's wrong with her cat again?" "She rolled over it yesterday. She wants to know if you were able to save it." "The cat was DOA," Jerry said. "It's in the freezer." "Oh, that's very bad," Peggy said. "She's all smiles out there. She's been here for about a half hour, and everything she's said to me is how great a vet you are that you could help Pinky to pull through." "Hmm," Jerry said, looking over the appointment list. As he did, he wondered whether he could use his client list to promote the restaurant. Then he looked up at Peggy. "What you say her name was, again?" Book 1, Page 4. The Chef The Cat Brought In. Mrs. Lacey Lancaster was sitting with a handkerchief in her hand on one of the dogproof benches in Jerry's waiting room. Jerry sat next to her and said nothing, knowing that it was easier to let her ask how her cat was. Which would be easier than just coming out and telling her the cat was deceased. But Mrs. Lancaster asked the wrong question. "How much do you think it will cost to make Pinky well again?" She seemed to be exercising brave control of great sadness. The perfect answer popped into Jerry's head. "There will be no charge," he said. Mrs. Lancaster's eyes turned to lock onto his, as she tried to puzzle out what he meant. Somehow, his return glance told her the truth. He watched her eyes fill with tears, as if little water pipes had been turned on under her lower eyelids. Her lower lip trembled. "Is poor Pinky dead? Is she dead? Did you try absolutely everything?" "I'm sorry, Mrs.--I'm sorry, I forgot your name. Lancaster. I'm sorry. Your cat was dead when you brought him here yesterday. There was nothing I could do." "I read about a shot that can make a stopped heart start beating again," she said hopefully. Jerry shook his head somberly. "No, I don't know of that. If there had been anything that could have been done, I would have done it. But Pinky was hurt so badly that even if he lived he would have died soon from other things. It's really a good thing he died right away." "Pinky was a girl!" she said. Obviously, Jerry hadn't tried as hard as he was saying if he didn't know that. "So, what do I do now? I'd like to bury her at home." "Yes, of course," said Jerry. He was never much good at this pet undertaker business. "I'll get Pinky for you. Excuse me." Jerry went to the freezer, a big upright in a shed just outside the back door. He opened it to see that Pinky, which he'd more or less just thrown in there the night before, had her legs splayed out in a silly way. He thought for a second. He picked the cat up, put it into a plastic bag, and brought it to the kitchen. He put the sack into the microwave oven, and pressed "Defrost." The microwave asked how many pounds. Jerry punched in 4, closed the door, and pushed Start. The panel showed that this would take twenty-eight minutes. Jerry went back to Mrs. Lancaster. "Mrs. Lancaster, there are some papers that need to be filled out before I can release your pet," he said. "Some ridiculous state law. You know how it is. My assistant is working on them now, but they need to be faxed up to Baton Rouge and approved. It might take about a half-hour. Maybe you could come back later, and we'll have a nice box for Pinky." "Oh, that's all right," she said. "I'll just wait here." Mrs. Lancaster sat on Jerry's hard wood bench for a half-hour while her frozen cat thawed in the microwave. He excused himself from Mrs. Lancaster to tell Peggy, his assistant, about the ruse. Then he returned to the bench and tried to ease the transition for her. "Do you have any other pets, Mrs. Lancaster?" he said. "If you need one to replace Pinky, we have some cats here looking for a home." "Oh, yes," she said. "I have seven other cats. But Pinky was one of the oldest. My daughter Winifred got Pinky for her eleventh birthday. Of course, when she went away to college, she left Pinky here with me, and she's so busy now that she can't take care of a pet. She's going to feel terrible when I tell her that Pinky died." Mrs. Lancaster's lower lip began to tremble again. "What does your daughter do now?" Jerry asked. "She should be a doctor like you, but she started working as a waitress in college. She spent more time at the restaurant than she did studying. Then she started cooking. She worked her way up to being a chef. But she's too smart and too beautiful a girl for that. She's just throwing her life away." "Oh, I wouldn't say that," Jerry said. "Look at Emeril. He's made a lot of money as a chef. More people know him than any doctor I can think of." "That's what Winnie tells me all the time, too. But she's getting nowhere. She says that she has to move from one restaurant to another to keep moving up, but it just looks to me like she can't hold down a job." "Where is she working now?" Jerry asked. "Nowhere," said Mrs. Lancaster. "The restaurant where she was working closed down when the owner was sent to jail for tax evasion. What kind of people are these? But she still wants to stay with it. I wish I had some money so I could help her open up her own restaurant. That's what she really wants to do." "Really?" Jerry said. "Mrs. Lancaster, I know this might sound cruel, but it might be a good thing that--" Jerry caught his callousness before it formed into words. "That you came in today. I think I might know where your daughter can get a really good job with a new restaurant I think is going to do very well." "Oh?" she asked, with a hint of suspicion. "What restaurant is that?" "I don't know the name. I'm not sure they have one yet," said Jerry. "It's going to be on the corner of Carrollton and Claiborne, in the old Roquette's drugstore. I can't believe it closed after all these years." "Oh, yes, he had to close," said Mrs. Lancaster. "Bobby talked about retiring for a long time, but at eighty-eight it's about time. Bobby Roquette is my brother, you know. But he didn't tell me about a restaurant in his old building." "You're kidding!" said Jerry, his smile widening. "Boy, this is just like New Orleans. Sometimes I think there are only five hundred people in this whole city. I went to Roquette's every afternoon on my way home from high school when I was a boy." He held back from saying he himself was the would-be restaurateur. "You're still a boy," said Mrs. Lancaster. "Tell you what," Jerry said. "Can you give me your daughter's phone number, and I'll pass it along to the person who's opening the new restaurant?" "I'll have to ask her first." "Sure! Would you like to use our phone?" Jerry said, then had the feeling perhaps he was getting pushy. He got the cordless and brought it over to Mrs. Lancaster, and left her to make her call while he checked how well the cat was defrosting. Book 1, Page 5. The Dig. Mrs. Lancaster couldn't get her daughter on the phone at Jerry's office. But Jerry didn't want to let the lady get away without establishing some means of contact. When he emerged from the recesses of the clinic with Mrs. Lancaster's dead cat--it was inside a plastic garbage bag, inside a specially-printed, cardboard cat coffin--he asked whether she had any way of digging a hole to bury the cat. She looked a little frail to be doing such things. "I'm not too busy," Jerry said. "I'd be happy to help." "Oh, I dig in my garden all the time," she said. "I know just where I'll put her, right between some irises. The ground is real soft there. I'll have no problem." "Well. Please ask your daughter if it's all right for me to call her about the new restaurant," Jerry said. "Or she can call me." He handed the box to Mrs. Lancaster, then reached for one of his cards to slip under her hand. "My goodness!" Mrs. Lancaster said. "It feels as if Pinky is still warm! She wouldn't be warm if she died yesterday, would she? Are you sure that she's dead?" Jerry hadn't thought about that. Yes, the cat was warm, from the microwaved thaw Jerry had to perform so he could arrange the legs of the cat into a position of repose. "It must just be where I was holding it, Mrs. Lancaster," he said. "I wish I could say Pinky was alive, but I assure you that she has passed on. She must have been a nice cat for you to love her so much." "Not really," said Mrs. Lancaster. "I'm just worried about Winifred. It was her cat. Well, I'll sure ask her to call." Jerry held the door open and Mrs. Lancaster left. He stood thee for a minute after she drove away. Wasn't she tearful and emotional when she brought the cat over? Now she was acting as if the cat were no more of a loss to her than a bag of garbage. Jerry returned to his desk and looked over his list. First item was to call the real estate agent handling the old Roquette's Drugstore building. He picked up the phone and dialed. ¤  ¤  ¤ At her home, Mrs. Lancaster got out her old shovel and began to dig. She first removed a few bulbs, then went through the planting soil in her flower beds, then into the harder clay beneath it. It was much harder than she thought to dig a hole deep enough for Pinky and her little cardboard coffin. She paused, wiped the perspiration from her brow, and put the shovel into the ground again. It went in deep. She levered out a hefty load of clay. She tried to lift it, and found it heavier than she thought. She paused, took a deep breath, and gave the shovel another jerk. The big wad of clay came out of the hole about four inches, then sagged. She strained against the shovel with all her might. Then Mrs. Lancaster dropped the shovel, and fell, face forward, on top of the cardboard box with the dead cat inside. Book 1, Page 6. Memorable Corner. The real estate agent was late. Jerry stood on the uptown-river corner of Carrollton and Claiborne and felt the bracing air brush his face. Last night, a front came through with its line of thunderstorms, and now the sky was clearing as the temperature went down. Classic New Orleans winter weather. The corner was as familiar to Jerry as any in New Orleans. Standing there in this weather shook loose from his memory images of his commute to and from high school in the 1960s. How many times did Jerry stand on that exact spot, waiting for the Tulane bus? A line of them rested across the street along Palmer Park, waiting till it was time to make the U-turn, begin another run, and pick him up. In those days the Tulane buses were the old electric kind, with two roof-mounted poles taking their power from the cateneries above, like the streetcars that waited to begin their own turns in the neutral ground there. This was where the Jesuit boys and the De La Salle boys separated. The Sallies (that's what Jerry and the other Jesuit Blue Jays called them; the De La Salle boys had their own epithets to shoot back) boarded the old, slow St. Charles streetcar, and the Jays crowded into the swift Tulane trackless trolleys. Which had surprisingly good pickup, Jerry remembered. On his way home every afternoon, Jerry stopped between buses to have French fries and a cherry Coke at the soda fountain of Roquette's Pharmacy. Buses from all four directions ended their routes at this intersection, so bus and streetcar operators were always in and out of Roquette's for a quick cup of coffee. Jerry remembered that the lady behind the counter always had to ask whether they wanted chicory or pure, even though it was the same guys in there every day. If Jerry had some money in his pocket and time to spare, he'd buy a comic book and read it at the counter while eating a cheeseburger. But mostly what he ordered at Roquette's soda fountain counter was French fries and a cherry Coke. They were the best fries he'd ever tasted. Crinkle cuts. You could watch them being fried as the anticipation grew. For some reason the oil foamed up almost to overflowing in the fryer. Jerry hadn't thought about those fries in a long time, but knew he still hadn't had their equal in the thirty years since. And the more he thought Roquette's, the more it seemed like something out of an era gone far longer than his teen years. The building was an antique. It was one of the first branch stores built by Katz and Besthoff when that local drugstore chain began to expand. K&B had moved across the street to a much bigger building, but that left a niche for a little old drugstore that Mr. Roquette filled. Jerry remembered Mr. Roquette as being pretty old even back then. A nice man, soft-spoken and usually smiling, a pharmacist out of a Norman Rockwell painting. "Dr. Wells?" a woman's voice said. "Oh!" Jerry said, emerging from his nostalgia. "Are you Miss Gottlieb? With Letter and Farmer?" "That's me!" she said. Jerry looked her over. She was about thirty-five. Black hair, big eyebrows, too much makeup, stylish dress too tight. She had not subjected herself to rigorous dieting or workouts, but she was probably in better shape than Jerry was, he concluded. "I'm glad to meet you!" Jerry said. "I love this old building, and I used to come here all the time. When I saw it for lease I knew I had to at least look into it. I'm thinking about a restaurant." Book 1, Page 7. A Restaurant? "A restaurant!" said Karen Gottlieb. "What a wonderful idea!" In fact, that wasn't what she was thinking. Her mind raced ahead to the first obstacle Jerry would have in putting a restaurant into the old Roquette's Pharmacy: there wasn't enough parking. No off-street parking at all. It would certainly be an issue when Jerry went for his permits. But she didn't let this show in her face, which maintained a broad smile. She couldn't afford to. Her sales this year were far behind those for last year, to the displeasure of the higher-ups. This was a sale she needed to make. "Yep," said Jerry. "And can you believe the idea came to me in a dream?" Karen kept her smile going, but thought, uh-oh. Another flake who wants to open a restaurant. How many dozens of these had she wasted time on over the years? "Do you have a restaurant now, Mr. Wells?" "No, I'm a veterinarian," Jerry said. "But I love restaurants, and I was thinking about opening one when I saw this space available. I've been coming here since I was a kid." This relieved Karen, who knew that she could get a rent at the upper end of the range from prospects who had sentimental attachments to the property in question. "Let's go in," she said. "We have to go in through the back." They walked down Claiborne to an old wooden delivery door. She turned the key and pushed the door open. A funny medicinal smell came out in a warmish flow of air. It wasn't the smell Jerry remembered. But it did smell like what you'd expect of a 70-year-old drugstore. The old fluorescent fixtures, hanging on chains from the pressed-tin ceiling, buzzed and flickered as they lit the store up. What they illuminated stirred up no memories for Jerry. It didn't look the same with empty shelves. Jerry half thought he would still see that old Kaz Humidifier for sale above the soda fountain. He'd looked at it for years and wondered whether anybody would ever buy it. Did someone actually come in here with a need for such a thing one day and take it away, faded box and all? "How does it look?" Karen asked. "Is it like you remember?" "Yes and no," said Jerry. "But this definitely is the place in my dream." Jerry's attention was stolen by the sight of the old soda fountain fixtures. Some were gone, but the good old Bastian-Blessing soda spigot was still there, and all the stainless-steel dispensers for things like chocolate and cherry syrup. "May I check this stuff out? he asked. "Be my guest," Karen said. "I think the water is still connected." He pulled on the soda spigot's handle. It sputtered, but then water came out. He pushed it and a thin, hard stream shot out. He remembered that this was how they made nectar sodas fizz. A grin broke out over his face. "Wow, this is great!" he said, sounding like a little kid. Book 1, Page 8. Just Perfect. Jerry took the lead in his tour of the old drugstore, and Karen Gottlieb followed him. He walked the length of the business side of the soda fountain. The old grill was still there, but the deep-fry unit was gone. He opened the stainless steel door of the refrigerator, and was instantly sorry that he did--not a nice smell. They stepped quickly away from the offending appliance and toward the storeroom. Jerry remembered, from having gone to the bathroom a few times in the old days, what was back there, more or less. But like most parts of the store, it didn't match his recollections. The back room was smaller than he remembered it, but still plenty big enough to put a kitchen in. The small black-and-white floor tiles, arranged in a pattern that someone must have had to figure out a long time ago, continued all the way to the back of the building. Floors like that last forever, even when the concrete beneath them tilts and cracks, as this floor did. But there was a certain antique charm in that. People would connect that look with the floors at Arnaud's and Tujague's and the Crescent City Steak House, and get the same warm feeling Jerry now felt. A phone rang. Really rang--an old phone with a real bell. Jerry looked around to see where that antique might be, but saw Karen reach for her cellphone. "Is that your--" "Hello?" Karen said, holding her hand up. She listened for a moment, and then began to drift to the front of the store. Jerry stood in the back room, alone. The more he took in as he scanned the scene, the more he felt a glow of rightness in this place. He'd leave the soda fountain in--make it the oyster bar. Over where the pharmacy was he'd have a small private dining room. The old checkout counter would become the hostess stand. He remembered how it was completely cluttered with magazines, gum, candy, so that you could hardly see the face of the clerk. Why not do that again? He thought. Like in the Sixties? Everything he looked at triggered an idea, and each idea added to his excitement. He extracted his own cellphone and called Julie. "So, what's it look like?" she answered, knowing exactly who it was and what he was calling about. "Is it the place in your dream?" "Is it ever," he said, knowing he sounded too enthusiastic even as the words came out. "You've got to get over here and let me show you what I'm thinking! Do you have time to come over?" Karen Gottlieb returned. Jerry ended his call with a talk-to-you-later, not waiting to her Julie's excuse for not coming over. He turned the beam from his happy face onto Karen. But her turned it off when she looked grave. "That was my office," Karen said. "They say they have somebody who wants to buy this building and tear it down for a new bank." Book 1, Page 9. The Bucks Start Here. "What?" asked Jerry, with some alarm, having just been told by real estate agent, Karen Gottlieb that the old drugstore he was interested in converting into a restaurant was about to be bought from under him by a bank. "They can't tear this place down! It's too important! Have they made the deal yet? Can I talk to the seller?" "Wait a minute," said Karen, looking down and holding her hand up. She had her own reasons for being upset by this news. She needed to make this sale. "It's not impossible for you to block this. But let me ask you something important that I wasn't going to bring up yet. Can you get your hands on a million dollars? And, if so, would you be willing to sign the lease right now?" That gave Jerry pause. "Well. . . what's the million dollars for?" "The owners want $4500 a month rent," she said. "That figure is not negotiable. I think it's a good deal for a location like this. But here's the thing. They'll include an exclusive option to buy for another $300." The first calculation that went through Jerry's mind was that this was about half of what he earned from his veterinary practice. In a good month. Then he added in what it would cost to equip the place. And hire people. It got scary, now that he was looking at real money. "Can I borrow your pad?" he said, reaching for his pen. Karen handed it over to him. He flipped the top page over to a clean one, but as he did so he saw, in Karen's hand, "Needed to make this month's target: $4500/mo." It only caught his attention for an instant, yet the fact write itself to one of Jerry's mental Post-It notes. His conscious attention turned to adding how much this would all cost to get going. He had only five figures written, but he was already feeling a shiver. "Does it seem unreasonable that this project will cost me $200,000 the first year?" he asked her. That would sound about right to me," said Karen. "I know people who have opened restaurants for more, and for less. Depends on what you do, I guess. But all I really know is the real estate angle, and this $4800 I think is quite a deal. For a location like this, I mean." Jerry felt cold inside. Yet every instinct within him said that this was the right move, at the right time, even though it would complicate his life exponentially. "I'll take it," he said. "Are you serious that we can sign the lease right now?" "Sure!" said Karen. "The owners said they'd get right over here if I had someone ready to move in. Shall I call them?" "Let's do it," Jerry said. He knew he'd catch it from Julie for not consulting with her. But each moment he spent in the old drugstore made him love it more. If he could lock the place down, he could maybe save it from disappearing. And he'd have the restaurant he dreamed of. Book 1, Page 10. Surprise Requiem. Smiling with expectation, Karen punched in the number for the owners of the old Roquette's Pharmacy. As she did, Jerry called Julie to tell her the news, and to take her counsel. "Guess what?" he told her. "I think we're leasing the old drugstore right here, right now!" "How much?" Julie asked. "Forty-eight hundred a month. I think we can swing that, although it won't be easy." "I'm glad to hear you say that, Jerry," Julie said. "At least, I think I am. I thought the rent would shock you out of your scheme, and I figured it would be at least that much. But if you're still in the game, then maybe we need to talk about whether we really want to do this." "I want to do it," said Jerry. "If you want to talk, you've got to get over here now, because if we don't nail this place down right now we'll lose it. A bank wants to buy it and tear it down." Julie, who dabbled enough in real estate to know how deals were pushed along by agents, found this suspicious. "Be careful, Jerry. Why not wait to sign it until I get there." "Okay, I'll ask her." "I'm on my way," Jerry heard Julie say. He turned to Karen and saw a troubled look on her face as she spoke to her party. "I understand," she said. "I'm so sorry. I'll be in touch after things settle down. Thank you. Again, my condolences." She snapped her phone shut. "It looks like we wont be able to execute the lease just yet," she said. "The Roquettes want to put everything having to do with the building on hold. Mr. Roquette's sister just died. She was handling a lot of his business. But that might work in our favor. We won't have to turn this into a fire sale. Or, on the other hand, maybe we will. Who knows?" She looked distressed to the point of disgust. "Did they say the name of the person who died?" Jerry asked. "They did, but I can't exactly remember," Karen said. "I was thinking about something else. Might have been Winchester?" "Was it Lancaster?" "Lancaster! Yes, that's it. Do you know her?" "I think so," he said. "A woman who said she was Mr. Roquette's sister was in my veterinary office a few days ago with a dead cat. Did they say what happened to her?" "That's definitely her, then," Karen said. "Mr. Roquette said she was digging in her garden when she had a heart attack, and that her cat was next to her, dead in a box." "Hmm," said Jerry. "Do you think we should go to the funeral?" "Well, I'm not going, if that's what you mean. If you knew her, that's up to you. I would be very careful about talking real estate at a funeral, though." "Of course not," said Jerry. "I just thought it would be nice to see Mr. Roquette again, and let him see me. I wonder if he'll remember me from all those years ago." "Okay," said Karen, suddenly seeming impatient. "Let's swap cards, and I'll let you know when I find out anything," said Karen. "Damn! And I thought we'd get this done right now!" "I'm not giving up," Jerry said, although he wasn't sure what his persistence would accomplish. This scenario was not in his dream about the restaurant. Book 1, Page 11. Mind Reading. "How does it look?" Julie asked from fifteen feet away, as she walked her perfect walk up the sidewalk, toward where Jerry and Karen were standing, outside the back door of the old pharmacy. Julie did not have to wait for the answer to her question. She could read Jerry's mind. This was not a talent she had with many other people, but something about her relationship with Jerry made his every thought as clear to her as if it were playing on a readerboard hung around his neck. This was a mixed blessing, as far as Jerry was concerned, because while he couldn't hide anything from her, she always knew what he wanted. Often enough, she gave it to him. "Okay, so what's the problem?" Julie said, as Jerry craned over to give her a kiss. "Is the place a mess?" "Not at all," said Jerry. "In fact, it's so much like I remember it that I knew where everything was, and everything I saw I remembered. But it seems like we have to battle a bank for the place." "I wouldn't say it's a battle," Karen said. "But we do have to be ready to move fast." "This is Karen Gottlieb," Jerry said. "She's the agent. Like I told you on the phone, a bank wants to buy the place and put a new branch on the spot." "You already told me that," Julie said, as she shook Karen's hand. The thought crossed her mind that her had was cold as she reached out. "But there's something else, isn't there?" "There's been a death in the Roquette family," said Karen. "They want to hold off dealing with the building for a little while. Don't know how that will affect things." "And you won't believe who died," Jerry said. "Remember that lady I told you about who brought in the cat she wanted me to bring back from the dead? The one whose daughter is a chef? Turns out that she had a heart attack burying the cat. Talk about weird coincidences!" "You must go to the funeral," said Julie. "That's what I was thinking," Jerry said. "If I can talk to Mr. Roquette about the place then, that would maybe give me a leg up on the bank." Julie looked at Jerry as if he had dried-up ice cream all over it. "Jerry, promise me you want bring up your restaurant at the funeral. You don't say anything about it. Just that Mrs. Lancaster was one of your patients. Is that clear?" "That's what I told him," said Karen. Jerry, sensing that he was now outnumbered, changed the subject."The drugstore is fantastic," he said, a smile of concupiscence spreading across his face. "It has that old tile floor and big old wooden cabinets and the original soda fountain. People would come in just to dig on it!" He turned to Karen. "Can I give her a quick look at the place?" "I have another appointment," Karen said. "I hope you don't mind if we make it real quick." They went inside, and Jerry rhapsodized about his recollections of the place. As he did, he felt his optimism about the project--which had been dampened by the news of the bank and Mrs. Lancaster's death--rise once again. "So Jerry tells me it's $4800 a month," Julie said to Karen, as Jerry continued to babble. "Forty-eight with an option to buy. They want a three-year lease. And there's one more thing I didn't mention, Jerry. They insist on approving any business that goes in there." "I have no doubt," Jerry said. Old Mr. Roquette really loved this place. I don't think he wants to see it turn into a bar or a dry cleaners or something. Let alone a bank." "Yeah, but an old guy like that can sure be turned around if the figures go high enough," Julie said. "And I don't know if you've heard, but banks usually have a lot of money." A cellphone sang. Julie answered it. She handed it to Jerry. Fora change, it was Jerry who could read Julie's face which emitted curiosity. "She sounds young," she said. "Her name is Winifred. Who's that?" Book 1, Page 12. Electricity. Jerry had a short, mild burst of alarm. That was enough for Julie to tune in and decode the message on Jerry's face. What she read was that he felt he'd been caught thinking something he shouldn't. Why he felt that way was a mystery even to him. Winifred Lancaster was just a name to him. He hadn't met or even spoken to her. All he knew was that she was a young, single woman, an unemployed chef, and the owner of a deceased cat named Pinky that her mother, now also dead, had rolled over. "This is Dr. Wells," said Jerry, his tone deepening to the professional register. "Is this Winifred Lancaster? I was so shocked to hear that your mother passed away. She was in my office the morning before last, and the Friday before that. She said that Pinky was your cat. I'm sorry about that, too. This must be a terrible time for you. Is there anything I can do?" "You just answered my question," Winifred's voice said. "When we went into the house after we took care of my mother, I found your card on her kitchen counter. On the back of the card it just said, 'Winifred call.' I didn't know what I was supposed to call you about, but of course it must have been the cat. My mother was under the impression that I loved that cat, and she always made a point of telling me how well she took care of it, better than all her other cats. That's what's so crazy about this. They think that her heart attack was brought on by the strain of digging the hole to bury the cat, which I know she was doing for me, but to tell the truth as far as I care she could have thrown the cat into the garbage. But now she's dead, and I have a cat in a coffin." She paused. "I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm telling you all this. But I saw this note to call you, and so I'm calling you." Jerry said nothing for a second, then came back, still in professional tone, "It's quite all right. I deal with this sort of thing all the time. Our pets can really mess up our heads." "Yeah, well, I'm more messed up about my mother than about the damn cat," Winifred said. "This really has nothing to do with you. I'm sorry I had to bother you like this. Good-bye." "Wait!" said Jerry, too late. Julie observed all this carefully. "What was that all about?" she asked. "It was Mrs. Lancaster's daughter Winifred," he said. "She owned that cat--the one that died--although she doesn't sound like she was very attached to it. When she went over to her mother's house after finding out she had a heart attack, she found my card, which I gave to Mrs. Lancaster to give to her, because she's a chef, and she doesn't have a job right now." It was a perfectly good explanation, and it was all true. But Jerry knew he was blurting it all out in a way that made Julie regard it with suspicion. It was kind of a weird story, come to think of it. "Why did she feel the need to call you?" Julie wanted to know. "Because Mrs. Lancaster wrote herself a note on the back of it to give it to Winifred," Jerry said, feeling himself continuing to lose control. "But how did she know you need a chef, if that's all that was on the card?" "She doesn't know. I'm going to have to call her back. In fact. . ." Jerry looked at the caller ID. It was Mrs. Lancaster's number. "Uh-oh," he said. "She called from her mom's. I'd better call her back to get a good number for her." "Can't she call you?" said Julie. "She has your number." "She has no reason to call me back," Jerry said, as he punched in the number. "If I don't get her now, I'll lose her." What does he mean by that? thought Julie. "Hello, Winifred?" Jerry said. "This is Dr. Wells again. I'm sorry to trouble you, and I understand how upset you must be. But the reason your name was on my card was that there was something else I wanted to discuss with you. But it's not pressing, and I understand that this is a bad time for you. But would you mind calling me after things have settled down a bit? No hurry at all. What? No, it's not about a bill. I didn't charge your mother, I felt so bad about her cat. Yes. Good. Thank you." "Why didn't you charge her mother for taking care of that cat?" asked Julie. "You certainly spent some time on it." "I don't know. . . it's just that. . . well, when she came in. . . Look, it just didn't seem right to me at the time, okay?" "I guess so," said Julie. But she felt an oddly intense charge in the air between her and Jerry. Book 1, Page 13. Distraction. A young woman with long red hair stood in the door of Jerry and Julie's bedroom. Julie, on the opposite side of the bed from the door, was in deep sleep. Jerry sat on the bed and recognized the woman as Winifred Lancaster. She wore a chef's white jacket but apparently nothing else. Jerry saw smooth, perfect legs first. She turned her face, and the light coming through the door illuminated it like the crescent moon, enough that he could see she was smiling, but not much more. She took a few steps toward Jerry. He sat up in bed, pivoted around, and then slid to a standing position facing her. It occurred to him that he was wearing nothing but boxer shorts. He touched her arm and walked around her. She turned to follow him with her gaze. He saw Julie's face, but with red hair. "It's my turn now," a different, soft, smoky voice said. "It's lonely in bed without my cat." It took Jerry a minute or so to realize that this was not really happening. He was looking into Julie's face, but her eyes were closed, her head on the pillow, next to the pillow where Jerry's head lay. His heart was pounding, and he was in a state of excitement. He sat up a bit too quickly. "What's the matter?" said Julie, startled. She listened to Jerry, who was breathing heavily. "Is it this again? Jerry, you must go to the doctor to have him check this reflux problem of yours. Every time you do that you scare the crap out of me! Here! Feel my heart beating!" "It wasn't reflux," he said. "I was having a dream that someone was in here. She was. . . oh, forget it. It's too stupid. I'm sorry. It felt real. . . okay, it wasn't. None of it happened. Life is normal." "Who's 'she'?" Julie wanted to know. "It was you, but it was actually not you. Your face, somebody else's voice." "Tell me in the morning. It's quarter to four. Good night, or whatever." Jerry lay there, wide awake, listening to his wife's gentle snoring, for over an hour. He thought about the dream. How absurd. He had no idea what Winifred Lancaster looked like. And he was very happily married. Never had an unfaithful thought. What was he doing in that dream? It was disturbing. But also very, very sexy. His last feeling, as he returned to sleep, was guilt mixed with a hope that the dream would resume. When Jerry woke up, Julie was up and fully dressed. He sat up, a little disappointed. "Good morning, sleepy!" she said. "Forty-five minutes till your office opens! I told Jeannie and Carol I'd meet them for coffee this morning. Later!" she swooped by to slap a kiss on his mouth, and then whooshed out the door, those pants making their usual sound as she walked. Jerry's mind was in the thrall of carnal urges, but there was nothing he could do about that now. Still, the dream kept interrupting his thoughts, which for days until now were an all-consuming focus on his possible restaurant. He had no time to make any calls about that. He hoped there would be nobody waiting to see him at the veterinary office so he could call the real estate agent from there. He also thought about having lunch in some restaurant where he knew the owners, so he could get a line on buying equipment. Maybe it would be a good idea to sit and talk with somebody in the business for awhile. But, to his odd disappointment, the waiting room was occupied. Two dogs waited for shots. Another was becoming incontinent. That was Jerry's least favorite problem, not because of any accidents that happened in his office, but because he hated the attitude change it wrought in the poor pet's owners. An animal who had been up to that time a beloved member of the family became an outcast at a time when it needed love and understanding most. The number of pet owners who put their dogs or cats to sleep because of this problem was disgusting. The flow of patients continued all morning. Most of the time, nothing made Jerry happier. Now it made him testy. He wanted to turn his full attention to his restaurant plans, instead of the half-concentration he was giving it. The building and the chef had to be secured, and both were in danger of slipping away. And there was that dream. Who was that tender redhead? "Is there something wrong, Jerry?" Peggy asked. "It's like you don't want to be here." "I don't," Jerry said. The sound of that declaration stopped him, as if he'd said the wrong thing to his wife or a policeman. "I mean, I have some other things on my mind. I really need to deal with them so I can concentrate on the office." "Is there something I can do?" Peggy asked. "Yes!" Jerry said, realizing he had a resource in Peggy that he was not using. "It has nothing to do with the office, though. Do you mind calling a few people?" "Of course not! Who?" "A real estate agent. You have to call her at least a dozen times to get her. I want to set up a meeting with the owners of a building I want to buy." "A building? Are we moving?" "No. It's an old drugstore I want to turn into a restaurant." "A restaurant? I had no idea we were doing that well here. Who's going to run it?" "Me. Me and Julie." "What?" Peggy laughed. "That's ridiculous! Who would let a veterinarian cook for them? Imagine the rumors!" Book 1, Page 14. Respects. Things finally slowed down for Jerry at one-thirty in the afternoon. Two more patients were coming in for minor matters, which made anything more than a short lunch impossible. He walked over to the Taj Mahal, barely making it before the buffet closed. While he ate a plate of lentils and chicken saagwala, he scanned through the newspaper. It was the usual new developments on old developments, concerning things he either didn't care about or thought were so outrageous that reading more about them would only make him mad. Then a photograph caught his eye. It was of an attractive woman who seemed familiar. When he looked more closely, he found it was an old picture of Lacey Roquette Lancaster, in a short article about her death. Jerry learned that she was only 67 when she died. He thought she looked and acted much older than that. She was a widow, the story said, and she was survived by three daughters, of which Winifred was the youngest. And her brother Robert Roquette--the old pharmacist who owned the drugstore he wanted to buy. "Yes!" Jerry said to himself, but audibly. He would go to the services! He'd meet Winifred Lancaster there, and probably Mr. Roquette. And he could talk to them, and. . . The callousness of this then welled up from Jerry’s conscience and flooded over this hot idea. But still. Mrs. Lancaster was a patient, wasn’t she? He had put the cat she was trying to bury when she died in its box for her. Nobody would think it odd for him to be there. Would they? He'd have to soft-peddle the restaurant connection, but the contact would be enough. But what if they're all crying over their loss? Jerry phoned Julie to ask her advice, but hung up before she answered. He knew shed not only disapprove, but be ashamed of him for even harboring such a thought. The phone squirmed and tootled. "Did you just call me?" Julie's voice said. "Yes!" Jerry said, caught off balance. "I wanted to ask you. . . whether you want to go out to dinner tonight. I, uh, want to talk with Ralph Brennan about what I need to do to get a restaurant open." "I don't know, Jerry," Julie said. "Id have to go home sooner than I was planning, and anyway I don't want to go out to some expensive place to listen to you talk with Ralph Brennan about stoves and stuff. Why don't you just go to lunch there without me?" "Okay," Jerry said, relieved that heed got off two hooks at the same time. Although he'd thought about talking to someone he knew in the restaurant business, he didn't know what he'd ask just yet, and Julie would find that an inadequacy. Anyway, he was still stuffed with Indian food. Julie was still on the phone. "Did you see the notice in the paper about Mrs. Lancaster?" she asked. "I think you really ought to go to the funeral. It's tomorrow at Lake Lawn at 10 o'clock. It's not that far from the office, and you probably don't know any of those people and won't have to stay very long." I love you, he thought. “Really?” he said. “I guess you're right. What time is the funeral?” Book 1, Page 15. Uneasy Moments. Jerry left his office by the back door just as, after two hours without a single patient coming in, the first one of the day pulled up in front. Peggy would handle it and tell the man that the doctor was at a funeral. And the man would get mad. And Peggy would tell him that he should have been there earlier, when the waiting room was empty. And that would make the man madder still, and more likely to take his veterinary business to the big slick clinic over on Veterans Boulevard. But this was something Jerry had to do. He drove to Metairie-Lake Lawn funeral home and parked under its large live oaks. There weren't many people there, although the visitation had been going on for an hour already. He found Parlor C, signed the book, and stepped into a room of strangers. The few whose eyes caught his looked away in non-recognition, nodded solemnly, and moved on. Jerry drifted into the inner room, where the casket lay open. But his drift was arrested by the sight of a man whose face was both familiar and shocking to behold. It was unmistakably Robert Roquette. He was very much aged from the man in the mental photograph Jerry held, taken over thirty years ago. Roquette seemed old back then to Jerry. But he proved today that he could look much older still, and did. His full head of hair was of a whiteness that glowed. He was as tall as Jerry remembered him, a fact that Jerry noticed even though Roquette was sitting down, his hand on one of those aluminum canes with four short, branching legs at the bottom. It was a training walker, Jerry thought. "Mister Roquette!" Jerry said. "I haven't seen you in a million years!" Roquette looked up. A smile spread over yellowed, long teeth. "I expect it must be that long, because I can't remember who you are!" "I'd be surprised if you did," said Jerry. "Back in 1965 and 1966 I used to come into your drugstore every afternoon on my way home from Jesuit. I sat at the counter in my uniform and had French fries and cherry Cokes, and read comic books." "That doesn't help me!" Roquette said, exerting himself as if he were shouting, although his voice was at the level of normal speech. "We used to have a lot of young men come in and do that." "You had the best French fries I ever ate," Jerry continued. "I'm still looking for French fries that taste like that. I remember watching them fry. The oil would foam up, like butter. They were great! I can taste them right now!" Roquette stared at Jerry for a long moment, then waved his finger at him. "Wait. I do remember you. You walked in on me once in the back room while I was taking a nap, didn't you?" Few memories were more vivid to Jerry than that one. He'd gone back there to use the bathroom that was not supposed to exist, except that he was such a regular customer that they let him use it. An embarrassment that hadn't crossed his mind in years now did. He laughed nervously, an old transgression come back to haunt him. "I can't believe you remember that," Jerry said. "I never went back there again after that. But it did give me the idea of taking a nap every day. I still do that." "It's a darn good idea," said Roquette. "How do you think I got to be eighty-eight years old?" "You don't look eighty-eight," Jerry said automatically. "That's what everybody says, and you're all full of crap. I sure feel eighty-eight. Maybe even eighty-nine. But not ninety. Well." Roquette chuckled, then paused. "How did you know my sister?" Jerry felt a new twinge. Honoring the dead was really his secondary motivation for being here, credible though it may be. "I was Mrs. Lancaster's veterinarian," Jerry said. "The cat that she was trying to bury when she had that stroke was the one she'd just picked up from my office." "What? You sell dead cats?" asked Roquette. "No, no. She rolled over the cat with her car, and she brought it to me to see if I could help it. But it was already dead. She was really heartbroken about it. She said it belonged to her daughter." "Here, sit right here," said Roquette, patting the chair next to him. Jerry sat down. Roquette paused again, as if trying to think of the right words to say. "So it was you who put the cat in a box." "I told her we could take care of the cat," Jerry said. "I even offered to send someone over to help her bury it. We do that all the time, especially for older people." "Well, it's a hell of a reason to go," said Roquette. "She was my little sister. Twenty years younger than me. She was a beautiful girl. I was more like her father than our father was. She used to go out with so many boys. They were always coming over. Most of them were terrible. Once there was this feller who had a big purple Mercury, the kind with the little window in the back. He made her cry one night. I went to his house and threw a bucket of yellow paint on his god-damn purple car." Roquette stopped talking again, but longer this time. He looked out into the room. Jerry sat, uneasy. He wanted to shift the conversation back to the drugstore, and maybe bring up the fact that he wanted to lease it for his restaurant. But he saw no opening for that. "And the boy she married," Roquette continued. "I thought he was bad when I first met him. Turned out he wasn't so bad after all, but. . . " Jerry's peripheral vision alerted him to turn his head. He saw a woman walking toward him, wearing a black dress that was a bit too small for her somewhat overabundant body. She had long, brilliant red hair. Forward to Pages 16-30. © 2006 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com