Goodbye, Debbie Sue by Troy Seate

Troy is this month’s winner of $407.50 for his story about setting out on your own and freedom on your own terms.

Bio: After reading a few stories to his parents, they booted him out of the house. Undaunted, he continues to stand on the side of the literary highway and thumb down whatever genre comes roaring by. His storytelling includes everything from Horror Novel Review’s Best Short Fiction Award to the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. His website is www.troyseateauthor.webs.com

Without further ado, “Goodbye, Debbie Sue” by Troy Seate.

I started collecting secrets when I was just six years old. That was the first time I saw Debbie Sue naked. I thought about sharing the occurrence with my dad but decided he already knew about the differences between boys and girls. Nearly a decade would pass before I again beheld a sight such as that time on the riverbank.

I’m graduating from high school soon and working in a little place called Mel’s Diner. A baptism at the church had just ended with a good dunking, and I wanted to get over to Mel’s before the fun started. Lionel Scoggins was already on his favorite stool at the counter. He was a hulking bear of a man with short, white whiskers that made him look like Santa Claus down on his luck. Mel stood behind the counter, pouring Lionel a cup of coffee. Mel, short for Melanie, must have been a good-looking woman once upon a time before life had beaten down on her. That’s what my friend, Debbie Sue, had told me lots of times—that life could beat you down, and it could be darned hard to beat back.

Debbie Sue was old enough to leave school for good, but we were friends just the same. I didn’t even mind that some kids made fun of me for having a girl for a friend. We had lots of secrets between us. One of my favorites was the time she put a rubber finger sticking out of a drain in the girl’s restroom at her school. She told me how a couple of girls ran out screaming to high heaven. We laughed a lot about that.

Not only was Debbie Sue nice to me, but she was also easy on the eyes. She had budded a few years earlier, and she always smelled like powder. We were able to talk to each other about life, which I couldn’t do with the knuckleheaded boys my age. Conversations with them were pretty much limited to fishing or how to ditch school or church.

Debbie Sue seemed downright philosophical at times, like when I said we just had to get through the crummy stuff in life. “Life ain’t about just getting through. That’s losing,” she’d said. “Stay in a place like this your whole life and you wind up like Lily Hawkins who said a voice was telling her to jump off a bridge, so she goes off and does it. No sir, not me.” Debbie Sue wasn’t about to grow up and old in this backwater town. She was an unsettled searcher, like a squirming cat trying to escape its master’s arms. When the time was right, she planned to light out. And furthermore, all the foot-washing yokels who’d ever teased or made fun of her could kiss her ass as she headed down the road. Debbie Sue talked tough, and I would have bet she’d get life by the tail before it had too much time to beat on her like it had on Mel.

I watched Mel pour Lionel a refill. Her thin-hipped figure had withstood a pack of kids and husbands, and around fifty years of gravity. Although she wore her hair ratted up and brushed back like a fading country-western singer, her fallen arches and her face reflected some hard times and harsh disappointments, a life of hard knocks, most notably highlighted by a crescent scar on her forehead—the result of getting kicked by a horse or running into one of her ex-husband’s fists, way back when. I wondered why she still wore her faded and frayed mustard-colored uniform, but figured it was because it gave her a modicum of professionalism or purpose. Even this far from anything important, a person needed to feel they had a niche in life.

“What can I do to make your day less of a drag?” I offered.

Mel gave me a tired look, but managed to make her mouth turn up in some semblance of a smile. “You don’t need me to tell you what needs to be done, Bobby. Put on your apron and tend to whatever needs tending.” 

“Yes, ma’am,” I said and disappeared into the small kitchen that was barely big enough to throw a cat in. I’d cleaned all the dirty dishes before I left the night before, so I found the fly swatter and quickly ended the day for the kitchen’s first two visitors.

Soon Corky Trumball came trundling through the front door. I knew it was Corky even before he said, “Howdy” to Lionel and Mel. Most of the customers were so familiar that I could identify them just by the way they shuffled their feet. Both Corky and Lionel claimed to be men who’d seen and done everything, even though I was pretty sure they’d never been farther than the state line.

All of the diner’s customers had their own niches. Corky was the town sot. Even his moniker came from his love affair with the fruit from the vine. Not that what he drank had ever seen a cork. But he was fine in the mornings, opting for strong coffee, and that was a blessing because he wouldn’t want to be three sheets on this Sunday morn, considering what was going to happen once the place got busier.

Mendoza came in through the back. He ruffled my hair and wrapped his none-too-clean apron around his waist. “You’re here early today, amigo,” he said while he busied himself with a skillet of bacon fat.

“Yeah. They dunked ole Harlan Johnson in the baptismal over at the church.”

 “And you slip out before they catched you, eh?”

“Looked like the preacher was about to drown ole Harlan the way he held him under. I think it was long enough to put the fear of God in him for sure.”

Mendoza laughed, revealing his gold tooth. I liked the way Mendoza laughed. It was a pleasanter sound than bible-beating voices any day.

“Since you’re here, give me a hand with the eggs and biscuits.”

Within a few minutes, the rest of the crowd sauntered into Mel’s. They found their usual chairs and stools while Mel made the rounds with her coffee pot. She didn’t need to ask them what they wanted. She just started shoving orders through a cubbyhole between the counter and the kitchen. I wouldn’t be real busy until there were breakfast scraps to be bussed, but the entertainment would come sooner than that, or so I’d been promised. I peeked out the door again and counted twelve men who ranged from age fifty to seventy. I’d seen their faces my entire life, all of them covered with layers of lost opportunities for different outcomes to their lives. Josh Potts and George Fraily were already shoving dominoes around a checkered, plastic tablecloth while they sipped coffee and waited for their orders of ham and eggs.

Suddenly, the event I’d been waiting for was about to commence. I saw Debbie Sue’s shapely silhouette approach the diner’s front door and step in. Her sweet perfume cut through the diner’s caffeine and greasy odors. She wore a cotton print dress with lavender flowers and red-leather heels. The dress looked like a mail-order catalog number but everything looked cute on Debbie Sue. She also carried a beat-up suitcase. Lionel noticed her first. His jaw stopped in mid-chew on a slice of toast. Soon everyone, including Mel, stopped what they were doing to wonder what could bring Debbie Sue into the old man’s club at this hour.

She stood just inside the door and said a little unsteadily, “I need about a hundred bucks. I’ve got bus money, but I need more to buy some stuff.”

This wasn’t what I had expected. Debbie Sue had told me she was going to make a grand entrance and give a few old codgers who’d given her grief over the years an ear full. Then she was going to flash them and hit the road, leaving this grimy town behind once and for all. Begging for money was the last thing I ever thought she’d do.

No one responded to Debbie Sue’s rather strange request. Instead, they appeared dumbfounded to hear she had a notion to shake off the town’s dust and go somewhere else. She looked at the assemblage and sighed. Then she sat her suitcase next to the door and walked into the diner. She stepped on a chair and climbed on top of an unoccupied table in the middle of the room. It wobbled a might until she was carefully centered, but there was no uncertainty in her act.

Two furrows of concern appeared on Mel’s brow. She broke the crowd’s silence by saying, “Debbie Sue. Get down off of there. You might break a leg.”

“Please, Mel. I have to do this.” She had everyone’s undivided attention. “I’m hitching my wagon to a star, and I’m leaving to make a career for myself in California. I’m going to be in the movies,” she announced, her voice steadier now.

The word “career” had never been associated with anyone from around these parts. Debbie Sue unbuttoned the top of her dress.

“Tarnation, girl. What ’er you up to?” Josh Potts said, an unplayed domino frozen in his hand.