Eccentricity

She opened the screen door and held it aside with her left foot while she looked through her purse for the front door key. As she turned the key in the lock and grabbed the front door handle, she noticed the glass door knob was loose.

"Another repair job I can't afford right now," she told herself.

Sursanna turned on the lights and let the doors close behind her. She dropped her purse behind the counter, turned on the CD player, lit a candle and sat down for a moment, looking blankly around the room.

She talked quietly to herself. "I am not this old house. I am not this business. I am not the servers who come and go. I am not the customers who are never happy, no matter how much I try to please them. I am not...you know, I miss my grandfather today. Do you hear that, house? My grandfather gave these walls life and now it's on my shoulders to keep this place going. You're going to do what I tell you to do and stop falling apart."

Sursanna turned on the cash register and adjusted the broken paper tape cover, tearing off a piece of cellophane tape and sticking it across the crack that threatened to get bigger every time someone pushed a key or tore off a receipt. She picked up the phone and called her cousin the cook, Reggie, to remind him she needed him in the restaurant in half an hour, assuming he was sober enough to make the five-mile drive here. If not, her husband could always substitute, one more time.

She flipped through her personal name and address book she'd set down on the counter one day, that then turned into a sort of customer registration and comment journal. Some of the comments were usually funny. Some were indecipherable. Some were hard to interpret such as "the hostess with the mostest." Was someone referring to her? If so, the mostest what? Strange mood? Worst memory? Business debt? Number of grandkids?

A tear welled up in her eyes as she automatically looked up at the photo and drawing of her granddaughter she'd placed on the wall across from the counter, helping her remember her 20-year old granddaughter, her pride and joy, who was going to graduate early from college until a drunk driver ran a stop sign and killed her granddaughter on her way to work at the restaurant.

Only if...

What if...

"Well, we can't go back in time, can we?" Sursanna said out loud to no one except herself and perhaps the house. She pushed the thoughts aside that wanted to place some kind of blame on her for her granddaughter's death. She reminded herself that her granddaughter had worked at the restaurant for years - it was the drunk driver who killed her.

"And I wonder why I'm so scatter-brained! If it weren't for me, half my family would be unemployed and have no money. And there's always a chance I'll get Alzheimer's. Not in my lifetime! I enjoy my grandbabies too much."

Sursanna stood up and walked into the kitchen, taking another moment to go over her mental list of things that had to get repaired, food that had to be bought and things that could be put off until tomorrow. She knew she played up the eccentric matron image for her customers a little much, hopefully not too much, but she could still run a restaurant and a gift shop and stay in business, a lot better than many folks she knew who had been caught off-guard by the change in the national economy, depending either too much on local business or tourism, when she figured out how to keep a little bit of both to balance out the number of customers, if not her checkbook.