The day Zelda’s father drove her to college, her mother, Bee-Bee, couldn’t come because of the PTA meeting at Zelda’s younger brother’s school, the brownies she needed to make for a church fundraiser, and her volunteer work in the visitor’s center at Union Station. She gave Zelda her signature peck on the cheek and told her to make lots of friends.

Bee-Bee was the classic Montgomery social butterfly. She had more bosom buddies than Zelda could keep up with, whereas Zelda only had Valerie really. And when Val went to Reed College, well, that was the end of their friendship, since Zelda wouldn’t have been accepted and anyway she could have never afforded it on her father’s teacher’s salary. Her mother was too busy to work.

Bee-Bee never understood why Zelda wanted to hide in her room for hours, reading Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, listening to CDs, drawing pictures of her favorite rock band logos, or writing poetry. Her mother constantly told her to get out in the world, be with people, socialize, have fun.

Now, she was gone, and Zelda was lost.

Not literally. The downtown and suburbs might shuffle around like kids playing musical chairs, but her Montgomery was still there, the cotton seed oil plant perfuming the city like a giant aromatic Frito, longleaf pines shading the streets that teemed with ghosts of her and her friends back when they rode their bikes past the Old Cloverdale houses to get to the Capri Theatre. Zelda’s favorite place in town was the Fitzgerald museum, mostly because of her name, and she used to stare at the tightly covered windows, pretending to be the real Zelda. She loved the fiction, but more than that, the stories about the real couple traveling around the country, drinking too much, and causing scandals. Despite their antics, Montgomery claimed them. Would it someday want to claim Zelda Collins? Zelda doubted it.

She was prepared to hate the new Café Louisa, but instead of heading to her parents’—now her father’s—house, she drove her hand-me-down Honda Accord down Old Cloverdale Road, telling herself that she had to see if the coffee was still any good. At three in the afternoon, she was able to park right in front of the building, which had once housed the A&P Social Club, a restaurant that had seemed impossibly fancy when she was a kid. When her parents still received infusions of cash from Bee-Bee’s parents, Zelda’s father and mother dined there or at the Elite (pronounced E-Light), once a month, coming home with the scent of seared beef and wine wafting from their clothing. But by the time Zelda was in high school, the money ran out and the expensive meals stopped, along with trips to the beach and Disneyworld. Her mother, ever resourceful, filled their vacations with the free events at the annual Shakespeare Festival and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, church potlucks, and outdoor concerts.   

Zelda walked into the old A&P building and found scarlet walls decorated with paintings of local landmarks—the Capri, of course, and her beloved Fitzgerald house, but also the state capitol and the somber Civil Rights Memorial. The distressed dresser from the old Café Louisa location still held straws and packets of sugar. The pastry case was new, filled with heart-shaped cookies and miniature bundt cakes more like art than food. Zelda didn’t recognize the pimply teenager behind the counter. He stared at his phone as if it contained the mysteries of the universe.

“Can I have a cap?” she asked.

Pimples fumbled the phone and slipped it into his pocket. “Oh, yeah, sorry.”

Zelda pretended to study the pastries while waiting for her drink. After years of her mother not allowing her to eat sweets, she didn’t really want them. Her stomach couldn’t handle food anyway, not since that phone call from her father. Her mother had collapsed on the steps of Union Station, he said. A passerby performed CPR, but she was dead before the ambulance arrived. Zelda couldn’t find the mental compartment in which to put this information. Her dad tried, telling her that her mother wouldn’t have wanted them to fall apart. After he hung up, she sat in her dorm room, staring at the Lynyrd Skynyrd poster and thinking that her mother wouldn’t complain about her taste in music anymore. Now, she had to go home and face the army of her mother’s friends bearing casseroles and heartfelt condolences. Montgomery claimed Bee-Bee for sure.

“Here’s your coffee,” Pimples said.

He had a nice smile, friendly and innocent-seeming. She wanted to tell him about her mother—she was exploding with it. She shouldn’t be here and neither should he. The universe shouldn’t be continuing without Bee-Bee. But instead, she nodded to him, trying to look normal and not ripped in half like a cheap pair of pants.

Setting the coffee on the table, she sank into the soft couch and closed her eyes. She hadn’t slept the previous night, after the phone call. But there, on that couch, she drifted off, falling into a dream about her mother. One hand on her hip, she asked Zelda what the heck she was doing back in Montgomery. “Just what am I paying all that tuition for again?”

Zelda jerked awake and grabbed the coffee, noticing that Pimples had drawn a perfect cat in the foam. She felt like someone was watching her. Moving just her eyes, not her head, as she and Val used to do when checking out boys, she saw a skinny guy sitting on the couch next to her. He wore a stiff, gray suit that looked too big for him, a narrow tie, and cowboy boots with the silhouette of a white eagle on top of the foot.

“Who invited you to sit here?” she asked.

“No one.” He smiled with his thin lips and ran a hand through that weird helmet-like hair. His ears were too big, and his cheekbones stuck out.

He showed no intention of leaving, so Zelda decided to ignore him.

“You used to live here,” he said, his voice a little froggy, as though he’d been quiet for a long time.

“How do you know that?”

He shrugged.

“Yeah, I did. But don’t get any ideas. I’m going back to my new home, Athens, Georgia, right after the funeral,” Zelda said. She was glad that she felt annoyed with him, otherwise she couldn’t have mentioned the funeral without crying.

“That’s the worst reason for traveling,” he said.

“Especially when you don’t like the person very much, but you are supposed to love them.”

“You didn’t love her?”

“I did. Of course I did. But why couldn’t she just accept that I wasn’t like her? Why did she have to criticize me all the time? Nothing I ever did was good enough.”

“I don’t know.” The guy smiled slightly again.

Zelda thought it was a little creepy, but she didn’t know why. Anyway, she was still thinking about her mother. “That’s the problem. I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t get wonderful grades. I snuck out at night to meet boys, smoke, drink, all the stuff I wasn’t supposed to do. We’d hang around Oakwood cemetery at night, smoking, avoiding the cops on night patrol. My mom and dad worried about me so much and I didn’t even care.” She scrubbed her hands over her face. “I thought I had time to make it right. I was doing better in college. I even stopped drinking.”

“That’s a very hard thing to do.” He spread one long-fingered hand on his sharply creased pants and looked at it like he didn’t know what it was.

Zelda drew air into her lungs—why were they filling when her mother’s weren’t? “But then I met Paul. He’s a student too, but he doesn’t care about school. He says he’s an artist and artists don’t need to be educated, so we started hanging out in coffeeshops and this bar that doesn’t card. I knew he was wrong and bad for me, but it was fun. Maybe I liked that my parents would have hated him if they’d known. Stupid.”

The guy cocked his head to the side and for a moment it looked like a skull.

“Yeah, I know. I broke up with him as soon as I heard the news that…you know. God.” Zelda reached for her coffee. The cat was gone and now the top of the mug was just foam. “I wish I could tell her.”

“Tell her what?”

“Tell her I’m sorry, damn it!” Zelda glanced toward the counter, expecting Pimples to be staring at her, but he was gone. In fact, the coffee shop was empty, which was odd, but she was glad for the privacy. “I’m sorry for not listening to her. I’m sorry for being a loser. I’m sorry for stealing her nail polish and denting her car and saying mean things to her and not liking Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and breaking her Girl Scouts mug. I’m sorry I dated that idiot. I knew his paintings were awful, but I pretended to like them.”

“Young people do dumb things. I sure have,” the guy said.

“I feel like all I did was cause her misery.”

“You can’t know that.”

“It’s true! I can’t think of anything good I did for her.” Zelda set the coffee back on the table. “Okay, when I was little, I sometimes made her breakfast in bed. Biscuits with chocolate gravy. Dad helped me the first few times and then I memorized the recipe.”

“She had to like that.” He raised his hand, as though pushing back an invisible hat.

“Yeah, but I haven’t done it in years. We used to do a lot of stuff together, like go to the Capri and have lunch at Sinclair’s. Every time she went to the grocery store, I begged to go. I don’t know what happened.”

“You became a teenager.”

“So?”

He shrugged. “You had to rebel. That’s what teenagers do. But your mother understood, and she knew that, in your heart, you were still that little girl who tried on all her shoes and wanted to polish her nails for her.”

“How do you know I did those things?” Even as she asked, Zelda decided it didn’t matter how he knew. He understood.

“Lucky guess.” The strange man stared into space and Zelda felt comfortable in the silence. For the first time since that awful phone call, she began to breathe deeply. “You should go home to your father and brother now,” he said.

“Yeah.” Zelda turned to pick up her mug again and when she swiveled back around, he was loping toward the door, putting on an off-white cowboy hat as he stepped through.

She finished her coffee and brought the cup to the counter. Pimples was back and looking at his phone again. She noticed a framed picture on the wall behind him that she hadn’t seen before. It was a black and white headshot of a man with a cowboy hat, thin lips, and high cheekbones.

“Holy crap, that’s Hank Williams Senior,” she said.

Pimples glanced up. “Yeah. They have a museum for him in town. He’s from here, you know.”

“I know that. I used to hang out by the memorials to him and his wife Audrey when I was a dumb kid. The guy that was here. Don’t you think he looked like him? I mean, exactly like him?”

“What guy? No one’s come in since you. We’re always dead in the afternoon.”

Dead. No way. It was just a coincidence. As she walked into the almost blinding Montgomery sunlight, Zelda thought she heard a tune, but before she could identify it, the notes faded into the breeze. Feeling sad, but oddly light, she got into her car and drove toward Old Cloverdale, Zelda’s home and her own.           

Emily Beck Cogburn is the author of the novels Louisiana Saves the Library and Ava’s Place. Her short fiction has recently appeared in Miracle Monocle, Marathon, and Dillydoun Literary Review. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking and playing in the band Southern Primitives.