Just South of Paradise

by Grace Palmer

  But getting up means facing the day ahead, and that is something she very much does not want to do. Three of the four occupied rooms in the inn are checking out today, and five people are due to check in this afternoon. Tasks claw at her attention. There is too much to do. There is too much to forget.

  She has to choose: stay in bed and suffer from the past, or get going to square up with the present?

  In the end, it’s not a hard decision. She forces herself out of bed, getting dressed as quickly as she can. She has a lot of breakfast to make and very little time to do it in. Then there’s all the cleaning, the administrative tasks, the endless to-do list. So be it. That’s better than reminiscing.

  Georgia heads downstairs and starts preparing for breakfast in a flurry of movement. She couldn’t be bothered to make the muffin batter yesterday, all things considered, so there will be no muffins today. She hopes nobody notices or cares. She makes the coffee, loads up a tray with all the juice and breakfast sundries, and takes stock of the food in the fridge. She should have gone shopping yesterday. Richard normally does the shopping, so she didn’t even notice how low on eggs they are. She does a quick count and realizes there aren’t enough for everyone. She can’t run out of eggs! What kind of bed-and-breakfast runs out of eggs?

  She can feel a crisis brewing in the pit of her stomach as she dashes over to the guesthouse and raps on Tasha’s door. “Tasha! Are you awake?”

  “I am now,” comes a grumble from the other side.

  Georgia bursts in. “I need you to go get eggs.”

  “What time is it?” Tasha rubs her eyes blearily as she sits up in bed. Her hair is poking in every direction.

  “Six thirty. I need you to go get eggs.”

  “Where am I going to get eggs at six thirty in the morning?”

  “Break into Fred Waterman’s farm for all I care!” Georgia squawks. She know she sounds shrill and annoying, like a teapot in a sundress, as the panic is beginning to set in. But her daughter’s eyes are wide open in shock now—Georgia never yells—and she’s staring at her mother like she is a lion at a zoo who has gotten a little too close to the bars.

  Georgia sees that, realizes she’s coming on a little strong for the predawn hours, and takes a deep breath. “Sorry, dear. I’m a bit flustered this morning. Could you please be a doll and go get some eggs for me? The gas station should have some. Thank you very much.”

  Tasha nods, a little placated, and starts to get dressed. Georgia hustles back to the kitchen and does a mad dash around the dining room—setting up all the placings, making sure the sauces are full, checking there are enough napkins, arranging the continental items on the sideboard. She runs back to the kitchen and pours the coffee into urns, sparing just enough time to pour herself a cup.

  But she has hardly taken a sip when she hears someone enter the dining room, no doubt hungry for breakfast. She rushes out to take their order. Just before she rounds the corner, she stops to check her reflection in the dark glass of the microwave. Her eyes are a little puffy from crying this morning, so she dabs at them with the corner of her apron. She looks like a mess, quite honestly. Hair frizzled, gaze distant and distracted, an uncharacteristic downward slope on her normally sunny face. It’s a little rattling to see physical proof of what’s happening in her heart. She decides she doesn’t want to see her reflection again for quite some time. Steeling herself with the umpteenth deep breath she’s forced herself to take this morning, she steps into the dining room with a megawatt smile—fake it ’til you make it, right?

  The smile becomes a little easier to bear authentically when she sees that it’s Joel who’s come downstairs. “Good morning, dear,” she says.

  “Good morning.” He smiles, cheeks wrinkling. “It looks as though it’s going to be a beautiful day.”

  “Doesn’t it just?” Georgia responds. She’s aware of the part of her that wants to sit down next to him at the breakfast table with her coffee and talk for a while about everything and nothing. He’s one of those folks who radiates calm. She needs a little bit of that in her life right now. She feels frazzled and hectic, both within and without. Joel, on the other hand, is placid and at ease. She could use a dose of that.

  But she’s too conscious of just how much work she has to do. “What can I get for you to eat?”

  He pushes his glasses up on his nose. “Just the Willow Beach Classic with bacon, please.”

  The Willow Beach Classic is the inn’s staple namesake breakfast, one she’s made a million times over without much fuss. Georgia scribbles it onto her pad, grateful that Joel is so easygoing. “Right away,” she says. “The coffee just came out so it’s nice and fresh for you. I’ll bring you a cup in just a sec.”

  He smiles and thanks her as Georgia retreats back into the kitchen and takes a breath. Everything is going to be fine, she tells herself. She’s going to make a lovely breakfast for Joel and he’s going to say more lovely things to her and everything is going to be lovely.

  For a second there, she almost believes it.

  Georgia is halfway through preparing Joel’s breakfast when she hears the clump and clatter of more guests coming down the stairs. Their voices float down ahead of them—laughing, joking, smiling so big you can hear it. The footsteps make their way into the dining room, followed by the scraping of chairs being pulled out and the groans of the big old slab of oak as it takes up the weight of the elbows of hungry guests.

  The bacon is sizzling merrily in the pan, but it’s still got a while to go. Georgia gives it a stern glance and a “You better behave,” before wiping off her hands on a towel, retrieving her pen and pad, and sweeping into the dining room to see what the people want for breakfast.

  “Good morning, dears!” she says in a happy trill that sounds fake even to her. “The pan is hot, so let me get some breakfast started for you all. What’ll it be, darling?”

  “Oh jeez. Uh, come back to me, please,” murmurs a blonde teenager in jean shorts as she peruses the menu. “I’m super indecisive.”

  “Of course.” Georgia smiles and glances over to the girl’s mother. “Do you know what you want, sweetheart?”

  “Well, she gets the indecisiveness from me,” the woman laughs, “so I’m afraid you’ll have to come back around to this side of the table. Maybe the men know?” She looks over to her husband and son.

  “What’s that, hon?” the man grumbles. He still looks half asleep. The boy is too occupied with the video game unit in his hand—Georgia can never remember the names for the latest gadget, but she remembers how Drew used to be so attached to his Game Boy or Game-man or whatever it was called. How he howled when she made him put it away for mealtimes! These parents don’t seem interested in provoking a tantrum like that. She supposes she can’t blame them.

  “Your breakfast,” the woman repeats patiently. “Mrs. Baldwin is ready to take your order.”

  Georgia is halfway to spitefully blurting “It’s ‘Miss’ Baldwin now, actually,” before she manages to put her foot in her mouth and stay silent instead. But the unspoken barb stays lodged in her throat. She can taste it there, bitter and acrid. It doesn’t feel real to say. She fears that if she does say it out loud, then any chance of reconciling with Richard will become dust on the wind. Not that she’s thought that far ahead. She’s barely thought ahead to the end of breakfast, as a matter of fact.

  It takes another five to six minutes of Georgia explaining each of the items on the menu before the family finally makes up their mind. She wouldn’t ordinarily be too miffed about something like that. This is a new and unfamiliar place for these folks, after all, and helping people is precisely her job description. But today, it’s sapping energy from her soul that she cannot spare.

  By the time she returns to the kitchen with a pad full of scribbles, she smells smoke. “Oh no!” she cries out.

  The bacon has decided to misbehave after all. Georgia rushes over to it and turns off the burner, flapping at the columns of smoke with a dish towel. Mirac
ulously, the strips of bacon are still salvageable, though a little bit charred at the ends. She hopes Joel won’t mind.

  Tasha chooses that moment to return from her early morning errand. She looks hardly more awake than she did when Georgia burst into her room in a frenzy scarcely half an hour ago. None of her children were ever exactly “morning people,” but Tasha was perhaps the hardest of all of them to rouse.

  “Here,” she mumbles tiredly. She thrusts the carton of eggs into Georgia’s hand.

  “Thank you, darling,” Georgia says absentmindedly. Tasha turns to leave, but Georgia calls over, “Tasha, dear, would you be so kind as to bring some coffee out to the family in the dining room?” She points toward the coffee station, where a tray of cups is waiting to be filled.

  “Mom …” Tasha groans.

  “It would really be very nice of you,” Georgia says in that stern ‘do it or else’ Mom voice that she’s perfected over the years. She tries to mask the exhaustion simmering beneath it. She’s desperate for help, actually. If the simple act of breakfast is short-circuiting her brain, then Lord only knows what kind of toll the rest of her task list will have on her. A helpful pair of hands like her daughter’s would truly be a godsend.

  She knows Tasha doesn’t want to. Her daughter is doing a fair bit of suffering of her own, if the weariness in her face is anything to go by. She hasn’t said much in the way of specifics about the reason for her return home, but it doesn’t take much of a mother’s intuition for Georgia to know that something has gone very wrong indeed. She’ll have to inquire later. Right now, there is work that needs doing.

  “Okay,” Tasha says, barely audible. She gets to work pouring coffee.

  Georgia nods her thanks and cracks a pair of eggs in the pan. When those are done, she plates them alongside the burnt bacon, some toast, and two packets of strawberry jam.

  Tasha doesn’t say much else as she floats robotically in and out of the room throughout the remainder of the breakfast service. She does whatever Georgia asks her to do—runs dishes out, cleans pots and pans, prepares fresh coffee. But there is a sour look on her face that never leaves. Well, perhaps “sour” isn’t quite the right word. “Melancholy” might be more accurate. Whatever it is, it tugs at Georgia’s heart. No mother likes seeing her children unhappy, after all.

  Breakfast service eventually comes to an end, as all things do. It takes Georgia and Tasha a few more minutes to finish cleaning up everything and directing the guests on their way to the beach or into town for a day of fun.

  “All done?” Tasha asks quietly.

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Can I go, then?” She is playing with the hem of a dish towel in her hand and not looking up.

  “Tasha,” Georgia says in a soft voice.

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s on your mind, darling?”

  Tasha glances up, then back down. She’s got a bit of Richard in her jawline. That makes Georgia’s heart throb painfully. She wonders how much longer it will take before she stops seeing him in everything. Every nick in the floor, every pair of Wrangler’s blue jeans on a guest, even the slope of Tasha’s grimace—it all makes her think of her husband. She wonders where he is, what he’s doing, if Annika truly loves him. Then she makes herself stop. Not now, she says to herself. Do that fussing later.

  “Nothing.”

  “It doesn’t look like nothing.”

  “It is.”

  “Color me skeptical.”

  Tasha finally looks up and meets Georgia’s gaze. “I’m just tired, Mom,” she whimpers, her voice breaking.

  “Tired of what?” Georgia asks carefully. She knows she is treading on thin ice here. Tasha has always been a creature of raw emotion.

  “Tired of being led around and yelled at and lied to.”

  “Did Chuck do something to you?”

  “Yes, no, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. We’re through.”

  “Oh honey,” Georgia empathizes, rushing over to cup Tasha’s cheek in her hand.

  But Tasha turns her head and blocks her mother’s touch. “Why did Dad leave, Mom?” she asks quietly.

  Georgia freezes. “We don’t need to talk about that right now, dear.”

  “Why’d he leave?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He didn’t say anything to you?”

  “He—well, he left a note. It said that he needed some time away and that he will get in touch with you kids when he is ready. And he says he loves you.”

  “Mm.” Tasha’s eyes flit up. To Georgia’s surprise, they look almost accusatory.

  She doesn’t know what to say. Does her daughter want an apology? An explanation that makes sense? Georgia herself is desperate for those things, but they don’t seem to be forthcoming. The only thing that’s headed her direction is busywork. Even now, her task list is screaming in the back of her head. Maybe that’s a good thing—keep her mind off things. Maybe not, though. Maybe what she needs is to sit in a dark room and cry for a very long time. It’s hard to say. This is all such new and heartbreaking territory.

  But Tasha is looking for something from her mother. Georgia casts around for inspiration. The best she can come up with is, “Everything is going to be okay, Tasha.”

  That doesn’t land at all. Tasha backs away and sets the dish towel she was holding on the countertop. “I got fired, my relationship is ruined, and now my family is crumbling to pieces. It sure doesn’t feel like everything is going to be okay, Mom. That’s a silly thing to say.”

  Tasha goes to the door and pulls it open. “I’m going for a walk,” she announces. Then she steps through and closes it behind her, and Georgia is alone once again.

  After Tasha leaves, the day comes rushing in, as if to fill the space she left behind. Georgia has to clean and straighten up the dining area, all the while managing checkouts for the guests who are departing today. The newlywed couple are already standing at the desk when she arrives. They smile and thank her before leaving. Then comes Mr. Jacobson from room 4, who has been a quiet guest this whole time but talks to her about his conference, and how much he loves Willow Beach, for a solid ten minutes before leaving. Then it’s Mr. and Mrs. Kleinman.

  Finally, the rooms are clear and Georgia rushes up to start cleaning them, leaving a sign at the front desk for the guests to call if they need anything.

  Of course, the phone starts to ring off the hook as soon as she tries to start that portion of her things to do. Potential guests inquire about reservations, current guests inquire about directions and activities, past guests call to see if they left their phone charger behind.

  One guest in particular seems keen to keep Georgia tied up on the phone forever. “Who is this?” he says—rather rudely, in her opinion—when she picks up.

  “My name is Georgia Baldwin. I and my hus—I own the inn,” she corrects in a hurry. She wonders if the man caught her slip, and if he did, whether he made anything of it. But he’s far too preoccupied with the million small questions he wants to ask—whether the rooms are wheelchair accessible, how hot the showers are, the thread count on the sheets—to worry about her problems.

  Mercifully, his questions finally end and Georgia can return to the cleaning.

  What little she’s been able to get done has been haphazard and poorly executed. She is dismayed to find an errant chip bag under one of the beds and a lamp in need of dusting. What’s wrong with her today?

  Georgia hurries back down to reception after her second clean to find another couple waiting at the reception desk to be checked in. Yet another couple waits behind them. She tries to hurry through the check-in process without making the guests feel rushed.

  As soon as the queue is cleared, Georgia hurries into the kitchen to mix muffin batter, since she made none earlier this morning. She notices that thick clouds have gathered outside, gray and bloated. The day started off so beautifully, but the weather in coastal Maine is mercurial by nature.

  By the time the muffins go into th
e oven, the first droplets of rain are pattering against the window.

  By the time the muffins come out, it’s a full-on downpour.

  Her thoughts turn to Tasha and her beach walk. She hopes she’s okay. Georgia has set the last muffin down on the cooling rack and is about to go do a sweep of the sitting area when the phone rings.

  “Willow Beach Inn,” she answers, already walking toward reception.

  “Hi,” says a woman’s voice. “I’m in room four and the ceiling is leaking.”

  Georgia stops in her tracks. “Oh no. Really?”

  “Yeah. It just started, but I worry with the amount it’s raining it’s going to get worse. I’ve got a cup under it at the moment.”

  Georgia covers the receiver and indulges in a quick curse, then tells the woman she will be up in just a moment. She goes up to assess the situation and sure enough, there is a steady dripping of water from the roof. Worst of all, the leak is above the bed. Georgia puts a bucket on top of the bedspread while she goes downstairs to make a plan.

  Georgia paces across the kitchen floor. What is she going to do? She just wants to crawl under the covers of her bed and not come out again until the busy season has passed. She’s tempted to go up and have a look herself, but she doesn’t know the first thing about roofs. Richard would know. He’d be up a ladder and have it sorted in minutes.

  Her stomach groans and her legs feel weak. She collapses onto a stool, snatching a muffin from the cooling tray. Her lip quivers but she refuses to cry. Today has been an absolute disaster, and she doesn’t have much more fight in her.

  Georgia does the only thing she can do. She picks up the phone and dials a familiar number.

  17

  Georgia

  Alma Anderson knows how to make an entrance. She doesn’t bother knocking, mostly because most folks can hear her coming from a mile away. She’s like that—larger than life in every way. It starts with her voice. She’s got a Texas drawl that makes Richard’s subtle accent look like watered-down nonsense, and it booms into every corner of the room, town, county, state. She laughs loud and lives loud, and it’s darn near impossible for Georgia to hear that laugh without offering a smile of her own.