Whistlin' Dixie in a Nor'easter

by Lisa Patton

  Within twenty-five minutes of their arrival at the Peach Blossom Inn, I showed the Kays to the Folletts’ room.

  “This is nice,” Emily said, looking around. “Worth waiting for.”

  “Thank you, I’m glad you like it. Well, let us know if you need anything,” I said, scooting backward out into the hall.

  “Are you okay?” Mr. Kay asked. “You seem winded.”

  “Oh, no. I’m just busy, that’s all, and the night’s young. Why don’t y’all go downstairs and toast the New Year? Have a glass of champagne . . . on me.”

  They looked at each other and shrugged, threw their coats on the bed, and followed me down the stairs.

  “See Bev, the lady over there?” I pointed to where Bev was standing at the Folletts’ table. “She’ll take good care of you.” I motioned over to Bev and pointed at them behind their backs. Bev gave me a wink and I was off—to hold a little impromptu waitstaff meeting.

  I had no time to explain to the staff why we were doing what we were doing. “Just follow me,” I instructed. Three people on my waitstaff trailed behind me upstairs to the junk room. Roberta was already inside pulling stuff out into the hall.

  I took one peek into the room and thought, Oh my gosh, no, there’s no way. I had all of Helga’s tacky old furniture, every spare mattress, all my old clothes, old files, pictures, and lamps stored in that room. I even had Issie’s old changing table set up in there. The junk room had become a rest stop for all my surplus goods when I didn’t have the time to climb the attic stairs. The room was completely jam-packed and impassable. But I had no other choice.

  I couldn’t start making up beds until I could get to them, so all the other junk had to come out of the room first. Everyone carelessly banged this and that. “Shhhh, y’all, please, we have guests in these rooms,” I told them. But how quiet can you be with six people moving furniture out of one room?

  Jonathan and Vanessa carried the extra lamps, pictures, and other oddities down the stairs, through the restaurant, and back to my apartment. I can only imagine what my lingering dinner guests must have thought when they saw the staff that had been so attentive to their needs hustling through the restaurant carrying armloads of clothing, boxes, lamps, and files.

  An hour later we had the room cleared out enough to uncover the double mattresses that had been propped up against the wall since the day I moved in. Still, the biggest dilemma was finding a home for all the unwanted pieces—another double mattress set, a twin set, a chest of drawers, an old twenty-inch Magnavox TV, all of our suitcases, a couch, and three ugly, oversized chairs that simply weren’t going to fit anywhere. Obviously we couldn’t store them in another guest room and we certainly couldn’t carry them through the dining room to the apartment. Our only choice was to haul them down the stairs, straight out the front door, and down the street to the barn.

  So at one o’clock in the morning, negative twenty degrees outside, and with a foot of fresh snow on the ground, all six of us began the long, frigid haul to the barn—five women and one guy in a furniture procession. I never had time to change out of my heels and cocktail dress. A little bolero was the only thing keeping me covered, and one can only imagine how warm that felt in the frigid air.

  Just as Roberta and I rounded the corner with the double mattress, Peter, Jim, and Jeb were en route back from emptying the trash in the barn. Until that moment I had successfully kept the overbooking a secret from the guys in the kitchen. When they saw me, with my head propping up the weight of the mattress, Peter’s mouth gaped open.

  “Leelee. What. Are. You. Doing?”

  “It’s a long story. Don’t ask.”

  “Give me that,” he said, jerking the mattress away from me. He motioned to Jeb to help him and when Jeb didn’t move fast enough Peter yelled, “Get the damn mattress! Where are we going with this?”

  “The barn,” I yelled, and scurried back to help Jonathan and Michelle with the heavy old TV they were helping each other carry. Jim took the weighty suitcase from Vanessa, who had had to take little tiny baby steps because of the way she was holding it in front of her with both hands.

  After all the unwanted furniture had been dumped in the barn, Roberta and I dashed back to make up the bed and lay out fresh towels for the Folletts. Once inside, Roberta noticed all the goose bumps covering my arms and legs. “Look at you, Leelee, you’re ice cold from head to toe. But it’s no wonder, you’re not as big as a minute.”

  “You don’t have on a coat, either. Aren’t you freezing?”

  “Nuup, I’m fine. Besides, I’ve got plenty of padding to keep me warm,” Roberta said, and grabbed ahold of her tummy.

  “Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the Folletts are drunk as skunks by now. Peek in the dining room and tell me what they’re doing.”

  Roberta peeked around the corner and jerked her head back around. “Oh my, you’ve got to see this.”

  “What is it?”

  “See for yourself.”

  I peered inside the dining room and there was Mrs. Follett running her hands through Pierre’s thick, shoe-polish-black hair and tousling it all around. They were sitting next to each other at the table giggling, and the champagne flutes they carelessly held in their hands looked like they would topple over at any second. Meanwhile, Mr. Follett’s head rested on the table next to them and he was fast asleep. Bev was nowhere in sight.

  “Pierre’s a charmer,” I said. “Look at him—he’s loving every second of it. He needs a honey, bless his heart.”

  “He very well may, but we’ve still got work to do,” Roberta said.

  “I’m ready to drop dead.”

  “You can do that later, but reet now we need to get cracking, missy.”

  Roberta and I dragged ourselves back up the steps, one more time, and while she made the bed I fetched the Folletts’ suitcases. I unzipped them again, just as they had, and scattered their things around the room like before. I placed their hanging clothes exactly as they were in the other closet and messed up the bed. The two guest rooms were very similar. The bed coverings were different, but basically, it was the same furniture, lamps, and the old hardwood floors. True, it was still a bit Helga hideous, but hey, who’s complaining at two in the morning?

  With the hardest part behind us, now we had to get the Folletts to their new room. Bev was back at their table when Roberta and I made it downstairs. She’d been finishing the dinner checks and counting out the tips for the rest of the staff so they could go on home.

  Drunker than two Cooter Browns, Pierre and Mrs. Follett paid no attention to anyone else. Mrs. Follett’s speech was slurred and I heard her tell Pierre that he was wickedly handsome. Pierre uttered ne’er a word but he smiled and glowed back at her. Her husband was still sound asleep with his head resting on the table.

  “Mr. Follett. Mr. Follett,” I said, and gently patted him on the back. When that didn’t rouse him I shook his arm and raised my voice a little. “Mr. Follett, it’s time to go up to your room.”

  Mrs. Follett never even looked away from Pierre. Now she was stroking his widow’s peak with her thumb.

  I tried once more to rouse her husband and this time I really shook him. “Mr. Follett, it’s two o’clock in the morning. Don’t you want to get in your bed?”

  “Huh?” He finally opened one eye, never moving his head from the table. “Take me to my room, would you?” He rose clumsily from his chair and I grabbed ahold of his arm.

  “That’s it, now put your arm around my neck and I’ll lead you upstairs.” I motioned to Roberta to get on his other side.

  We walked the poor thing upstairs to his room. Once inside, I pulled back the covers and Roberta and I laid him down on the bed and took off his shoes. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Mr. Follett reached out for me and tried to pull me down on top of him. Somehow, I managed to duck my head under his reaching arms and squirm away. He rolled over and fell right to sleep.

  “That was close,” Roberta said, outside the door.


  “I’ll say.”

  “What should we do about the missus?”

  “Here, we’ll leave the door cracked open; she’ll figure it out.”

  Roberta and I headed back down the stairs. “Even if Mrs. Follett does notice the change, she’s not about to say anything after the way she’s carrying on with Pierre.”

  We dragged ourselves into the kitchen, which had already been mopped down and cleaned for the next day. After changing into her Sorels, Roberta grabbed her coat and purse at the back door.

  “I don’t know what to say, Roberta. You’ve come through for me again. You must think I’m cuckoo by now. Maybe you’re even starting to miss Helga around here, huh?”

  “What are you talking about? I’ve started havin’ fun since you took over the reins.”

  “Now that’s the best compliment I’ve heard in a long time. You better get on home; Moe’s probably waiting on his New Year’s kiss.”

  “He’s fast asleep by now. Moe never stays up past ten, even if it is New Year’s Eve. But even still, I must say I’m ready for bed myself.”

  “Happy New Year.” I hugged my Vermont friend extra tight and sent her on her way.

  New Year’s kiss. Where’s mine? I stepped inside Roberta’s little bathroom off the kitchen and studied my sulky face in the mirror. My eyes matched the color of my hair and they puffed out like two marshmallows. No wonder I didn’t get a kiss. I’m a fright! My sunglasses still sat atop my head so I reached up and slid them back down onto my nose.

  Dying to call Virginia, I stumbled back to my apartment and collapsed onto my bed. My cordless phone was not on its cradle in the windowsill, so I got up again and fumbled around for it in the mess out in the sitting room. When I couldn’t find it there, it suddenly dawned on me that I had left it in the kitchen.

  With just enough strength left, I trudged out to the inn one more time. Just as I rounded the corner to the kitchen, I happened to hear Jeb’s voice out in the dining room. I thought about ignoring him altogether, but when I heard him talking to Peter, I changed my mind. The two of them had on their coats, ready to call it a night, when Peter caught me peeking in on them.

  “Hi, boss! Are you pooped?”

  I nodded my head and collapsed into the nearest chair.

  Jeb made sure that I had heard about his night. “I washed a thousand dishes tonight, with the Hobart. Thank God I didn’t lose her.”

  I was too tired to comment.

  “Is it too bright in here for ya? What you got your sunglasses on for?” Peter asked.

  “To hide my puffy eyes. Did you hear about Gracie?” My voice cracked when I said her name.

  He came over and sat down next to me, patted my back, and pulled me close to him. “I did hear. I’m sorry.”

  When I felt his arm around me, my tears sprung forth again and streamed down from underneath my sunglasses.

  Peter drew me even closer to him. “Hey, don’t cry. It’ll be all right.”

  When I pressed into his shoulder my sunglasses dug into my forehead. He must have sensed my discomfort because he pulled back and looked at me. “Why don’t you take these off,” he said, and tried to lift the glasses off my face.

  I jerked my hand up to my face and held them on. “No, I’m too embarrassed. I don’t want anyone to see me looking like this.”

  A sweet smile spread across his face, which was only inches away from mine, and his voice was filled with tenderness. “It’s just Jeb and me, we don’t care what you look like with swollen eyes. Do we, Jeb?”

  “I don’t care,” Jeb said.

  “But I do.” I held my glasses in place and changed the subject. “Did y’all have a nice New Year’s Eve, even if you did have to work?”

  Peter scratched the back of his head and glanced at Jeb. “It was like every other year. I always work on New Year’s Eve. And have for as long as I can remember.”

  “New Year’s is a big night in the restaurant business,” Jeb informed me.

  You don’t say. “So you never get New Year’s kisses at midnight?” I said to both of them, before I had a chance to think about what I was saying.

  Peter shook his head. “Not in a long time.”

  Jeb didn’t comment. Poor thing. I wondered if he’d ever had a kiss at all.

  They couldn’t see the anguish in my eyes but perhaps Peter sensed it in my voice.

  “You missed out on your New Year’s kiss this year, didn’t you, boss?”

  My right hand lay resting next to his and I saw him eye it. I thought he was merely admiring my emerald dinner ring, when he slowly lifted my hand up off the table and brought it up to his mouth. Peter brushed the top of my hand with his lips and paused before giving it a soft, tender kiss.

  For some reason, I tensed underneath his touch. I suppose I was startled—it came so unexpectedly—and a mixture of nervousness and exhilaration ran through me.

  Peter pulled away and glanced over at Jeb. “Man, it’s late. And we’ve got to do it all over again tomorrow. How many reservations do we have?”

  “Ninety,” I said.

  “Woah.” He backed his chair away from the table.

  When he made his move to leave, I felt the disappointment creeping up and I so regretted the way I flinched underneath his touch.

  “Hey, Jeb, let’s walk Leelee to her door.”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s just a few feet away, I can—”

  “I insist.” He pulled me up from the chair. “Southern guys aren’t the only gentlemen on earth.”

  Before they escorted me the thirty feet back to my apartment door, I ran into the kitchen to grab my phone. Once we had reached my door, Peter said, “Dixie peaches need rest to be ripe and sweet. You get some sleep.” He patted me on the head and winked.

  I smiled through my weariness. “ ’Night, guys.” I waved and then shut the door.

  When I fell out on my bed, I looked over at the windowsill. The backlight on the clock illuminated the dark room and read 2:30 A.M. Even still, I dialed Virginia’s number. “Gracie’s gone,” I wailed into the phone, as soon as I heard her voice.

  Chapter Twenty

  We rang in the New Year and ushered out our little Gracie. Little did I know, I was in for the mother lode of all Yankee oddities. As I was planning the service, and writing her eulogy the next morning, Jeb had the nerve to tell me that all my planning would have to wait.

  “No funerals this time of year,” he told me, then took a big stretch and pulled out a seat at the table where I was sitting in the dining room, writing out my speech.

  “What do you mean, no funerals this time of year?” I looked up at him like he’d lost his mind.

  “Nuup, Princess Grace Kelly will have to stay laid out on the garden shed shelf until the Thaw.”

  “What in the world are you talking about, Jeb Duggar?”

  “I’m trying to tell you. We don’t bury our dead in the winter.”

  “You what! What do you mean y’all don’t bury people in the winter?”

  “Exactly what I said.”

  “Why not?”

  “The ground’s frozen.”

  “And what difference does that make?”

  “A big difference. You’d never get a shovel in the ground,” Jeb said matter-of-factly, and then took a loud slurp of his coffee.

  “Jeb. This is not acceptable! I would never ever in a million years make Princess Grace Kelly lie on a shed shelf all winter. You’re gonna have to come up with another solution.”

  “There isn’t one.”

  “Jeb, please, this is not proper. I’ve never heard of such a thing.” I’ve just got to say this right here and now. Not once, not one time, in my whole entire life did one person ever mention this to me before that day. I had no earthly idea that you can’t bury people up north in the wintertime. “So what do people do? What happens to humans when they die in the winter?”

  “They lie in a mausoleum until the Thaw. Then they get buried.”

  I was complet
ely and utterly dumbfounded. “So let me get this straight. You mean when someone dies in the winter, their family can’t even have their funeral? They have to grieve all over again months later?”

  “Yuup.”

  “You know what, Jeb, this takes the cake,” I told him, and stood up from the table. “This Yankee idiosyncrasy is my last straw. I’ve so had it with y’all’s quirkiness up here. What else do I have left to discover?”

  “That depends on what subject you’re interested in.”

  If Daddy only knew.

  Come hell or high water, I was determined to let Gracie rest in peace and no idiotic Yankee custom was going to stop me. I even went outside with my own shovel to make sure Jeb wasn’t just being his usual lazy self. Sure enough, I couldn’t get the dirt to budge even a sixteenth of an inch. But while I was standing there with a shovel in my hand the perfect solution dawned on me.

  I wasn’t sure what they were called, but I’d seen some road workers with those big, heavy tools that have the spirally point. It bobs up and down and digs a hole in concrete. I didn’t see why one of those wouldn’t dig Gracie’s grave. On top of that, I figured I could get every pot in the kitchen and boil a whole bunch of water. Then I’d pour it all onto the gravesite while Jeb used the big, heavy bobber.

  When I told him about my plan, Jeb bucked and hem-hawed around and did everything he knew to get out of burying poor old Princess Grace. But in the end, he finally relented.

  Maybe it’s just me, but I think there’s always something that can be done to get through any situation. But that’s not the case with Jeb Duggar. He ended up charging me an extra hundred dollars, even though he knew I was grieving, to break open the ground out back with what I found out was a jackhammer. Jeb made me hire his buddy to help him, too. When you add in Jeb’s normal pay, the whole thing ended up costing me $325. But if you ask me, that was the littlest bit of nothing, when you consider the alternative.

  First of all, Jeb had to use the snowblower to make a walking path over to the hill where I wanted to bury Gracie. That job alone took them a couple of hours. I watched periodically from the window. I could tell by Jeb’s body language, though, that he was not enjoying himself.