On the Right Side of a Dream

by Sheila Williams

  Bertie didn’t call until Sunday, when she called to let me know she was “on her way.” I heard a party going on in the background. By 11:30 AM Monday, Bertie was still “on the way.” My sister, KayRita, closes her beauty shop on Mondays so she babysat T so that I could go to work. Bertie left a message that she’d gotten “hung up” and would be “by later.” She finally came home on Tuesday.

  KayRita gave me an earful.

  “Juanita, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. I woulda taken that gal’s head off and mopped up the floor with it. Kicked her butt from here to Cleveland.” I heard the sound of water in the background. I could see my sister balancing the phone between her shoulder and ear as she shampooed her customer. “You need to have a come-to-Jesus meeting with Bertie. I don’t know why you put up with that mess.”

  But when Bertie came in that afternoon, I was so worn out and worried half to death that I was exhausted. It took all my energy to look at her and then walk out of that door and catch my bus. I was relieved that she was alive and not beaten up, raped, or left dead somewhere. I was angry about her just leaving the baby with no concern at all about how she was or how long she’d be gone or any damn thing. But I was tired. When you’re weary, nothing else seems to matter much. The life and the spirit have just plain dripped out of you.

  But I am not that woman anymore.

  “Momma! You hear me?”

  “I hear you,” I told her. “Bertie, I’ve got to go. I’m real sorry about this, but I won’t be able to take Teishia. You’ll have to make other plans.”

  I heard her take in a breath and then she called me a really ugly name in a voice as cold as a glacier.

  “I don’t have to listen to that disrespect.” I had my finger on the button.

  “But she’s your granddaughter!” Bertie exclaimed as if that would make it all right for her to call me names and try to run a guilt trip on my head.

  “She is your daughter,” I said.

  “Have you lost your mind?” she yelled.

  “Oh, no. But you must have lost yours, thinking you’re just going to drop that child on me with hardly any notice or anything. I have to go. I’ll talk with you another time . . .” No time soon.

  “I don’t give a shit what you have planned, I could just fly out there and leave Teishia.”

  Poor Teishia, that she should have such a mother.

  There’s a sci-fi movie that I saw once, peeking through my fingers because it was so scary. It’s about a space monster that starts out as a parasite. It grows inside you and then pops out and makes a nasty mess. This thing is the ugliest damn monster you ever saw with a face stretched back tight over its skull and a mouth full of big, sharp, drippy teeth. I think it eats its young, too. Not a bad idea. This monster came out of me when I was talking with Bertie. I know this because Dracula whined and took off out of the room with his tail between his legs.

  “Bertie, you do that, you’d better run fast ’cause I’ll be after you. I’ll track you down if I have to walk across this country barefoot.”

  I hung up.

  Guilt can be aggravating; it doesn’t let you off the hook, no matter which way you go. If I took Teishia, everyone would be happy. Everyone but me. Of course, as far as Bertie is concerned, my happiness doesn’t count. And, if I take Teishia, will Bertie ever learn to be responsible for her own daughter—good times or bad? And, if I don’t take Teishia, folks will say that I’m being selfish and throwing off my responsibilities. I know that I’m family and I’m the grandmother. And I agree, it does take a village to bring up a child. But I have noticed that, even in villages, the older women teach the younger ones how to be mothers. I am the teacher but I don’t know what lesson plan to use: the one that lightens the load for the burro or the one that helps the burro get strong enough to carry it. Way too many questions. No good answers.

  After the first day of school, I was able to take one question off my list. I was not ready for school.

  Chef Durphy had us sit in a semicircle around the sparkling stainless-steel tables. I looked like a chocolate Pillsbury doughwoman, dressed in white from head to toe. There were eighteen of us and we were supposed to introduce ourselves. By the time they got around to me, I felt as if I was six inches tall. A few of the students had a college degree. One of them had two! Many of ’em had worked in restaurants for years and were already chefs, not like me. I’m just a home-style cook. There were others who worked for corporations. And, to make it all worse, except for the instructor, I was the oldest thing in the room, and that included the desks and chairs!

  “Karen Chin. I’m from San Francisco. B.A. from Pepperdine, Masters in Sociology from UC, Berkeley. I work for Kraft, in the product development division . . .”

  “Larry Barrymore. I’ve been the sous-chef at Phenom for a year . . .”

  “Brad Weeks. Hey, I went to Pepperdine, too, 1993. Did you know Linn Frazier?”

  “Marti Dinsmore . . . U of M. . . Masters in Chemistry from . . . I’m taking the program as part of a company initiative . . .”

  “Hello, I’m Juanita Louis, general diploma from Columbus East Central High School, twenty years of regular cooking, most recently the breakfast cook at the Paper Moon Diner, Paper Moon, Montana, and the Silver Cactus Hacienda in Sedona, Arizona.”

  Yeah, that’s what I said. It’s all that I could think of. Chef just smiled and said, “Next?” The person beside me began to speak.

  Maybe they wouldn’t notice me shrinking down to six inches tall and I could make a break for the door. Finally, the last infant was speaking so my torture was almost over. Then the voice of a young man broke the cycle.

  “Hey, Juanita . . . Juanita Louis? You cook at the Paper Moon Diner, right?”

  “Right,” I said slowly. Why, did I give you food poisoning?

  “Yeah, I thought I recognized you,” the kid continued. He looked as if he was about ten years old with Howdy Doody red hair and freckles. Skinny as a sapling. “I go there sometimes with my cousins, the Manns? They live out just past Mason. I had some of your fried peach pies.” He grinned and his freckles spread. “Man, they were awesome.”

  “Oh, yeah! I went there once, had something with shitake mushrooms on top . . .”

  No, that wasn’t mine.

  “Did you make the chili? Best I’ve ever had except for my mom’s . . .”

  By some strange coincidence, I’d fixed lunch or breakfast for most of the other folks in the room. They were all nodding at me with smiles. The redheaded kid was grinning. Like growing boys everywhere, he is always hungry and never gains an ounce. “That meatloaf was sweet.”

  The instructor interrupted but smiled at me.

  “Well, Madame Louis,” he said with his clipped accent. “Your reputation has preceded you. Now we shall see if you can apply those skills to terrines and puffed pastry.”

  Oh, oh. What is a puffed out pastry?

  Chapter Nine

  * * *

  When the gods want to punish us, they send every darned thing at once.

  The day after I stayed up nearly all night to study for my first Food Sanitation and Safety test, Broderick Tilson Hayward-Smith showed up on the doorstep of Millie’s place—four weeks early. Geoff Black managed to get me some advance notice—a few hours. Nice of him. Not only had I had a test that morning, but I’d also had a cooking project in Basic Baking class—our team assignment was honey-wheat bread. There were two of us: the redheaded kid, Marc, and me. The loaves looked like works of art when they came out of the oven: lightly golden brown on top, softly browned on the sides. They smelled like angels had baked them. Even Chef was forced to admit they looked and smelled perfect. We were so proud, until Marc tried to cut a slice. The loaf was doughy in the middle, wet, drippy, and gooey-looking. The baking angels had either forgotten to convert the formula correctly or they’d set the oven temperature wrong. Either way, our team got an “E” for effort and an “F” for the rest.

  But even that was better than “the
great salami disaster” of Basic Cooking One class the day before. Each team was assigned a salami or sausage to make—from seasoning, grinding, chopping, and mixing to squeezing, er, pushing, um, forcing the meat through the sausage grinder into the casings. Chef demonstrated a few times with Karen Chin’s perfectly seasoned-blended-mixed andouille sausage then turned the grinder over to the students. Karen volunteered to go first. Of course. And her links came out ready to be photographed for a magazine layout. Chef oohed and aahed over them. The rest of us wanted to put Karen, instead of the sausage, through the grinder. When it was my turn, Marc and I flipped a coin to see who was going to do the grinding and who was going to handle the sausage casings. We both lost.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one but an old-time commercial-grade iron sausage grinder looks like something left over from the Inquisition. I’d just finished reading a romance set during that period—those folks had no sense of humor at all. The grinder’s big, it has a huge, cranklike handle, and it looks scary. It’s as if some efficiency expert found a stash of these damn things in somebody’s basement and said, “Don’t throw them out! Use them to make sausage!”

  So one of you cranks and one of you fills the casings. You have to make sure that you keep the casings good and snug around the meat mixture. If you’re cranking, you have to make sure that you don’t crank too slowly. And you have to make sure that you don’t crank too fast.

  “Faster,” Marc said. His brow was scrunched up and his eyes were fixed on the tube where the meat was coming into the sausage casing. He looked like a ballplayer waiting on the next pitch. I cranked faster.

  “No, slower,” he barked.

  I cranked slower. The handle turned sluggishly as if I was crunching through somebody’s bones and the tibia got stuck. Like I said, this thing was left over from the Inquisition.

  “Faster, no . . .”

  Well, all I heard was “faster,” so faster it was.

  The salami mixture broke through the casing and flew across the room, landing with a “splat” on the front of Julia’s chef coat. The class broke up. Marc grinned for the rest of the day. Chef said, “Madame Louis, I suppose I shall have to order bulletproof vests for this class.” He was only half kidding.

  And now I had to deal with Hayward Tilson Smith or whatever his name was.

  My mother said not to be “ugly” about things. Nina tells her clients that negative energy is a waste. But just once, I’d like to stir up a cauldron of eyes of snake or ear of toad (something like that) and mess up somebody good. Let’s face it, some people do deserve it. I’m not like that. But if I were? I would have had to tell Millie “I’m sorry” ’cause I would have hacked Broderick Tilson Hayward-Smith into pieces and buried him under the rose bushes along the white picket fence. He was the biggest hemorrhoid that you ever met. And that is no lie.

  He was a rude, arrogant, finicky, pompous ass. And those were the good things that I could say about him. He blew into Paper Moon, Montana like a plague of locusts and, within one week, he’d made himself as welcome as the stink coming off a landfill in the middle of August. Everybody, their brother, and their dog, wanted that man to leave town by sundown. I’d heard from the manager of the Bi-Lo, who’d heard from one of the nurses at the hospital, who was dating one of Millie’s nephews, that Hayward-Smith had turned up his pointed nose at the invitations from his Tilson relatives. Even Elva Van Roan’s patience wore thin. She locked the bathroom door on him one night and switched the lamps on and off in another room and I didn’t have the heart to yell at her for it.

  First old white man I ever saw with an entourage as large as a hip-hop star’s. I heard through the grapevine that he’d flown into Missoula in a private jet. My, my. Rolled up to Millie’s in a motorcade of three black Suburbans with tinted windows. He marched up the steps like a general (pretty spry for an old fart), followed by Williams, his valet, a skinny, pale-skinned man who looked like the cousin of Dracula, and Ms. Amy Hsu, his executive assistant, a four-foot-tall Tasmanian devil who wore glasses as big as an owl’s eyes and black high-heeled boots.

  Hayward-Smith walked through the front door without a knock, a push of the doorbell, or a “Hello, how are you? Kiss my big white butt.” Just like he owned the place already. He looked at Inez and me over his nose as if we were ants and needed a squirt of Raid. Miz Hsu and Williams tried to look important, too, but they weren’t as good at it as the old man was.

  “I’m Broderick Hayward-Smith,” he announced in a loud voice with an accent that sounded half English and half something else.

  Well, no shit, I said to myself. I thought I’d been waiting for the Easter Bunny.

  “You may address me as Mr. Hayward-Smith.”

  Oh, no, he didn’t say that.

  “I’m Juanita Louis,” I told him in my best eastside Columbus, Ahia tones. “And you can call me Mrs. Louis.” I almost said, “And you can kiss my wide brown behind,” but I left that part out.

  I don’t think Mr. H-Smith (one of the more flattering names that I would call him behind his back from that day on) was ready for me. And I wasn’t ready for him either. I was expecting someone who was funny and friendly like Millie. I had forgotten that, even though he was Millie’s son, she hadn’t raised him. And he must have been expecting a Laura Ashley dress, clogs, and blonde hair. So we were both disappointed.

  Broderick Tilson Hayward-Smith is as tall and as wide as Mountain and, like Mountain, he has blue eyes—his mother’s blue eyes. He probably had blonde hair when he was young, like most of the other Tilsons around here. But that’s where the similarities end. Mountain has a wide open face, like the eastern plains of Montana; there is friendliness, gullibility, and a whole lot of humor there. Broderick’s nostrils pinch together and the tip of his nose curls up as if he just came across a pile of something Dracula left in the middle of the floor. The corners of his mouth curve down. Makes him look like Abel’s bloodhound, Trixie. The man hasn’t smiled in forty years. He has the expression of someone who needs a good . . . let’s just say I think he needs a laxative. A strong laxative.

  His eyebrows rose slightly when I introduced myself. He didn’t expect me to be the Juanita Louis who was mentioned in his mother’s will. I smiled and pointed his roadies (or whoever they were) toward the banister. They were loaded up with suitcases, office equipment, and boxes. It was bad enough that he’d come early—how long was he planning to stay?

  “Up the stairs, down the hall, take the back staircase,” I told them sweetly. “That will take you to the third floor.”

  To Mr. Pointy Nose Tight Ass, I said, “We’ve given you the Tower Suite, Mister Hayward-Smith. It’s our largest and most luxurious accommodation. You’ll be very comfortable there.” I smiled as widely as I knew how.

  Inez cleared her throat but I ignored her. Until just ten seconds ago, Mister H-Smith was going to the Monte Carlo Room, a spacious room on the second floor that catches the morning sun. Next to the Mauve Room, it is my favorite, with its French country decor and wood-burning fireplace.

  But the man had ticked me off with his ski-slope nose and stuck-up behind. He may be able to prove that Millie was a little crazy—I don’t know if Geoff Black will be able to prove that she wasn’t. But until that hearing, I’m the inn-keeper, and Mr. High-Up Butt goes in the Tower Suite with the ghost.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Louis. I’m sure that it will be adequate.”

  I watched him climb the stairs.

  Inez was giggling.

  I hoped that Elva Van Roan didn’t take me seriously when I asked her to behave. I was only kidding.

  I know cooking. I can clean pretty well if I have to, and I make a dynamite nurse’s aide. But what I don’t know about running a business would fit in the Superdome. But I am a fast learner. Thank God for Millie. Despite her frilly and impractical appearance, the woman had a head for business. She had organized it all in a notebook, scheduling each activity of the bed and breakfast, from rotating towels and sheets to sending ou
t thank-you notes. Her accounts were set up on the computer, and she had mailing lists prepared and contact lists for anything that might go wrong with the house, from plumbing to ghost therapy. All I had to do was follow her instructions and keep it simple. I was also learning how to use a computer, but I keep pressing “delete” instead of “enter.”

  “This is a bed-and-breakfast,” Millie had said months before when I suggested that she serve sandwiches or dinner. “We can’t be all things to all people. You’ve got to make a choice about what you want to do and then do the very best you can at it.” Looking back on that conversation, I realize now that she wasn’t just talking about running a business.

  Inez, Gwen, and I kept the linens changed, the bathrooms clean, and the breakfasts cooked. We answered the phone, Inez handled e-mail, and I . . . well, I managed. I am happy to say that it worked. At least it did most of the time. There was just one hitch. We didn’t count on having the houseguest from hell.

  “He is like the man who comes to dinner,” Inez said under her breath. “We’ll be stuck with him forever.” That was one old movie of Millie’s that I hadn’t seen. But I did remember what old Ben Franklin said. Something about fish, houseguests, and three days. Most of the B&B guests stayed only about two or three nights. Hayward-Smith and group would be with us for more than four weeks. If they’d been fish filets the place would stink to high heaven.

  Smith and company took over the inn. They set up computers, a fax machine, and a copier. Williams, the valet, commandeered the back pantry and turned it into an “ironing room” since Mr. H-Smith liked his stiff, white-on-white button-down shirts “just so” and the local dry cleaners couldn’t be relied on to do that. I can’t imagine why—they did OK when they put creases into blue jeans. Williams looks like the creepy butler in old black-and-white horror movies, the ones that are on at two in the morning. Tall and thin, with dark, slicked-back hair, Williams is the color of rice pudding that’s been cooked too long—not white, not quite beige, not pink but very waxy looking. And serious. If he smiled, his face would split and crack. I imagined him turning into a vampire bat and flying around a turret.