On the Right Side of a Dream

by Sheila Williams

  “I am responsible for Mr. Hayward-Smith’s person,” he told me.

  All righty.

  Miz Hsu, a little bit of a person who moved like a hummingbird and always had one of those palm thingies in her hand, took care of everything business related, whatever business Mr. Pointy Nose was into. If she wasn’t tapping on her notebook-sized computer, she had a cell phone to her ear, sometimes two of them. Amy is attractive and very stylish with her huge hoop earrings and short, deep burgundy-colored spiked hair. She doesn’t wear anything but black. Inez, who knows about these things, says that her suits are very expensive. She’s crazy about three-inch-heeled boots. Watching her skip up and down the stairs was enough to cause you heart palpitations. Inez and I took bets on which one of us would have to drive her over to County Medical when she tripped and broke something.

  Both of these characters acted like their poop didn’t stink, but at least they were pretty easy to please. Williams was happy with one industrial-sized cup of black coffee in the morning to give him a jump-start, and he had no complaints about the Violet Room. And Ms. Hsu was a girl who would have been right at home at Nina’s hacienda in Sedona. You could cook her up a Belgian waffle with fresh strawberries on it and crisp bacon on the side and that gal would take two bites of everything and say she was full. No wonder she was the size of a half minute.

  Mr. High-Up Butt was something else.

  He didn’t even start out on the good foot. Just pissed me off right away and it went downhill from there. First off, he was the pickiest man I ever met. I’m not talking about wanting to have things a certain way; I’m used to that from taking care of patients. Running a bed-and-breakfast is the same way. People like to be around the things that make them comfortable. But Hayward-Smith? Let’s just say that I’m surprised that he’s managed to make his first million considering the amount of time he spends worrying about the way that the window shades are drawn.

  I know that “God is in the details.” But I maintain that He never would have had time to create the earth if he had still been worrying about how many grains of sand he’d put on the beach and whether they were perfectly shaped and aligned.

  The first evening that Mr. High-Up Butt stayed at Millie’s, he sent Williams down with all the towels from the bathroom.

  “Mr. Williams?” I said. I had to make sure it was him since his face was completely hidden by a tower of stacked towels.

  “Mr. Hayward-Smith only uses white towels, ma’am. And he prefers that they be folded in half first, then, like so, on the sides.” Williams demonstrated.

  “I see,” I told him. I said this with a smile.

  Fifteen minutes later, he was back.

  “May I help you, Mr. Williams?” Yes, I was still smiling.

  “Uh, just ‘Williams,’ Mrs. Louis. Mr. Hayward-Smith wanted to remind you that he only drinks bottled water. Evian. If he could have a few bottles for the bathroom, ma’am, to brush his teeth.”

  “Of course,” I said. Now would he really know the difference between Evian and Meagher County Reservoir? My smile was starting to hurt my cheeks.

  Williams returned ten minutes later. I was trying to make heads or tails of my homework. I wasn’t having much luck. This time, Williams coughed to get my attention.

  “Yes, Mr., er, Williams?” My smile was fading fast.

  “Mr. Hayward-Smith wanted me to confirm that the pillows are hypoallergenic.”

  “Yessss,” I told him. Now, I was counting to twenty. Mr. High-Up Butt had faxed over a page of his “requirements” prior to his early and unexpected arrival. The pillow requirement was on the list. The Evian water was not.

  By the time I left for the night, Williams had run down and up three flights of stairs—four more times. “Mr. Hayward-Smith will have Earl Grey tea and unbuttered rye toast for breakfast. Served at seven-thirty sharp.”

  “Mr. Hayward-Smith requires that his hand towels be changed twice daily.”

  “Mr. Hayward-Smith wants his FedEx packages brought to him immediately.”

  “Does Mr. Hayward-Smith want single-ply or double-ply toilet paper?” I asked. “You don’t know? Oh, then maybe I’d better ask him myself. I wouldn’t want him to irritate his backside.” I headed for the stairs.

  Williams followed me, protesting.

  “Ma’am, I really don’t think . . . what I mean is, Mr. Hayward-Smith doesn’t . . . he’s not quite decent, ma’am.”

  But I took the steps almost two at a time. I had had Mr. H-Smith over my head and he hadn’t been in the house more than twenty-four hours. I was through with the back-and-forth stuff. If Mr. High-Up Butt wanted something done, then he needed to talk with me. Directly. I knocked on his door.

  “Come in.”

  I opened the door. H-Smith was at the desk in the sitting room, peering at a computer screen.

  “Mr. Hayward-Smith,” I said, pronouncing every syllable as slowly as I could just as he did. “Mr. Williams, here, has a list of items that you . . . require. Maybe you’d like to go over your list now? So that I can take care of everything all at once. Would that be OK with you?”

  “Oh, it’s you. Um, Louis . . .” He always looked at me as if I was a fly he’d just smashed on the end of the fly-swatter.

  “Mrs. Louis,” I said. Thank-you, Rodney Louis, wherever you are.

  “Yes. Right. I think Williams has taken care of everything that I require. Thank-you, um, Mrs. Louis.” I turned to leave when Hayward-Smith’s voice came again. “Oh, there was one more item.”

  I started counting to twenty-five right then.

  “I would like to review the luncheon and dinner menus, Mrs. Louis. They weren’t on the desk with the breakfast menu.”

  “That’s because we are a bed-and-breakfast, Mr. Hayward-Smith,” I told him. “Your mother ran the inn that way.” He winced when I said “your mother” and I wondered why. “We only serve breakfast. I did include a listing of local restaurants for your convenience. Most of them are pretty close by, just a few minutes drive, unless you want to go into Mason or Missoula. . . . Are you all right, Mr. Hayward-Smith?”

  Both Williams and Mr. Pointy Nose High-Up Butt looked as if they were about to have strokes.

  “Obviously, my mother had no business sense at all,” Hayward-Smith said in a sharp tone.

  I took that comment personally.

  “I think she did just fine. In fact, I . . .” I started to say something else but remembered that Geoff Black had warned me not to be . . . what was the word he used? “Acrimonious.” I had looked it up. It meant “caustic” or “biting.” Yeah, I was about to tell Hayward-Smith what he could bite, all right.

  “Oh, Mr. Hayward-Smith couldn’t possibly go out to any . . . of those places,” Williams gasped before his employer, or I, could say anything else. “Perhaps . . . they deliver?”

  In my daydream, I could imagine Fred at Fred’s Coney Island picking up the phone and being asked if he delivered. Or Jess, for that matter. The diner does a lot of things but it doesn’t do delivery.

  I shook my head and kept a straight face. Sort of.

  “None of them deliver. And Missoula is a little far. But they do have carry-out.”

  Williams looked as if he was going to have a fainting attack but the suggestion must have appealed to him and to his employer because they agreed that would be acceptable. And I left that room before I got mad enough to start throwing sharp objects. For the next week, I hardly saw Mr. H-Smith at all and that was just fine with me. And I only spoke to Williams once more. This time, he had a request that had nothing to do with food.

  “Mr. Hayward-Smith would like to have a tour of the house, if your schedule would permit, Mrs. Louis.”

  Great.

  “So, you’re going to give him the grand tour,” Jess commented. He was prepping for dinner, chopping onions, peppers, and celery for a gumbo recipe that I had shared with him. He scraped the vegetables aside and started measuring the spices. His expression was mischievous. “I’d like
to be a fly on the wall for that little event. Are you going to show him Millie’s boudoir or is that still off limits?”

  I was sitting on the stool in the kitchen watching him work and reading off the measurements. I’ve only made this dish a few thousand times but it can be tricky. Sometimes I have to throw the roux out because it is either too light or I’ve burned it.

  “No, I’ll show him her rooms. The attorney says it’s OK to do that. I guess I’m just disappointed. . . . No, Jess. No filé, use the okra.” Bobby Smith’s experience with filé powder came back to me. It must have come back to Jess, too, because he chuckled. “I know what you’re thinking. But the okra will help with the thickness.”

  As I supervised (Jess called it “meddling”), I thought about what Millie would have thought about Broderick Tilson Hayward-Smith, his stiff personality, and stuck-up way of talking. I couldn’t imagine them getting along together. I wondered if they’d ever met when he was growing up. And I wondered why he seemed to hate her so much.

  Mignon peeked around the kitchen door.

  “Mountain’s here,” she said. “Can he still get some breakfast?”

  “Yeah, what does he want, the usual?” I asked her. To Jess, I said, “I’ll get it.”

  Mignon glanced at Jess and her smile dimmed slightly.

  “Um, he’ll have,” she looked down at her pad, “one egg over easy, white toast, and coffee.”

  I watched her disappear. Mountain’s usual breakfast order is three eggs, scrambled, grits (or hash browns, or both), six strips of bacon, two slices of toast (or three pancakes or one extra-large Belgian waffle), coffee, a large O.J., and beefsteak tomatoes, if they are in season.

  If Mountain only ordered one egg and one slice of toast, that boy was either (a) dying or (b) already dead.

  I left Jess in the kitchen chopping celery to find out which one it was.

  “Don’t be too hard on him,” Jess called after me. “He’s lovesick.”

  “You know anything about this?”

  Jess shrugged his shoulders but kept his head down as he concentrated on his chopping.

  “Yeah. I forgot to mention it.”

  Wonderful.

  I found Mountain sitting at a table (not like him), alone (not at all like him), staring out of the window (really out of character). His arms were at his sides, his hands in his lap, and his elbows weren’t on the table. I concluded right then and there that he was seriously ill.

  Mountain looked real pitiful but I decided to tackle him head-on. When he looked up at me, I could see that he had lost weight. He actually had cheekbones.

  “Mountain, since when do you eat one egg and a slice of white toast in my diner? You’re going to hurt my feelings!”

  “Oh, hey, Juanita,” Mountain said without a smile or any feeling at all. He hardly looked at me. “Don’t take it personally. I’m just not real hungry,” he added.

  “You need to eat enough to keep up your strength if you and that Swenson girl plan to keep dancing like you did at Millie’s party.”

  I noticed Mignon just behind Mountain holding the coffeepot. She was shaking her head and mouthing the word, “No.”

  “Oh,” Mountain’s voice was low. “You’ve been so busy with school and Millie’s place that you probably didn’t know. Lawra dumped me.”

  Mignon rolled her eyes and poured his coffee. I wanted to drop through the floor.

  “Oh, I’m real sorry to hear about that,” I told him. “Let me fix up a nice Southwestern omelet for you or some French toast. You can’t live on one scrambled egg.” My solution to most traumas of the heart is to feed the stomach. It doesn’t always work but at least it keeps you from feeling sorry for yourself and starving at the same time.

  Mountain’s eyes were sad like a kid who’s been told that there isn’t a Santa Claus.

  “Thanks, but I’m not that hungry. Honest.”

  And he only ate that egg and half a piece of toast. Not what I expected from Mountain. One more thing to worry about. Peaches had come through the week before, her face a little gray, her eyes bleary. She’d barely eaten a full meal either.

  “Peaches, you got the flu again?” I’d asked her.

  Her smile barely lifted her cheeks.

  “No . . . just a little tired. Long haul,” she said in a voice that was low and slow and very much un-Peaches-like. The fact that she was having more tests done in Casper didn’t make me feel any better. And she wasn’t telling me or anyone what kind of tests they were.

  And now, Mountain? I went back into the kitchen to find out what was going on.

  “How long has he . . .”

  “Shhhh!”

  “I just wanted to know when Mountain . . .”

  “Quiet!”

  I stopped in the middle of the kitchen floor. Mignon had stopped, too, even though she had a tray of orders balanced on her hand.

  “The chef is at work,” she said sarcastically. “He needs . . . complete silence.”

  The “Chef” was a comical sight.

  He had the Bull’s cap on backward, his hair was hanging in a braid down his back, and he wore one pair of glasses while the other pair rested on top of the baseball cap. He was stirring something in the large cast-iron skillet. Whatever it was, it smelled wonderful. I looked over his shoulder and smiled.

  “Back off,” he barked, shrugging me away. “This is the critical point in the roux. It is about to make the color change. I need my concentration.”

  “Jess, it’s just flour and oil. You act as if you’re doing a chemistry experiment.”

  He snorted. Not in the roux, thankfully.

  “That’s what’s wrong with you, Juanita. No respect for the food. Everything has to be . . . just right. Precision, that’s the word. Precision. Now watch this. And be quiet, will you?”

  Good grief.

  He stirred with machinelike precision and very slowly, almost like the change of day to night, the mixture began to thicken and changed color from a light caramel to a deep reddish brown. It was a pretty sight. When the roux was just the way he wanted it, he added the chopped vegetables and let them cook and soften.

  “Now, I can be sociable,” he said with relief, wiping his hands on his “Grouch in the Kitchen” apron that I had given him for Christmas.

  “Since when have you ever been sociable? And when were you going to tell me about Mountain?”

  Jess shrugged as he grabbed a can of Coke.

  “Thought I’d get around to it sooner or later. It wasn’t real high up on the crisis list this week. I figured you had enough to deal with with Bertie and Mr. High-and-Mighty over there on the hill. Don’t know how you’re going to get through that grand tour, considering how fond you are of him. Try to resist the temptation to push the man down the basement stairs, will you? Geoff Black said that you have to be . . . what was the word he used? ‘Diplomatic.’ ” Jess’s eyes twinkled. I wasn’t amused.

  “Mrs. Louis,” I could hear quiet panic in Geoff Black’s voice when he’d called me earlier in the week. “Please don’t antagonize Mr. Hayward-Smith. We want to keep things civilized.”

  “Diplomatic, my butt.”

  Jess’s eyebrows rose.

  “Things not going well?”

  “If I hear the words, ‘Mr. Hayward-Smith would like to point out . . .’ again, I am going to open the basement door and push them all down the stairs. The man finds one speck of dust, one that I can’t see, and now he wants his room dusted twice a day. He says he’s allergic to the rye bread we use for his morning toast so he’s having some sent by FedEx from New York City. He doesn’t like the soap we use. He thinks the water is hard and shouldn’t we put in a water softener.” I glared at Jess. “Why did they outlaw drawing and quartering?”

  Jess whistled and turned his attention back to the gumbo in progress.

  “Glad it’s not me you’re mad at.”

  I watched Jess as he put his meal together but I didn’t really see him because I was thinking so hard. I was
mad at Mr. Pointy Nose High-Up Butt. He’s a stuffed shirt with an Evian bottle up his butt. But it’s his attitude about his mother that really gets to me. He’s ready to tear down a perfectly good old house and sell the land, and he doesn’t even need the money. Geoff Black said he inherited millions from his father and made millions of his own. I think I’m mad at Hayward-Smith because he’s doing all of this out of meanness, just for spite, to get back at Millie because she wasn’t there when he was growing up. Hayward-Smith talks about her as if she was a neurotic sex fiend. He makes me angry when he makes snippy comments about her that don’t sound like the woman I knew at all. I’d like to ask him where he heard those lies but Geoff has warned me not to get into a “discussion” with Hayward-Smith. That’s what Geoff calls it, a “discussion.” White people discuss things. Black folks argue. OK, I promise not to discuss anything with Mr. Pointy Nose. But if he pushes me the wrong way, he’s going to get an argument—a big one.

  When I told Jess this, he shook his head.

  “Did you take your pill today?” he asked, teasing me.

  “Not today, probably not tomorrow either,” I told him. “May not take them ever again.” I was gleeful when I said this. “Those power surges just might be good for something.”

  Jess turned his eyes heavenward.

  Chapter Ten

  * * *

  I took Broderick Hayward-Smith on a top-to-bottom tour of Millie’s house. We started in the basement and worked our way up. I should have saved myself the misery and pushed him down the basement steps. The tour was a disaster.

  This was a man who hated everything. That’s a sign of bad digestion. Every stick of furniture, each dish, and all of the paintings were targets. He didn’t miss a chance to talk bad about the house, the Northwestern United States, Paper Moon, Montana, or Millie—especially Millie.