The House at Royal Oak

by Carol Eron Rizzoli

  “You must be kidding” was all I could think to say. His nerves weren’t the only ones beginning to fray.

  Because I couldn’t drag a 150-pound sander up and down the steps or trim a door with the circular saw or do the other heavy work, cleanup was my job. I didn’t mind. It seemed like a fair trade-off, although I had heard stories about construction dust wrecking marriages.

  Now I got it. Even when I taped doors closed and covered passageways with plastic, dust seeped around—or through?—the plastic and sifted over every surface in the clean, finished rooms on the other side of the house.

  I reminded Hugo about this and said that if he started refinishing floors, I was quitting. No, you wouldn’t, he said.

  Try it and see, I thought. We simply couldn’t afford a big step back, like redoing floors, because it would mean too many more months until the third room was ready for paying guests.

  In the days leading up to opening weekend, we would be discussing something like this when Hugo would just walk off. It was so unlike him that I followed once to see what he was up to.

  Out in the garage he was sawing wood, building something. He didn’t want to say what it was because I wouldn’t approve.

  He picked up a hammer. “It’s an enclosure for the electric meter.”

  Now, when the rooms aren’t even finished?

  He didn’t answer.

  I asked if everything was okay.

  “Yep.” He went back to measuring and sawing.

  I suggested that he didn’t seem like himself. Was it a reaction to all we’d been through? Or the debt? Should I apologize again for my tantrums along the way? Or was he just decompressing now that the end was in sight?

  He didn’t think anything was wrong. He felt great about everything, he said and switched on the electric saw.

  Five days to go. Hugo wanted to do it really right to prove to the guests, and most of all to himself, that we could.

  He moved faster and faster. I could hardly believe how much the painstaking perfectionist could accomplish in a day.

  He was moving so fast I never heard about the phone call from his dad, saying Zia Lillia was very ill, until I found him throwing clothes in a knapsack. He planned to drive to Washington, pick up his dad and continue from there straight to New Jersey, where Zia Lillia lived.

  That night he called to say she was unable to speak, move, or open her eyes, but she unmistakably squeezed his hand. An hour later she was gone. He sounded hoarse. I asked again if he was all right.

  “Not really. Dad kept bugging me to drive faster even though I was already doing seventy-five.” He broke off for more news. Home tomorrow to finish details like installing a bedroom door and cleaning up the yard. On Friday he would drive back to New Jersey in time for the funeral on Saturday morning. “So,” he concluded, “you’ll have to run the bed-and-breakfast.”

  It wasn’t my best moment and I said something like, “What do you mean? This is your business. Why can’t the funeral be on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday? The guests will be here on Friday and . . . I have to be in the office on Friday for a very important meeting.”

  Only one of us had professional catering experience. My experience was limited to working as a waitress at a boardwalk pancake house for a summer and I couldn’t even remember if you served from the left and removed from the right or the other way around. My vision for fitting into the new business centered on growing herbs and flowers, baking muffins, discussing the history of our area with guests, and giving them directions to the museums, shops, the best places to kayak, and where to eat crabs on a dock with a sunset view.

  I planned to leave everything else to Hugo. His commercial gas range, for one thing, with its 25,000 BTU burners. I knew beyond doubt that it could sense my fear. Then there was the furnace, the pump that ran the well, and a dozen other gadgets that might need adjusting. I didn’t even know how to run the credit card machine. This meant crawling under the desk to unplug the phone and disconnect the computer because we didn’t have enough outlets and connections to run both, then sitting down on the floor to swipe the card because the machine’s cord wasn’t long enough to reach the desktop. If the card wouldn’t go through, you had to reconnect the phone and call up the credit card company. This wasn’t helplessness on my part, it was division of labor. I didn’t want to know everything.

  I could probably handle breakfast, although here was cause for alarm, too, because I had helped with the catering business enough to see that it’s one thing to turn out a meal for family and friends but quite another to do it for paying guests. My grandmother’s blackberry muffins could be counted on if I didn’t forget the baking powder or overbake them, and I had seen Hugo glaze ham in maple syrup and scramble eggs with fresh herbs and butter. But everything would have to be perfect and on time.

  Even with his new frenetic pace, Hugo could still be patient and he waited until I had finished talking.

  There will be paybacks, he said.

  “Like what?” I couldn’t think of a payback big enough.

  “Big paybacks.”

  There was promise in his voice, but I saw no reason to let him off easily.

  “Well, I’ll think about it. But this is the only excuse I could possibly accept for you not being here to run your business on opening day.”

  This proved to be the strangest conversation we ever had, though there was no guessing that then. Mumbling a distracted good-night, I was busy considering a payback. One large gift, like a trip, or lots of smaller favors for a long time? The more I considered the second idea, the more I liked it. Honey, please make me a hot chocolate and while you’re up bring me the newspaper and my slippers. Will you stop at the florist on the way home? I’d think I’d like some roses tonight. . .

  CHAPTER

  11

  April 3

  IN THE 1930s FISHERMEN REMOVED THE WEIGHTS AND pulleys from the windows of houses around here to use as weights on their nets. In those hard times our house contributed its share and I pictured one of the big, weightless windows slamming down on the hands of our very first guests. Out in the garage I hunted for a stick to prop the guest bedroom window open. As I yanked one out of a trash can of scrap building materials, a long, thick splinter wedged under my fingernail. It hardly hurt because I was thinking about the lawsuit if a window fell on a guest.

  I checked my watch. The guests said they would arrive at 3:30. It was 5:10. They probably weren’t coming. They had paid for the night and I wondered if they expected a refund if they couldn’t make it. We didn’t have a policy about that yet. I found a scrap of sandpaper and started smoothing the wood for another day but stopped when a car hit the driveway hard, spraying gravel up against the fence. Unless it was the tattooed visitor again, it was probably the guests. Someone making a wrong turn would drive more slowly. But what kind of guests?

  I smoothed my hair the way my grandmother did when the front doorbell rang and worried what the guests would think if they saw the hostess emerging from a dark garage with a stick in her hand. Weird. I put it down. No, weirder. I picked the wood up to show purpose and walked out.

  Coming around the door I saw her, clearly the bride-to-be, pulling suitcases and shopping bags out of a baby-blue sports car. Slipping the stick in my pocket, I greeted her. As a guest, my least favorite part of the bed-and-breakfast experience is arriving and wondering what I’ve gotten into. If no one’s around, the arrival anxiety intensifies. Is the room ready? Is the reservation remembered? Is the host a nutcake? I vowed that we would always go outside to greet guests. Only now I also experienced the other side of it. As host when a guest arrives, I wonder what we’ve gotten into and if the guest will be a responsible, reasonable person, a nutcake, or worse.

  Chic in a starched white shirt, dark capri pants, and slides, she looked worried. She was about the age of my own children. How hard could this be?

  “I’m late. Is it okay?”

  My chance to be assured. Of course, I
told her, your room is waiting.

  Relief washed over her face. Without thinking, I offered to help carry her bags. This was supposed to be part of a hospitable welcome and Hugo was supposed to handle it. She pointed to a suitcase that easily weighed forty pounds. With my patched-together knees, there was little possibility I could get it in the house; up the stairs was out of the question. This whole B&B idea was a mistake, I was deciding, when she handed me a shopping bag. I took it gingerly, not wanting to jam the splinter deeper under my nail. In the bag were five shoeboxes. Evidently getting married had changed from the days when all you needed were two pairs of shoes—one for the wedding and one for going away.

  “Men are handy to have around, aren’t they?” she was saying. I relaxed. She was going to be a good guest.

  After three trips from the car with her gear, I showed her the parlor, the dining room, and upstairs.

  Fine, she said, explaining that she would be back later with her mother, who was busy with wedding arrangements.

  I went back to the garage for the needle-nose pliers and pulled the splinter out.

  That night when Hugo called from his aunt’s house in New Jersey, I reported every detail of the day.

  Up at 5:30 to take care of office work and phone calls. Next, finding something to wear for greeting guests. My sister had anticipated this moment months before and come up with nice gray velvet pants and a black sweater. “I hate it when the hosts look tired and wear old work clothes,” she’d said and I had smugly agreed, unaware that they probably were tired and were working when we showed up long before or after the official check-in hours.

  I interrupted my account long enough to thank Hugo for stocking the house with food before he left. Then I rushed all day long, I continued. He could not imagine how many lastminute details I expertly attended to. Opening curtains and windows, cleaning windowpanes we had overlooked in our haste, scraping off flecks of paint, finding a hefty wasp building a nest between the screen and the inside of the window at the head of the bed where the guests would sleep. Bug spray didn’t faze this wasp in the slightest, so I closed and locked the window. Then I closed the curtains so the guests wouldn’t see the wasp. Next, I put flowers and a dish of chocolates in the guest room. I wanted this bed-and-breakfast to be exactly as I expected one to be, inviting, charming, comfortable, and very clean. A good bed-and-breakfast seems effortless, I had noticed, and superior to ordinary surroundings through some magic that ordinary people don’t possess.

  I looked around and saw paint peelings on the rug, probably from Hugo’s last-minute reinstallation of the bedroom door, and vacuumed them up. In their place the vacuum deposited stray threads. I went back and picked them up, but there was nowhere to put them, certainly not in the brand-new guest room wastebasket. I stuck them in the pocket of the velvet pants. Carrying the vacuum cleaner back downstairs, I heard myself hyperventilating.

  It was almost three by then, the guests were due any time, and I still had not swept the porch or started getting ready for breakfast. The bride finally arrived, I summed up to Hugo, deciding that it was probably clear to him by now how hard I had worked.

  “But all she said when I showed her the room was, ‘Fine.’”.

  “I’m sure it was fine,” Hugo said, “and I’m sure you did a fine job. Try to take it easy.”

  He reported that the family had gathered and everything was set for the funeral. He’d call back at eleven.

  When the bride returned with her mother, I said what I had practiced. “We usually serve breakfast at nine, if that’s convenient for you.” The we and the usually were intended to give everyone confidence that this was a well-run, experienced establishment and that I wasn’t alone and ill at ease, a woman past forty trying on a brand-new role for the first time.

  They requested one tea, one coffee, and the bride asked if breakfast could be a little earlier, at 8:30, because she had a lot to do on wedding day.

  One tea, one coffee, 8:30, I repeated, going into the kitchen to write it down.

  By evening I was setting the round table at the dining room window for their breakfast when I heard rustling behind me. I turned and saw a man sitting on the floor in the parlor. One of the groomsmen, as he introduced himself, he was wrapping gifts. The bride rushed in then and asked where the closest all-night copy store was, because she had to make copies of the wedding programs. I explained that here in the country the closest store, nine miles away, probably closed by six. She said she had left too much for the last minute and the rehearsal dinner wouldn’t end until eleven. I looked up the phone number so she could call the store but resisted the impulse to take care of getting the programs copied. Was that part of the job at a really nice bed-and-breakfast?

  I spooned jam and butter into small dishes, poured cream into a pitcher, washed tangerines and herbs, filled the sugar bowl, folded napkins, put a spray of flowers on the table, beat the eggs with milk and seasonings, replaced them in the fridge, set out the coffeepot and teapot, and filled the kettle with water. Then I made a sandwich and ate it at our desk. I set two alarm clocks.

  Around eleven as I was getting into bed, the phone rang.

  “How are they?” Hugo asked.

  “What do you mean, how are they?”

  “The muffins. Did you make them right, with butter and cream?”

  The argument about whose version was better, my original family recipe or the one he developed in cooking school, was longstanding and the more we debated it, the less we agreed. My grandmother made them not sweet by modern standards or buttery, but with a tender batter that holds together more berries than I have ever seen in a single muffin.

  When Hugo decided to “improve” the recipe for his catering clients, I did not object. It was cooking school doctrine that lots of butter and cream are essential to give food good “mouth feel” and that fat is a great carrier of flavor. But he went too far when he insisted that guests at a bed-and-breakfast would not want my muffins. Even if his were more cloudlike, which they were, I thought mine tasted more old-fashioned and I intended to use my recipe.

  But not now. After a long day, I had no intention of baking any muffins of any kind. “The guests will have to do without.”

  “But that’s what we planned, homemade blackberry muffins. It’s supposed to be our signature.”

  “Don’t you have to get some sleep for tomorrow?” I asked before we said curt good-nights.

  In an hour the phone rang again. I asked Hugo to hold on while I took the muffins out of the oven. He wanted to know which recipe I used.

  “My grandmother’s, of course.”

  “Well, how are they?”

  I took my time running a knife around a muffin to loosen it from the pan, tasting, and taking another bite before I picked up the phone again.

  “Perfect,” I told him.

  “Good work,” he said. “Have a glass of wine.” I said I felt tired in my bones.

  Then have a large glass of wine, he suggested.

  The next morning the house was silent when I got up before the alarm went off to set plates and cups in the oven to warm. Passing the door between the dining room and the front hall, I spotted a torn piece of lined notebook paper pushed under the door.

  CHAPTER

  12

  April 4

  IN THE DIM LIGHT I UNFOLDED THE PAPER AND SAW an almost illegible scribble.

  “Back late last night—could we move breakfast to ten?” The innkeeper obviously had something to learn. I went back to the desk and wrote out the guests’ bill. With three hours still to go, I made the bed, checked my tax return, signed it, and walked down to the post office.

  By 9:30 the fresh juice was squeezed, triangles of thick country bread were ready to be toasted, a basket lined with a napkin waited for the muffins and toast, and condiments were on the table. I switched on the coffeemaker and set the kettle to boil.

  Five minutes before ten I opened the dining room door, went into the front hall and listened. It was
quiet except for the sound of water running. That was encouraging. The guests were getting ready to come down for breakfast. I opened the front door, went out on the porch, and saw someone hurrying up the road. As she got closer, I recognized the bride, her long hair flying, in jeans and sweatshirt.

  Breathless, she came through the gate and up onto the porch. “The bridesmaids and groomsmen are coming over to help put the program together, if that’s okay?” I nodded.

  After the rehearsal dinner, she explained, she and her friends had driven back across the Bay Bridge to an all-night copy center in Annapolis, the closest place to get two hundred programs copied. All were now impressively stacked on tables in the parlor. The bride started to collate pages, but her hands shook and it took her half a minute to get the first one together and put a paper fastener through the punched-out holes. The program, I saw at a glance, consisted of two different religious ceremonies separated by a jazz concert and ran to eight pages. Two programs assembled a minute, a hundred minutes, I thought, sitting down to help her. She threw me a look that said a thousand thank-yous.

  Next, her mother called down the stairs that the towels hadn’t been changed since yesterday. Less than twenty-four hours after they arrived, it had not occurred to me to change the towels. This was supposed to be a bed-and-breakfast, after all, and I thought it an unreasonable request. What were they doing with all the new, extra-thick towels anyway? Thinking rude thoughts, I hurried to get her some.

  When her mother appeared, I served breakfast while the bridal party assembled programs and the wedding photographer took pictures of everyone. It was 11:40. After serving seconds of coffee and tea, I went into the back room and called Hugo.

  “What am I supposed to do now? It looks like they’re going to stay all day. Check-out was at eleven.” Other innkeepers had warned us that you need to hold your ground because if you make things pleasant enough, some guests just won’t leave. It took me a while to get the point and months later, with a group of guests who wanted to linger, I actually made and served five pots of coffee.