Morning Glory Circle

by Pamela Grandstaff

  “It’s too long,” Ed told her. “You have to cut twenty words.”

  “It’s the same length it always is,” she insisted. “I used the same size paper and the same margin settings I have used for almost fifty years. I ought to know how long my own column is.”

  “I have explained this to you many times, Ethel,” Ed said. “What fits on your paper does not necessarily fit in the column.”

  “Your father always made it fit.”

  “You need to cut twenty words.”

  “Your grandfather always made it fit.”

  “Fine,” he said. “I will cut them for you.”

  “Oh, no you won’t,” she said, clasping the page to her prodigious bosom. “You butchered it once before and I’m not going to let that happen again.”

  Ed calmly handed her a red pencil. Ethel huffily arranged herself at the extra desk by the window, and put on her half-moon reading glasses, which hung from a beaded chain around her neck.

  Ed went back to his desk, where he was wrestling with a web-site-building program. He had recently decided to bite the bullet and put up a Sentinel web site, and was determined to do it all by himself. He purchased the domain address and set up an account with a service provider, and was now working on designing the site. When he followed the instructions that came with the software it worked, but he couldn’t understand why it worked, and that frustrated him.

  The front door opened and Mandy came in smiling, carrying a plate of hot doughnuts.

  “Hey good lookin’,” she said, but then stopped abruptly when she saw Ethel, who was giving her a stern look over her reading glasses.

  “Good morning,” Ed said, as he jumped up and took the plate from her, conscious of Ethel’s eagle eye and bloodhound nose for gossip. “You really shouldn’t keep bringing me these. I’m getting fat.”

  Mandy just beamed at Ed, flashing her big green eyes, dimples, and white teeth. A Fitzpatrick Bakery apron was wrapped around her slim, petite frame, and her long blonde hair was twisted up on top of her head.

  “Well, I know how much you like ‘em,” Mandy said in her Tennessee twang.

  Ed glanced at Ethel, who wasn’t even pretending not to listen.

  “Doughnut, Ethel?” he offered.

  “No,” Ethel said, obviously enjoying Ed’s discomfort. “I can’t have the sugar, but you two enjoy yourselves.”

  Ed felt awkward and Mandy just stood there, smiling up at him like a child waiting for a pat on the head.

  “Well, thanks,” Ed said.

  “You goin’ to the bonfire tomorrow night?” Mandy asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I have to take photos for the paper.”

  “Would ya mind if Tommy tagged along with ya? I gotta work, and I don’t like him runnin’ around alone after dark.”

  “No, that’s fine, I don’t mind,” Ed said. “Tell him to come over here after dinner and we’ll go together.”

  “Thanks,” Mandy said. “See ya later.”

  She was still flashing those white teeth and dimples as she went out the door.

  Ed braced himself for Ethel’s comment.

  “She’s too young for you,” she said.

  “I know,” Ed said. “We’re just friends.”

  “Hah,” Ethel said. “She’s got a big crush on you.”

  “That may be true,” Ed said, “but I’m not going to do anything about it.”

  “Fiddlesticks,” Ethel said. “Most men would give an eyetooth to have a pretty young thing like that chasing after them.”

  “Well, I’m not like most men, I guess.”

  “You aren’t made of stone,” Ethel said.

  “I’m not an idiot, either.”

  “We’ll see,” she said, smirking as she returned to her copy editing.

  Ed didn’t know what to do about Mandy. As improbable as it seemed to him, she was seriously infatuated, and he just kept hoping it would pass, like the flu or the measles. He was attracted to her, how could he not be? She was young, pretty, and sweet.

  ‘If I was ten years younger,’ he told himself.

  But that wasn’t true. Ten years earlier he’d been married to and madly in love with the sexy, ambitious Eve, whom he met in their college journalism program. After they graduated they worked on the same newspaper in Philadelphia. When his father died, Ed came back to Rose Hill to take over the family’s newspaper business. He and Eve tried to keep their relationship going long distance for awhile before realizing they wanted very different things out of life. Being the wife of a weekly newspaper editor in the sleepy little town of Rose Hill was not what Eve had in mind.

  Ed suddenly realized he had eaten half the doughnuts on the plate and done no work on the web site since Mandy left. He pushed the plate away.

  “She’s fattening you up,” Ethel said, “so you can’t get away.”

  “Twenty words,” Ed warned her. “Or I’ll do it myself.”

  The Rose Hill Winter Festival was held in the field behind the Foxglove Mobile Home Park, between Rose Hill Avenue and the Little Bear River. One of the city’s snowplow drivers plowed wide swaths into and around the four to six foot drifts of snow that covered two acres of roughly flat ground, and the fire department set up a temporary fence to mark off the boundaries and keep small children (and drunken adults) off the train tracks and out of the river.

  There was a string of food vending caravans lined up on Marigold Avenue, waiting to be towed into place. While Scott directed traffic, Patrick drove the tractor that pulled each caravan. Maggie’s sister-in-law Ava was setting up the games area for the littlest children, and some volunteer firefighters were designating the other contest areas with red flags atop six-foot tall metal rods, which could be seen over the highest drifts.

  At noon Hannah and Maggie took a break from the hot bakery kitchen, went to the diner, and ordered late breakfasts. Evidently Caroline had been making the rounds, because lots of people came up to them and mentioned seeing her, surprised she was back a week early. Maggie was very polite but vague, saying she didn’t know what Caroline’s plans were.

  “Everyone thinks we’re still her best friends,” Maggie said to Hannah, “so of course we should know what she’s doing.”

  “You gotta let it go now,” Hannah said. “That’s just the way Caroline is and she’s never going to change.”

  But Maggie couldn’t let it go. She knew she should, but she felt used and discarded.

  “Did she give your keys back?” Hannah asked her.

  “Yes,” Maggie said.

  “Did she leave any money to repay you for all you spent on her yesterday? You know, for the gas for the evil SUV we drove for two and a half hours to pick her up at the crack of dawn, the magazines and newspapers made out of all those defenseless trees, and all the other stuff you bought?”

  “No,” Maggie said. “But that’s my problem, not hers. She didn’t ask me to buy her that stuff, I offered.”

  “You’re not going to give yourself a break, are you?” Hannah said, while mashing her fried eggs up in a gross looking puddle of soft yolk she planned to scrape up with toast. “Let’s melt some candles, make a Caroline doll, and stick it with pins so you’ll feel better.”

  Maggie didn’t answer, but she didn’t think she was going to get over her hurt feelings quickly just because Hannah was already tired of hearing about it. She knew she was pouting but she didn’t care.

  “Okay, let’s think up her comic book name,” Hannah suggested. “That’ll make you feel better.”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  “C’mon, you know you want to. How about ‘Rich E. McBitchy?’”

  “She’s not bitchy, her sister is.”

  “Yeah, but Gwyneth already has her comic book name. She’s Twiglet, the British Bumstick. Her super power is sucking all the fun out of a room just by entering it. She’s a member of the League of Fantastic Funsuckers.”

  Maggie cracked a smile at that.

  “That’s right,” H
annah said. “Now you’re back on board. Tell you what, Caroline can be ‘Stinky Megabucks.’”

  “How about ‘Stinky Megabucks, the Vegan Menace?’”

  “Perfect,” Hannah said. “I will enter that in the official handbook.”

  Caroline had gone to school with Hannah, Maggie, and their cousin Claire, from kindergarten through seventh grade at Rose Hill Elementary, and the four had been inseparable. Mrs. Eldridge may have looked down her nose at the local girls, with their hand-me-down play clothes and clumsy way around her fine china, but they were Caroline’s only friends, so she tolerated them.

  The summer after seventh grade Caroline’s brother Brad drowned, and their mother used that as an excuse to send her youngest daughter to boarding school. Caroline came back each summer and palled around with Hannah, Maggie, and Claire, but as much as they loved her, she grew up in a much different culture, with different types of friends and interests than those of her small town counterparts. They saw less and less of her until, after her father passed away and her mother went back to England, she rarely came back to Rose Hill.

  Maggie had once driven to Dulles airport in DC to see Caroline during a long flight layover after Caroline called and begged her to. Maggie ended up holding her friend’s backpack for forty-five minutes while Caroline argued with the boyfriend who had come to the airport expecting to join her on the next leg of her trip, only to get dumped as soon as he arrived. When he got there, he found out Caroline was actually going with a man she’d met at the Glastonbury Music Festival in England the week before. The new boyfriend drank in the airport lounge while the old boyfriend, who had turned down a prestigious internship and sublet his apartment in order to go on this trip, cried in front of everyone at the departure gate. Maggie couldn’t remember the dumped boyfriend’s name, but the new one from London was memorably named “Giles Thripps-Maythorne III.” Maggie had later named a goldfish after him.

  Caroline’s setups sometimes included Hannah as well. One summer Caroline invited Maggie and Hannah for a week-long stay on the outer banks of North Carolina, but once the two got down there, they discovered a house full of Caroline’s hard partying, condescending friends from college. Alarmed and repulsed by all the pretentious posing, cocaine snorting, and partner swapping that took place on the first night, they had driven home early the next morning.

  “Your trouble is,” Hannah said, as she pointed a fork full of hash browns at Maggie, “you keep expecting her to be like you and me, when she’s nothing like us.”

  “I know,” Maggie said, “and I know that shouldn’t matter so much.”

  After lunch, Maggie checked in at the bookstore, and Jeanette came to her with a concerned look on her face.

  “Your friend Caroline came in and got a big stack of books,” she said quietly. “I mean hundreds of dollars worth. She said you wouldn’t care.”

  Maggie’s hurt feelings zoomed into anger, and she took a few moments to calm her temper before she spoke.

  “The next time Caroline comes in, tell her she needs to see me before she takes anything else. Also, please total up everything she’s taken so far, and give her an invoice, due upon receipt.”

  Maggie could tell Jeanette was pleased with her answer, but she didn’t go into it with her.

  Caroline Eldridge dropped the books she’d taken from Maggie’s store down on the polished table in the formal entry of her sister Gwyneth’s house. The stately Edwardian home had served as the Eldridge College president’s residence after their father died up until the time Gwyneth claimed it, after their brother Theo’s death. The college president and his wife barely had time to put their belongings in storage and move into the Eldridge Inn before Gwyneth’s moving van arrived.

  “As you can see, there were some hideous attempts at amateur interior decoration which I have yet to address,” Gwyneth said, by way of greeting, as she descended the central stairway in a grand manner. “The college president’s wife had an unfortunate fondness for pastel floral wallpaper.”

  “Hello Gwyneth, how are you?” Caroline said, and the two sisters, who hadn’t seen each other in many years, shared an air kiss to each side of the face.

  “My interior designer, Blaine, is coming down this week to show me some new sketches. Unfortunately I am at the mercy of a vanishing contractor and the ignorant local tradesmen. There is no sense of urgency or pride of workmanship among them that I can detect. It’s all, ‘We’ll get to it,’ and ‘I’m waiting on the supplier,’ until I just want to scream. You can’t even throw money at problems down here, it doesn’t do any good.”

  “How are you, though? Are you well?”

  “As well as can be expected, I suppose, considering the conditions. I had to import staff from the city and they’re all suffering from culture shock.”

  “It’s not that bad, surely,” Caroline said.

  “I warned them,” Gwyneth said. “‘This is not a lark in the Hamptons,’ I said. ‘This is a safari into deepest, darkest Appalachia.’ They didn’t believe me, of course. Now they’re frantically calling their families to send them care packages, like Oxfam.”

  “They’ll get used to it,” Caroline said.

  “Their cell phones and wireless laptops don’t work here,” Gwyneth sighed, “and they act like someone’s pulled their IV’s out. I’ve had to double their salaries just to keep them here. They’ve taken to referring to it as hillbilly boot camp.”

  “It’s hard to get good staff, that’s what Daddy always said,” Caroline said. “At least they’re being paid fair wages.”

  “More than fair, I’d say. The locals are unemployable, of course, and so hostile. This town is trapped in the past, and not in the charming, marketable way that Martha’s Vineyard is. The mayor and his wife are the only semi-civilized people I’ve met, and the only ones interested in my suggestions for improvements to the town. I’m glad you’re here, darling, although I have to say, you look a mess. What are you wearing?”

  “This is an improvement on what I arrived wearing, believe you me. I wish you and I were the same size, Gwyneth. I need some natural fibers and I know you have them.”

  “As a matter of fact, I just bought the most divine cashmere wrap in the palest oyster color. Come up and see.”

  Gwyneth crossed the foyer and ascended the stairs with Caroline following.

  “The cashmere trade is terrible for the goats, you know, Gwyneth. They’re often ill-treated.”

  “Not these goats, I can assure you. My stylist Marissa says they gather just the tiniest bits of chin hair from each one. It probably feels like the barest tickle, and they are all so spoiled and fat. They give the most heavenly filaments. It’s the softest, lightest, warmest thing you’ve ever felt. You’ll want to wash your hands first, of course, before you touch it. Your cuticles are beyond help, I fear. They’ve run amok.”

  Caroline dutifully washed her hands before she made her way to Gwyneth’s dressing room for the show and tell portion of the visit.

  “I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed hot water and hand cream,” Caroline said. “Although I wish you’d read the labels and make sure there’s no animal testing involved.”

  “You’re always so serious, Caroline. Lighten up, please, will you? Let’s not worry for ten seconds about lab rabbits, and just enjoy my beautiful clothes together, shall we?”

  “Alright, but it really is the most frightful waste of resources and a shameful display of excess.”

  “Oh, I know it, but don’t be cross. Tell you what, I’ll have Louise fix us a nice lunch and then you can tell me about all the dreary things you’ve been doing in all those awful places you go.”

  Caroline sighed, but acquiesced. Gwyneth was her only living relative on this side of the Atlantic, after all.

  Later, after lunch, Gwyneth broached the delicate subject of money.

  “When you talk to Paxton, my love, just tell him you’re broke, and he simply must advance you some of your inheritance. That’s what I did an
d the coffers were immediately opened wide. Now there is as much money as I need, right there in my account, whenever I need it. It’s all electronic these days.”

  “Except Theo didn’t leave mine to me like he left yours to you, so accessible,” Caroline said. “Mine’s all tied up in trusts, and Paxton will probably put me on some sort of budget, or make me submit receipts.”

  “How dreadful,” Gwyneth said, but smiled as if it was delicious to hear. “I’m sure I could help you out if you’re desperate.”

  “Well, not exactly desperate. I got Paxton to pay for the plane fare.”

  “But how did you get here from the airport? Why didn’t you call me? I would have sent my car for you.”

  “It was two in the morning and I didn’t have money for a hotel room or a rental car. I know how you hate to have your sleep disturbed, so I called Maggie, and she came to get me.”

  “Oh, that odious book store woman. I don’t know how you could stand her for five minutes, let alone for two hours in a car.”

  “I slept most of the way. The thing about Maggie is I knew she’d do it. She’s like that. You call and she comes.”

  “Like a faithful, stupid dog.”

  “Handy to have around, though, and she’s got great taste in books. Her store is very well stocked.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Gwyneth said, still smarting from being banned from entering that particular establishment, after literally being thrown out of it.

  “She introduced me to a great guy, too; Dr. Drew Rosen, have you met him?”

  “A doctor, and on your first day, how lovely,” Gwyneth said with a marked lack of enthusiasm.