I started to speak but he continued, confident again and grinning. “And anyway, seeing as you’re the one writing press releases and shopping for inventory, you’re going to need some help. Who’s going to make coffee runs? Get the air conditioner fixed? Open up in the morning when you have a late night?” he said with a smirk.
“First off, I’ve already called the repairman. He’s just late. And second, I don’t have many late nights, except now that I’m trying to get this place up and running. I would have opened quicker, but it’s been a chore getting people to show up on time and do the work. Like this AC.” I fanned my gauzy top away from my body in an effort to stir up a breeze. It was June, and the heat was already intense.
“You must be a transplant. We natives know how to get things done. Just give me a shot.”
For the first time I took him in from top to bottom. Movie star sunglasses perched on his head. Acid-green hair with blond roots showing. Red tank top tucked into black skinny jeans. Black Chuck Taylors.
“You look like a Christmas nightmare,” I said.
“I can get the AC fixed in an hour.”
I hired him on the spot, and it was the best decision I could have made. I discovered early on that he was being truthful when he said he’d lived in the house. A decade before, when he was young, scared, and desperate to figure out who he was, he’d run with a slew of other kids from the dirtier parts of the city. Without welcoming homes to return to, they’d lived in the empty house on Magazine Street for months. It became their refuge, and Allyn still felt welcome in the space—hence his attitude of ownership the first day he’d strutted into my shop. I never would have thought we’d still be together four years later. He may have been flamboyant, keeping odd hours and even odder company, but he was a true friend to me.
Backed into a corner, I did the only thing I knew to do. I picked up my phone from the nightstand and called him. I had to shout so he could hear me over the pounding house music.
“Just a minute,” Allyn said. “Let me go outside.”
“Where are you? That music is terrible.”
“No, it’s great. You should see the people here. It’s Margaritaville meets Marilyn Manson.”
I told him about the will, the house, and what Mags had done. He wasn’t as shocked as I’d been.
“Who else would she have left it to? The old folks? You’re her family. You obviously care about the place, or you’d have stuck a For Sale sign in the yard the minute you got there.”
“I guess so. I just wasn’t prepared to come here and start the biggest house-rehabbing project of my career. Especially not in Sweet Bay.”
“It doesn’t have to be that big, does it? Make a few tasteful changes and bring it up to date. Why the drama?”
“A few tasteful changes wouldn’t even scratch the surface of what’s necessary to turn this place around. Plus, it is Mags’s home and she loved the place. I wouldn’t feel right doing it halfway. She said it deserved to be beautiful again, and I have to honor that.”
“Then there’s your answer.”
“But I don’t live here,” I said. “My life—my job—is in New Orleans. I can’t stay here and direct a renovation. Dot, Bert, and the Greggs would all be under my feet, trying to micromanage everything. Plus, I miss you.”
“Are you done? First, your life here in the city isn’t going anywhere. Just because you stay there a little longer than you originally intended—”
“A little longer? This could take months. Lots of them.”
“—that doesn’t mean you can’t pick right back up when you get back,” he continued, undeterred by my outburst. “I can manage the shop and Rick can help when things get busy. Plus, it’s not like you’ll be across the country. Sweet Bay is, what, three hours away? You can come back for an afternoon or a whole day if necessary. It’s not a long drive.
“Second, you always talk about how you set people up with beautiful houses and things, then you leave and never get to enjoy the beauty of what you created. The house is yours now. You won’t have to hand the keys over and never come back, unless that’s what you want to do. Regardless, you’ll own the results and you won’t have to bow to what anyone else wants. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.”
“What am I going to do with a bed-and-breakfast in Sweet Bay even if it is beautiful again? If I keep it, I’ll have to hire people to run it, and if I sell it, I’ll have my head on a plate carried by Major Gregg.” Even I could hear the petulance in my voice.
“I don’t know who Major Gregg is, but Mags left the place to you, no one else. Remember, you called for my advice, so listen to it. You have to do this. This is your project, and I think you know it. Yes, it’s happening somewhere other than here, but you’re good at what you do. And anyway, you need to make peace with Sweet Bay. We’ll all be here when you get done.”
I was quiet, digesting, listening to the muffled bass and manic voices in the background. I gripped the phone in my hand.
“Third,” he said, “I miss you too. If you do this, don’t think I won’t drive over to check things out. I think I need a little Sweet Bay in my life too.”
I laughed. “This town wouldn’t know what to do with you. You’d stop people cold.”
“Darling, I’d be offended if I didn’t.”
After the call, I didn’t feel total relief, but I did allow that tingle of excitement and anticipation to bubble back up to the surface. I wanted to pull out my computer and notebooks where I’d sketched and mapped out ideas, but my eyelids were heavy. I pulled the blue quilt up to my chin and surrendered.
10
SARA
APRIL
The funeral was a quiet affair, almost an afterthought—no real ceremony, no tearful eulogies, not even a funeral parlor. The five of us just met the funeral director at the cemetery. He shared a few words about the meaning of life and loved ones who had passed on, then pushed a discreet button and the coffin slowly descended into the ground. It was simple, just as Mags wanted it. I found out later that Mags gave Dot clear instructions for her last hurrah.
“You don’t have to put me in a pine box, but you get my drift,” she’d said. “And don’t anyone go crying over me. We’ve all had enough years together to be happy we knew each other at all. Just skip the hoopla and take me straight to the grave.”
Dot couldn’t resist adding a couple of extra details. She laid an armload of cheery sunflowers on top of the casket and propped an eight-by-ten framed photo of a smiling Mags on an easel next to our chairs.
I’d never noticed the resemblance between us. In this old photo, it was unmistakable. I had the same dark, unruly curls, although I tamed mine with a flat iron and extra-hold spray. But I saw something else, something in the shape of her light-blue eyes or the slope of her nose. I saw me in there. Even more than I resembled either of my parents.
Mags was young in the photo, early twenties at most. Her curls tumbled out of a messy ponytail and one shirttail hung free. Her eyes crinkled into barely visible laugh lines. I recognized pieces of the Mags I had known, but I’d never seen her smile like that. She was holding her arm up, trying to get the camera away from whoever was taking the photo, but that smile—no one had ever made me feel that way.
As the funeral director spoke of the glorious light (he must have missed his calling as a revival preacher), a small blue car approached a little ways off. A man climbed out of the car, his face shaded under a cap. He stood still and glanced over at us a few times. After a little while, he sat back down in the car and slowly pulled away.
When the service was over, I helped Dot and Glory gather the flowers while Bert and Major talked to the director. In the hurry to get everyone into their cars and back to the house, I didn’t notice the man drive back up to the gravesite. As I pulled out of the cemetery, I saw him in my rearview mirror. He stood by Mags’s grave as the cemetery workers carried off our chairs. He brushed his hands against the sides of his pants as if he was dusting something off, then re
ached over and touched her headstone.
Back at the house, the driveway was already full of cars. Word had spread quickly, and old friends of Mags, some neighbors, mostly former “guests,” came to pay their respects. It was a good thing, because the house was stuffed full of food, like Bert predicted.
Mr. Eugene Norman, the glassblower who used to make all the neighbors nervous with his raging furnace in the yard, sent a towering bouquet of lilacs that Dot placed on the table in the entryway. Mr. Crocker, who owned a farm up Highway 22, dropped off a mason jar stuffed with gardenias. Tiny Bernadette Pierce hobbled up the front walk with the help of a gold-tipped cane. Bernadette, or Bernie, as everyone called her, checked in a few weeks after my parents’ wreck and stayed a while, long enough for her husband to think she really had moved to Tahiti with the gardener. She moved slowly and painfully up the walkway. I took her arm, fearing she might topple over before she got to the dessert table. The grin on her face when she turned to see who I was proved me wrong.
“The cane is just a prop,” she whispered. “I may be eighty-four years young, but I can move just fine. And this.” She gestured to the gray bob on her head that wasn’t moving in the breeze. “This is a wig. Luis and I may not have gone to Tahiti, but we did get out of Dodge. This is my first time east of the Mississippi since I moved out of The Hideaway and we went to California. My former husband, Harry, is still alive and living somewhere in the South, so I have to be careful.” Her eyes were bright and wild. Crazy maybe, like a fox.
Other folks came and went throughout the day, many more than I’d expected. Those who remembered me talked about what a sweet girl I had been, as if I’d turned out to be someone wearing black lipstick and studs in my chin.
“That’s not what we mean,” Hattie Caldwell said when I joked about it to a small group of ladies gathered on the back porch. “It’s just that after all you’d been through, you were still a polite, gracious child. I was a therapist in my former life, and believe me when I say you could have taken many roads after such tragic deaths in the family. From the looks of you, you’ve taken the right one.”
Hattie hadn’t been back to the house in at least twenty years, so she may not have known I no longer lived in Sweet Bay. What would she think of the road I’d taken if she knew it had paved my way clear out of Alabama?
That afternoon while most of the guests were out on the porch or sitting around the main parlor, I caught Dot alone in the kitchen. She struggled to open a Tupperware container of pimento cheese. A tray of crackers sat on the counter next to her.
“Dot?”
“Mmm?” She couldn’t get the lip of the container to pop up, so I held my hand out and she slid it over to me. “Did you notice the car that pulled up toward the end of the funeral?” I pulled the lid off and handed the Tupperware back to her.
“At the gravesite?” Dot asked, her attention on me now that the pimento cheese was no longer stuck inside frustrating plastic. She dipped a cracker in and took a bite. “I didn’t see anyone but us.”
“An old man pulled up on the path and watched us for a few minutes. I didn’t recognize him, but I think he was there for Mags.”
Bert and Major walked through the kitchen door. Bert put his hand on Dot’s back and Major pulled open the fridge.
“Who was where?” Major asked.
“Sara saw an old man at the funeral. Someone who had come to pay respects to Mags.”
Dot and Bert exchanged a look, but Major shook his head.
“The obituary said the funeral was family only. That’s why everyone else came here.” He shut the fridge. “He must have been there for someone else.”
I nodded but kept thinking about the man. It sure looked like he was there to pay respects to Mags, so who was he?
Later, after all the guests were gone, I came back downstairs for something to eat. Dot and Bert were on the back porch talking. As I moved around in the kitchen, their quiet voices drifted. I took my plate to the door of the porch and watched them.
They sat next to each other in wicker chairs, hands linked in the empty space between them. I smiled thinking of how these two found love at The Hideaway. The house provided the perfect backdrop to their second shot at love when they both checked in on the same day for solo vacations. Bert’s wife had died a few years earlier, and Dot was getting over a messy divorce. When it came time for them to go back to their own lives, they decided to stay. They got married on the dock at sunset six weeks later.
I turned, not wanting to disturb their moment, but my foot bumped an overlooked plate from earlier in the day. Dot turned.
“Hi, dear, come join us. We were just telling old stories.” She wiped her eyes with a tissue. “The funeral seems to have dragged up all kinds of memories.”
“Are you sure? I can take this upstairs . . .”
“Nonsense. Come sit. This will give us a chance to talk. The day got busier than I expected. I knew Mags had admirers all around, but I didn’t know so many would show up. Many of them were older than she was, not that seventy-two is old.”
“If it is, I’m ancient,” Bert said.
Dot sniffed and swiped his shoulder. “You’re not ancient, just well aged.”
“Doesn’t make it sound any better.” He smiled.
I settled into an adjacent chair and took a bite of my ham sandwich.
“We were just talking about Bernie Pierce,” Bert said. Dot still had tears in her eyes, so Bert gave her time to gather herself. He gently tipped his rocking chair back and forth. The wooden boards on the porch floor groaned and squeaked. “Do you remember her?”
I nodded. “She’s a hard one to forget. The situation always seemed a little scandalous to me—Mags harboring someone who left her husband. Did Bernie actually run off with her gardener?”
“In a nutshell, yes,” Bert said. “But it wasn’t that simple. Bernie’s husband Harry was a bully. He used to knock her around, and one day Mags happened to be outside their house when she heard a ruckus inside.”
“Mags claimed she’d been out delivering tomatoes to some of the neighbors, but I think she was just sneaking one of her cigarettes,” Dot said.
“She was in the right place at the right time,” Bert continued. “Harry shoved Bernie and she fell through the open doorway and onto the front porch. Mags stomped up the front walk, stepped right up to Harry, and thumped him hard right here.” Bert pointed to the space between his eyebrows. “Then she did it again for good measure. Harry was so taken aback, he just let her do it. Then she took Bernie’s hand and led her down the steps into the front yard. She told Harry that Bernie wouldn’t be coming back and if he ever so much as stepped a toe on her property, she’d chase him down with her oyster knife.”
Dot laughed. “Mags never would have actually hurt him, but the important thing was Harry didn’t know that. Everyone knew Mags could shuck oysters faster than the men down at the docks, so for all Harry knew, she’d shuck out his heart with her little pearl-handled oyster knife.”
“Her gardener, Luis, packed up some of her belongings one day and brought them all over here for her,” Bert said. “He handed her the bags and a pink rose he’d plucked from someone’s yard on the way over. We saw a lot of him after that, and they finally left for California together. We didn’t hear from her again. Not until she walked in here today.”
“Sounds like Mags was a good friend,” I said.
“Sure was,” Dot said. “She was the best.”
We were quiet a moment until Dot spoke again. “Have you thought any more about your plans for the house?”
“I’ve had a chance to look around. I have a few ideas. Nothing too drastic yet.”
“I just hate to see it change too much. Mags liked it the way it is,” Dot said.
“I’m sure she did in some ways, but she left me with specific instructions to fix it up. You have to admit, the house has seen better days. I’m good at my job, but it won’t be worth it if I only use a hammer and a can of paint,” I
said as gently as I could and waited for Dot’s reaction. She had become the mouthpiece for the four still living in the house. I wasn’t looking for permission, but if I had her blessing, I knew the others would fall in line.
She took a deep breath and looked at Bert. He raised his eyebrows and held his hands up in surrender. “It’s your call, honey.”
“We all know I don’t have a real say in this,” Dot said. “The house is yours now to do what you like. Me? I’m partial to the old place being a little rumpled—just like Mags was—but I understand most people wouldn’t agree. You do what you need to do to spiff it up, whatever that means. If you think you might sell it when you’re done, just try to give us as much warning as you can. I know you have a life to get back to in New Orleans, but remember we have a life here in this place.”
“You took your first steps out here on this porch, did you know that?” Bert asked.
I shook my head.
“That’s right,” Dot said. “Jenny brought you over here one afternoon before the evening rush at the diner. You’d been on the verge of taking off for a few weeks. She wasn’t gone ten minutes before you put one foot in front of the other and toddled clear across the porch. I still remember the look on your little face when you realized what you’d done.”
“I’ve never heard that story,” I said.
“An old house can hold on to its memories for only so long,” Bert said. “We may hold you hostage at night and spoon-feed you old stories.”
“Bert,” Dot said firmly. “She does not want to sit around here with a bunch of old folks all night.” Dot turned to me. “Mags did ask you to stay at the house while you’re in Sweet Bay. Is that your plan?”
“Sure beats the Value Inn on Highway 6,” Bert said.
The Hideaway Page 7
