“I thought you were an interior designer. Don’t most people want new things when they redecorate their houses?”
“Not always. I am a designer, but I also sell vintage furniture in a shop on Magazine Street. I go to estate sales, yard sales, whatever I can find, and buy gorgeous old things for pennies. Usually the owners don’t even know what they’re selling. They’re just trying to clean out Grandma’s house after she died.”
Crawford glanced down and my words hit me. I rubbed my forehead with my fingertips. “Well, that wasn’t very nice of me, was it?”
“I do a little of the same thing,” he said, taking a seat in the chair next to me. “But I make the old furniture instead of looking for it. I pick up old wood—mostly scraps I find on job sites—and turn it into tables, chairs, that sort of thing. It’s all pretty haphazard, to be honest, but my mom likes it.” He smiled. “I’ve sold a few pieces here and there, and I’m working on a table for a client now. That is, when I can find time between work and this boathouse Charlie’s talked me into building.”
“I’d love to see your work sometime.”
“I doubt it’s anything you’d be interested in. To be honest, it looks like it was made in someone’s woodshed in the backyard. And most of it was.”
“Trust me, if it looks in any way like it’s had a past life, I have customers who’ll eat it up.”
Glory stuck her head out the back door then. “Can I get y’all anything? Iced tea? More pie?”
Crawford stood. “No, ma’am. Thank you though.”
“Don’t leave on account of me, now,” she said.
“It’s time for me to head out anyway. I have a stop to make in Fairhope before I go back to the office.”
I walked him back through the house to the front door. He said he’d be in contact soon about prices and materials.
“You really think you’ll sell it once you finish all this work?” he asked at the top of the front porch steps.
I picked at a string on my skirt and shrugged. “I haven’t decided. It seems like the smartest thing to do. I sure can’t stay here and run a bed-and-breakfast.”
“That’s too bad. Once this house is fixed up, you’ll be sad to let it go. Mark my words: it’s going to be a showstopper.”
Later that afternoon, I waited until the upstairs hall was quiet before I pulled down the creaky attic stairs and climbed up to retrieve the box. After Crawford left, I hadn’t been able to focus on anything except the box and its mysterious contents. Part of me felt like I did when I scored a big find at a junk shop or estate sale—excited to dive in and see what I could make of something old—but another part was scared to wade any further into who Mags might have been.
I tiptoed back to my room with the box and closed the door behind me. I reached into the box, gently pulling out the envelope, and emptied it onto the blue quilt, turning each piece over so the words were visible. They were still disjointed, but I moved them around until most of the torn edges lined up and it seemed maybe they were in the right places. There were gaps, sections of the note that had been lost to the years, but what was left was an even bigger mystery.
Dearest Maggie,
. . . leaving now to save . . . the discomfort . . .
is the right choice . . . know our time . . . your finger . . .
be mine and I . . . in the cove, just as we planned . . .
Love,
William
I stared at the broken note for several long moments trying to sort out the emotion behind the words. Anger? Frustration? Passion? With the missing pieces, it was so hard to tell.
I pulled the box back toward me and laid everything else on the bed—the ring box, stack of newspaper clippings, tiny wooden house, and handful of photographs, the one of Mags on top. But there was something else I hadn’t seen earlier. Stuck down along the edge of the box was a yellowed postcard. It had a picture of Mobile’s Bellingrath Gardens on the front. The postscript on the back was dated June 1960. There was no return address, just one line written in small, neat cursive.
Margaret,
You made the right choice.
Mother
I heard a faint knock at the door, and Dot poked her head in. I discreetly nudged a newspaper clipping over the ring box.
“We’re headed out for dinner. You sure you don’t want to come? We’re going to our regular meat-and-three over in Daphne. Bert hates to miss the early bird specials, and the food is actually pretty good.”
I smiled. “No thanks. I’ll find something here.”
She gestured toward the assortment on my bed. “What’s all that?”
“Just some things I found up in the attic earlier.” I almost said more, but something stopped me. I craved more time alone with all I’d found before I brought Dot into the mystery.
She nodded, her eyes scanning the items. “Okay then. See you when we get back. I’ll try to bring you some leftovers.”
She stepped away from the door but paused before closing it. “Secrets may come to light the deeper you dig in this old place. Feel free to ask me anything. I may not have all the answers, but I can probably come pretty close to the truth.”
17
SARA
MAY
Crawford and his team worked fast. The electrician came during breakfast the next morning. Glory grabbed her coffee and hurried up the steps, her long nightgown billowing out behind her. Ten minutes later, we heard knocking at the door again. It was the foundation specialist. Back at the table, Dot was folding and refolding her napkin.
“It’s okay,” I said. “They’re just here to see if the house has any major problems, which it probably does. It’s better to find out quickly. Remember, this is a good thing.”
Dot’s eyes filled. “I trust you. It’s just hard to see other people trampling around the place.”
“But it’s a bed-and-breakfast. That’s kind of the idea, isn’t it? Didn’t it used to be this way?”
“That was a long time ago. And we made friends with the guests quickly. Look at Major and Glory.”
“You’re welcome to make friends with Larry the electrician, although I doubt he’ll be moving in. He’ll be up in that hot attic checking the wiring, but I’m sure he’d love a piece of Bert’s pie.”
“I know you’re poking fun at me, but maybe I’ll do just that. At least let them know those of us who live here care about the house and are keeping a close eye on them.”
“Just remember they’re here doing a job I hired them to do, and I care about the house too.”
Dot reached over and patted my hand. “Don’t mind me. I’m old and set in my ways. I’m sure whatever you have in mind for this place will be just fine. I’m going to check on that pie.”
I hadn’t planned to say anything just yet about my findings in the attic, but since no one else was around, I took advantage of our privacy. “Dot, did you ever know Mags to be . . . well dressed?”
She paused in the hallway. “Well dressed?” She laughed a little with her back still turned. “Not unless you count those hideous hats as formal attire. What in the world makes you ask that?”
“It’s probably nothing. I just found this old picture of her up in the attic yesterday. She was much younger and looked . . . well, different than I ever saw her.”
“Mags was very pretty.” Dot walked back to the table. “Even as she grew older, she still had that beauty, but when I first moved in here, she was a knockout.”
I nodded. Mags had been pretty—the photo beside my bed in New Orleans showed that. But mentally peeling back the layers to the woman she might have once been and actually seeing that younger woman were two very different things.
I wanted to ask about William and the ring too—the words danced on the end of my tongue—but just then, the front door banged open, followed by the sound of work boots on the hardwood and a tinny radio belting out a Spanish love song. Dot pulled the belt on her robe tighter.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Go on and
get changed.”
“I’d love to talk more about this though. Could you show me the photo later?”
I nodded. “It may be nothing. I just thought I’d check.”
“You never know. Mags wore some getups in her life, that’s for sure.” Dot glanced left and right in the hall before hurrying to the stairs, the pie for Larry the electrician long forgotten.
I sat there a minute longer. Dot’s reaction seemed innocent enough, but that hesitant pause before she turned around spoke louder than her casual dismissal of the photo. I’d said it may be nothing, but Mags’s neat hair and prim smile told a different story.
I spent the rest of the morning taking inventory of all the furniture in the house. So much of it had to go—La-Z-Boy recliners, a velour couch with cat scratches along both arms, at least fifteen water-stained occasional tables, even a strange orb-shaped plastic chair that shouldn’t have been allowed out of 1972.
Hidden among the ugliness were a few pieces I could work with. Mags’s chair for writing letters sat in a corner of the main living room. It was an old Chesterfield with nailhead trim, its leather in surprisingly good condition. Even after the invention of e-mail—not to mention texts—Mags kept in touch with former guests by writing letters to them. She always used thick, creamy Crane stationery embossed with a breezy, swirly M in the upper left corner.
Such traditional stationery always seemed out of character for her, but she said it was a sacrilege to use anything else. Saturday was her day for writing, and this chair was the place. Her old cat, Stafford, would sit with her, his hind legs on the back of the chair and his front paws draped over Mags’s shoulders.
I sat in the chair and ran my hands up and down the armrests. Under me, the cushion gave way just enough to create a scoop of soft leather. I picked at a stray cat hair stuck in the seam of the cushion.
A gorgeous old buffet table stood next to the chair under a bank of windows. It had slim drawers on the front and carvings of vines and leaves snaked up its curved legs. Sunlight glinted off the table’s surface, despite the layer of dust. A closer inspection revealed a small key engraved along the edge of one of the drawers. I smiled—the key was becoming a familiar sight—and ran my fingers across the indentation.
Major stuck his head into the room. “What’s the order of business today?”
I stared at him. We hadn’t spoken more than a few polite words since the conversation at the dinner table my first night at the house.
“Put me to work,” he said. “I don’t like to see these other people working on the house while I just sit here. Makes me uncomfortable.”
“Okay, I was about to move some of these older pieces of furniture outside to take to Goodwill. I won’t do much before talking to Dot and Glory, but some of these things are useless.” I gestured to an orange plastic love seat. I loved refinishing things, but I couldn’t do much with spray-painted plastic.
“I’ll give you permission myself. You can’t imagine what it’s like to have to look at some of this stuff every day. I’m no decorator, but even I know when something’s ugly as a three-eyed cat. And I don’t like cats.”
Together, we moved the most offensive pieces outside. While carrying a bulky coffee table to the driveway, he cleared his throat. “Glory tells me I’m not good with apologies,” he said. “The other night at dinner—”
“It’s okay, I understand. If I were in your position, I’m sure I’d feel the same way.”
“I was just caught off guard.” He grunted as we backed down the front steps with the table. “The four of us wouldn’t have been able to take care of this house for too many more years on our own, anyway.”
“I don’t know about that. Y’all have been here so long, the house is a part of you.”
“It’s a part of you too, even if you don’t live here.”
We set the table down and surveyed the furniture we’d amassed in the driveway.
“Who’s going to want that old thing?” Major pointed to a side chair with springs exposed and fabric hanging off the back.
“We’re keeping that one.”
“You’re getting rid of a perfectly good coffee table”—half upholstery, half glass, there was nothing good or perfect about it—“but you’re keeping an old busted chair?”
I smiled. “It’s ugly now, but just wait.” Whenever I saw chairs like this at an estate sale or garage sale, I couldn’t snatch them up fast enough. As long as the wood wasn’t too banged up, it was the easiest thing to refinish and recover. I regularly picked up chairs like this one—stuffing pouring out, ugly fabric, scratched wood—for less than fifty dollars and sold them for a few hundred. I wasn’t going to sell this one though. “It’ll be your favorite chair when I’m done with it.”
Major snorted. “Doubt that.”
He continued shuffling things around outside while I sat in the gravel next to the frayed side chair. Using a pair of pliers I’d found in the kitchen, I ripped the staples out of the upholstery and carefully pulled off the tattered fabric, laying the strips down by my feet. I’d already decided to reupholster it in a cool graphic print to downplay the fussy Rococo design carved into the wood. After a while, Major paused in the shade, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Of course. Just thinking of Mags. She talked about going down there to visit, you know. She even looked into buying an apartment so she’d have a place to stay.”
“In New Orleans?” It wasn’t difficult to imagine Mags meandering through the little streets and alleyways of the Vieux Carré with her flowered hats and ponchos. But still—Mags in New Orleans?
Major nodded. “Especially if bad weather was coming. If there was even a hint of a hurricane out in the Gulf, she’d keep that darn TV on the Weather Channel all day long.” He turned a chair around so it faced me and sat down. “I don’t know if she actually would have gone down there. I can’t imagine her anywhere but here.”
I smiled. She probably would have fit right in, making friends with George the jeweler, Allyn, and all the other misfits.
“She hated being so far from her only family,” Major said. “She figured if you weren’t coming this way very often, she could go to you. Then at least you couldn’t blame your lack of visiting on distance anymore.”
I sighed. “It wasn’t the distance so much as—”
“I know, I know, your shop. I’m just calling it like I see it.”
“Thanks. That hurts,” I said. But he was right. Regardless of my reasons—the still-sore memories of my parents, my suffocation at the hands of small-town life, even my childish embarrassment of Mags and her friends—it had been a mistake to allow so much time to pass between visits. The phone calls hadn’t been enough, even if they were as regular as clockwork.
“Just speaking the truth, young lady.” He folded his handkerchief into a tight square and stuck it in his pocket. “But it’s water under the bridge. You’re here now, and wherever Mags is, I’m sure she’s happy you’ve come.”
He sounded confident, but I wasn’t so sure. What kind of ungrateful granddaughter would I have been if I’d ignored Mr. Bains’s summons to come to the reading of the will? If I’d stayed away from the funeral? If I’d come back to collect Mags’s things long after Dot and the others had moved out?
It hurt to admit it, but those were my first thoughts on the streetcar after talking to Mr. Bains. Of course, they were fleeting—I knew I’d return to Sweet Bay, regardless of whatever memories waited for me. And now, back at the house I thought I’d left for good, I no longer yearned to leave. New Orleans still beckoned, but Mags—the one I never knew—beckoned too.
Later that day, I went into town to buy a few items for Bert.
“Teriyaki? What in the world for?” Major asked when Bert asked me to pick up a bottle for him. “You getting adventurous in your old age?”
“I don’t want Sara to think all I can cook is chicken, butter beans, and cornbread,” Bert said. “She�
�s used to better things in New Orleans. I’ve never made an étouffée, but I can make a good roux. In fact, scratch the teriyaki and pick up some shrimp. We’ll have gumbo instead.” Bert was hunched over a battered church cookbook, thumbing through pages.
“Bert, I’d eat a wooden chair if you cooked it,” I said. “I’m sure whatever you whip up will be delicious. Don’t make something special just for me.”
“Go ahead and pick up shrimp and teriyaki,” he said. “Maybe I’ll combine the two and come up with something new.”
Major wrinkled his nose. “Just stick with chicken and butter beans. You’re good with those.”
I laughed and grabbed my keys. Outside, the air was light and breezy. I inhaled—cut grass, salty air, and the faint scent of coconut. I smiled. Close by, someone was sunbathing on a dock.
I picked up Bert’s ingredients at Grimmerson’s Grocery, then paused on the sidewalk. Paint chips hung in the window of Grant’s Hardware across the street, practically begging me to dive right into my job at The Hideaway, but the diner next door advertised fresh-squeezed lemonade. The day had grown warm, and my thirst won.
I took a deep breath to steady my nerves before opening the door. The last time I stood outside the diner, Mags had bumped into me from behind.
“What are you standing out here for?” she’d asked. “The lemonade is inside, not out on the stoop. I’m sweating through my shirt. Let’s go in.”
But I couldn’t make myself grab the door handle. My parents had been gone less than a year, and my nerves were still raw and exposed. The diner was their place. I’d been afraid to see someone other than my mom manning the register, someone other than my dad slinging plates of catfish and coleslaw across the counter.
In the end, I backed away from the door, bumping into Mags in the process. Red-faced and sweating, and not from the summertime heat, I escaped around the corner and found a bench outside Sandifer’s Music Shop. A few minutes later, I felt Mags’s small hand on my shoulder. I looked up and there she stood, holding a huge Styrofoam cup of lemonade. Her bird’s-nest hat sat askew on her head, one of the birds dislodged from its nest and holding on by a string. With two fingers, she pulled her shirt away from her skin and flapped it back and forth in a lackluster attempt to create a breeze. She kept her other hand on my shoulder, the heat from it radiating into my bones. After a moment, she pointed the straw toward me and offered me a sip.
The Hideaway Page 11
