“Thank-you, Mr. Hayward-Smith,” I told him. Now, all I had to figure out was what the hell I was going to do with it!
“Just ‘Rick,’ ” he said simply. “I actually prefer to be called Rick.” Then he got an impish expression on his face. It looked so out of character that I almost laughed. He looked just like Millie had when she was about to do something mischievous. “Unless you want to keep calling me ‘Mr. Pointy-Nose High-Up Butt’ I can answer to that name, too.”
“No, no, Rick will be fine,” I said quickly. When had he heard me call him those names? Now, it was my turn to feel embarrassed.
“Oh, and Mrs. Louis?”
“Juanita will be fine, thanks,” I said, my cheeks still burning.
“Montana has given me quite an appetite. I’ll have to watch my weight while I’m here. I would like to spend a certain number of weeks at the inn every year. And, when I’m here, do you think you could prevail upon Mr. Gardiner to include catfish and collard greens on the menu more often?” His eyes sparkled with amusement. “Oh, and extra rolls next time, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Louis.” He added in the stiff cadence that only Hayward-Smith could use. “I didn’t have enough to sop up the gravy with.”
“I don’t know what you did or how you did it,” commented Geoff Black, the attorney for Millie’s estate, “but Mr. Hayward-Smith is being very, very generous.”
Not only had Rick dropped the will contest but he had also supplemented the annuity that his mother left to keep up the old house. It was over one hundred years old and there was always something going wrong. Right now, it needed roof repair, a new air-conditioning unit for the top floors and new sidewalks. Rick’s ideas were like Millie’s—practical and creative at the same time. Later, when I told him that he reminded me of his mother, he blushed.
“You don’t know what it means to hear you say that,” he told me. He looked so happy, so different from the man who I had made fun of by calling him names. I kinda felt bad about that. “Funny thing, though . . .”
“Yes?” I said.
“Elva Van Roan said the very same thing, just the other day,” he said thoughtfully.
I almost fell through the floor.
He
was talking to Elva. As far as I knew, the only person around this house who had ever had a conversation with Elva was Millie. I didn’t count myself, of course.
I could have sworn that Millie winked at me from the portrait over the fireplace.
Wednesday’s class was out of control. Because of the Memorial Day holiday, we’d had a long weekend, which was both good and bad. Good to have the time off, Jess and I had spent it visiting his relatives in Boise, bad because it stretched out the time before we got our grades on the test. Chef sauntered into the classroom as he always did, always on time yet never appearing to be in a hurry. He greeted us all and reached into the black leather portfolio that he carried his class notes in. Like second-graders, we got real quiet now that the teacher was here.
“Ladies, gentlemen,” Chef greeted us in his usual continental way. “I am very pleased to return your examinations. I must say that I was surprised at the results but I think I can safely say that this group has promise. Some of you will have done much better than you thought, some of you did as you expected, and others of you will be disappointed.” He looked around the room as he said this. Olympia flipped her hair over her shoulders (it’s a wonder she didn’t snap her neck doing that) and straightened her body a little when Chef’s glance fell on her.
I sighed. Marc, who sat next to me, was antsy. He was drumming his fingers on the desk and bouncing his knee up and down. The tapping and the smacking of his sneakered foot on the floor were more than I could take in my state of nerves.
“Will you quit it?” I whispered loudly, glaring at him. I have adopted Marc. He reminds me of Randy and Rashawn rolled up into one. He has Rashawn’s focus and tenacity (unfortunately, of course, Rashawn is using his focus on illicit drug sales) and Randy’s playfulness and sense of humor. And he’s hyper. Randy could never sit still for a minute.
“Sorry,” he said.
Chef handed Marc his paper and moved on to me. I held my breath. I didn’t want to look at it. Chef said, “Hard work and persistence always pay off, Madame Louis.”
B-plus.
I got a
B-plus
!!!!
“Good shit!” Marc exclaimed, looking over my shoulder. “You’ve been holding out on me! You’ve got this stuff down cold!”
He had squeaked by with a C-plus but he was grateful for that. I glanced around the class. Some of the other students were grinning, some were not. And, which was very interesting, Olympia looked as if she was about to cry. I found out later that she’d gotten a D. I was stunned.
Marc was not surprised, though.
“High expectations, low preparations, mediocre results,” he said, using uncharacteristically scholarly words.
“Where did you get that pearl of wisdom?” I asked him as we moved into our teams to tackle petits fours.
“My father,” he said glumly. “He was always telling us shit like that when we were growing up.”
“Sounds as if your father is a very wise man,” I told him. We both found out later that Marc was right—Olympia hadn’t studied as much as the rest of us because advanced mathematics was her forte and she felt confident that she would do well. Marc and I had studied our butts off. Our confidence had only extended as far as putting the right name on the paper. Beyond that, we had just said a prayer and hoped that we had done enough.
I guess we had.
“Don’t swish the cake around in the fondant,” Chef instructed, the Irish lilt in his voice rising as he belted out the message. “Just give it a good dip, turn it slightly, and let the mixture drip down the sides. Good, Alisa.”
Marc’s first effort barely had any of the sticky white icing on it at all. His second was at the opposite end of the spectrum; there was fondant dripping down the fork. Dipping petits fours is a two-handed operation, not one of my strong points. So I watched Marc for a few moments then took a deep breath and moved to try a few myself. Just as I grabbed the fork, I heard Chef’s voice from behind me.
“Ah, Juanita. Let’s see them.”
I sighed. Speared the little square one, said a quick prayer, and held it over the creamy white icing. As I dunked it in, it promptly slid off the fork. Oh, no! For half a second, I didn’t know what to do! But, just as the bottom half of the cake started to disappear into the quicksand-like icing, I stabbed at the little cake cube, speared it, and rescued it from the quagmire. Marc and some of my classmates applauded.
“Good save,” Marc said with admiration.
Chef cleared his throat.
“You’ll get the hang of it sooner or later,” he said, not commenting on my miraculous rescue.
I decided that I had done something marvelous. Let’s face it, you haven’t lived until you’ve dropped a petit four into a bowl of fondant and recovered it, one-handed, using a plastic fork.
Chapter Fifteen
M
ontana finally shrugged off winter and plunged right into a summer for the weather record books: hot and dry one minute, hot and steamy the next. For the first time in twenty years, there were forest fires north of Paper Moon near Glacier. It got pretty scary. The rains were very slow in coming. And when they did come, the moisture they brought wasn’t enough to put out a Girl Scout campfire. I could smell the dark, peatlike aroma of the burning trees when I stood on the porch of the diner in the morning. Some days, the air was light and sweet like a spicy French perfume—woodsy, dark, full of amber, and trimmed with smoke. On the other mornings, the burning timber smoke was thick and persistent. It glued itself to my lungs and made me cough. It stung my eyes. Sometimes I wondered if Montana would burn up and blow away on a future breeze. It didn’t. The fires eventually burned themselves out. Montana remained.
The fires painted the early evening skies of late summer the colors of fresh peach and strawberry ice cream but we knew that the beauty was dangerous and false. Arcadia Lake rose and fell like a yo-yo. I watered my geraniums first thing in the morning and last thing before sundown. Many days, it was too hot to be outside at all. At dusk, it cooled down, but you had to box with mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds. They had the flying expertise of World War II pilots swooping down out of the sky, making a perfect landing on an uncovered arm or neck. You needed a baseball bat to swat at them. There were a lot of days when the weather felt more like Paper Moon, Arizona, than it did Paper Moon, Montana. And, as people always do, we complained about the weather. We’d whined when the snowdrifts were up to our butts. Now we whined again because the thermometer was stuck at ninety degrees and we daydreamed of cooler days.
August came and, as the calendar moved into double digits, the evening temperatures began to drop, half a degree at a time, hardly noticeable at first, except at night. Sometimes, I thought I smelled frost on the evening air, just a hint of ice. A whisper to us that fall was on its way, that seasons change and nothing stays the same.
Peaches’s Purple Passion roared into the parking lot of the diner one late-August afternoon. I hadn’t seen Peaches in three months but we’d traded e-mails. Well, she had, anyway. I’m better at pressing “delete” than “enter,” a problem if you’ve deleted the message you are supposed to reply
to.
Dracula barked to let us know that we had another customer then went back to his nap. The rig stirred up a lot of gravel and dust but its wax job was still in place. The truck finally settled itself into its city block–sized parking space and the engine idled down. I heard a door slam. Stacy walked around the front of the truck cab, waving.
“There’s Stacy!” I exclaimed, heading for the door. It had been awhile since I’d seen her—Stacy usually drives the eastern routes. I liked Stacy—she was as gregarious as Peaches and just as hardworking. When she drove, she liked to listen to Stephen King thrillers and opera.
The Shining
and
The Magic Flute
were her favorites. She said that the horror stories sometimes scared her so much that she was afraid to get out of the truck!
“Juanita, you’re a sight for sore eyes!” Stacy said, giving me a warm hug. Tall and slim where Peaches was shorter and stockier, Stacy has short, dark curly hair and green eyes.
“It’s good to see you and good to see this place.” Stacy rubbed her hands together. Stacy only looked like a toothpick—this was a woman who could throw down some food. “What does Jess have good to eat?”
“Yeah, what’re the specials? I’m starving half to death!” Peaches yelled from the cab. She had her elbow on the windowsill and was grinning like a fool. “I hope you have some grub, Miss Juanita. None of that highbrow stuff you’re learning about in coolin’ airey school.”
I held my hand up to my forehead to block the late-afternoon sun.
“We might have a crumb or two. Are you going to come down from your throne, Your Highness?” I shouted up at her. “ ’Cause if you think we have curb service, you are going to be disappointed.”
“I need to report y’all to the Better Business Bureau,” Peaches commented, shaking her head in mock dismay. “Surly cook and no curbside service. What’s happening to this country? Not at all like the good old days.”
I laughed. Peaches is so silly. And then I stopped laughing. Stacy had swung the purple door open and was now helping a
very
pregnant Peaches maneuver down the steps. My mouth dropped open.
“Well, this is a fine thing,” Peaches said loudly to Stacy, using a sarcastic tone. She grunted a little as she slowly put one foot then the other down on the ground. “You would think she’d never seen a pregnant woman before. It isn’t polite to stare, Juanita.” Her eyes sparkled. Beside her, Stacy smiled proudly.
I don’t think I had ever seen a belly so
big!
“How did this happen?” I asked, and then shut my mouth. I gave her a hug. Well, I tried to give her a hug. I ended up hugging her from the side because her belly was in the way!
Peaches gave me a sideways look.
“OK . . . but I thought that . . .” I looked at Stacy. She grinned and started rubbing Peaches’s back.
They had talked about Stacy having a baby last year but I didn’t hear anything more about it for a long time. So I just forgot about the whole thing. Then I remembered Arizona and Peaches’s visit to Nina, her giving up cigarettes and beer, all of a sudden, and the fact that she’d looked under the weather for several months in the spring. Not to mention that her appetite had fallen off. The day Peaches eats a piece of toast and ginger ale? I should have known then but, with all of the bugs and viruses going around, I just thought she was having a hard time getting over that flu.
Peaches shrugged as we moved toward the diner. Stacy and I walked, Peaches waddled.
“We had some tests done. Stacy had some issues.” Peaches sighed and stretched a little. “I didn’t have any issues sooooo . . .” She gave her belly a gentle pat. “Here we are! All of us!”
“Lord, yes,” I said. Together Stacy and I helped Peaches up the steps. “And should you be gallivanting around the countryside in that truck?”
Both women laughed.
“This is her last trip, doctor’s orders,” Stacy answered. “The baby is due in early November but they don’t think she’ll make it until then.”
“I don’t think I’ll make it until tonight,” Peaches groaned. “I feel as if I’m carrying around the Superdome.”
“Baby?” I looked at the Mount Everest–sized mound around Peaches’s middle. “Are you sure that there is only one in there?”
Peaches chuckled.
“Some days it feels like a rugby team, fighting and wrestling. But the ultrasound shows one child. The little twerp rolled up into a ball so we can’t tell whether it will be a girl or a boy.”
Jess had opened the door for us and shook his head when he saw Peaches.
“Guess we’ll have to open a day care center,” he commented. He had Teishia in his arms. They were both eating Popsicles and had sticky faces.
“You see what I have to deal with.” I sighed.
Where was that pack of Wet Ones?
“How do you feel about being a godmother?” Peaches asked.
“Oh, I think I can squeeze you in,” I said, giving her another sideways hug. “Somewhere between the puffed pastry and petits fours, Millie’s bed-and-breakfast, and Big Bird.”
Business, Math II, Menu planning, Labor Day, my Spanish lessons . . . and a trip to Mexico.
Once upon a time, I had a COTA bus life. I got up, ate the same kind of cereal, smoked the same brand of cigarettes, and got on the same bus every day, going to the same job. I thought the same thoughts and figured that, if I lived long enough, I might have thirty more years or so of the same thing: bus passes, empty Coke bottles, a blaring TV, fried chicken, and church twice on Sundays and once on Wednesday nights to eat up the long empty moments when I got old. It was a safe enough life, if you could call it a life. Without hopes or dreams, you don’t have much to look forward to. I didn’t allow myself to hope. Dreams were something that other people had.
Fat chance of that happening to me now. I have so many hairpin turns, sudden starts and stops, that it is a wonder that I don’t have whiplash. And I don’t have any more answers about the secret of life than I did when I started. If anything, I have more questions.
The inn is booked every week until it closes in October and I’m busier than a sand flea on a beach. For the first time in my life, I am a businesswoman.
Millie’s son, Rick, has been as good as his word, better, actually. The old house got a face-lift as soon as the weather broke: roof, air-conditioning, sidewalks, paint, everything. A very fancy and very expensive magazine ad has kept the phones ringing. And I am going to write a cookbook. I already have the title:
Juanita’s Put-Your-Foot-In-It Cookbook.
Randy is spending his vacation in Montana. He and Jess are “refining” the dinner menus at the diner. They are quite a pair.
“Just don’t get too fancy,” I have warned them. “A slice of blood-rare meat and a sprig of parsley do not a decent meal make. Especially in this country.”
They ignore me, but as I walk away, I hear Jess ask Randy, “What does ‘suddity’ mean?”
Teishia is staying with us for a while and she is a joy. Randy brought her with him for a visit. She starts Saint Dominic’s Pre-School in September. I guess Bertie was listening to some of the things I said.
There are no heartwarming endings there. Bertie has come a long way: She has a new job making almost twice what she did at Kroger’s. She has a new apartment and gets “A”s in the business courses that she takes. Randy knows her boyfriend, Victor. Says that he is a gentle, hard-working man who is good to my daughter and good to Teishia.
But Bertie and I don’t have cozy mother-daughter chats. I wish we did. We don’t call each other to chitchat about something we saw on the TV. She does not ask me for advice. When I said good-bye to Bertie last winter, we did not hug. I see Mary and Mignon together and I wish that things could be different. But wishing is not enough.
Rashawn is still a businessman—the demand for his products has yet to dry up. He is coldly polite when we talk on the phone, which is hardly ever. No sunshine and blue skies there, either.
I graduate next year in May. I will have an associate’s degree. It’s not a PhD but it is a start. Chefs are a hot commodity. I have received offers from resorts, spas (including the Yellow Cactus because Nina refuses to give up on me), hotels, and luxury cruise lines. Next spring, I become a woman with credentials. I will have to decide what to do with them.
“The Ritz-Carlton? Humph. That sounds suddity, if you ask me,” Jess said, smugly.
My mother said that I was a slow learner. It took me nearly forty years to figure out that she was right. I have been living life backward, picking up pieces and parts of the lessons of living in the afternoon of my life, lessons that other folks learned in morning kindergarten. My head got real hard from the knocks, bumps, and bruises. And my soul had no protection, because I had forgotten that I had a soul until it was hardly there at all, just a small puff of smoke left over from a match struck two minutes ago, the rumor of a memory. Just before it was too late, I reached out with both hands, grabbed at my soul, and pulled it back before it slipped away and left me forever. Souls don’t stick around to see if you’re going to grow into them or not. They have better things to do.
I’m starting over now, going off to taste and see what I missed. Some of my destinations are new and unfamiliar; others are roads worn down by my footsteps but now I walk them wearing a different pair of shoes. Not all of my trips are journeys of the foot. More often now, I am a voyager of the spirit, and those are the journeys that can hurt the most but bring the most joy.
I move, slowly and with aching joints, but I move, even if I don’t know exactly where I’m going. I know that I will be OK. I have found my place in this world. And it has nothing to do with geography. A fish doesn’t drown in water and birds don’t fall out of the air. Every creature that God makes flies best when it flies in its own way and in its own space. And I have found mine.
Jess and I don’t talk about the future. We take each morning as it comes, we work hard, we love hard, and we get on with life. There is a fork coming in the road in a few months—for both of us. I might be cruising in the Mediterranean next year this time or I might be flipping crepes for spa guests in Sonoma Valley, or baking pecan brownies for the Eagle Scouts in Mason, and popping toast for breakfast guests at Millie’s place. Lately, Jess has talked about selling the diner and retiring. To go into business with
me.
I still read when I have the time. But I have noticed something about the endings of my books. Maybe it was there all the time and I wasn’t ready to see it. At the end of a romance novel, the money is in the bank, the villain has been locked up forever, and the heroine has her man. Love triumphant. The endings of the sci-fi sagas are not as sugary—the villain is lost in space somewhere but he, she, or it will be back in the sequel. In the meantime, though, the two suns are shining, the galaxy is safe, and there is, finally, enough food and water to feed the colony for a while until they can figure out what to do next. In the westerns, the cattle can graze, the coyote are dead, and the water rights have been protected. And in highbrow literature, the protagonist or the antagonist (it depends on your point of view) is either ready to commit suicide or close the draperies and sit in the dark, enlightened and alone but not lonely.
This is fiction. Real life falls somewhere between “they lived happily ever after” and “life is hell and then you die.” So you dance along the edge of a tin roof and the rain soaks you and you dodge the lightning bolts and you slip once or twice in your high heels and, sometimes, you almost fall off. But if you don’t, you’ll see a rainbow and it will have been worth it.
I didn’t find a new life in Paper Moon, Montana. I made myself one. That wise woman who said that there are years that ask you questions and there are years that answer left out something. There are years that answer with more questions.