Man, was I wrong.
The folks at First Presbyterian were not ready. And neither was I.
I wore a black sweater and matching long skirt—an appropriate “going to a meeting” outfit. Looking back on it, I should have worn a cocktail dress and heels.
Millie had written instructions for her funeral. She had outlined in detail the music, flowers, reception hall, type of champagne, hors d’oeuvres, and the location of that Maine bocker suit she’d wanted to be buried in. Millie didn’t leave anything to chance.
She had an accomplice. Reverend Hare had grown up on the farm next to the Tilsons, having lived with them for a while when he was a boy after his mother died. Millie was like his big sister. He did anything she told him to. And that included having a jazz trio soothe the mourners instead of the pipe organ, testimonials from Millie’s friends, including a Texas oilman and a few retired Follies Bergere chorus girls, and the recorded strains of The Preservation Hall Band playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” as the casket was carried from the church. There were some gasps when a heavily made-up and obviously male, but dressed as a female, soloist gave a moving rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” but, other than that, I thought the residents of Mason, Paper Moon, and other parts of Lake, Silver Lake, Mineral, and Missoula counties in southwestern Montana coped pretty well with the unorthodox service. They listened quietly to the sermons—all three of them—given by (in order) a Buddhist priest, a female Druid (if I’m lyin’, I’m flyin’), and the accommodating Reverend Thomas Hare, on behalf of the Presbyterians. Later, the Reverend confided that he’d had one of the Altar Guild ladies standing by with smelling salts, water, and pillows in case any of the mourners were overcome.
After the service, the mourners were invited to pay their respects to the family and bring their dancing shoes. That’s what it said at the bottom of the program.
“Bring your dancing shoes.”
In my experience, postfuneral activity means fried chicken in the church basement or church-lady lasagna at the family home. I should have known that Millie Tilson would not have anything as boring as that. Folks were invited to pay their respects at the Mason Ramada Inn. And it was not a quiet, solemn pat-the-family-on-the-back-and-we’ll-keep-you-in-our-prayers affair. It was a cabaret.
There were at least a hundred fifty people there, maybe more. Millie had contacted the motel’s manager in advance (his grandmother was one of her bridge partners) so when he found out about her passing, he knew just what he was supposed to do.
Jess and I stood in the corner like two wallflowers sipping our Dom Perignon (slowly, because we knew how much it cost) and trying not to stare too hard at Millie’s friends, both Montanans and “others,” dancing around the room in a conga line. There was a live band, champagne, and hors d’oeuvres trucked in from a la-di-da place in Missoula. (California rolls and smoked salmon were not on the banquet menu of the Mason Ramada.) Not only were the townsfolk of Paper Moon in attendance (the whole town closed down to go to Millie’s funeral) but the colorful members of Millie’s past lives (and she’d had many) were also there. The parade of characters made cable television seem stale.
The six-foot-three-inch transvestite soloist came with three similarly dressed colleagues from Miami’s South Beach. They’d known Millie when she’d owned a condo there.
“Girl,” gushed Patsy Pinkman, a nearly seven-foot-tall wonder who could salsa in high heels better than I walked in sneakers and who had once played men’s college basketball, “Millie gave the best partays. Champagne fountains, tables groaning with food, great music, and the cutest waiters . . .” He batted his inch-long eyelashes at me. “I’ll miss the old girl. Here’s to her!” He lifted the squatty little glass of neat bourbon and dropped it with one gulp.
“Takes a real man to do that,” Jess observed solemnly. Together, we watched Patsy P, as she, er, he, liked to be called, move to the center of the floor and start an electric-slide line. Reverend Hare and Mr. and Mrs. Olson joined them.
A whole plane of Texans had come up from Austin and San Antonio, business colleagues of Millie’s last husband, the oilman Paul Daniels. They did the Texas two-step to Bootsy Collins in their ostrich and alligator cowboy boots. The staff of Francine’s Beauty World—from Francine with her platinum blonde twelve-inch-high beehive to the shampoo girl with fuchsia-colored tresses—came, bringing their dates. Even the members of Millie’s creative writing class at the college stopped by. These were mostly college kids wearing black (but not for mourning) with studs in their noses and ears. They congregated together in the corners of the ballroom looking like latter-day vampires, waiting for the food train to arrive and only becoming animated when someone put on (by mistake) a heavy-metal CD. It was quite a bunch.
I two-stepped with a man named “Bud” for a little while and tried to keep up with the electric slide without getting trampled but had to give up the floor when the showgirls joined us. We’d started doing “the Bump” and, with my wide hips, I was afraid that I’d bump into one of them and break a bone—my bones, not theirs.
The retirement home of former Follies Bergere dancers was well represented by ten ladies who claimed to have been in the chorus line with Millie back in the twirties. When I asked what that meant, one of them (a striking woman with navel orange–colored hair) cackled, “Darling, we can’t remember if we danced with her in the twenties or in the thirties, so we just put the two together.”
“Barbara,” one of the other ladies chimed in. “It might have been the forties!”
They made quite a sight.
Now, Jess is rarely impressed or surprised by anything. But the sight of these old ladies moving around the dance-floor ballroom of the Mason Ramada was more than he was ready for. They danced with canes and without. Some of them wore sneakers, some of them wore forties-style platform heels. One thing they had in common, though. I have more gray in my head than any of them had in theirs.
“These old bats better be careful, they’ll break a hip!” he exclaimed as one of them twirled by in the arms of one of the “boys” from South Beach. Both she and
he
were wearing platform shoes.
“Watch your language,” I shouted back to him. The music was really loud. “Not ‘old,’ ‘mature.’ ”
“Mature, hell,” snorted Jess, watching one of the brightly rouged octogenarians scamper across the floor doing the salsa with a walker. Now, that was a sight. “These women are
artifacts
!”
Mountain stomped by with his girlfriend on his arm, moving like a tree stump with legs. He and his girl are cute together but they don’t quite fit. For whatever reason, Mountain likes to date the tiniest, skinniest little girls that he can find. “I like to pretend that they’re Tinkerbell,” he says.
“Mountain, that’s sick,” Jess tells him.
Mountain is now dating Lawra Swenson, all five feet and ninety-five pounds of her. Watching them dance together is like watching a Saint Bernard cha-cha with a Chihuahua. Mountain looks like he’s fighting off a swarm of bees and Lawra looks as if she’s dancing with the Jolly White Giant. Very interesting.
“Excuse me!”
I jumped because it was so noisy and the owner of this comment had just yelled in my ear to make sure that I’d hear him.
He was a tall, thin, unassuming man, wearing wire-rim eyeglasses and a business suit. He had perfectly cut light brown-colored hair and watery blue eyes. He looked like a lawyer.
He handed me his business card. He
was
a lawyer.
“You’re Juanita Louis, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am!” I yelled back.
“I want to introduce myself,” he said very slowly and loudly, “I’m Geoff Black. I’m Mrs. Daniels’s attorney.”
“Mrs. Who?”
“Mrs. Daniels. Sorry, Miss Tilson. She hired me when she was Mrs. Paul Hillman Daniels.”
Right, the oil man.
“Oh,” I answered. “Nice to meet you.” It was funny thinking of Millie as a “Mrs.” Anybody. She had always just been Millie Tilson, even though everyone knew that she’d been through more husbands than there were holidays in a year.
“I need to confirm your mailing address,” he yelled.
The band had been playing “Super Freak” and the fossilized chorus girls, the boys from South Beach, and the Mason City council were on the dance floor.
“My what?” I thought I heard him say that he liked my dress.
“Your mailing address,” he repeated, moving closer to my ear. “Box 4, Rural Route 17, Paper Moon, Montana?”
“That’s the diner but that’s OK, I’ll get it,” I told him. “What are you sending?”
“You are listed as a beneficiary in Mrs., um, Ms. Tilson’s will. Each beneficiary has to be notified pursuant to probate law.” He said this as if to make himself seem more lawyerly or something. It helped because the last time I saw him, he was dancing but looked as if he had ten-ton boulders on his feet.
“Oh. OK,” I said because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“I’ll be in touch because—” Mr. Black started to say something else but was interrupted by the deejay’s announcement that the conga line was forming at the opposite end of the room. One of the mummified showgirls grabbed him by the arm and pushed him in that direction. He waved back at me with an apologetic expression. The showgirl gave me a wink of one heavily mascaraed eye.
“He’s got a cute ass,” she yelled over her shoulder.
On the way back to Paper Moon, it suddenly came to me what the attorney had said.
Jess thought that the whole thing was funny.
“Got the old woman to write you into her will, huh? ”
“She probably just left me her old movie collection. Or her shoes. We wear the same size.”
Jess made a face as he turned the corner.
“You don’t want her shoes.”
“No, I don’t . . .” I murmured, looking at the night sky. I couldn’t fill Millie’s shoes. I wished she’d left me her spirit and her nerve. I wish she’d left me the strength to say “I can” instead of “I can’t.” I was thinking about the white envelope from the community college that I hadn’t opened yet—the one that might hold my future inside. I was thinking about my last conversation with Nina, about being her business partner.
“I didn’t like Will Rogers as much as other folks did,” Millie had said once while she was working on her laptop, her glasses perched on her nose, her fingers flying. “But that man did have a few wise things to say. Said once that even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”
It’s true.
I looked across the highway toward the street where Millie’s house sat near the top of the hill. The old place would always be “Millie’s House,” no matter who lived there, no matter what happened to it. It was dusk and the house was lit up, including the Tower Room, Elva Van Roan’s third-floor domain.
Yeah. She’d probably just left me her old movie collection.
Chapter Six
J
ust when life gets hectic and overwhelming, some pious soul will say, in a back-of-the-church whisper, “God never gives us more than we can handle.” They don’t know what they’re talking about. Here’s the gospel according to Juanita: Sometimes, God sneaks a quick one in just to see how much we can take before our legs buckle. It’s a test. But it’s hard to know, when it’s all over, whether you’ve passed or not. That comes later.
That’s the way I felt about my homecoming to Paper Moon. It was bad enough that I came back because there was a death in the family, so to speak. But from Millie’s funeral on, it was just one damn thing after another. My great adventure began to stall like a ’78 Oldsmobile Deuce and a quarter left out in the cold too long.
The Thursday after Millie’s farewell party, I couldn’t sleep so I got up before the sun. Jess stuck his nose out from under the covers.
“Juanita, Randolph starts the breakfast run on Thursday mornings. The diner’s covered, you don’t have to go in.”
I pulled the blanket back over his head.
“So, I’ll help. I’m up, I might as well do something,” I told him. It was as if I had real ants in my pants—I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t sit still. I showed up at the diner at six o’clock in the morning just as I used to do, was tackled by Dracula, had to change the station on the radio (I think Mountain tuned it to “easy listening” on purpose), and found the breakfast supplies laid out for me as if I was an executive chef. It was a good thing that some of the snow had melted, though, or I would have slid all the way down Kaylin’s Ridge Road. Randolph, another one of Jess’s young cousins, and I worked side by side to get things ready. Fish, Abel, and the boys stomped through the door at six-forty-five sharp, even though it wasn’t fishing weather, knocking the snow off their boots and making a ruckus as usual. They didn’t seem surprised to see me behind the counter.
Fish spat a wad of tobacco into the spittoon and gave me a wave.
Abel said, “How you doing, Juanita?” like he saw me every day and life picked up from there.
Sort of.
That next Saturday, the furnace went out and even though we shut down for dinner (you can’t eat gourmet food if you’re freezin’ to death), I still cooked breakfast that morning for a dining room full of people! (It was a little chilly, but this is Montana.) Jess built a huge fire in the stone fireplace and I cooked up eggs, sausage, and my new Sedona Southwest Omelet like I was Frontier Sallie. Shoot, my great-grandparents sharecropped in Georgia. You think they had central heating? Then, we had a heat wave. The sun came out; the outside thermometer read fifty-five degrees, and most of the snow melted. Some of those fools were walking around without coats. The creek flooded and River Walk Road was closed. Apparently, Mother Nature has hot flashes, too.
But it was too good to last. A front came in from Alaska. The temperature dropped like a stone in the bathtub. And so did everything else. I remembered something my mother had said: “If it weren’t for bad luck, we wouldn’t have any luck at all!”
“Momma, I’m not sure how to tell you this,” Randy said slowly over the telephone.
Oh, Lordy, I was ready to find a nice, dark closet, walk in, and lock the door.
Rashawn had been arrested for drug trafficking and his case was going to a grand jury. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. Well, I guess it could have been worse. Whenever I get a phone call about that boy, I’m scared they’re going to tell me he’s been shot or worse.
“How did you find out?” I asked. Rashawn didn’t call me anymore when he got picked up. We’d had that conversation. I had told him not to call me to put up bail, get him out, or any other such stuff. It had gotten to be too much of a habit.
“Saw him yesterday, he came by for lunch,” Randy answered.
Came by for lunch? That was a picture that I wanted to see: Rashawn sitting at a little bistro table, munching on a Caesar salad, drinking sparkling water.
“He’s doing well?” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I’m sure the owner of Sixes and Sevens was just tickled to have a nearly indicted drug dealer in his place.
Randy snorted and, at first, I thought that he was laughing. But when he spoke again, I heard the bitterness in his voice.
“Oh, yes, ma’am,” he answered. “He’s real proud of himself, says he’ll beat this thing. He has the most expensive lawyer in town, some guy named Harrison, and posted bail faster than you could say . . . shoot. He must have some pretty good . . . contacts.”
“Moving up in the world,” I said, more to myself than to Randy. I guess the days of calling me at 3:00
AM
asking for two hundred dollars were long gone. Rashawn was in the big leagues now and leaving the little people behind.
“Didn’t mean to spoil your day, Momma,” Randy apologized. “Just thought you’d want to know.”
I knew that Randy meant well but I wasn’t sure I did want to know. Rashawn moves in a dimension that I do not want to visit.
The thirty-degree drop in temperature froze the pipes in the diner and left us with a mess in the basement and a very happy plumber.
But the phone still worked.
“Momma!” Now, it was Bertie. I held my breath. My daughter was doing OK, much better than when I left, but, like Rashawn, I only heard from her secondhand through Randy. She didn’t call me directly unless she wanted something real bad. After about twenty seconds of small talk, I could tell that she couldn’t stand it anymore. She was ready to plunge in. “I was wondering . . . could you come home and keep Teishia for me? Just for spring quarter?”
Just for spring quarter? Oh, is that all?
I felt my hair turning white before I could answer. The last time Bertie left Teishia with me “just for” a certain unspecified period of time, she was gone for four days and I never even got a phone call. I loved T but, let’s face it, I have done children. Hadn’t planned on doing much more with the grandbabies than hug ’em, buy ’em toys, and hand ’em back. And what made Bertie think I wanted to “come home”?
“Bertie, I hadn’t planned on coming back to Ohio . . . anytime soon.”
“Oh, then I could bring her out there,” she answered without missing a beat.
Bless her heart, this is not a girl to take no for an answer. She always has a backup plan.
You’d better think again,
I said to myself.
“No, Bertie, I don’t think so,” I told her. The last time I made arrangements for a babysitter, Ronald Reagan was president. Or was it Jimmy Carter?
My daughter was not to be put off by my hesitation, the fact that I had my own life, or that I said, “No.” This is a gal who will definitely run a corporation someday. She has no compunctions about running over anybody. She went on with the conversation like I hadn’t said anything at all.
“Can you let me know by the fifteenth, so I can make my plans?”
Her plans?
Every damn thing at once,
I said to myself, my stomach tying itself into a knot.
By the time I got off the telephone, Jess had the plumbing estimate so we were both in a bad mood. The damage was bad and, what was even worse, it would take a couple of days to fix so the diner had to remain closed. Jess was in the growling stage and I wasn’t too far behind him.
Then the mailman showed up with a certified letter. For me.
“It’s from the attorney, Geoff Black, the guy I met at the funeral,” I reminded him, reading off the four names on the letterhead. “Remember? He said that I was a beneficiary.”
“Prob’bly left you the damn cats,” Jess grumbled from behind the counter, turning off the lights as he locked up. Jess hates cats.
My mood wasn’t any better than his. Rashawn in trouble again. Bertie making plans to drop a three-year-old in my lap. All the new possibilities dissolved. My old life was chasing me and I couldn’t run fast enough. I wondered what else I would have to deal with.
“Or else she left me the damn ghost,” I murmured.
It was worse than that.
Millie had left me the B&B: house, cats, ghost,
everything.
This is the part in the romance novel where the heroine faints. I would have, too, if I’d known how.
Since I was too stunned to faint, I just sat in the chair in attorney Geoff Black’s office with my eyes bugged out and my mouth hanging open. My brain wasn’t working so the words I’d started to say wouldn’t come out of my mouth. I was so surprised at what the attorney had said, I inhaled but didn’t exhale. I must have looked as if I was about to go into shock.
“Ms. Louis, are you all right?” Geoff Black leaned forward with a worried expression on his face. “Do you need a glass of water?”
“Juanita, you OK?” Jess patted me on the arm.
I was staring at Mr. Black.
“She left me the whole house?” I asked. A stupid question. What did I think, that Millie was going to leave me the first floor and leave the rest to somebody else?
Geoff smiled slightly.
“Yes, the whole house and a small annuity for upkeep. Mrs. Daniels, er, Miss Tilson said that old houses are like old showgirls. They need maintenance every once in a while.”
That certainly was something Millie would have said, all right. But, why me?
“What about her family?” I asked. I thought about her sister and Horace and her other nieces and nephews. Geoff shook his head and glanced down at the paper.
“She’s left them some very generous bequests. They won’t have any complaints. Miss Tilson was a wealthy woman. But she felt that you would be the perfect person to carry on her legacy.”
Me? Millie’s legacy? With the tentacles from my past life reaching out to pull me back? What was she thinking?
“Congratulations, Miz Louis,” Jess said. “You got yourself a business.”
His eyes danced with merriment and he smiled.
Ask and ye shall receive.
Well, I’d been thinking about running a business. A bed-and-breakfast business. Now, I had one right in my lap.
Geoff Black’s cough brought me out of my daydream.
“I would hold on the congratulations for the moment,” he said. I could hear thunderclouds in his voice. He fumbled with the papers in his hands. “I’m not sure how to say this, Ms. Louis, but . . . well, there may be a slight impediment to the bequest. Nothing to really worry about.” He paused. “I don’t think.”
“Slight” was not the word I would have used to describe the “impediment.”
“The will has been contested. A hearing hasn’t been set yet but I expect the papers to be filed soon and then Judge McGriff will set a date.”
“By who?”
“I’ll handle the will contest hearing,” Geoff went on, not answering my question. “The complainant alleges that Miss Tilson was not of sound mind when she made her will and that all bequests are void. If that happens, the estate reverts to the heirs as dictated by probate law when a person dies intestate.” He paused for a moment. “Because of Millie’s, well, eccentric behavior . . . it could be a challenging case.”
Ask a lawyer where he’s going, he’ll tell you where he’s been.
“Who’s contesting the will?”
“Oh, sorry. In this case, it’s pretty simple. It means that Miss Tilson’s entire estate would go to one person. Her son.”
“Her son?”
Jess and I answered in a duet.
The lawyer smiled sheepishly.
“I get that a lot,” he said. “It isn’t really common knowledge that Millie had a son, even in Paper Moon where everybody knows everybody’s business or
thinks
that they know everybody’s business. But Millie did have her secrets and, unlike most folks around here, she was pretty good at keeping them. I’ve handled her legal affairs for some time but . . . well, attorney-client privilege being what it is . . .”
“Who is . . . where is . . . was he born in Montana?” I was recovering from the shock. But I wasn’t too shocked to be nosy. “Or is that information privileged?” I asked, using his word.
Geoff shrugged his shoulders.
“Not anymore. At least half the town should know by now. Her son was born in Kenya, brought up in the UK, educated in the UK and the United States. He’s very wealthy, like the old-time tycoons. It’s quite a story.”
And then I remembered that I had heard at least part of it—a story that Millie told me one summer night when the sky was so dark and clear that you could see the stars back to forever; a love story about a dancer and a wealthy farmer, set in Kenya. But was it a story—a short story that she had told me was for her creative writing class at the UM Extension—or was it true? Now, the words were coming back to me and I remembered the faraway look in Millie’s eyes when she spoke them. I remembered the purring of Asim, the Siamese cat who she’d held in her lap.
She knew that, while it was easy to stay in paradise, it was better, even braver perhaps, to leave. She still had mountains of her own to climb. Even though she left everything she ever loved in his hands.
What she’d left in his hands was her baby. Her story wasn’t make-believe at all. Dear Millie.
“So, what do I do now?” I asked. I felt as if someone had given me a birthday present, changed their mind, and taken it back, wrapping paper, tape, bow, and all.
“Until the hearing, which will probably take place in six weeks, the will stands, as written . . . more or less,” Geoff added uncertainly.
That wasn’t helpful. I felt a stone settle in my stomach.
“Oh, and you might want to get involved with the inn,” Geoff answered, closing his file folder. “During the interim.”
I wanted to melt into a puddle and just drip away.
“What about . . . the son? What’s his name?”
“Broderick Tilson Hayward-Smith,” Geoff answered. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Mr. Hayward-Smith is flying in, sometime before the hearing. He wants to stay at the inn, get a feel for the place.” Geoff looked at me sympathetically. “I guess he’s checking out what he hopes will be his inheritance.” Then Geoff frowned. “Although his attorneys say that he’d like to tear down the place and sell the land to the VFW for a parking lot.”
Six weeks? This man was coming in six weeks to stay at the inn? And the lawyer forgot to tell me?