The phone rang just in time to keep me from crawling over that desk and smacking Geoff Black in the head with a stack of file folders.
“Hello?” He listened for a moment then looked up at me. “It’s for you.”
It was Inez and her girdle was in a knot. She needed help and could I stop by? The inn would be full of guests by the weekend with reservations booked last year. There was a list of unreturned phone calls and food to order. Millie’s house had been closed for most of the winter. FedEx had delivered four boxes—of something—and the carpet cleaners were coming on Wednesday. There was a stack of unopened mail, unpaid bills, and one of the cats had disappeared again. She didn’t have to tell me which one.
I grumbled, growled, and just plain bitched all the way back to Paper Moon.
“I thought God didn’t give you more than you could handle,” I complained to Jess. “What did I do to deserve all this?”
Jess did not feel sorry for me.
“Quit complaining!” he shot back. “You’re smart, hardworking, a halfway decent cook.” He winked at me. “You’re a little contrary but I still love you. And you’re more resourceful than most foxes I’ve seen.”
I guess that’s a compliment.
“But I don’t know anything about business and accounting and reservations and . . . besides, I’ve already . . .” I shut my mouth. Nina’s quirky face appeared. The thick white envelope from Arcadia Valley Community and Technical College was still unopened. And there was Bertie.
“Juanita, you just concentrate on keeping that inn from going under until after the probate hearing. Then you can sit back and decide just what you’re going to do in the long run.”
“What kind of people would take a vacation in Montana in the winter? This is stupid!”
“No, this is business,” Jess barked out. “Folks don’t wait on the weather to break as much as they used to. Millie saw the trend and rode the wave. Smart old lady.”
“Crazy old lady,” I said.
“Don’t say that to anyone else,” Jess warned. “If the probate judge agrees with you, you’re out of an inheritance.”
By the end of that week, sitting by Nina’s pool in Sedona doing nothing was beginning to look real good.
Millie’s was a crazy house.
Inez was so upset that half of her sentences were in English and the other half were in Spanish. The “to do” list was longer than a giraffe’s neck. Millie had been sick a long time and things had just been left to take care of themselves.
The refrigerators hadn’t been stocked in a while, the parlor furniture had a half inch of dust on it, and the bedrooms needed to be aired out. There were stacks of unopened mail, newspapers, and magazines from as far back as Christmas, and twenty telephone messages to return. Millie’s e-mail box was “full,” whatever that meant, and . . . did I mention the half inch of dust in the parlor?
I wanted to scream. I wanted to run back out the door and down the road to the diner and lock myself in the pantry. I wanted to tell God, or whoever else was listening, that I was grateful for the gift but that it had been given to the wrong woman. I couldn’t do this. I am not a businesswoman. I didn’t have what it took. I didn’t know how.
I stood in the doorway of Millie’s suite. I hadn’t been here since my last visit to Paper Moon over the holidays. Everything was the same except for the empty space in the middle of her bedroom where the hospital bed had been. I walked around the room and could smell a faint thread of fragrance, the Secret of Venus perfume that Millie wore. Books were stacked on top of her nightstands and her tortoiseshell-tipped cigarette holder was perched on the delicate bone-china ashtray. And, on top of the delicate lady’s desk, which sat in the corner in front of the tower window, were her laptop and her files. Like a quiet spirit, Millie was in every corner of this room. It kind of got to me and, for a moment, I just stood there, frozen, with just my memories of her in my head. Suddenly, I heard bumping on the third floor above, probably Inez running the sweeper, and remembered that I was supposed to be organizing, cleaning, and managing, whatever that meant—not crying.
I wiped the tears from my eyes and headed toward the door. I went down the back staircase. What would Millie have done first? Make a list. She always said that no project was too difficult to put down on paper. The rest of it, I would have to worry about later.
Inez and I worked like fiends, there is no other way to say it. We called in Gwen, who sometimes worked at the inn, and we all worked hard for the next three days to get the place ready for its weekend guests
and
for Broderick Tilson Hayward-Smith. I didn’t cook during that time. Instead, I called out for pizza or gobbled down the meals that Jess sent over from the diner, including a tuna-salad sandwich that he made. He had remembered to put in a pinch of sugar.
“Everything has got to be perfect,” I told Inez later for the three hundredth time. “Millie’s son will stay here for the hearing. I want everything just right.”
Inez frowned.
“Then maybe we should make it not so perfect,” she commented. I could hear the anger in her voice. “Then he will not want it so much.” Inez was furious at the thought of Mr. Hayward-Smith turning the B&B into part of the parking lot for the VFW.
Actually, that wasn’t such a bad idea. The house needed some work and it was really old. But I knew how Millie felt about this place. Regardless of the circumstances, she would be furious if the inn were in less than A-plus shape. When Millie was alive, there was never any dust, the carpets were vacuumed two times a day, and the rooms always had fresh flowers in them. I couldn’t do any less than that. Especially since it was Millie’s son who would be our most important guest. Inez headed for the second floor to check out the Violet Room one last time. Gwen was dusting the demitasse cups in the huge china cabinet in the dining room. I grabbed the silver service and headed toward the kitchen. I would polish it until it was brighter than a searchlight.
Later, I walked back to the little office that was behind the kitchen to pick up papers that Inez had set out for me. Above, on the second floor, I heard a door slam. Then, something heavy dropped on the floor. It shook the crystal chandelier in the dining room. Someone with the shoe size of a bull elephant stomped down the hall toward the back of the house and another door slammed. Then the house was quiet again.
I looked up at the ceiling where the chandelier was still swaying.
What on earth was she
doing
up there?
My question was answered when she rushed in from the front porch with the day’s mail. The cold air swirled around me and I shivered. Inez stomped her feet and quickly closed the door, rubbing her shoulders.
“Here is today’s mail, I . . . what is wrong?” she asked. I must have looked as if I’d seen . . .
“Is Gwen still here? Or Bea?” I asked, hopefully, even though I thought that I already knew the answer.
Inez shook her head and sorted through the mail.
“No, she left at five. Bea comes in tomorrow. ¿Por qué?”
“Oh. OK,” I said slowly. “Then we have a problem,” I added, looking up at the crown-molded ceiling. There were scraping noises coming from the Mauve Room just above us. It was as if a chair was being dragged across the wood floor.
We listened for a second, then I looked at Inez. I was hoping that she would tell me that her niece was helping out today. Inez read my expression, then sighed.
“Oh. Sí. I forgot to tell you . . .”
How many times was I going to hear
that
?
“Ever since Millie die, well, Elva, she is not happy. She locks herself in the bathroom. She stomps down the hall, slams doors. Moves the furniture here, moves the furniture there. I don’t know
what
to do. Last time she had a tantrum, Millie call a ghost therapist but I can’t find the woman’s card.”
Ghost therapist? You’ve got to be kidding.
“So, now, I have a ghost with . . . issues?” I asked. This was more than I wanted to deal with. OK, the inn was haunted. It was just something I’d had to accept while I stayed with Millie. I’ll admit it, I don’t do ghosts. I feel about them almost the way I feel about spiders. If there is a spider in the room, I’ll leave the room to the spider. Can’t stand the creepy things. Same with ghosts. But most of the time, Elva was cool, kept to herself, and didn’t bother anyone. There wasn’t any howling or walking through doors. She didn’t wake you up in the middle of the night or bring her friends along from the other side to entertain. She minded her own business, whatever that was, and I minded mine.
And now,
she
was upset?
We had guests coming in less than twenty-four hours. And in that time, I had to put out towels; polish the brass door knockers one last time; fluff the quilts, pillows, and comforters; dust the chandeliers; mail the invoices to the lawyer’s office; make sure that Lowell’s Towing Service shoveled the walks and the driveway if it snowed again; and a million other things.
The last damn thing I needed was a ghost with personal problems.
I took the stairs two steps at a time and marched down the hall to the back staircase that led to the Tower Suite. I opened the door and looked up. The door at the top of the landing was open and I could see the floral wallpaper that bordered the ceiling in the tiny sitting room.
I started to go up but I am not a total fool. I’ve seen Elva Van Roan before. But, unlike some things in life, once was enough. I am quite happy to talk to her without seeing through her.
So I stayed at the bottom of the stairs.
“Elva, I know you’re up there. I hear you knocking and bumping around. Now listen here. I know you’re upset that Millie’s gone.
You could go with her, you know,
” I added under my breath. Do ghosts hear well? “Now, I’m trying to manage this place and keep everything together if I can. But I’m gonna need some help. We’ve got guests coming tomorrow and Millie’s son will be here pretty soon. Now if things don’t go well . . . and if you get to charging around and slamming things and dropping stuff and just plain making a damn fool of yourself . . . well, all I got to say is, if this hearing doesn’t go my way, you may be a homeless ghost trying to find an empty plot at Glen Rest, ’cause the attorney says that Mr. Hayward-Smith wants to tear down this place and turn it into a parking lot.”
I stopped for a minute. The house was quiet. Inez and I looked at each other.
“You got to give me a break, Elva. We all miss Millie. But you knew her. We have to get on with it.” I paused. “Do we have a deal or not?”
I heard Inez exhale loudly. I shrugged my shoulders and turned to go back downstairs.
Then the door at the top of the third-floor landing slammed shut. But there weren’t any sounds after that.
Inez’s eyes were huge.
So were mine.
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’ ” I said loudly.
Chapter Seven
I
never thought I’d say this (and I’ll deny it to my dyin’ day) but I’m starting to look back on my Sedona days and wonder if I shouldn’t have paid more attention to all that restoring your soul and quieting-the-mind stuff. Maybe I should have taken the yoga class that Nina told me about, stood on my head for a few hours. Or hiked into the canyon to attend a healing meditation. There were hot rock massages that I passed up and Om sessions to help me clean out my mental toxins. And I could have had a spirit dusting for twenty percent off!
Why
didn’t I do those things? Instead, I chuckled at all the metaphysical talk and avoided the vortex guides like I was running away from food poisoning. By the end of my first month back in Paper Moon, I was ready to pack up and run away. Again.
Inez dropped me off at Jess’s cabin one Thursday night. The inn had reopened without a problem (amazing) and weekend guests were coming that Friday. We had worked like crazy women to get the B&B back to its old self and had pretty much succeeded. Even Elva Van Roan had been helpful—no public appearances and she hadn’t moved any of the furniture. It was after ten and Jess looked up when I came in. He turned down the sound on the basketball game. I struggled to get out of my coat and hat and boots. I felt as if I was a hundred years old with arthritis, rheumatism, sciatica (What is that, anyway?), and dropsy—all together.
He didn’t seem to be surprised to see me. I had been staying at Millie’s off and on, half of my stuff was there, half of my stuff was here, and then there were some boxes that Randy had sent from Columbus that were sitting, unopened, in Jess’s second bedroom. I was like an itinerant preacher, leaving bits and pieces of myself all over the place. But tonight, I had to get out of Millie’s. Besides, the Mauve Room had been reserved for the weekend.
“You look like death warmed over,” he commented, setting down his glasses and coming over to help me as I fumbled with my coat.
“Thanks for the compliment,” I said.
“You feeling OK?” he asked as he hung up my coat in the closet.
“I feel like shit,” I told him. I was so tired that I couldn’t think of a better word.
He kissed me gently on the cheek and took my hand.
“I know how to fix that,” he said quietly. He clicked off the TV and led me down the hall.
If my body was fading, my mind was racing. And it raced off into a completely wrong direction. My mouth almost said the wrong thing. I stopped midway down the hall.
“Jess . . . I don’t feel like . . . well . . .” I sighed.
Jess gave me one of his signature “you-are-a-silly-woman” looks and opened the door to the bathroom instead of the bedroom.
“No kidding. And here I thought that a hot bath worked for almost anybody.”
All I could do was bite my lower lip and wrap my arms around his neck. This man is always doing something to cut me a path through the wilderness.
The tub was full of bubbles and there were candles everywhere, the tiny ladylike ones that smelled like fresh-cut roses and reminded me of spring. The room had a nice yellow glow, soft and quiet. He had laid out two huge towels and a fancy sponge like the ones they used in the spas. My bathrobe was hanging on the door and my slippers had been set right next to the tub so that I could slip my corns into them when I got out. The room was warm and cozy despite the ten-degree temperature outside.
Jess cleared his throat.
“Good thing you came when you did or the water would be cold.” He spoke with a completely stony expression but, as usual, his eyes were laughing at me.
“How did you . . .”
“Inez phoned just before you left. Take off your clothes. That’s an order.”
The water was hot (just the way I like it), the bubbles were everywhere (on me, on Jess, on the floor), and I closed my eyes and leaned back against the pillow that Jess put under my head. Perfect.
“This is nice. How’d you learn so much about spa stuff?” I asked him.
“Asked Nina to send me the works,” he answered as he gently washed my arms with the sponge. “I’m gonna give you a bath, then a pedicure.”
I opened one eye and gave him a doubtful look. A pedicure?
“Wash there, no,
there,
” I directed him between sighs.
“I’m not washing,” he growled. “I’m exfoliating.”
Washing, exfoliating, fondling, whatever.
“You’re just doing this to get cheap feels,” I told him. I sighed again. Then I smiled as his hands reached a certain spot. “Could you feel there again, please?”
He chuckled and did what I asked.
By the time he worked his way down to my feet, I was so relaxed that Jess had to keep poking me so that I would stay awake. He washed my feet, then each toe one by one, bunions, corns, calluses, and all. It tickled.
“I really needed this,” I managed to murmur. “I’m worn out. Crash and burn . . .” I probably didn’t make any sense at all.
Jess turned on the tap and ran more hot water into the tub.
“That ain’t no surprise. You just got back, went to a funeral, found out you’re an heiress, and now you’re working more hours than a West Virginia coal miner.”
I opened one eye.
“Now what would a Montana boy know about West Virginia coal miners?”
He began to massage my feet.
“I get around.”
“Ummm . . .”
“You’ve been opening up the diner,
after
I told you not to, working at the inn, and you jump every time the phone rings.”
I closed the one eye that I had opened.
“And I wasn’t going to mention this, but . . .” Jess kissed the bottom of my right foot. “There’s a thick white envelope from Arcadia Valley that’s been setting around collectin’ dust. If I were the curious type, which I’m not, I would have opened it by now. Especially seein’ as you haven’t. And Nina called.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What’s wrong, Miz Louis?” he asked. “You’ve been running around here like a chicken with its head cut off. You’re hardly sleeping and I might be mistaken but I don’t think you’re eatin’ right, either. I’ll have to drop you if you lose that nice derriere of yours.” With that comment, he gave me a squeeze and I almost jumped out of the tub.
“Quit it!” I kicked at him. He caught my foot again and kissed it. Oh, I just love that.
“What’s got your thong in such a knot?”
“I don’t wear thongs,” I told him defiantly.
Jess grinned.
“Yeah, I know. Been meanin’ to talk with you about
that,
too. But don’t change the subject. What’s wrong?”
“I’m feelin’ a bit . . . like I got too much on my plate.” I’d heard that term somewhere. Really didn’t like it much but it seemed to fit my situation.
Jess snorted.
“No, woman, you ain’t just got too much on your plate. You’ve got a full set of china and every damn plate, saucer, and bowl is full.” He shook his head as he leaned down to grab the sponge that had slipped out of his hand.
I buried my face in the bubbles.
“There’s so much . . . that’s right. I don’t want to bitch about a few little things . . .”
“Juanita . . .”
“OK. There’s the inn. There’s the diner. There’s Bertie . . .”
“She tell you what she’s up to?”
I wiped off the bubbles.
“No. I’ve left her three messages. Nothing.”
This was a real sore point with me. Bertie had gotten herself together. But some things had stayed the same. I was still one name on her list of folks to tap when she wanted something. It wasn’t, “Hi, Mom, how are you?” it was, “Mom, what can you do for me today?” I hadn’t heard from her since she’d mentioned that she thought it would be a good idea for me to keep T for a few months, just how many months she didn’t say. Then she said that she needed to know my decision by the fifteenth. The fifteenth or what? Not real encouraging.
Jess was quiet.
“There’s Rashawn . . .”
“Juanita, there’s nothing you can do for that boy. He’s gonna have to take care of this himself.”
“I know, I know,” I said, feeling my voice getting smaller and smaller. “But I’m still his mother. I just wish . . .” I had been wishing on that same star since Rashawn was thirteen and it just blinked back at me silently. Maybe it was the wrong star.
Jess moved the warm water across me in waves with his hand. It was soothing.
“It’s hard to watch the mistakes from the sidelines,” he said, quietly.
“No kidding.”
“And there’s one more thing,” Jess offered.
I had taken up a handful of bubbles and was blowing on them to see if they would float across the room like the bubbles did when we were kids.
“No, that’s all,” I said.
That’s enough.
“When were you going to tell me that you’re goin’ back to school?”
“Did you open the . . .” He was grinning at me. No, he hadn’t opened the white envelope. He’d just tricked me into telling him what it was all about.
“I haven’t decided yet,” I lied.
“Yeah, right. Well, you’d better hurry up. The term begins pretty soon, doesn’t it?”
I knew that. I’d known that for weeks, months really. I knew exactly when the term started and the time of my first class and the name of the teacher: Banes. I also knew how long before I’d lose my deposit money if I dropped out. That’s assuming that I’d gotten
in.
When I told Jess that, he almost turned on the cold water.
“Why the hell would you drop out?”
“Because . . . I can’t . . . go,” I heard Millie’s voice in my ear.
“Of course, you can!”
“Why the hell not?” Jess bellowed.
I sat up in the tub. Despite the glow of the candles, the mood had been broken.
Jess shrugged his shoulders as he reached for a towel.
“There ain’t no way. I’ve got the diner . . .”
“Juanita, you are indispensable but we have your recipes, the diner gets along just fine without you. All you have to do is,” he tickled me, “make a celebrity appearance once in a while.”
“OK, then there’s the inn. I have to manage the place. And with school, too . . .” I frowned. I was afraid of having too many good choices after a hundred years of nothing but bad ones. What was wrong with me? My mind was spinning. Then, there was Teishia. I had told Bertie that I wasn’t coming back to Columbus. But that wouldn’t stop her from coming out here and leaving a three-year-old deposit on my doorstep. And then, there was Nina . . .
“It’s too much for me. I can only do one thing at a time.”
“Might be true if you’re trying to be a one-woman armored tank and tough your way through. But if you ask for a little help, delegate (that’s a new word), and not try to do every damn thing yourself, you might be surprised at what you can accomplish.”
“But it’s too hard! I’m too . . . stupid to do the course work. I barely got through high school, there’s no way I’ll survive all those classes at once!”
Jess’s frown deepened until it completely turned his face almost inside out.
“Juanita, what classes are you taking exactly? Aerospace engineering?”
“Might as well be,” I grumbled as I let the water out. “I’ve applied for the Culinary Arts program. Maybe . . . learn to be a pastry chef.”
Jess sat back on his heels and stared at me, had a funny, unreadable look on his face.
“What? You don’t think I can do it?” I asked him, starting to get angry. I didn’t think I could do it either but I sure as hell didn’t want him to agree with me.
“No . . . no, it ain’t that,” he said slowly. “It’s just . . . well, I didn’t know you were thinking about being a pastry chef.”
I didn’t know that I was thinking about it either until I went to Los Angeles. And then I couldn’t think of anything else. I started remembering how Jess folded this, garnished that and, sometimes, made his own sausage. I thought about my son stir-frying a Cantonese–Italian “fusion” dish, as he called it. And watching him plate a meal so that it looked like a painting ready to be hung. I was fascinated by the way that Wendy sketched out, planned, and built her tasty creations: Measuring this and shaving off that and putting pieces together like Legos and Tinker Toys; swirling whipped cream made from scratch here and dropping a dollop of something else gooey and full of sugar and calories there; and creating the right balance of structure and lightness in pastry crusts. It was amazing. It looked like fun. It looked like art. To me, it had the same appeal that playing in the mud has for a little kid. But I am just a homegrown kind of cook, not a chef, not a gourmet, not a certified anything. But I wanted to be certified and qualified. A woman with . . . credentials.
“It sounds good until you add in everything else,” I told Jess.
He listened for a moment but I could tell that his mind was working.
“A chef . . . how long is the program? A year?”
When I told him, he whistled.
“That’s a serious time commitment,” he said thoughtfully. He handed me a pair of elephant-sized towels. “Dry off. I’ll be right back.”
“Well, what do you think?” I yelled after he’d been gone a few moments.
“Sounds like the diner is going to have soufflés, flambés, petits fours, and tarts on the menu to go along with the rest of my cuisine,” he answered, and then appeared in the doorway. “Or, are you planning to ply your trade in a celebrity haven like New York City or Las Vegas? Or maybe a fancy cruise ship?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with it,” I admitted. I hadn’t thought that far ahead, it was just too exhausting to think about these days. I sighed as I slipped on my robe. “I gotta get through the classes first.”
“Aw, you can do it,” he told me. “You been accepted yet?”
I paused.
“I don’t know. I’m afraid to open the envelope and find out.”
Jess gave me a look that said “You got to be kidding me!” but he didn’t say anything. Just sat me down on the bed, put my feet up on a stool, and pulled two bottles of nail polish out of his pocket.
“Passionate Pearlized Plum or Feathered Fanny’s Fuchsia?”
“What? What are you doing?”
He grinned as he waved a nail file in the air like a conductor leading an orchestra.
“I already
told
you. I’m going to give you a pedicure.”