The Hideaway Read online

  “No. What is this about?” I asked, ignoring the gentle sadness in his voice.

  “Your grandmother passed away this morning. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but Mrs. Ingram didn’t feel she could handle speaking about it yet. She asked if I would break the news to you.”

  I closed my eyes and turned my back to the other people waiting for the streetcar, then covered my eyes with my free hand, pressing my temples until it hurt.

  “You’ll be happy to know she didn’t suffer. She complained of some chest pain, so Dot brought her in to the doctor. They couldn’t have known it before, but Mrs. Van Buren was at the beginning of what turned into a major heart attack. The doctor called for an ambulance, but she died on the way to the hospital. Dot said it looked like she just closed her eyes and fell asleep.”

  I thought of the streetcar rumbling down the tracks toward me as it picked up and deposited people at various points on the line. Three and a half more minutes and it would stop for me.

  I cleared my throat and sat up straighter on the bench. “Thank you for calling, Mr. Bains. I appreciate you letting me know.”

  “We’ll have a reading of the will on Friday afternoon here at my office.”

  “And where is that?”

  “I’m in Mobile. Just across the Bay.”

  3

  SARA

  APRIL

  That night, I took a glass of wine into the courtyard. My building and several others on the block, all duplexes formed out of circa-1850 carriage houses, backed up to a small patio ringed by bougainvillea, sweet jasmine, and palms. Someone had stuck a wrought-iron table and a jumble of chairs in the middle, creating an open area in the lush oasis. On nights when the humidity wasn’t 200 percent, a cluster of neighbors and friends of all ages and varying degrees of quirkiness congregated to toast the end of another day.

  On this particular evening, Millie and Walt, the couple who lived in the other half of my duplex, were staring each other down across a chessboard. Everyone knew better than to disturb them until one—usually Millie—cried checkmate. I settled down onto a glider and took a slow sip of cabernet.

  I had roughly forty hours before I needed to head east on I-10 toward Alabama. I’d have to start early the next morning to move appointments, make phone calls, and write notes for Allyn. He’d probably resent me for assuming he couldn’t do my job alone for the week, but I couldn’t help it. The shop was my baby, and I didn’t take lightly leaving it even for just a few days.

  I pulled out my phone to check the time. Eight o’clock, a good time to call. Dinner would be over, and if everything was as it had always been, Bert would be putting the last of the scrubbed pots and pans away. Dot would gather her crossword book and a big bowl of popcorn and retire to the back porch for the evening. Mags would head to her garden in her dirt-caked rubber shoes.

  Mags always spent the late evenings there, sitting on one side of a well-worn cedar bench. Not gardening, not reading, just sitting. When I was a child, I’d try to keep her company there, but she always shooed me away, saying she needed to be alone with her memories.

  My finger hovered over the number for The Hideaway. What would happen to the house now that Mags was gone? It hadn’t been a proper bed-and-breakfast since I was a kid. Could it be again? Should it be?

  When I was young, the house had been a fun, if bizarre, playhouse to explore. As I got older, I became more aware of the unusual living arrangements the house offered. It might have been a legitimate B and B at one time, but over the years it had become a senior citizen commune with a revolving door, a long layover for people on their way to Florida retirement glory.

  Maybe Dot and Bert would stay on and run the place, although it couldn’t have much life left in it. The house had once been a true beauty—Victorian turrets, white gingerbread trim, French doors opening up to a wide wraparound porch—but it had deteriorated over the years. By the time I left for college, it was hard to ignore the peeling paint, dislodged bricks, and window screens covered in wisteria and kudzu.

  Even still, no one could deny it had a peculiar charm. Somewhere, in some forgotten, dusty travel guide, The Hideaway was still listed as a “Southern Sight to See.” Every summer, some unwitting family would stumble in, bleary from travel, and be shocked to find the B and B was decidedly not what the guide made it out to be. Mags and the others would fuss over them and usher them up to their rooms, excited to have real guests again, convinced it was the start of “the season.”

  Somewhere in the first couple of days, the guests would inevitably cut their vacation short, saying something had happened at home and they needed to get back. Even though they couldn’t wait to leave, something about the place, or the people, would have charmed them. They were always apologetic about leaving. It was a strange conundrum—guests fleeing, sometimes in the middle of the night, but always thanking Mags for her hospitality.

  Aside from the true guests who came and went, the B and B was always home to a wild assortment of folks who had checked in years back and never left. Some took jobs at the house, helping with gardening or cooking, and some just lived. Mags’s friends Bert and Dot Ingram had been there for decades, and Major and Glory Gregg moved in not long after them. The Hideaway was always a hodgepodge of flabby arms, gray hair, housedresses, and suspenders.

  “Good evening, The Hideaway.”

  I smiled at Dot’s familiar voice. “It’s Sara.”

  “Sara, hon. I’ve been waiting for you to call.” She put her hand over the phone and called out in a muffled voice, “It’s Sara.” Then she said, “Vernon must have called you. I just couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud. How are you?”

  I sighed and rested my head against the back of the glider. “I’m okay. How are you?”

  “Oh, you know. It all just happened so fast.” Her voice broke and she paused. “You’d think a seventy-two-year-old woman would have another decade of good living left, if not more. At least a woman like Mags. And her heart of all things. She was healthy as a horse.”

  “Did she mention anything at all about feeling bad? Had she been having any pain? I didn’t have a clue.”

  “Believe me, I’ve gone over this a million times in my head,” Dot said. “She did mention being a little short of breath a couple times over the last week, but I blamed it on those awful cigarettes she snuck every now and then when she thought we wouldn’t notice.”

  Dot blew her nose. “She’d slowed down a lot since you saw her at Christmas. She just wasn’t up to her usual speed, cruising around on her bike and banging through the screen door at all hours. I should have realized something was going on.”

  Mags had sounded a little weary the last time I talked to her, but I chalked it up to normal fatigue. She was seventy-two, after all.

  “She must have had a hint that something was coming though, even if we missed it,” Dot said. “Last week, out of nowhere, she said if she ever got really sick, we were under strict orders to pull her out of the hospital and bring her back to the house. She said she’d rather spend her evenings in her garden instead of a cold, sterile hospital room. Can’t you just hear her say that? As we pulled down the driveway to go to the doctor this morning, she had the presence of mind to ask Bert to check the garden for berries, because she wanted a slice of his strawberry pie.”

  Dot’s tissue crinkled over the phone.

  “There’s no way you could have predicted this was coming.” I said it as much to myself as to Dot. “I wish somehow I had known though. Maybe I could have done something.”

  “Not much you can do from three hours away.”

  “I could’ve come back for a visit to help.”

  “She never would have asked you. Regardless of what I think, she wouldn’t have wanted to be the reason you left your life there, for any length of time.”

  “You think differently though?”

  Dot sighed. “I just think it was hard for her not to see much of you, even if she never said it.”

&nb
sp; “But we talked every week. And I came to Sweet Bay as often as I could. It’d have been different if I had more staff at the shop who could take over for me. I only have Allyn.”

  “I know, I know. You’re probably right.”

  I mentally shushed the voice in my head—maybe it was Allyn’s voice, come to think of him—that asked if things really would have been different if I’d had a full roster of staff at my disposal. Would I have gone back more often? I wanted to say yes, but I wasn’t sure. I had grown comfortable with the distance between Sweet Bay and me.

  “She always told me she understood,” I said.

  “Sure she did. She was so proud of you over there. She never wanted to be a burden to anyone, especially you. You know Mags. She hardly ever asked for help and she was private until the end.”

  Of course Mags wouldn’t have called me up and begged me to come for a random weekend. That’s not who she is—or was. She wanted me to come on my own terms. I just waited too long.

  “No sense in worrying over it all now,” Dot said. “How could any of us have known? She was Mags—we took it for granted that she’d be around forever.”

  By the time we finished our call, the courtyard had emptied out. Only Millie and Walt remained, peering at each other and pondering their next moves on the chessboard. I could just barely make out the early evening sounds of Bourbon Street a few blocks away, quiet as a house cat compared to the frenzy that would ensue in the coming hours.

  “You’re a million miles away,” a familiar voice called out. “What’s going on?”

  Bernard, an artist who lived in one of the duplexes across the courtyard, settled down in the chair next to me. He twisted off the plastic top of a dented Nalgene bottle and took a long sip.

  “Just watching Millie and Walt. Married sixty-eight years and still embarrassingly in love.”

  We watched them in silence for a few moments.

  “Gone out with the fellow from the law firm again?” he asked.

  “We’ve gone out a few times.” A slow grin crossed Bernard’s bearded face. “What’s that look for?”

  He held up his hands in mock surrender. “I’m not saying a thing. He just appeared to have a fat wallet for someone so young.”

  Mitch was a lawyer at one of the oldest firms in New Orleans. He made partner when he was thirty, a record in the firm, maybe even in the city. We’d been out a handful of times since he booked the chef’s table at Commander’s Palace for our first date, but it wasn’t exclusive and definitely wasn’t serious—which is exactly how it had been with most of the men I’d dated in New Orleans. And I was just fine with that.

  “He’s nice, believe it or not. He asked me to go with him to some gala tomorrow night, but I have to cancel. I’m going back to Sweet Bay, actually. My grandmother died.”

  Saying the words out loud gave my new reality—that I was now family-less—a weight I didn’t quite know what to do with.

  “I’m so sorry. Were you close?”

  I hesitated. “We were and we weren’t. There was always some part of her she kept away from everyone else, including me.”

  “So that’s where it comes from.”

  “Where what comes from?”

  “You’re a private person yourself. Locked up. You don’t lay all your cards out like most everyone else around here.”

  I considered that for a moment. “Maybe Mags and I were more alike than I realized.”

  “Was she a typical ‘fresh-baked cookies and soap operas’ kind of grandmother?”

  I laughed. “Not quite.”

  “Mine made the best potato-chip cookies in Butler County, Mississippi.”

  “Potato-chip cookies?” I rubbed my eyes. “Now, that does sound like something Mags would have cooked up. But no, she wasn’t typical, that’s for sure. She used to embarrass me like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Isn’t everyone embarrassed by their grandparents to some degree? Come on—potato-chip cookies? No one actually ate them—we just shoved them under our napkins until we could sneak them to the dog.”

  I smiled and thought of the woman who didn’t think twice about picking me up from school in a men’s smoking jacket and plastic flip-flops. She walked or biked everywhere she went because of constant floaters in her eyes. When Mom and I would drive her to get her hair done, I always slumped down in my seat. With fuzzy gray curls peeking out from under a bird’s-nest hat complete with baby-blue eggs perched on top, Mags was oblivious to my humiliation. At least she pretended to be.

  But she was my only true family. Probably my biggest fan. And now she was gone.

  I stood and squeezed Bernard’s shoulder. “I should get on to bed. Allyn will be giddy at the prospect of running the shop for a few days without me. I need to have his instructions ready to go.”

  Inside my loft, everything was in its place: overstuffed down pillows on a couple of linen slip-covered couches, vintage silver vases of fresh flowers, a few tasteful pieces of artwork. I’d decorated the loft in the same vein as Bits and Pieces, although I was rarely home long enough to enjoy the flowers or the soft comfort of the couches.

  As I went through my usual preparations to get ready for bed, my mind was on Mags. Occasionally, she’d flutter through The Hideaway in a burst of energy, saying she was going to clean out and declutter. She’d poke through closets, check desk drawers, eye various pieces of furniture as if she’d actually have the nerve to get rid of any of it. She never did. It was as if once things—or people—found their way there, she couldn’t bear to force them out.

  I, on the other hand, hated clutter and chaos, and my home and shop were evidence of that. I hadn’t consciously developed a taste so different from what I grew up with, but that’s how it turned out.

  Across the room my eyes fell on two side chairs I’d recently refinished but hadn’t had the nerve to part with yet. I’d run across them on a rainy Saturday trek to an estate sale at a decadent, moss-covered home on St. Charles. Water dripped from the ceiling into silver buckets discreetly tucked around the opulent parlor of the eight-bedroom, prewar home. Mildewed silk curtains covered the ten-foot-tall windows. A tarnished, silver-encrusted mirror hung in the downstairs powder room. It was shambles like these that had made me fall in love with old, forgotten things in the first place. I came away from the sale toting the pair of French side chairs with busted cane bottoms that now sat in my living room, proud and beautiful. My shop was full of similar rescued and restored beauties.

  Maybe I wasn’t as different from Mags as I’d thought. I’d spent years all but running from her and The Hideaway, but there I was, inviting other old and tattered things into my life by the armful.

  I sat up against the bed pillows and gathered my hair into a braid to keep it neat while I slept. On the bedside table was the bottle of Jo Malone hand lotion I rubbed into my fingers and cuticles, the last item to check off my list before turning off the light. But tonight, I paused with my hand on the chain. Instead of pulling it, I opened the drawer of the small table and reached all the way to the back.

  The photo was still there, though I hadn’t pulled it out in a while. Mags and my mother smiled up from the yellowed Polaroid, while I, a busy eleven-year-old, laughed at something outside the camera frame and tried to bolt. My mother’s hand on my shoulder was a feeble attempt to keep me in place long enough to snap the shot.

  I focused on Mags. The ever-present bird’s-nest hat was missing, and her hair—salt and pepper, heavy on the salt—was loose around her shoulders. It must have been a day with low humidity, because her hair fell in gentle waves instead of frizzy curls. Her face was soft, and her eyes crinkled into a smile at the corners.

  I’d never thought much about Mags as a younger woman, but in this photo, it was easy to peel back the years and see how she must have looked at my age, or even younger. I’d held this photo in my hands many times, but I’d never seen past her fifty-four-year-old face into the person she may have been before my time, before my mom’s ti
me even. As far as I knew, she’d always been the same strange, frustratingly dowdy woman I’d always known her to be. But those eyes. And her smile—it was tilted higher on one side, as if a smirk was in there somewhere, trying to sneak out.

  I held the photo a moment longer, then put it back in its place at the back of the drawer and turned off the light. I could feel the storm brewing—my throat burned and my eyes stung. I’d held myself together all day, but with the room dark and quiet, the tension in my chest and sadness welling in my heart overflowed. Tears spilled over my cheeks unchecked and made damp spots on my pillow.

  While my chest heaved with quiet sobs, I had a fleeting memory of my grief after my parents’ death. It was different back then—not better or worse, just different. A twelve-year-old with a grandmother and four live-in “grandparents” grieves much differently than an adult who knows she’s now alone in the world, regardless of how she’s tried to tell herself she doesn’t really need anyone else.

  I rode out the storm until it ended. Exhausted and shaky, I reached over and pulled the photo out again. I propped it up against a book on the table and took a deep breath. The murky yellow glow from a streetlight outside my window illuminated Mags’s face in the photo. I sank farther into the pillows and closed my eyes, content to know that Mags, wherever she was, was sending that half smile my way.

  4

  MAGS

  JANUARY 1960

  I was going to leave him, but he beat me to it. My bags were packed, stuffed into the upstairs closet ready to go when the right moment presented itself, but then I found his note. I couldn’t believe he left a note.

  Margaret, I have business in Tennessee. I’ll be gone a while.

  Robert

  As if I didn’t know what his “business” was. Mother kept telling me to ignore everything. Of course she did. She said if I kept busy at home, doing what I was supposed to do, my husband would end up back under our roof where he belonged. I took her advice through gritted teeth for most of the three years Robert and I had been married, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. And I didn’t even get the satisfaction of leaving him, because he was already gone.