The Hideaway

As the funeral director spoke of the glorious light (he must have missed his calling as a revival preacher), a small blue car approached a little ways off. A man climbed out of the car, his face shaded under a cap. He stood still and glanced over at us a few times. After a little while, he sat back down in the car and slowly pulled away.

When the service was over, I helped Dot and Glory gather the flowers while Bert and Major talked to the director. In the hurry to get everyone into their cars and back to the house, I didn’t notice the man drive back up to the gravesite. As I pulled out of the cemetery, I saw him in my rearview mirror. He stood by Mags’s grave as the cemetery workers carried off our chairs. He brushed his hands against the sides of his pants as if he was dusting something off, then reached over and touched her headstone.

Back at the house, the driveway was already full of cars. Word had spread quickly, and old friends of Mags, some neighbors, mostly former “guests,” came to pay their respects. It was a good thing, because the house was stuffed full of food, like Bert predicted.

Mr. Eugene Norman, the glassblower who used to make all the neighbors nervous with his raging furnace in the yard, sent a towering bouquet of lilacs that Dot placed on the table in the entryway. Mr. Crocker, who owned a farm up Highway 22, dropped off a mason jar stuffed with gardenias. Tiny Bernadette Pierce hobbled up the front walk with the help of a gold-tipped cane. Bernadette, or Bernie, as everyone called her, checked in a few weeks after my parents’ wreck and stayed a while, long enough for her husband to think she really had moved to Tahiti with the gardener. She moved slowly and painfully up the walkway. I took her arm, fearing she might topple over before she got to the dessert table. The grin on her face when she turned to see who I was proved me wrong.

“The cane is just a prop,” she whispered. “I may be eighty-four years young, but I can move just fine. And this.” She gestured to the gray bob on her head that wasn’t moving in the breeze. “This is a wig. Luis and I may not have gone to Tahiti, but we did get out of Dodge. This is my first time east of the Mississippi since I moved out of The Hideaway and we went to California. My former husband, Harry, is still alive and living somewhere in the South, so I have to be careful.” Her eyes were bright and wild. Crazy maybe, like a fox.

Other folks came and went throughout the day, many more than I’d expected. Those who remembered me talked about what a sweet girl I had been, as if I’d turned out to be someone wearing black lipstick and studs in my chin.

“That’s not what we mean,” Hattie Caldwell said when I joked about it to a small group of ladies gathered on the back porch. “It’s just that after all you’d been through, you were still a polite, gracious child. I was a therapist in my former life, and believe me when I say you could have taken many roads after such tragic deaths in the family. From the looks of you, you’ve taken the right one.”

Hattie hadn’t been back to the house in at least twenty years, so she may not have known I no longer lived in Sweet Bay. What would she think of the road I’d taken if she knew it had paved my way clear out of Alabama?

That afternoon while most of the guests were out on the porch or sitting around the main parlor, I caught Dot alone in the kitchen. She struggled to open a Tupperware container of pimento cheese. A tray of crackers sat on the counter next to her.

“Dot?”

“Mmm?” She couldn’t get the lip of the container to pop up, so I held my hand out and she slid it over to me. “Did you notice the car that pulled up toward the end of the funeral?” I pulled the lid off and handed the Tupperware back to her.

“At the gravesite?” Dot asked, her attention on me now that the pimento cheese was no longer stuck inside frustrating plastic. She dipped a cracker in and took a bite. “I didn’t see anyone but us.”

“An old man pulled up on the path and watched us for a few minutes. I didn’t recognize him, but I think he was there for Mags.”

Bert and Major walked through the kitchen door. Bert put his hand on Dot’s back and Major pulled open the fridge.

“Who was where?” Major asked.

“Sara saw an old man at the funeral. Someone who had come to pay respects to Mags.”

Dot and Bert exchanged a look, but Major shook his head.

“The obituary said the funeral was family only. That’s why everyone else came here.” He shut the fridge. “He must have been there for someone else.”

I nodded but kept thinking about the man. It sure looked like he was there to pay respects to Mags, so who was he?

Later, after all the guests were gone, I came back downstairs for something to eat. Dot and Bert were on the back porch talking. As I moved around in the kitchen, their quiet voices drifted. I took my plate to the door of the porch and watched them.

They sat next to each other in wicker chairs, hands linked in the empty space between them. I smiled thinking of how these two found love at The Hideaway. The house provided the perfect backdrop to their second shot at love when they both checked in on the same day for solo vacations. Bert’s wife had died a few years earlier, and Dot was getting over a messy divorce. When it came time for them to go back to their own lives, they decided to stay. They got married on the dock at sunset six weeks later.

I turned, not wanting to disturb their moment, but my foot bumped an overlooked plate from earlier in the day. Dot turned.

“Hi, dear, come join us. We were just telling old stories.” She wiped her eyes with a tissue. “The funeral seems to have dragged up all kinds of memories.”

“Are you sure? I can take this upstairs . . .”

“Nonsense. Come sit. This will give us a chance to talk. The day got busier than I expected. I knew Mags had admirers all around, but I didn’t know so many would show up. Many of them were older than she was, not that seventy-two is old.”

“If it is, I’m ancient,” Bert said.

Dot sniffed and swiped his shoulder. “You’re not ancient, just well aged.”

“Doesn’t make it sound any better.” He smiled.

I settled into an adjacent chair and took a bite of my ham sandwich.

“We were just talking about Bernie Pierce,” Bert said. Dot still had tears in her eyes, so Bert gave her time to gather herself. He gently tipped his rocking chair back and forth. The wooden boards on the porch floor groaned and squeaked. “Do you remember her?”

I nodded. “She’s a hard one to forget. The situation always seemed a little scandalous to me—Mags harboring someone who left her husband. Did Bernie actually run off with her gardener?”

“In a nutshell, yes,” Bert said. “But it wasn’t that simple. Bernie’s husband Harry was a bully. He used to knock her around, and one day Mags happened to be outside their house when she heard a ruckus inside.”

“Mags claimed she’d been out delivering tomatoes to some of the neighbors, but I think she was just sneaking one of her cigarettes,” Dot said.

“She was in the right place at the right time,” Bert continued. “Harry shoved Bernie and she fell through the open doorway and onto the front porch. Mags stomped up the front walk, stepped right up to Harry, and thumped him hard right here.” Bert pointed to the space between his eyebrows. “Then she did it again for good measure. Harry was so taken aback, he just let her do it. Then she took Bernie’s hand and led her down the steps into the front yard. She told Harry that Bernie wouldn’t be coming back and if he ever so much as stepped a toe on her property, she’d chase him down with her oyster knife.”