The Hideaway

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.”

“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.