The Hideaway

“How long do you have before all this happens?”

“I don’t know yet.”

We sat in silence. Allyn handed me his glass of tea and I took a sip.

“Everything was going so well.” I laughed, but it was only to keep the tears at bay. “The house is coming along and it’s going to be gorgeous. The thought had even crossed my mind that I might be able to run this place as a B and B. I’d keep Bits and Pieces, obviously. And I couldn’t move here—not fully anyway—but maybe I could do both. Crawford and I . . . well, like you said, Sweet Bay and New Orleans aren’t that far apart.”

I leaned back in the chair and tilted my face toward the sun. “So much has happened here, I just can’t imagine it all ending now—and at the hands of Sammy, which makes it even worse.”

I closed my eyes and forced my thoughts of William, the house, and all those pieces of furniture engraved with a skeleton key into a deep pocket in the back of my mind.

“It’s probably a good thing this happened now,” I said, willing my voice not to shake, “before I make any big changes in my life to accommodate this house. Sammy will raze it, throw up some atrocious condo building, and that’ll be that. I’ll head back to New Orleans and do what I’m supposed to be doing, and things will go on in Sweet Bay like they have been for years—except now it’ll be filled with snowbirds and spring breakers.”

Even with my eyes closed, I could feel Allyn staring at me. I sat up and took another sip of tea, forcing myself to look calm.

“What about Crawford?” he asked.

“He said we’d figure it out.”

Allyn waited, but he dropped the subject when I didn’t offer any more.

“It’s beautiful here. A little . . . quaint”—he glanced around—“but I could sit on this dock all day. It’s so quiet I think I can hear the fish breathing.”

“That’s just because the construction guys are wrapping up for the day.”

“Construction guys?” He grinned. “Maybe you need to show me around.”

After a ten-cent tour, during which Allyn was disappointed to discover that most of the workers had indeed left for the day, we ended up in the driveway next to his Harley. He handed me a helmet.

“I brought an extra in case I needed to rescue you.”

“Rescue me from what?”

“Doesn’t matter. You don’t need to be rescued. You’re doing just fine, and we’ll figure out what to do about the house—and your man. I just need to do it over something stronger than sweet tea. Hop on.”

With no energy to argue, I did as he asked. I directed him to the Outrigger Lounge, the only white-tablecloth place in Sweet Bay. The tablecloths were white vinyl, but in Sweet Bay, that counted. We sat at a table on the patio overlooking the bay. Allyn ordered white wine for both of us, along with fried pickles and a plate of Oysters Bienville.

“What?” he asked when I looked at him over the top of my menu. “If you’re going to stay here, I need to make sure the food is up to par.”

“Stay here? Did you not hear me tell you everything about Sammy?”

“I heard you. Tell me about Crawford.”

“Crawford is wonderful. Almost too wonderful, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Even if I had considered staying in Sweet Bay—which I haven’t—I might not even be able to. If the house falls through, I wouldn’t have the option of staying.”

“Of course you have the option. You’re a big girl—you can do whatever you want. More than that, I’d say he gives you a pretty good reason to stay.”

A reason to stay—was that what I was looking for?

“But what am I supposed to do—go buy a house? I have the shop and clients and the Broussards’ house coming up. It’s not like I could just forget all that and move to Sweet Bay.”

“You’re overthinking this. We don’t know how it all will play out.”

I dipped a fried pickle in ranch dressing, then dropped it and leaned back in my chair.

“What?” he asked.

“I haven’t been back home that long, but Sweet Bay was starting to feel—I don’t know what it was feeling like, just something different than it did when I was younger. I think I was starting to like it.”

“Did you hear what you said? You just called Sweet Bay home.” “I did?”

Allyn nodded.

“Hmm. Maybe it’s that it feels like life here could be different a second time around. But you know how much I love the shop. And you. And New Orleans.”

“Of course I do. But you’ve opened the door to a whole other part of your life. The house, your memories of Mags, those crazy old people living in the house now. Crawford,” he said, tilting his head. “This isn’t small stuff. And it’s okay to feel pulled in two different directions.”

“Sounds like my therapist just jumped in the conversation.”

He waved the thought away. “That’s why you pay me the big bucks. But you never finished telling me about Mags’s things you found in the house.”

I pieced everything together as best I could—Mags’s privileged life and marriage to Robert, Robert leaving to be with another woman, and Mags moving to The Hideaway and meeting William.

“For reasons that made sense to him at the time, and I think due in part to Mags’s parents, William left. He planned to come back for her, but it never happened. And he never knew she was pregnant.”

“So little Mags had some secrets.”

“Yes, but it’s more than that,” I said. “By the time she was my age, she was a widow and in love with a man she’d never see again. But despite all that, she was content. Or she seemed so. She loved her friends and her old house, gave the neighbors something to talk about, and never cared about how ‘a woman of her age’ should live her life. She was brave.”

“Sounds like it,” Allyn said.

“Maybe she worried I would have thought badly of her if I’d known all this.”

“Would you have?”

“No, just the opposite. It would have shown me there was a reason for her oddness, that she was more than just the strange old lady I always thought.”

“You think she was strange because of what happened with William? I don’t get it.”

“Not William, but Robert. And maybe even her parents too. From what I’m gathering, Mags was raised to be proper and ladylike, to always do the right thing, even to marry the right man. I’m thinking maybe she got to Sweet Bay and ditched all that. Maybe she went in the total opposite direction from what her parents and Robert represented.”

I thought of her crazy hats and bright yellow ponchos that made me want to crawl under the nearest rock when I was a teenager. What if all that quirkiness had just been her way of pushing back against a lifestyle and culture that had crushed her dreams? “It all makes perfect sense now.”

I flagged the waitress and ordered another glass of wine. The sun was setting. Long, thin clouds, now dark purple against the orange sky, draped across the sky like streamers.

“I drove by my old house last week,” I said. “My parents’ old house.” We’d started on our entrées—blackened Gulf snapper for Allyn, grilled mahi wrap for me.