Doing It at the Dixie Dew
Read Doing It at the Dixie Dew Online
Authors: Ruth Moose
Â
Â
Â
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at:
us.macmillanusa.com/piracy
.
To Lyle, Robin, Jordan, Tyler and Barry, Melissa, Mallorie, and Madison Moose, with much love
Contents
Â
Â
Chapter One
People don't go to a bed-and-breakfast to die, do they? I'd never heard of it before, but let me tell you about Miss Lavinia Lovingood. She came to my bed-and-breakfast, the Dixie Dew, in Littleboro, North Carolina, checked in and “checked out.” She died. Went to bed in my Azalea Room, fresh with deep pink paint and wallpaper still damp from the hanging, and never got up.
I couldn't believe it. There I was after my first night in the bed-and-breakfast business and I'd had six guests. Two couples and two singles. A full house. The two couples were a Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Ottinger from Hackensack and Will and Ann Dinsmore from Quebec. The singles, a Mr. Fred Fredricks from Forest Grove and a tiny ivory wisp of a woman, Miss Lavinia Lovingood, who was surely eighty plus but extremely well kept, if you know what I mean. She'd written for a room weeks ago, even before I knew I'd have a room ready. She'd written in perfect cursive on thick, monogrammed notepaper and enclosed a generous deposit for a three-night stay.
When the reservation came, Ida Plum Duckett, “my good right arm” and lifesaver in general, peeked over my shoulder and said, “Come home to die, did she?”
“Who?” I asked, wondering how somebody in Rome, Italy (not Rome, Georgiaâaround here you had to specify), knew about the Dixie Dew Bed-and-Breakfast. “You know her?”
“Beth Mckenzie Henry, if you knew anybody in this town, you knew a Lovingood,” Ida Plum said. “Took the whole hill in the cemetery for themselves until they daughtered out. I guess she's the last one.”
“Imagine,” I said. “Somebody from Littleboro, North Carolina, living in Italy.” I tapped my teeth with the envelope that smelled almost good enough to eat. A smell that had a hint of citrus and some delicate, delicious spice.
Ida Plum went back to folding the sheet she'd just ironed.
I've always thought, next to baking smells, the smell of clean, sun-dried laundry had to be right up there with the best in the world. I'd gone to sleep most of my childhood to the
whump, whump
of my grandmother ironing tablecloths for some wedding reception or anniversary party she was catering.
“Lavinia Lovingood must be eighty if she's a day,” Ida Plum said. “Grew up in that mansion near the courthouse. Married some somebody from overseas, I heard tell, went to live abroad, and nobody's seen her since. Her mama and daddy died in a train wreck when she was eighteen or twenty and left her a bundle. In fact, a whole bunch of bundles. More bundles than anybody could count is what I always heard.” Ida Plum stacked another finished sheet beside the ironer.
I remembered when my grandmother won that ironer in some sort of giveaway at the Western Auto Store on Main Street. I'd been eight or so at the time, and when they called to tell Mama Alice she'd won she just whooped, hugged me tight and whirled me around the kitchen. “Honeybunch,” she said, “somebody up there really does like us. Maybe just a little.”
When the
Littleboro Messenger,
which everybody around here calls
The Mess,
ran her picture on the front page under the heading “Local Native Wins” we laughed until our sides ached. For years after we called it “loco native” every time the newspaper used the term. “Local Native Graduates with Honors” or “Local Native Chosen First in This and That.” Local native Margaret Alice McKenzie used that ironer to iron enough tablecloths and napkins to clothe the whole town and then some. Her catering business kept us both in jeans and sneakers, fed us and even sent me to art school in “that godforsaken Yankee land” (as my grandmother called Rhode Island). She never understood why I couldn't go someplace sensible like Atlanta. Or Florida. “Someplace warm,” she always said when we packed my clothes each fall. “You'd save enough on wool sweaters to pay your tuition.”
That April morning rain dripped from the eaves in crystal sheets. The house needed gutters ⦠bad. The old ones, rusted to shreds and hanging on out of habit, had been taken down and hauled off when I had the new roof put on. A new roof paid for with a bank loan bigger than the national debt ⦠or at least that's what it felt like to me.
I'd borrowed on the house, one of those big old barns with a wraparound porch on three sides, and the McKenzie good name. My grandmother believed in paying bills almost the same day she received them. Not owing anybody. And she believed in keeping things in good repair. A stitch in time and all that stuff. That's why I couldn't understand how she'd let the house “go.”
When I came home last spring, I couldn't believe this was the same house I'd grown up in. It seemed to have fallen into disrepair overnight, peeling paint, rotten roof, rusted gutters. This was a house that had to be kept painted sparkling white, and every board seemed to slurp paint by the gallon. The painters I hired first thing after I got the loan kept buying paint and more paint, shaking their heads as they opened and stirred bucket after bucket. And I kept asking myself how it all seemed to have happened overnight. Like it had with her.
One day my grandmother was baking for a wedding reception for a hundred and fifty; the next she lay crumpled in a heap at the bottom of the basement stairs, unconscious. A state she stayed in for six months in The Oaks Nursing and Rest Home. Their motto was “You Rest with the Best.” And Mama Alice
had
rested in the best of care. The kind that cleaned out her life savings and would have started on mine if I had any. The house would have gone next.
As it was, that was all I had left. Turning it into a bed-and-breakfast seemed to be about the only thing I could do with the “white elephant.” It wasn't even in any condition to sell, take what I could get, get it off my hands and run, which had been one of my options. Run where? That had been my question, so I backed up and borrowed to the hilt and now I was sweating it out.
That was when Ida Plum Duckett showed up at my front door. In Littleboro you never had to run a classified ad for anything you needed. All you had to do was mention what you needed to anybody within earshot of anybody else and somebody would be on your porch within a week saying, “Heard tell you got a tree that needs downing.” Or, “Heard tell you got plumbing troubles.”
Ida Plum stood on my front porch that December day in her purple plaid coat and gray lace-up shoes, white crocheted beret and matching scarf. “Heard tell you're trying to turn this old barn into some fancy-schmancy bed-and-breakfast thing,” she said.
I explained I wasn't in the position to hire anybody yet. Hadn't even started inside. Opening was months and mucho dollars down the road that sure wasn't paved with gold. Littleboro's not the kind of place for tourist trade. Just a dot on a lot of maps and bypassed off the Interstate. I wasn't likely to make a fortune. Just a small living was all I wanted. In a quiet town where everybody knew everybody's troubles
and
failings and forgave them.
Ida Plum said she was tired of sitting home gathering dust. She'd helped Mama Alice after I left for art school and stayed gone fifteen years. “Deserter,” Mama Alice would tease when I called or came home summers and holidays. “I'm surprised you don't get stopped at the Mason-Dixon Line.” She knew why I stayed in New England, in Maine, though she never met him. At least I never married him. I can say that for myself.
Sherman, my black-and-white cat who had been sitting beside the front door washing a paw and looking as if he knew a secret, shot in when I opened the door. Ida Plum followed. Cat and woman marched over that threshold, chins tilted toward the ceiling like they owned the place.
“But⦔ I started, and before I finished the sentence Ida Plum had hung her coat on the hall tree, taken off her beret and fluffed her hair.
“Money doesn't buy everything,” she said. “I won't charge you what I'm worth. You couldn't afford me.” She laughed. “Let's just say I'm doing this as a favor for Margaret Alice.” She named an hourly figure that I quickly shook on before she could change her mind.
That was how she came to man the ironer while I polished silver and waited for Miss Lavinia Lovingood to decide to descend the stairs and come to breakfast. “Surely she doesn't think she'll get breakfast in bed,” I said to Ida Plum. It was nearly noon and everybody else had gone long ago. The Ottingers, who had the Periwinkle Room, left at seven, tiptoeing downstairs and taking their coffee and pecan muffins to go. The Dinsmores were through breakfast and gone by eight and Mr. Fredricks had two eggs over lightly, bacon, three cups of coffee, five muffins with fig preserves and apricot marmalade and waddled out the door before eight thirty. Only Miss Lavinia still slept.
I emptied stale coffee from Mama Alice's silver urn, rinsed and wiped off the water spots. I'd polished her assorted silver trays, large and small, legged and not, tea service, punch bowl, cups, ladles and serving pieces, candlesticks and flatware. My grandmother had a lot of old silver. Some she'd bought at antique shops and estate sales and some she'd gotten with Green Stamps. I remembered sitting at the kitchen table licking and sticking stamps, counting the books until we had enough for this piece or that. Some of the silver had belonged to my mother, who selected the same pattern as Mama Alice. In the South, if a girl was smart she chose the same swirl of roses and ivy as her mother and someday she'd end up with service for twenty-four or thirty-six. Silver was my grandmother's way of investing. And my inheritance, along with the house. Except the silver was in better shape. Even on a drab day it gave off a soft glow.
Ida Plum fed another pink sheet into the soft, padded lips of the ironer. “Pity the poor man who sees these sheets on his bed and thinks he's got the wrong kind of house.” She snorted a laugh through her nose.
“I'll send you up,” I said, and measured out beans to grind to make more coffee, this time in a smaller pot. “I'll get you a long, blond wig and shove you up the stairs.”
“He'd jump out the window when I came in the door.” Ida Plum laughed. “My sex life died the day they carried Turner Duckett out the door, thank God. It never was much and I had enough to do without it.”
I knew Ida Plum had one daughter who'd gone straight from some women's college in the Midwest to California and didn't come back to Littleboro. Ever. Ida Plum visited her but didn't stay long. She said she could never live in a place where they
dried
okra and
arranged
it instead of breading and frying it. “Pure foolishness. Some people don't know good eating when it's put before them.”