Lending a Paw(24)

“Oh, Minerva, I’m so sorry. Did you send a note to his wife? He was elderly, as I recall. Cancer, was it? So many people get cancer these days—it’s all this plastic, I just know it. The other day I was reading about this woman who—”

From long experience, I knew the only way to get a word in edgewise was to interrupt. “It wasn’t cancer, Mom.”

“It wasn’t? Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.” The word “murder” hovered on my lips, but I brushed it away because I knew what would happen if I said it out loud. Mom would say, “Minerva Joy, are you sure you’re all right?” and escalate rapidly to “You’re not fine, I can hear it in your voice. Bob? Get the luggage, we’re driving up to Chilson right now.”

After they got here, it would take me days to reassure my mother that, yes, I was fine, that, no, I didn’t need therapy, and that I wasn’t going to fall on their necks weeping with anxiety and sorrow and loss and beg to be taken home with them for an extended stay.

So I didn’t say that Stan had been murdered. I dealt with the guilt by vowing that I’d tell Dad all about it. And I would. One of these days.

“Just because he didn’t have cancer,” Mom said now, “is no reason not to stay away from pesticides. Speaking of toxic chemicals, how is Kristen doing with getting organic pork?”

The conversation stayed permanently diverted. The call came to a close with Mom’s typical “I worry about you, honey. Are you eating enough vegetables? And are you still writing the notes? Please tell me you are.”

I reassured her on both counts. As soon as we said good-bye, I made a quick call to Aunt Frances and asked her not to tell her sister-in-law and her brother, aka my dad, anything about the end of Friday’s bookmobile trip. Since Aunt Frances had known my mother longer than I had, it didn’t take much persuading.

Somehow, it was inevitable that Kristen would call when I was on the phone. I picked up her message: “Sorry I didn’t call earlier, had to take a fast trip down to Traverse to test a new cheese. Stop by tonight, okay? See ya!”

I stowed my cell phone in my purse, patted a sleeping Eddie on the head, scrawled a note on the whiteboard, and headed out.

• • •

The name of Kristen’s restaurant, Three Seasons, was a direct result of her vow to specialize in serving locally grown foods. When she was working up her business plan, she decided to draw up sample menus from each season. Spring was full of greens, asparagus, lamb, and fish. Summer ranged from cherries to corn to peaches to tomatoes to pork and fish. Fall was apples and squash and potatoes, beef, and fish. It was when she started work on the winter menus that she ran into problems.

“I can’t serve frozen vegetables!” She’d thrown her arms in the air, making her tall self even taller. “What am I going to do?”

We’d been at the sideboard in Aunt Frances’s dining room, our backs to a winterscape of white lawns and naked trees, our fronts facing Kristen’s pages and pages of spread-out scribbles. “Shut down in the winter,” I said. “Go somewhere warm. You don’t like snow that much, anyway.”

“What?” She’d put her hands to her sleek hair. “I can’t do that! How can I be closed four months out of the year?”

“Okay, close after New Year’s, open on April Fools’ Day.”

“How can I be closed three months of the year?”

“Who’s going to eat there in February?” I’d asked. “Besides me and Aunt Frances, I mean. The snowbirds are all gone after the holidays and we’re too far from most of the ski resorts to be a destination.”

“I can’t be closed three months of the year,” she’d said, but it was almost a question.

“Why not? Lots of restaurants around here are closed in winter.” I ran roughshod over the objections she was starting to think up. “Interview the people you want to hire and tell them right off what you’re thinking. If they shy away, well, maybe you’ll have to stay open to keep your core staff. Why not at least try? But this way you’ll only need to come up with menus from three seasons.”

By then she was starting to think about it. “Three seasons,” she’d said. “I can do three, easy.”

Thus the restaurant’s name was born. The location, after weeks of searching for a perfect place that I was convinced existed only in Kristen’s head, was locked in when a rambling bed-and-breakfast that had once been a family cottage went on the market. “Cottage” being a loose term, since in this case it referred to a mammoth five-thousand-square-foot structure.