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.
“She always told me she understood,” I said.
“Sure she did. She was so proud of you over there. She never wanted to be a burden to anyone, especially you. You know Mags. She hardly ever asked for help and she was private until the end.”
Of course Mags wouldn’t have called me up and begged me to come for a random weekend. That’s not who she is—or was. She wanted me to come on my own terms. I just waited too long.
“No sense in worrying over it all now,” Dot said. “How could any of us have known? She was Mags—we took it for granted that she’d be around forever.”
By the time we finished our call, the courtyard had emptied out. Only Millie and Walt remained, peering at each other and pondering their next moves on the chessboard. I could just barely make out the early evening sounds of Bourbon Street a few blocks away, quiet as a house cat compared to the frenzy that would ensue in the coming hours.