Eby turned. “I need to cancel the summer reservations. All three of them.”
Lisette followed Eby to the check-in desk in the foyer, furiously scribbling something on her notepad as she walked. Eby sat behind the desk, and Lisette tore out the note and slapped it on the desk surface. Eby picked it up and read it.
I am not going. I will chain myself to a tree. They will not make me leave. You go. Do what you want. Leave me here to get flattened by a bulldozer. Leave me here to die.
Eby pushed the note back to Lisette. “Flattened by a bulldozer? How unromantic. You’ll have to come up with something better than that. You jumped off a bridge in the middle of Paris. It’s going to be hard to top that one.”
Lisette snatched the note and stomped to the kitchen.
“Everything is going to be okay,” Eby called to her. She heard the smack of Lisette’s palm against the swinging door. “I promise.”
Eby worried about Lisette. Too much, probably. But Lisette had no one else to worry about her. The one true difference between them was that Eby had her memory of George, a memory that would always remind her that she was worthy of love. But Lisette only had the memory of a sixteen-year-old boy who committed suicide because of her. Lisette had pushed everyone in her life away except Eby. She had no one else real in her life, past or present, who had steadfastly loved her no matter what, and that was why the thought of losing this place scared her so. The memory of everyone who had ever loved Lisette was here.
That’s when it suddenly occurred to Eby.
Jack.
Aha.
Eby picked up the phone with hope.
She knew what she was doing. She was focusing on Lisette instead of dwelling on this tremendous, life-altering decision she’d just made. But she was okay with that. She was good at being needed. It had been years since she’d felt really useful.
And if she just kept busy enough, maybe she could ignore the strange, anxious fluttering under her skin and the tingling in her fingers from where she’d shaken hands with the man.
Then all this would all be over before she knew it.
*
The next day, Eby thought she’d be productive and begin the process of going through the things that needed to be packed. She had great plans for finding her clipboard and cataloging everything. Maybe even taking photos. But she quickly became overwhelmed when she realized just how much stuff there was. Forget cataloging it. Where was she going to put it? She started by looking up nearby storage units in the town of Suley’s thin phone book. But then she wondered who was going to move all these things, things she couldn’t possibly part with, many of them bought on her honeymoon. So she switched gears and looked up movers. Then she wondered, if she was hiring movers, why didn’t she just buy a house to move into and avoid having to move everything twice? But the only place nearby that was big enough to store everything she had—a house and thirteen cabins’ worth of memories—was the old Rue-McRae Homestead in town, which had been turned into a visitor center years ago. It detailed the history of the town’s settlers for anyone who was interested, of a rough-and-tumble group of people from the swamp, mostly displaced from Okefenokee over the past several hundred years. The Rue-McRae Homestead aside, it would take several normal-size houses to put all this furniture in. And she couldn’t afford to buy several houses. Selling the lake acreage would pay off her first and second mortgages. But then, buying even a single house would leave her with no money to travel.
That made her think of Lisette, who had been banging around the kitchen for the past twenty-four hours. Currently, the scent of rising dough and hot berries was being sucked through the old air-conditioning unit and spread throughout the main house. This was Lisette’s rebellion. She was cooking for guests who weren’t coming. It was as if nothing bad could happen if she just kept going. Like a wheel in motion, she seemed to think no one could stop her, or make her leave, once she started.
Eby gave up trying to plan her departure for now and sat behind the front desk with a crossword puzzle. She couldn’t do this alone. Lisette was going to have to help her. Eby would just wait for this hissy fit to pass.
The air conditioner turned off. The house ticked and settled. Eby sighed and set the crossword aside, then scooted her chair to the very edge of the desk, where she could lean back and see a corner of the window in the sitting room. She often did this, to watch a quiet corner of the lake. There were even scratch marks on the floor from years of pulling the chair to her daydream spot.
She was going to miss her daydream spot.
Giving up the money George had inherited fifty years ago had been the best thing she and George had ever done. But, as young and idealistic as they’d been, Eby still wished they’d squirreled a little money away, for times like this.
Times like this? She shook her head. She’d never in her wildest dreams imaged herself at seventy-six, forced to sell Lost Lake.
Seventy-six.
Good Lord, how did that happen? Yesterday, she was twenty-four making love under a bridge in Paris.
Suddenly, the front door flew open and two older women walked in in a gust of rose lotion and liniment oil. Eby gave a start and the front legs of her chair dropped to the floor.
“See? It’s still here,” said the woman with bright red hair. Makeup was caked into the fine wrinkles around her eyes, and she was wearing a cherry-print dress and four-inch red heels. She was helping a tiny old woman through the door. “She said she was selling it, not that it was gone. Can we go now?”
“No,” the elderly woman said.
The redheaded woman closed the door behind them and stopped to wave her hand in front of her face, as if to cool off. “Okay, what’s your plan?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet,” the old woman said. “All I know is that we didn’t know last summer was going to be our last summer, so we didn’t make it anything special. We’ve got to make this ending special.”
Eby stood. “Selma, Bulahdeen—you came!” Eby had called them just yesterday to cancel their reservations. They were two of the three summer faithfuls she had left, the old-timers who came back year after year. Eby watched the door, waiting for Jack, the third, to come in. But he didn’t.
“Bulahdeen called me after you canceled our reservations. She demanded I pick her up and drive her here,” Selma said.
“I couldn’t drive myself,” Bulahdeen told Eby. “They took away my license last year.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Eby said. In her eighties, Bulahdeen Ward was the oldest of all Eby’s guests. She was stooping like a fiddlehead fern now, curling into herself, making her appear that she was charging at life headfirst. She and her husband, Charlie, both former professors, used to come together to the lake until a few years ago. Charlie developed Alzheimer’s and was now in a nursing home. Since then, Bulahdeen had been coming alone. She was a quiet force of nature, the peculiar southern lilt to her voice as old as low-country sand. Selma, tall and painted and standoffish, was Bulahdeen’s every opposite. They were an odd pair. Bulahdeen had somehow, somewhere along the way, decided that Selma was one of her best friends. Selma vehemently disagreed. Bulahdeen didn’t care.
“And you don’t have to make such a big deal of it,” Bulahdeen turned to Selma and said, pointing a bone-knobby finger at her. “It was on your way.”
“I live in Meridian. Mississippi. You live in Spartanburg. South Carolina. That is not on my way.”
“Don’t give me that. You had nothing better to do.”
“Speak for yourself, old woman. I’ve got another husband to catch.” Selma was sixty-five but told everyone she was fifty, and she claimed to be an expert on men, though having seven husbands might mean to some that she was an expert on getting it wrong. Selma had a reputation for flirting with all the men who stayed here in the summers, in an offhand way, second nature, like the way a bird naturally flaps its wings when it falls. Thirty years ago, she’d visited Lost Lake with her third husband. She soon divorced him, like all the others, but then she kept coming back. No one understood why. She never seemed to enjoy herself.
“We stopped by town for some supplies before we came here,” Bulahdeen said as she walked to the check-in desk.
“Supplies meaning Bulahdeen bought six bottles of wine,” Selma said.
Bulahdeen hoisted her purse onto the desk, then leaned against it with a deep breath. “When I mentioned to some folks about you selling this place, they seemed surprised.”
“Oh,” Eby said. “Well, that’s because I haven’t told anyone yet.”
Bulahdeen looked at her curiously. Her eyes were as cloudy as crystal balls. “Is it a secret?”
“Not anymore,” Selma said dryly, still standing at the door, ready to make an escape.