Bed & Breakfast Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  PART One

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  PART Two

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Praise for Bed & Breakfast

  “[Lois Battle] manifests throughout a sort of fundamental decency—a compassion for human frailty—that makes her book especially appealing.”

  —The Washington Post

  “The Tatternall family will seduce you from page one of Bed & Breakfast.... It’s a tender sigh, glad-I-read-it, perfect-for-Christmas kind of book.”

  —San Antonio Express News

  “Like a cup of high voltage coffee, Bed & Breakfast will jolt you awake.”

  —Rita Mae Brown, author of Hounded to Death and

  Rubyfruit Jungle

  “Lois Battle’s Bed & Breakfast is pure delight: touching and witty, sympathetic and shrewd. It’s the kind of book I’ll rush to tell all my friends about; it’s the book I can’t wait to give my mother!”

  —Nancy Thayer, author of The Hot Flash Club

  “I loved it—it’s truthful and benevolent and entirely recognizable. It’s also a wonderful portrait of the fractured nature of the modern family, and proof that however much we wish we could get along without one, we simply can’t.”

  —Joanna Trollope, author of Friday Nights

  “An engrossing [and] emotion-filled story.”

  —Newport News Press

  “A heart-tugging drama.”

  —The Beaufort Gazette

  “A literate, witty, and affectionate tale.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “There are no heroes in this family drama, no villains either—just regular folks, drawn with sympathy and keen-eyed humor.”

  —Booklist

  Lois Battle is the author of seven novels, including Storyville. She lives in Beaufort, South Carolina.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) ● Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL,

  England ● Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books

  Ltd) ● Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) ● Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community

  Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India ● Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive,

  Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) ● Penguin Books

  (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 1996

  Published in Penguin Books 1997

  This edition published in Penguin Books 2009

  Copyright © Lois Battle, 1996 All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint

  excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

  “Stardust” by Mitchell Parish and Hoagy Carmichael. © 1928 (renewed) EMI Mills Music, Inc.

  and Hoagy Publishing Co. in the USA/EMI Mills Music, Inc. for the rest of the world. All rights

  reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

  “The Biggest Difference” from Alchemy by Dana Wildsmith.

  By permission of The Sow’s Ear Press.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-57189-7

  I. Title.

  PS3552.A8325B4 1996

  813’.54—dc20 96-17258

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means

  without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only

  authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy

  of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Colleen Battle, my sister and

  beloved friend

  Acknowledgments

  THANKS TO MY editor, Pamela Dorman, for her Penelope-like patience and continued guidance; to my dear friends Will Balk, Christine Stanley, Dana Wildsmith, Brewster Robertson, Shirley Carson, Meg Ruley, Gene Jones, and Pat Thelma Latimer, for their unflagging loyalty, humor, and affection. And to John W. Patterson, “Rat-Boy,” jokester, Guardian, Master of the Revels . . . and of my heart.

  PART One

  Prologue

  IT WASN’T AS though Josie’d had a premonition. Nothing as strong as that. Just a sense that something was going to happen that would be more than she could cope with. She’d had it from the moment she’d opened her eyes and realized that the girls were coming to her house for their weekly bridge game. She’d tried to shrug it off but the feeling had persisted, undeniable as the sneezes and aches that signaled the flu, right up until the moment it had happened. Then she’d been totally involved but totally surprised, as though she were watching an old movie she’d seen many times.

  The four of them—she, her sister Edna, Peatsy Gibbs, and Mary Gebhardt—had been playing bridge on her sun porch. The grandfather clock in the dining room, which she’d had repaired just last week but which was still running about seven minutes fast, had struck three. Peatsy had just trumped Mary’s ace and said she was feeling dizzy. “ ’Course you feel dizzy,” Edna had said, “you’re a dizzy broad.” But instead of the tight little smile Peatsy usually showed when Edna talked slangy, Peatsy’d closed her eyes and got a strange look on her face, as though someone had just come up behind her and whispered, “Guess who?” Her hand had wandered up to her pearls, forgot where it was going, and pawed the air. Then she’d plunged forward, her head hitting the table with an awful thud, one arm flung out scattering cards and Mary’s glutted ashtray. “Mother of God,” Mary cried, and ran to her, hauling her back by her shoulders so that her arms flopped to her sides and her head snapped back, mouth open, showing her bridgework. “Mother of God!” Mary cried again. Edna got up as though someone had lifted her by the hair, stared at Peatsy, doused iced tea on the smoldering cigarette that had rolled out of the ashtray, then sat down hard. But she, Josie, had known just what to do.

  She’d walked straight to the kitchen telephone and dialed 911, and when she’d said, “This is Mrs. Josephine Tatternall, over at The Point. We need some help here,” she’d sounded so calm as to be sociable.

  She’d answered all the questions, speaking slowly and enunciating carefully because the girl sounded young and not too bright, and when
the girl told her that the ambulance was on its way, she’d even remembered to say, “Thank you. And Merry Christmas.”

  One

  SHE’D WOKEN AROUND seven, shut off the alarm she always set as a precaution, and turned to look past the bedpost to the windows. They were undraped because her bedroom was on the second floor where no one could see in and she liked to be woken by natural light. The sun was already making a shy appearance, and it looked like a seasonable day for mid-December. She would like to have lingered in bed, but that was out of the question. When you ran a bed-and-breakfast, you had to get up. Hooking her arms behind her head, she ran her mind over the day’s tasks: she would fix breakfast for last night’s guests, see them on their way, do the dishes, garden while Cuba did the laundry, then make a quick trip to the Azalealand Nursing Home to see Mawmaw. Her sister Edna said there wasn’t any point in visiting because Mawmaw wouldn’t even know she was there, but just last week as she’d been about to leave, Mawmaw had said, “So glad you dropped by. You know, I’ve always thought of you as one of the family.” So even if Mawmaw no longer recognized her as her daughter, she at least seemed to appreciate her presence.

  When she got home from Azalealand she’d toss some leftovers together for lunch, then she’d decorate the tree. She’d carried boxes of ornaments down from the attic over a week ago when Edna’s husband, Dozier, had set up the tree in her living room, but she just hadn’t been able to face the prospect of decorating it alone. If Cuba helped her . . . that is, if Cuba came in. When it came to Christmas, or “the birth of our Baby Jesus” as Cuba called it, Cuba went hog-wild. She strung every bush and tree around her own house with colored lights, put little statues of the Three Wise Men on her scrubby lawn, and fixed a black-faced Santa, ready to crawl down the chimney, on her roof. She plaited wreaths, baked mounds of cookies and coconut cakes, drove her dinged-up’83 Olds on a daily round of Wal-Mart, Kmart, and the Bay Street stores, and went into hock for every toy and gewgaw her grandchildren saw on TV. And this year Cuba was making new robes (actually dashikis) and headgear for her choir at First African Baptist, so she’d told Josie straight out that she wouldn’t be putting in her regular hours until after the New Year. So ... if Cuba didn’t come in, she’d do the laundry, then she’d fix lunch, then . . . then she remembered that the girls were coming to her house for their weekly bridge game, and she allowed herself a single but heartfelt “Damn!”

  They usually met out at Mary Gebhardt’s place on Dataw Island on the third Wednesday of each month, but last Wednesday Mary had asked if someone would switch with her because her children and grandchildren were coming “from all over the country” for the holidays. Peatsy had said she couldn’t possibly switch because she was supervising the wrapping of Toys for Tots and singing the Messiah at St. Helena’s Episcopal before she took off to visit her son, Waring, in Washington, D.C. Edna, predictably, had begged off, too, saying she was keeping her gift shop open extra hours to catch the Christmas trade, then she and Dozier were driving up to their son’s place in Columbia. So the lot had fallen to Josie. How could she possibly refuse when they all knew she had no special plans? None of her three daughters was coming home for the holidays. On Christmas Day her daughter, Lila, would just drive over from Hilton Head to pick her up. They’d go back to Lila and her husband Orrie’s place, open a mountain of presents, then Orrie would take her, Lila, and the kids out to some expensive restaurant. So Josie’d said, “Why, sure, you girls can come back here again.”

  Edna, who’d gotten religion about the women’s movement since she’d gone into business, had said, “We’re not girls, Josie, we’re women.” She could have pointed out that Edna, who was two years her senior, still lied about her age, whereas she always told the truth (partly because in a town the size of Beaufort most everyone knew your real age anyway, partly because when she confessed to seventy-three, most people said she didn’t look it), but she’d just said, “Well, y’all are more than welcome to come here again.”

  At the time she’d meant it, but now she could hear the conversation in advance, the gush about holiday plans, the updates on children and grandchildren that were really just an accepted form of bragging (less happy topics—bankruptcies, unwanted pregnancies, and divorces—being reserved for one-on-one conversation). With a bright smile that only served to point up her underlying pity, Mary would ask if Josie had heard from her eldest daughter, Camilla, now known as Cam. Mary had never even met Cam but she knew (though Josie had never personally told her) Cam had sworn, some ten years ago at her father’s funeral, that she would never come back to Beaufort or speak to Josie again. She also knew that though Cam had relented to the point of making obligatory monthly phone calls, she had held to her promise never to come back home. Since Cam was unmarried, lived in New York, and worked for a publishing company, Mary thought of her as some sort of soap-opera siren—glamorous but hard as nails. Josie sometimes thought of her that way herself.

  Then, Mary would ask about her youngest daughter, Evie, a onetime runner-up in the Miss South Carolina contest. Evie wrote a column in the Savannah paper in which she shared the most intimate details of her private life, including her “dysfunctional” childhood. She wrote under the byline “A Good Ol’ Girl” but that, as Cuba had pointed out, provided about as much concealment as Saran Wrap.

  Josie focused on the bedroom windows, comforting herself with the thought that she could talk about her daughter, Lila. Lila had achieved the old-fashioned Southern ideal of being the well-cared-for wife of a successful man. Her husband, Orrie Gadsden, was a real-estate developer who’d been elected to the state legislature just months before. Lila had money, social position, a beautiful home, and two lovely teenage children. She called Josie daily; they saw one another at least once a week. They shopped and occasionally even traveled together. Lila was everything a mother could want. Or so everyone believed. And Josie wasn’t about to disabuse them of that notion. Still . . .

  Thank goodness she had only that nice Canadian couple to cope with this morning, and they’d been so grateful that she’d bent the rules to let them keep their little dog in their room that they’d said they’d only want tea and toast before they got back on the road to Florida. But since most of her guests came through word of mouth, she’d make the effort and fix the homemade sausage, pan-fried gravy, biscuits, and peach preserves for which she was rightly famous. Maybe she’d even sell them a copy of the Lowcountry cookbook she’d published years before and kept on the kitchen counter. She was too polite to push the book, but guests often wanted to buy it after they’d tasted some of the recipes, and the extra cash was always welcome.

  Hearing her dead husband, Bear, command, “Reveille! Up and at ’em,” she flung back the quilt, grasped the bedpost, and stood up. The floorboard’s creak seemed to be a cry of protest coming from her feet but she straightened, pulled her jade satin robe over her flannel nightdress, tucked her hands into her armpits to warm them, and moved to the window to look down on her garden. In the early morning light it was like an Impressionist painting—a misty blur of greens, blues, grays, and white limned with pale gold. The paperwhites she’d planted for the Garden Club’s Christmas tour of historic homes—“Snow in the South”—were so thick that they really did look like snow and her mind drifted to the first time she’d seen snow—when she’d gone to visit Bear at that base in New Jersey right after they were married. When he’d said “up and at ’em” in those days, he’d meant something entirely different. He’d made love to her first thing every morning, and again when they’d come back to the inn after the walks he’d said were bracing but she’d sworn would give her frostbite. He’d undress her, pulling off her hat, gloves, galoshes, and socks, teasing her for being a hothouse flower, chafing her hands and feet, then massaging them, telling her in a husky voice, “I’m a gentleman. I always start with the extremities.” It had been a wonderfully arousing form of foreplay, though at the time she’d been such an innocent she hadn’t even known the word, let a
lone realized that he must’ve perfected his technique on other women.

  Thinking about those long-ago mornings put her into a sort of daze. Her fingers moved, gently kneading her breast, until the memory of the lumpectomy she’d had three years ago came across her like a shadow. The cyst had been benign and, perversely, she’d stopped all self-examination after she’d had the operation. She refused to think of her breasts only as a danger zone. If something went wrong, then it was up to that boy doctor to find it when she went for her semiannual checkup. True, she hadn’t kept her last appointment, and she’d ignored the nurse’s phone call and followup postcard, but she wasn’t going to think about that either. At least not until after the holidays.

  As she reached into the chest of drawers for fresh underwear, her eyes caught the two silver-framed photos on the dresser top. She found her glasses next to the bowl of potpourri, put them on, and studied the pictures.

  She had never, not even in the early years, been able to look at her wedding portrait without regret. There was Bear in his dress whites, wholesome yet somehow dangerous, already the embodiment of the World War II hero he was to become. His eyes under his brimmed hat had that “I can take on the world” look that had magnetized her when she’d first seen him, while ladling out nonalcoholic punch at a local “Support Our Troops” social. Only his nose—broken in a fight when he was ten and one of the boys at the Baton Rouge orphanage had called him a bastard and told him what it meant—stopped him from being movie-star handsome. And there she was, always notoriously unphotogenic, but just this once looking truly beautiful, her light brown hair flowing around her shoulders, her eyes shining, her smile bright, with just a whisper of sensuality.