The Innkeeper's House

by Elizabeth Bromke

  “That does sound a little young for a middle schooler,” Maggie added thoughtfully.

  Greta shrugged, trying to take up for the poor teacher who surely had a good reason. “It’s a classic. You’re never too old to read a classic.”

  “That’s true. And the school and teachers are terrific, truly. It’s just that since I don’t know how to help them learn the difference between commas and a scratch on the paper, they might fall behind. Will they be prepared?” Maggie asked pointedly.

  Greta restrained herself from rolling her eyes. “Depends on how the teacher had them study it. I’d say it’s more about the how rather than the what when it comes to instruction and curriculum.”

  “Maybe you could tutor Ky and Dakota this summer,” Rhett offered. He meant well, Greta was sure, but even Maggie cringed.

  “I’d love that. But, Rhett, look at your sister. Greta does enough around here. She doesn’t need to wrangle these heathens in their academics. Ky will have another English class again next year, with Ms. Randall. And I’m sure she will fill in any gaps or whatever you education people call it.”

  Greta tried to redirect the conversation, rising from her seat so she could bring dessert over.

  But Ky grunted. “Ms. Randall isn’t gon’ be there next year.”

  “What?” Maggie asked, frowning. “What do you mean?”

  Greta’s ears pricked up.

  “She’s getting married to somebody in Louisville and moving.” He went back to eating but a flash lit up his face. “Hey! Wait a minute! Maybe they’ll just cancel Language Arts! Maybe I won’t have to take it at all!”

  Maggie smacked her hand down on the table in front of her oldest son. “Ky,” she glanced back at Greta, who’d returned with an apple pie. “Are you positive?”

  Ky looked from Maggie to Greta to Rhett, his face a chubby ball of furrows and confusion. “Maybe. Maybe they’ll just tell my class to read a book for Language Arts.”

  Rhett chuckled, and Greta smiled, but Maggie shook her head before it flopped backwards in aggravation. “That’s not what I’m talking about, young man. I’m asking you if Ms. Randall really did quit her job.”

  The lightbulb flickered in his little boy brain, and a slow smile crept across his lips. “You’re talkin’ about if there’s gonna be a teaching job there? At Hickory Grove Middle?”

  Greta just shook her head. “Surely, they have more than one English—er, Language Arts—class per grade level?”

  Though, even when she attended H.G.M.S., there was only one teacher per grade. Small rural school, that’s what you got.

  Maggie wordlessly raised an eyebrow to Greta then pinned her gaze back on her son. “Yes, little boy blue, that’s what Mama’s saying.” She wagged her hand in lazy circles to drag more information out. But boys Ky’s age were notoriously useless at gossip.

  He hooked a fleshy finger at Greta. How that child could be pudgy was both bewildering and perfectly sensible. Though he played hard all the day long, he ate hard at every meal, with snacks in between. Rhett had said that ever since Maggie had taken up in the farmhouse, it was part hair salon, part Cracker Barrel. She ought to name it Maggie’s Cut and Crunch. It was a lame joke, but Greta began to see how true it rang. All throughout helping Maggie fix supper, every single day she was there, they had to repurpose the whole kitchen space, air it out with long dish towels and open windows, light half a dozen candles, preheat the oven with that morning’s bacon pan then move the supplies to the parlor, which Maggie eventually intended to turn into her shop. Just as soon as Rhett could get a plumbing fixture in there.

  “Are you asking if I could get Miss Greta a job at my school?” Ky asked.

  Rhett belted out a laugh and reached across the table to scruff the kid’s hair.

  Maggie just shook her head and held her hands to God to save her from her misery. “Oh, Lordy. Ky, you just kill me.” At length, she and Greta also laughed, but Greta’s died off faster.

  “Ky, I’d love to be your teacher.” She sliced into the pie, dividing it into six equal triangles before sliding each one onto the waiting dessert plates. “But I can’t.”

  “Oh, come on Greta. What are you talking about? If Ky here knows what he’s talking about, then there is an English position right under your nose, for goodness’ sake!”

  Greta blinked and fell into her chair, stabbing at her pie and shaking her head. “Language Arts,” she corrected him under her breath.

  “Huh?” Rhett asked.

  Greta held up a hand toward Ky. “It’s Language Arts, not English. I’m a high school English teacher.”

  “Sweetheart,” Maggie rested her hand on Greta’s forearm, squeezing it warmly. “I mean this to be as kind as I possibly can. You’re not a high school English teacher, Greta Houston. You’re a broken heart. You’re a little sister. You’re a houseguest and a farmhand. You’re a neat-freak and a hard worker. You’re a small-town girl who found her way home and yet you’ve got your sights set on some big city school up north. Why? So that you can say you’re a high school English teacher? Honey, you don’t know what in the heck you are.”

  Chapter 6—Luke

  The Hickory Grove Inn had turned into nothing short of a hot mess. Liesel didn’t shed any of her church responsibilities, and so Luke was alone in learning about how to run the darn place. Stella showed him all she knew, but that turned out to be relatively little.

  With his aunt, it was always I’ll come by later or I trust your judgement, just make the call. He’d had to give one set of weekend guests his phone number instead of Liesel’s for any overnight emergencies, which gave him hives. To be on call for strangers felt intrusive.

  Finally, after a couple weeks of driving back and forth from his house to the bed-and-breakfast, he ended up camping out in his grandmother’s little house next door. That proved even harder, and he learned very quickly why Liesel was so hands-off.

  Mamaw Hart was everywhere there. From her afghans to her Tupperware, he couldn’t escape the woman’s ghost. The sadness he thought he might have overcome by putting in extra time on some repairs at the Inn returned with a sharp vengeance, needling him to the point where he finally called a business meeting with his aunt.

  “This is too hard,” he began, as they stood outside his house up on Lowell Avenue. She had an accounting appointment for Little Flock, and he had been called to sit in on a couple of interviews. He and Liesel had exactly ten minutes, and he should have just taken her to dinner to sort things out, but, well, Luke was fed up. “School starts in a couple of weeks, and by then I can’t be on call. You’re busy too, Aunt Liesel, I get that. Still, something’s got to change.”

  “We said we’d hire someone,” Liesel replied, checking her wristwatch compulsively.

  “Mamaw’s stuff’s still in that house. We can’t hire someone for that. We need to set aside time to go in there together and sort through it. We need to commit.”

  He felt foolish being the one to come down hard on his elder, but it had to be said. If his own aunt couldn’t step up to the plate, then Luke was lost. Frustrated. At his wits’ end.

  “Fine.” She threw up her hands but then drew one down to rub under her eye. Her voice rattled. “We’ll clean it out. We’ll hire a live-in manager. Just say when and what, and I’ll do it.”

  He blew air through tight lips. “Let’s meet there tomorrow evening. I’ll see if I can bring Mark to help with moving stuff. We can store as much as possible in my shed. In the meantime, can you add the job posting to the parish bulletin?”

  She nodded her head in one quick bob and agreed to the plan.

  Satisfied that there was a light at the end of the tunnel, Luke took off, dialing Mark as he walked the short distance to school.

  “Hey, Mark. Any chance you’re free tomorrow night? Aunt Liesel and I are going to start sorting through Mamaw’s stuff, and we might need help with heavy lifting. She’s... she’s not taking it very well.”

  “I’ll be there. Say, I�
�m just finishing some new plays. Can you meet me at Mally’s to go over them?”

  “I’m heading in to help with the interviews. Afterwards?”

  Mark agreed, and Luke ended the call, rolling his shoulders back into place and redirecting his attention on the task at hand: ensuring Hickory Grove Middle School did not hire another faculty member who was charmed by the small town life but unwilling to stick it out.

  ***

  The first interviewee was a middle-aged woman from Corydon. It did not go well. Several times throughout the fifteen-minute Q&A session, Luke felt himself forcibly holding back a need to bite down on his fist. She had all the prerequisites, her certification and fingerprint clearance card. But her reason for applying, which she made crystal clear, was her dissatisfaction with her current position. She’d accidentally shown The Scarlet Letter film (the one from the nineties that was rated R) in its entirety to a classroom full of ninth graders. She’d been reprimanded and was happy to share all the gory details during the length of her time with the Hickory Grove hiring committee.

  When they thanked her for coming in, Mrs. Cook, a former English teacher herself, murmured that The Scarlet Letter wasn’t usually taught in ninth grade to begin with.

  Luke, who had read only a handful of books in his whole life, felt a little out of the loop on that angle, but he still took his job of helping to round out the committee by offering a male’s perspective. “She was confident,” he added as professionally as he could, “but this community is somewhat conservative. I doubt they would like for their children to be a captive audience to on-screen nudity.”

  The others nodded in agreement. A few snickered. Luke would, too, if Mark was there to josh with. But generally, he preferred to keep things above board. His title as a phys. ed. teacher already set him apart as less serious about the job, and he didn’t want to contribute to that if he could help it. Plus, he believed what he said. If he had a young daughter, he’d want a competent teacher. Not someone who didn’t properly vet her media before a lesson. Sure, mistakes happened. But that woman was a train wreck. Thank goodness there was a second applicant.

  Mrs. Cook left to bring her in, the second (and final) candidate. If this one was even one degree better than the last, they’d probably offer her a job on the spot.

  “Houston,” Mrs. Crabapple announced, reading from the printed resume they’d each received a copy of. “That name doesn’t sound familiar. Do you know the Houston family, Coach?” She coughed into her fist. Mrs. Crabapple was the only other staff member present who had grown up in the county, but she wasn’t a true local. She was from River Port, a tiny community on the banks of the Ohio. “Ladies? Any of you all?” She looked around the small group of teachers, but her gaze landed back on Luke and she shifted in her seat, tucking her hands beneath her bosom and lacing them together on her ample stomach.

  Luke shrugged. “It’s a common name. Feel like I might have run into someone by the name but not too sure.”

  He hadn’t yet studied the paperwork and, for some reason, expected to look down and see the name of a man. However, Luke didn’t have a chance to confirm his suspicion, because she appeared right then, in the doorway ahead of Mrs. Cook. She. Not he.

  The fact that she was a woman was not, however, the detail that shocked him the most.

  It was that this Houston woman, this—he glanced down at the thick white page in his hand, blinking before returning his eyes to her face—this Ms. Greta Houston was strikingly familiar.

  Chapter 7—Greta

  It was all wrong. Middle school language arts? And in Hickory Grove? The only reason Greta agreed to apply for the position and accept an interview was to keep Maggie and Rhett happily out of her business.

  What it came to feel like was that they were squarely inside of her business. Directing it, even. With Maggie, she didn’t mind so much. But with Rhett, Greta had the compulsion to turn back into her pre-teen self and tell him to bug out! or get lost!

  Still, to see the hope in Ky, Dakota, and Briar’s little faces that Miss Greta might one day be their teacher... it was too much to ignore. However, there was Gretchen to think of. Gretchen hadn’t yet heard the news that Greta was thinking of staying in Hickory Grove. Would it upset her further? Would she assume that Greta would stay in the barn for the long haul?

  She wouldn’t, of course. Because, for goodness’ sake, Greta was not taking a middle school language arts job in a town that barely had a stoplight, much less a dating scene.

  She would do it to keep them quiet and placid as she rooted around harder for something else. Anyway, it didn’t hurt to start practicing her interview skills. But that night, Greta swore to herself she’d stop being so lackadaisical and really get down to business, scouring the internet for school districts and opening her mind to different cities. Different districts. She’d even follow up with Chicago Public Schools by personally reaching out to principals. That way she wasn’t lost in a backlog of online interest forms.

  In the meantime, Greta would go into her old middle school, pray she didn’t know anyone on the hiring committee, make a half-hearted attempt to answer their questions, then get out of there. After all, she was still within the window for Chicago Public to get back to her without her reaching out to the principals. The online confirmation message promised a turn-around time of responding to her inquiry within one week. It was about to be one week.

  Also, summer was nearly over. But that was a thought Greta simply pushed aside. Worst case scenario, she’d find a normal district. One where you started school in September, not August, for goodness’ sake!

  Still, despite all of the reasons she should not teach in Hickory Grove, and despite her very vocal insistence that she was doing it just because I love you guys and it’ll be good interview practice anyway, a quieter, smaller voice from deep inside of her pushed on her heart, reminding her of the truth that she learned long, long before. When God closes a door, he opens a window. It was up to Greta to listen to that quiet, small voice. After all, even if she had better opportunities elsewhere, a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush.

  Right?

  It was the quiet, small voice that guided her through getting ready and putting together an outfit: a summery-but-serious pink chiffon dress with cap sleeves and a hemline that hit in the dead center of her knees and sensible-if-stylish espadrille wedges. She applied light makeup and drew wisps of her chunky blonde waves back from their typical position along her temples, pinning them in place with a pale pink barrette.

  Greta wouldn’t normally select pink for an interview. Green or red, or even black, sure. But she couldn’t find her dressy blouses, and it was too hot for slacks. Anyway, she was often told that pink was her color, and her mother had always said that if you’re lucky enough to have a color, you simply must own it. So, with little to lose anyway, Greta did just that.

  Maggie let her get ready in her bathroom rather than in front of the small mirror in the barn, but both locales were stuffy. The farmhouse was cooled by one, lone window AC unit, and so Greta had to get ready quickly enough that she could slip into her car where she’d blast the air and pray that she could stave off any anxiety sweat for the duration of the drive and her interview.

  ***

  Once she had parked in the front lot at Hickory Grove M.S., Greta tucked her leather attaché neatly beneath her arm. Inside of it was a tube of lipstick, her wallet, keys, and extra copies of her résumé, printed weeks earlier at Indy Print and Paper. Though she’d already emailed the same document with her application, and though, again, this whole thing was really just a practice run, it wouldn’t hurt to show up prepared and snazzy. You never knew who was connected in the world of education, and she sure didn’t want H.G.M.S. to spread the word that a sloppy applicant was making the rounds. Greta insisted to herself that she maintain the high level of professionalism she’d developed over the years. She might be from Hickory Grove, but even if she knew anyone on the interview team, she hoped to
impress them with her worldliness.

  “Hi!” Greta beamed at the secretary, who sat in front of an oscillating fan at a dated computer.

  The woman tore her attention from the screen and looked up, smiling broadly. “Well, now!” she gushed as she rose and crossed to the counter behind which Greta stood. “You must be Miss Greta Houston!” Her bubbly demeanor was disarming and welcome.

  “That’s right,” Greta replied. “I’m here for an interview with Mrs. Cook.” She smoothed the fabric of her dress along her torso, feeling surprisingly at ease. It helped that the secretary was a new face. No one to embarrass herself in front of. No one to shrink in front of when they droned on about how they hadn’t seen little Greta Houston since she was knee-high to a grasshopper! She let out a breath and glanced beyond the kindly woman.

  “They are just finishing up with the first one. Miss Danielle—I mean, Mrs. Cook—will be out shortly, dear. Take a seat if you’d like.” She gestured to a chair across from the counter, wooden and rigid, as old as the school building itself, no doubt. It was a wonder to Greta that the whole place didn’t feel more familiar. The shape was. And if she was pressed to, she could find just about any place or anything there, from muscle memory, but the bulletin boards and the general feel were somehow more comfortable and welcoming now than when she was in seventh or eighth grade. Perhaps, that made perfect sense.

  Greta sat and regretted it. As soon as her weight hit the seat, nerves set in. Was it the reality of an interview? Or the fact that she wasn’t the lone candidate for the job? Who’d have thought Hickory Grove Middle School would have a long line of applicants? Was this Danielle Cook turning around the rural school system and drawing in fresh-faced, capable teachers from the four corners of Indiana? From across the river?