A white sign with a red striped border got her attention. FOXBROWN & BROTHERS, it said and in smaller print, Mrs. Brown couldn’t read the smaller print from Main Street so she took a detour and went closer.
FOXBROWN & BROTHERS FINANCIAL ADVISERS. Mrs. Brown was struck by the name, of course, it being hers and her best friend and neighbor’s Mrs. Fox’s. Financial advisers, she thought. Is this an omen?
She had missed the article a few weeks ago in the Ashville Bulletin about the Foxbrown agency opening here. Three brothers, from New York, who summered at their grandmother’s “farm” nearby, had thought they’d leave the Big Apple and try their luck in Rhode Island (where the taxes were so much less than in New York).
So far, only one brother, the youngest, had actually managed to relocate from the city. Inside the office sat Stewart Foxbrown, tall, late thirties, wiry, preppy, a mop of brown hair, club tie, and pink button-down.
There wasn’t much business today, or any time so far.
Stewart spent his days playing solitaire on his computer and checking Bloomberg for money’s latest news. At night, he was pursuing a love affair with Mr. Jack Daniel’s. Rising to refill his coffee mug, he noticed Mrs. Brown at the window.
A live one! He opened the door. “Hello, ma’am,” he said, “need some financial advice?”
“How much?” Mrs. Brown asked.
“How much?” Stewart repeated. “How much for what?”
“For financial advice?” Mrs. Brown asked.
“It’s free,” Stewart said. Alas, this wasn’t a savvy investor at his door but a novice. Still, business was business, and business was better than boredom. “And if you decide to invest with us, we take commission on what you buy and sell.”
The lady seemed puzzled.
It was chilly with the door open. “Why don’t you come in and we can discuss it further,” Stewart said.
Mrs. Brown hesitated. Stewart stepped out into the alley and held the door for her. It would be impolite to decline such a gentlemanly gesture, so she stepped inside.
“I have to get back to the beauty parlor where I work,” Mrs. Brown said, resting Bonnie’s dry cleaning and shopping on a wood bench next to the office door.
She noticed that this fellow wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. If he was single, she might suggest he come by the beauty parlor to meet some of the beauticians who were unmarried. Just as swiftly as this thought came to her, it was dismissed. What if he was as nice as he seemed on first impression? She’d be doing him a disservice.
Stewart gestured for her to sit in the leather-and-wood chair across from his desk. “What are your financial goals Mrs. . . . ?” He waited for her name.
“Mrs. Brown,” Mrs. Brown answered. “What are my financial goals?” She paused. “To save enough money to buy . . .” She hesitated. Should she confide in this man, who, despite his endearing appearance—the mess of hair, the pink shirt riding up over his belt—was a total stranger, let alone a man?
“It usually helps if I know everything,” Stewart said. This was true, and he also was curious. Except for the clerk at the liquor store, Mrs. Brown might be the only other human he talked to today.
Mrs. Brown told Stewart everything about her dress, about going to New York for the first time ever, that it would be nearly an eight-thousand-dollar event, more money than she had ever imagined spending on anything . . . until she got to the end, saying: “So I have a thousand dollars in my bag. What can you do for me?”
Stewart, who indeed was a man, didn’t of course know how best to respond to Mrs. Brown’s story. So he offered the basics: “If you invest the money for a year, you might be able to earn five percent, maybe, probably less. But whatever the earning, it will be more than you’d get if you leave it in the bank.”
Mrs. Brown didn’t want to wait a year. “What if I give it to you for six months?”
“Well, then, you still will earn more than in a savings account at a bank. We will invest in a diversity of companies,” Stewart said, explaining what that meant.
Her next question was one of the most uncharacteristic things she had ever said: “What about speculating?”
Stewart cleared his throat. “Speculate? With a thousand dollars. Well, let’s see . . .”
Needy as he was for both business and something to do, his inherent sense of decency prevailed. “I cannot suggest a stock for you to speculate in, ma’am. I might have some ideas, but I think only if you really have money to burn should you ever gamble on a stock, or on a horse or anything else people gamble on.”
But Mrs. Brown wasn’t dissuaded. An instinct, she had: “By any chance is there anything called Santo”—the name of her beloved cat—“I could buy stock in?”
“I don’t know, ma’am, let’s see,” Stewart said, entering the name in his computer and hoping for Mrs. Brown’s sake that nothing was found. But, lo and behold, there was a Santo Eco, selling today for $23.45.
“Seems it has risen about two dollars a day since last week. Why don’t we just Google it here and see what the business of Santo Eco is. I always hate it when you find out it isn’t good for people, or it makes weapons or something . . .”
Mrs. Brown wouldn’t want that either.
“Now, this Santo,” Stewart said, reading professorially from his computer screen, “produces a variety of high-tech sorts of fabrics, including . . . It makes artificial flowers that when put in a vase with regular tap water supposedly can radiate enough heat to warm a room of upwards of three hundred square feet. Wow, that’s amazing.”
Actually, it sounded crazy, but Mrs. Brown overlooked that.
“I will take a thousand dollars’ worth,” she said, opening her pocketbook.
FLORIDA NOBLE TELEPHONED THAT Friday to say she expected to arrive at Mrs. Brown’s around seven o’clock Sunday evening.
Anxiously, Mrs. Brown prepared, and while she prepared she tried not to overthink the many ways that having a boarder, let alone this very special boarder, could go wrong. She focused instead on the domestic details she could control. She dusted and redusted Florida’s room. She washed the bed linen that had been on a shelf in a closet and dressed the bed. She replaced the boyish corduroy bedspread with a blue and white piece of cotton she had owned for years, and, to give it weight, she sewed a sturdy one-inch hem around its edges. She bought hyacinths for Florida’s room and made fresh lemonade.
In an unexpected gesture of support and kindness, Bonnie lent her an air conditioner. “Just in case summer comes overnight and it gets hot in her room,” Bonnie said. “Those row houses like yours get so stuffy, don’t they?”
One of Solomon Aquilino’s barbers had installed the AC that morning.
Alice, meanwhile, was points elsewhere, helping chaperone the fifth-grade on an overnight trip to a teaching farm in Putney, Vermont. She wasn’t expected back until tomorrow. Besides that, Alice wasn’t sure if she was looking forward to meeting Florida. A person who smiled as much as Florida did in photographs was suspicious, as far as Alice was concerned.
Any confidence Mrs. Brown might have had regarding her star boarder was rattled when she overheard the beauticians at Bonnie’s placing bets on how long Florida would last at her house—two days, one day, one night, no night were some of the wagers, twenty dollars apiece.
What concerned Mrs. Brown most was that her place had only one bathroom, and a humble one at that, without, as they call it in the decorating magazines, a “vanity,” a sink with a big countertop and a mirror with Hollywood dressing room lighting to do one’s makeup.
“But really, Mrs. Brown, it isn’t going to be a problem,” Florida had said when she first saw the house. “I grew up sharing a bathroom with five male cousins when I lived with my grandmother. This will be the Ritz compared to that.”
Around three on Sunday, the telephone rang. It was Florida Noble calling on a cell phone, the connection rather fuzzy as she was talking on speaker in her car, saying she would be arriving early.
“And
I’m never early, Mrs. Brown, I mean never—terrible defect of character of mine always being hopelessly late—I think maybe I should send out a press release. I know some haters who would consider this big news!”
Mrs. Brown didn’t quite follow.
“So I figure I will be there by six and I’d love to take you out for dinner when I get there—please,” Florida said. “What’s your favorite restaurant in Ashville? Will you make a reservation? Say for seven o’clock?”
Mrs. Brown didn’t have a favorite restaurant. As we know, she rarely, if ever, ate out. Besides keeping to her budget, she was brought up believing that, except on special occasions like wedding anniversaries and Valentine’s Day, you wouldn’t go to restaurants when you had a perfectly decent kitchen at home.
“But I don’t have a favorite restaurant, Miss Noble. Wouldn’t you like to eat here your first night? Won’t you want to unpack? I can make something simple. In fact, I was planning on it.”
A home-cooked meal sounded like paradise. “If it is no fuss, Mrs. Brown? That would be wonderful. I rarely eat at home—anyone’s home. Always on the run, always on the go . . . never really getting anywhere. And please, Mrs. Brown?”
“Yes?”
“Call me Florida? All my friends do.”
“Of course, Florida,” Mrs. Brown said. “And please call me Emilia.”
Florida hesitated. You could hear the road through her phone. If she called her new friend and landlady by her first name, then who would be her Mrs. Brown, the kindly and good soul who from the moment they met had become such a soothing presence in her life?
What’s in a name? (A lot.) “Okay, Mrs. Brown,” Florida said. “I’ll see you around six, Emilia.”
THE DINNER MRS. BROWN prepared was tomatoes in salted olive oil, soda muffins she had made in the morning, and a paprika chicken she put in the oven at 5:30.
Around 6:30 she was letting Santo out for some fresh air in the fenced-in area at the back of her house when she became aware of someone crouched behind a fern tree.
Of course she was frightened. But Ashville is a small town. For better or worse, you come to recognize people by their shapes and the casts of their shadows, or their gaits, before you even see their faces.
“What are you doing, Tony?” Mrs. Brown asked.
Her trespasser presented himself, his head bowed. This raggedy-looking teenager about six feet tall with scraggly brown hair, pale complexion, dark brown, sad puppy eyes, who was dressed in blue jeans and a faded pink T-shirt with a palm tree on the front and the wording MAUI WOW-IE, was Francie’s son.
“Tony, what’s going on?” Mrs. Brown asked. She knew Tony to be a sweet enough kid.
“Is Florida Noble here?”
“Excuse me?”
“Florida Noble?” Tony repeated. “My mother said she was coming to live with you today. Ohmigod, Mrs. Brown, she’s so beautiful I have to meet her. Please! She’s the fiercest of all the supermodels . . .”
Fiercest? Like tigers? Should she be concerned?
“You know, coolest. Hottest. Most fabulous . . .”
Mrs. Brown told Tony to come inside. Have some lemonade before she sent him home.
“I mean that commercial she did for Dolce and Gabbana, that’s the fiercest thing she’s ever done,” Tony enthused. “Don’t you think so, Mrs. Brown?”
She explained she hadn’t seen it but indulged him. “Why don’t you give me a synopsis?”
Which Tony did, in great detail, not taking a breath: “Here is Florida in the backseat of a black Bentley—do you think she’ll drive a Bentley in Ashville, Mrs. Brown?—she’s sipping a cup of tea in a dainty china cup driving up some fancy street in New York looking in all the store windows until she gets to Dolce and Gabbana, where the car stops. Wearing just his chauffeur’s suit jacket and pants but no shirt, the driver, played by one of the fiercest, most ripped male models in the world, opens the door for her and she gets out all legs first in this tight skirt to go into the Dolce and Gabbana store . . .”
They heard the sound of a car door on the street, and here was Florida Noble, in white jeans, a black T-shirt, a navy blue cashmere cardigan sweater, and brown alligator high heels, ringing the doorbell.
Mrs. Brown greeted her. Florida swept in apologizing for the way she looked. “I didn’t do my face today,” she said, following Mrs. Brown to the kitchen. “Does one’s skin good to not wear makeup for a day or two. Au naturel . . . And I’m so sorry that I’m an hour late. I really thought I’d be early.”
Tony was frozen, utterly awed.
It wasn’t the first time a teenager had been dumbstruck in her presence. “Hello,” Florida said, her voice purring, extending her hand to Tony. “I’m Florida.”
Tony could barely shake her hand, his was trembling so much.
“Love your T-shirt,” Florida said, and winked.
Mrs. Brown thought Tony might faint.
Santo played the peacock next. He jumped on the kitchen table, tail curled, elongating his neck for Florida to caress. Mrs. Brown shooed Santo off, but Florida scooped him up in her arms. “I love cats,” she said. “He’s no problem.”
Tony was so jealous of Mrs. Brown’s ratty old cat.
“Where are your suitcases?” Mrs. Brown asked. “Tony will get them for you, won’t you, Tony?”
OMG would he.
Florida handed Tony the keys to her Jaguar convertible. Did life get any better than this? Maybe if he took the car for a spin over to the 7-Eleven where some of his pals would be hanging out? Otherwise, without proof, they would never believe him. Then he knew what to do! He’d have old Mrs. Brown—who wasn’t anything like his mother had described, in fact, she was kind of cool and her house was really “vintage,” meaning a good thing—take a picture with his phone of him and Florida. Asking Florida to take a selfie seemed brazen, in Mrs. Brown’s house.
He got the suitcases. He’d be cool. Try not to make Florida think he was stalking her was his reasoning.
“Cute kid,” Florida said when he was out of the room. “Is he a relative?”
Mrs. Brown explained he was the son of one of the women who worked at Bonnie’s Beauty Salon, and how she’d found him hiding, longing for a glimpse of her famous guest. Florida gladly posed for the photograph he wanted, and then Tony went home.
“Oh, Mrs. Brown,” Florida said, sitting at the kitchen table and sipping from a glass of lemonade, Santo in her lap. “I am not famous. The things I advertise and the magazines I model for are the stars. I’m just a prop.”
Florida thought she was being endearingly self-effacing and funny, but Mrs. Brown detected sadness in her voice. She responded with a motherly look.
“Everything okay?”
“Just tired is all,” Florida said.
“We can eat now, if you’re hungry,” Mrs. Brown said. “Then you can unpack and get settled.”
Since Florida had a 9:00 appointment with her academic adviser in the morning, this was a perfect plan.
“DO NOT EVEN THINK of picking up that broom or making the coffee without telling me everything, absolutely everything, that happened last night from the minute Florida Noble arrived,” Bonnie insisted when Mrs. Brown got to work just after 7:00 the next morning.
Bonnie was already in her office, on her yoga mat, Omming away, chanting for money. The minute she heard Mrs. Brown’s key in the door, she was off her mat and in her face wanting all the news, the biggest scoop in Ashville today.
“What time did she get there? Did she really spend the night? Was she driving the Jaguar? Who did she talk to on the phone? What television did she watch before she went to sleep? What did she have for dinner? Excuse me, and what was she wearing? How was her hair? The makeup was what?”
It isn’t that she was opposed to it, but gossiping wasn’t Mrs. Brown’s forte. Bonnie pressed her nonetheless.
“Okay, relax. Start with what she was wearing,” Bonnie said, drinking some kind of seafoam-green vegetable panacea from a plastic bottle.<
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Mrs. Brown, pouring water into the coffeemaker, described Florida’s outfit to the best of her ability, the white jeans, the navy blue sweater, and the alligator heels.
“How high? One-inch, two-inch, three-inch, four inches, five, more, and she drove in them? Whose where they?”
“They were her shoes. Who else’s?”
What an odd question.
And what a clueless, pathetic answer, Bonnie thought. “I meant the designer. Who designed the shoes?”
Mrs. Brown didn’t know who the designer was, but she assumed, like the wonderful black dress and jacket she was saving up for, that anything she liked—and she had liked Florida’s shoes—had to have come from Oscar de la Renta.
“Oscar de la Renta,” she told Bonnie. “I think the shoes were made by Oscar de la Renta,” Mrs. Brown said, finding her sponges and duster.
“Oscar de la Renta? Really?” Bonnie said, fixing her makeup in the mirror near the cash register.
Mrs. Brown dusted.
“Now listen, Mrs. Brown, just a word or two of caution for you today,” Bonnie said. “It’s about the other girls when they get here. I think they are, well, I think you should know that they are jealous of you . . . how’s that for a twist? . . . because you’ve landed Florida Noble at your house while she is in Ashville.”
For “a fun look” she said would “perk up” her day, Bonnie drew a beauty mark, a perfect little dark brown spot above the right corner of her upper lip. As she drew, she continued:
“Just gird your loins, Mrs. Brown, they might not be too friendly today. But I’ll keep my eye out. You know, sweetie, I’ve always got your back.”
MRS. BROWN DID FEEL a decided chill from her co-workers, even colder than usual. Although they were dying to ask her about Florida Noble, they’d agree to subsist on Tony’s report via his mother.
Mrs. Brown survived the big chill with her innate grace. When a reporter from the Ashville Bulletin showed up wanting to interview her about what it was like finding herself landlady to one of the most beautiful people in the world, she declined.
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