“Didn’t your family try to buy that pile?” Gary asked James.
James ignored the question and the waitress arrived just in time and we ordered our food. Then Gary and Dawn whispered back and forth. James was sitting next to Marni, making conversation, and she eventually stopped tapping the scarf on her head.
Loretta was next to Brad Mallory, trying to get a chat going. He wasn’t much of a talker. Sandi and I were safely buffered, Sandi between Loretta and I, me between Sandi and Marni. Neither of us knew which conversation to try to listen to. We ended up amusing ourselves, making up what we thought Dawn and Gary were whispering to each other, really mature.
About the time we were finished eating, the D.J. played “I Love the Night Life” to which Dawn yelled, “I love this song!” She bumped Gary out of the booth with her hip, grabbed him by the hand, and pulled him out onto the dance floor.
I excused myself to the ladies room and when I came back, the booth was empty and everyone was dancing. I saw my chance and took it.
James approached me before I made it to the door. “Would you like to dance?” he asked me.
“Oh, thank you, but no. I’m going to call it a night. Would you mind telling my friends I’ll see them back at the inn?”
“Sure, I’ll tell them. It was nice to meet you, Cammy.”
“It was nice meeting you, James.”
I stopped by the bakery to see Sara. She was measuring ingredients for the morning baking, and I offered to help. She threw me an apron.
“I’m thinking about staying a few more days, but I need to find a room somewhere. What’s cheap, but clean?”
“I can rent you a room upstairs.”
“Really?”
“Sure, the Haustermans like me to rent their apartment when they’re not here. Keeps the dough rolling in for them, ya know?”
“Sara, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but you could do lots of things. It seems like maybe the Hausterman’s expect a lot, and maybe take advantage of you. Why do you stay here?”
“Free rent all year. I work dawn to dusk in the summer, so I can paint all winter. They let me live upstairs even when the bakery closes for the season. I’m in the studio across the hall from their apartment, home sweet home. Nothing’s fancy up there but neat as a pin, my place excluded. Gott kann nicht Ihre Gebete hören, wenn er Sie vorbei am Durcheinander, nicht sehen kann.”
“Excuse me?”
“God can’t hear your prayers if he can’t see you past the clutter. That’s wisdom according to my Oma, my Grandmother Ada.”
“Good to know.”
I got back to the inn just as Loretta, Sandi, and Marni were getting out of a horse and buggy taxi.
“You took a taxi two blocks?” I asked.
“And I may pay Jeremy to carry me up the stairs too. Do you have a problem with that?” asked Loretta.
“No problem, excellent idea in fact. Where’s Dawn?” I interrupted myself, “Never mind. Forget I asked.”
“You should have stayed, Cammy. James Alexander was asking a lot of questions about you,” reported Marni. “He’s rich, you know. His family owns the View Point Hotel.”
“And practically every other place you can... how did Gary Rogers put it?” said Loretta as she rolled her eyes. “I believe it was ‘eat, sleep, or piss on the island'. Now there’s a class act.”
“Guess how old he is,” said Sandi.
“No.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you, forty-five, a younger man. What would Race Coleman think about that, rich and younger?”
“Don’t forget... tall, dark, and handsome too,” added Marni.
What would Race think about that?
“It really isn’t necessary to compensate for Dawn’s brashness when she’s not around,” I said as I held the door open. “I’ve heard enough. Entre, ladies.”
When we were getting ready for bed, I said to Loretta, “I was thinking, since Janie is spending the July 4th weekend with some friends in San Antonio, I might stay here a few more days if that’s okay with you.”
“How will you get to the airport?”
“I checked. I can rent a car when I get off the ferry.”
“Guess you’ve already decided.”
“You’re mad.”
“No, I’m not mad. I’m worried.”
“Don’t be. I’m fine. Believe me. I’m better than fine, and I think I may be entering the Acceptance Stage.”
“Promise me you won’t buy any real estate before you leave.”
“I promise.”
I celebrated my forty-eighth birthday that week on the island. The girls woke me up with a cake aflame with candles and took me to the Water Gardens. The Water Gardens are a twenty-two acre preserve that includes Gabriel Falls, a waterfall that flows from the top of Grayson’s Meadow, into Gabriel Creek, and down to the shore where it feeds Lake Brigade. The pools that form on the way down to the lake are artfully maintained with native plants to make it look natural, which it does, like a natural fairyland. At the gardens I was indulged for hours of exploration and picture taking, and Dawn didn’t complain once.
Then we spent the last couple of days before the girls left the island, doing all of the touristy things. We toured the Fort, watched a Civil War reenactment in the park, and saw a melodrama and a musical revue at the historic Trillium Playhouse. And we ate our way up and down Main Street, but I don’t think I gained a pound. My skinny clothes still fit and I felt better than I had in months.
I checked out of The Willows Inn with the girls on Tuesday morning, I hugged them all goodbye at the ferry, and then I moved into the apartment above Hausterman’s Bakery. Sara nailed it, nothing fancy but neat as a pin. In addition, I found there to be a distinct odor of barley and Bengay.
I opened my suitcase. The box of postcards I had bought at Harper’s Antiques sat on top. I thumbed through the used and unused cards that I hadn’t yet looked at. Most of the pile was post-1960 with color photos, but there were a few older cards pre-1940 with black and white shots of Mission Hill, the Fort, and the View Point Hotel. Also in the stack were two photo postcards of The Lake Lodge.
One of the postcards was of a horse and buggy parked at the bottom of the hill with the lodge in the background. Two men in three-piece suits and bowlers and three women in long skirts, high collared blouses, and flat-topped straw hats were standing on the first few steps of the wooden stairs that led up the hill. The photo must have been taken from Shoreline Drive before there was a fence. There were more trees than are on the property now, and the spot where the cottage sits on the hill was vacant.
The other card was a close-up of the first floor porch. The twisted branches were intact in the railing, and flower boxes along the edge were filled with what looked like white geraniums. Flower baskets hung from the porch ceiling. Groupings of furniture lined the space—rocking chairs, side tables, and sofas that had been draped with blankets and set with pillows. All furniture that was no longer on the porch, buried somewhere in the attic, possibly. Guests dressed similar to the people in the other picture were lounging on the furniture.
Across the bottom of both cards was printed, The Lake Lodge, St. Gabriel Island. I didn’t usually believe in signs, but I wanted those postcards to be one.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Living on an Island
Tribal settlements, military skirmishes, trade, missionaries, and a century and a half of resort commerce are all part of the rich history of St. Gabe. And the St. Gabriel Historical Society guards the records of that history.
Located inside the St. Gabriel Museum, which is connected to the St. Gabriel Public Library, the Historical Society is overseen by a mother and a daughter who take their posts very seriously. Their clothes, however, are less serious.
Both women wore matching red plaid blouses and earrings hung with plastic cherries. Barbara and June greeted me warmly and knew everything about The Lake Lodge that was on record, which wasn’t much. About the rumors of hauntedness, they w
ouldn’t comment—they were only interested in the facts.
I learned that T.L. Tadyshak II bought the twenty acres the lodge sits on in 1912 and construction began in 1918. The project was finished in 1920 and opened for business the same year. It closed in 1943 during the war when the island tourism industry waned. There were no photographs and no records of who owned the property after Tadyshak and why it was never reopened.
After my visit with Barbara and June, I spent the next few days pushing Sara to her limit as I probed. I wanted to know how she went about living on an island. “How do you get things from the mainland to the island?” I asked her.
“All of the major parcel service companies bring packages over on the ferry and deliver to the homes and businesses by horse and dray. Big things like building materials and service and emergency vehicles are brought to the island on shipping ferries that dock on the pier on the east side of the island.”
The shipping dock was less than a mile from The Lake Lodge, how convenient. I was about to ask my next question, when a very nice-looking man came into the bakery with a dolly loaded with boxes. Sara and Logan finished their transaction while having what looked to be an ongoing flirting session. As he turned to leave, I looked cross-eyed at Sara and she looked back at me cross-eyed and made a silly face.
When Logan was gone, Sara said, “And that’s how I get my groceries each week.”
“That’s a nice way to get your groceries,” I said.
“Yes, it is.”
“I was going to ask you where and when you get supplies for the bakery.”
“I’m sure you were. No time to go shopping. It’s just me here in this joint. Most of the bakeries and restaurants use a grocery wholesaler from the mainland.” She raised her eyebrows and giggled. “That delivers.”
I moved on to my next query. “What happens to all the garbage?” The answer to that question sent me out to the Island Disposal Center the next day for a tour.
St. Gabriel residents and businesses sort their trash. Kitchen and yard waste—vegetable and fruit scraps, plant cuttings, leaves, wood are all composted. The materials are ground up in huge crushers and then mixed with horse manure. The mix is moved every day with big loaders to keep the piles oxygenated and cooking to temperatures of a hundred and seventy degrees, which kills all of the weed seeds and bacteria. It made my compost bin at home look like a cereal bowl. After three or four weeks, it’s sifted and the Disposal Center crew has made the biggest piles of gardener’s black gold you’ve ever seen. If you scoop up a handful of the stuff and hold it up to your nose, it smells sweet. It’s miraculous.
All of the trash on the island that can be recycled is recycled—aluminum, metals, plastic, glass, cardboard, junk mail, newspapers and magazines. The materials are all sorted, bundled, and shipped to recycling centers on the mainland. What’s left, which is a fraction of what comes into the center, is also baled and shipped off the island but to a dump. It’s an impressive operation.
As long as I kept helping around the bakery while I probed, I hoped Sara wouldn’t kick me out. We watched old movies after the bakery was closed at night, and Sara gave me a lesson in oil painting, something I had never tried. And I made my daily trek to the lodge.
If you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes, it’ll change. That’s a popular saying on the island. One night I slept with the window wide open, and I woke to the jingle of a wind chime that hung on the balcony across the alley. A cold breeze blew through the screen, filling the white sheers with air.
I dressed in layers but by noon, I had my jacket wrapped around my waist and was looking for something cool to drink. I had developed an addiction to the fresh squeezed lemonade at Meaks Deli.
“Raspberry, mint, cinnamon, or plain?” asked Larry Meaks Jr., a pleasant young man with a goatee and a premature potbelly.
“I’ll try mint today,” I answered.
Larry scooped crushed ice into a cup, which he then filled half-full of ice cold water and topped it off with the lemon syrup his mother made fresh daily. The deli had been in Larry’s family for three generations, and he’d grown up on the island and lived there year-round, a Gabey.
I took my elixir to the park and sat at the fountain. There I watched a family delight themselves that they were able to convince a squirrel to take their humble offerings. The squirrel was so believable in his apprehension that I wished I could nominate him for an Oscar.
The other addiction I indulged in? Every afternoon I walked the outer loop of the island to wander around The Lake Lodge, and then I sat on the beach until the sun set. It’s past nine o’clock at night when the sun disappears behind the watery horizon of St. Gabriel in the summer.
Being so far north, the island days are long, and the sunsets are big like nothing I’ve seen anywhere else. The edges of the orangey-yellow glow are blurry, fuzzy. You feel like if you backed up a few miles, you might be able to get it into focus. As it sets, the warm hues melt into the cool blue of the water, creating a pool of wet color ready to be picked up, brushed, and blended.
After I left the park, I set out on my daily trek. I was about a mile from my destination, The Lake Lodge, and I hadn’t seen a biker, buggy, or another pedestrian for a good two miles. A light mist of St. Gabriel fog had crept in from the water and was hovering over the road. The only sound, other than my own footsteps, was a buoy bell off shore. The day had come in with a cool snap, warmed to a summer balm, rained a little, and then had become a scene from a Hitchcock film that was oddly comforting. I loved it all.
The humidity moistened my skin and sweat was accumulating under my bra, a feeling that can drive me completely mad in a few short minutes. I wanted to rip off my clothes, streak down to the lake and dive in. But I did the next best thing, the Houdini Strip Tease: taking a bra off without removing any other clothing. It takes skill, but I’ve had some practice.
Just as I had my right bra strap down, almost to my right wrist, and was caught in a kind of sling, someone came running around the corner. I was hoping the fog would create enough of a cloak that the person would run by me without noticing my current state of dress, or undress as it was, which thankfully they did.
But then, from behind me I heard, “Cammy?”
I spun around and peered at the figure that was moving out of the fog toward me. It was James Alexander from the restaurant.
“I thought you’d left.”
“No, I decided to stay a few more days.”
“What are you doing?”
“Walking.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, fine.”
“You’re standing… lopsided.”
“I was just… I was getting warm and…. well… sweaty… and I was. I was taking my bra off. I can’t stand the way it feels when I’m sweating underneath it. It makes me feel claustrophobic.”
His face broke into a huge grin. “I’ll turn around and you can finish.”
When he turned, I had the idea to run down the road in the other direction or up the side of the hill, which was the start of a mini debate with me, myself and I. You know the ones, when with super-human speed, scenarios, choices, and consequences run through your brain lightning fast.
Should I run, or should I try to get my bra back on, or should I finish the deed? Running was ruled out first. The fog was too thick. I envisioned myself sprinting straight off a cliff or beaning my head against a tree limb. I was not going to get the bra back on without a great deal of squirming and tugging, so the decision was made.
I pulled the loosened strap over my hand, slid the other strap off my left shoulder, arm, and hand and then yanked the whole thing through one shirt sleeve. With the momentum, I whipped the bra out in front of me and snapped James in the behind. He jumped.
I winced. “Sorry.”
“Does that mean you’re done?” he asked with a chuckle.
“No, not quite.” Quickly, I rolled my bra into a ball and tried to shove it into the pocket of my jacket that
was still tied around my waist. I couldn’t find the opening in the bunched-up folds of fabric.
A scene from my past flashed before me—my ninth grade self, frantically picking up tampons that had fallen out of my locker and were rolling around the floor of the hall being kicked, initially without notice, by students bound for their next class.
I finally found the pocket and shoved my bra inside. “Okay, done,” I said.
James turned around, still grinning. Just as he did, I looked down at the front of my t-shirt and saw my nipples standing at attention through the thin, white jersey that was stretched across my chest. I hadn’t realized how thin and sheer that fabric was.
I yanked my jacket from my waist and turned around while I slid into it, and then I zipped it up to my forehead. This, of course, could not be done without my bra falling out of my pocket and onto the road that was wet with the afternoon rain and bits of all that the horses had left.
Defeat washed over me as I stared at the pretty white lace underwire that lay there helplessly exposed, spatters of poop soup spotted over the cups.
I looked up at James, a grown man who had certainly seen a bra before. Clearly his incessant grin had nothing to do with the lingerie lying on the road but rather with the clown that had been wearing it.
I bent down, picked up my bra, and gave it a shake, which sent a few small stones flying at James who dodged them. Then I folded it neatly and tucked it back in my pocket.
He tried to bury a smirk but it was there. I could see it.
James asked, “Are you going back to town? I’ll walk with you.”
“Oh, that’s okay. You were going the other way and running. I’m walking.”
“Yes, you told me. I’ve already had a good run in. A cool down will be good.”
I wanted to be alone. I wanted to visit the lodge and watch my sunset. I was still married, technically, and I didn’t want to be one of those women who went from one man to another. Not that this man was asking. I began walking and James walked with me, right into a cloud of bugs, and I felt one hit my eyeball.
“Ow.”
My Way Home (St.Gabriel Series Book 1) (St. Gabriel Series) Page 9