by Janet Spaeth
“That screen door never shut anyway. Those were some good times, weren’t they?”
“You know what was my favorite?” his grandfather asked. “The bonfire.”
Hayden smiled, transported back to those summer evenings at the bonfire his grandfather built each night. The kids had their favorite marshmallow-roasting sticks, and dodging the sparks to get your marshmallow done perfectly was part of the fun. “Does anything taste better than a marshmallow cooked over a bonfire?” he asked. “So hot you can’t eat it, and so gooey you can’t help yourself. Of course, the best ones are the ones that catch fire and turn black. Yum!”
“And the vespers.” Gramps leaned forward. “Remember the vespers?”
“Of course. Every bonfire ended with a prayer. It was the perfect ending to perfect days.”
Gramps turned to him and wrapped his gnarled fingers around Hayden’s hand. “Grub, we had good times here. But we can’t keep Sunshine wrapped in a bubble. We’ve got to move on. You’re a grown man now, teaching math, no less, to those high school kids. And me? I’m an old codger who gets his nows mixed up with his thens.”
“You’re doing fine, Gramps, and you’re coming with me to live in Obsidian,” Hayden reminded him. “You’ve got to make sure I don’t do anything too goofy.”
Gramps chuckled. “And vice versa.”
A loud sound, like a gunshot report, broke the afternoon silence. “What was that?” Hayden asked, bounding out of his chair and reaching for the screen door.
A horn honked. And honked again. And again.
He tore out of the kitchen and across the yard. An old truck was parked there, with a woman trying to do something to the hood of it while the horn continued to honk.
“What are you doing?” he hollered at her.
“It won’t stop!” she yelled back. “And I can’t get this hood thing to open.”
“There’s a lever inside you pull first.”
“I know.” She held it up. “It came off in my hand.”
Fortunately there was enough rust on the truck to make opening the hood fairly easy, and Hayden disconnected the horn.
“Sorry about that,” the woman said, smiling at him. “And sorry about that bang. This thing backfires something fierce.”
She reached her hand out to him. “I’m Livvy Moore, and I want to buy Sunshine.”
Chapter 2
The two men stared at her, and Livvy’s smile began to fade.
“This is Sunshine, isn’t it? I have the advertisement right here on the front seat.” She pulled the door of the truck open, and had to slam it twice to make it latch. “Sorry,” she added. “It’s not mine. A young fellow rented it to me.”
“It’s Trevor’s truck,” the older man said. “Boy has a fool’s heart but an accountant’s mind.”
“Excuse me?” The conversation had just started and she was already lost.
The younger man stepped forward. “I’m Hayden Greenwood and this is my grandfather, Charlie Greenwood. Please excuse our manners. We don’t get many folks visiting.”
“I’m not visiting,” she said. “Unless Sunshine is already sold?”
Behind Haywood, his grandfather grinned. “Nope.”
“Gramps and I were just sitting down to a root beer in the kitchen. Would you like to join us? We’ll be more comfortable in there, out of the sun,” Hayden said.
For a breath of a moment, Livvy paused. In Boston, she would never have gone into a house with two men she didn’t know, but on the other hand, she wasn’t in Boston. These guys didn’t look dangerous, and if they were, her fate was sealed anyway. What was she going to do? Leap into the rattletrap pickup truck that might or might not start?
Clutching the advertisement in her hand, she nodded and followed them. The house was a traditional two-storied home, plainly structured with no extra gingerbread features, slatted decorative shutters the only nod to adornment.
Why had she chosen open-toed shoes? The ground was a strange mixture of sand and tiny pebbles and loose red dirt, and it quickly worked its way inside her designer shoes where it ground away at the soles of her feet, and it certainly wasn’t doing her hosiery any good either.
She hobbled behind the men, trying not to wince as the debris dug even deeper into her feet.
At the door of the house, she surreptitiously slipped her feet out of the open sandals and shook the soil and stones out, vowing never again to wear those torturous things here.
The inside of the house was welcoming. In the open windows, light yellow curtains lifted and billowed in the afternoon breeze. An old-fashioned oscillating fan whirred in the corner, keeping the air moving.
“This is such a comfortable home, Mr. Greenwood,” she said as the older gentleman caught the screen door so it didn’t slam behind them.
His face crinkled into a smile. “Do us all a favor and call me Gramps. You use city words like Mr. Greenwood here and nobody’ll know who you mean. Right, Grub?”
“Grub?” she asked.
Hayden rubbed his grandfather’s shoulder. “Only Gramps can call me Grub. The rest of the world is forced to call me Hayden.”
She liked them already. The love between the two was clear.
She looked around the living room.
The floors were wooden—the original planks, she was sure, judging from the soft satiny patina and the slight dip in the floor leading from the front door to the kitchen, the worn path of many feet heading for a treat or a cup of coffee after coming from the outside.
A large braided rug, its edges curled and mended, had also held its place of honor in the middle of the living room for at least two generations. She’d noticed similar ones at auctions in Boston, going for quite a fine price as what the decorators called “vintage Americana.”
A tabby cat, the biggest one Livvy had ever seen, was curled in the middle of the rug. It opened one eye and looked at Livvy with a deep golden gaze and then, apparently deciding that the newcomer was no one important, shut the eye again and began to snore.
“That’s the only cat left here. Got the last of the barn cats—or resort cats, most rightly—adopted out a week ago. No, this is Martha Washington,” Gramps said with a fond smile at the slumbering cat.
“Martha Washington?” she asked.
“She came pre-named.” Hayden knelt and stroked the cat’s back, but the animal was clearly unimpressed, and slept on. “We inherited her from a lady in Obsidian who let her granddaughter name her. Why she chose that is a mystery that is unsolved today. And the goofy cat doesn’t answer to anything else.”
“Critter doesn’t answer to anything,” Gramps said, shaking his head. “She has a brain the size of a peach pit.”
“Now, now,” Hayden said with a chuckle. “You love that cat.”
Gramps harrumphed. “By the way, Miss Moore, the cat comes with Sunshine. Don’t want her? That’s a deal-breaker.”
“Call me Livvy, and the cat is welcome.”
“No changing your mind,” Gramps warned. “But let’s get back to those root beers and see if we can cool ourselves off a bit.”
She followed the men into the kitchen, which was bigger than the living room. Cabinets lined three of the four walls, with breaks only for two large windows. The fourth wall was covered with framed photographs, plaques with mottos and Bible verses engraved on them, and a painting of the Last Supper.
“Root beer?” Hayden asked as Gramps pulled out her chair for her.
The table and chairs were from the early 1950s. The chairs were upholstered in red vinyl, patched and re-patched with tape, and the tabletop was a matching marbleized red plastic with a dented aluminum edge that ran around it.
“Root beer would be lovely.”
“Back in the good old days,” Gramps said as he stared at a photo on the wall, “we had a big cooler that we kept all different kinds of pop in. Green River, Yoo-hoo, grape Nehi—remember those, Grub? Your favorite was Green River. Or was that your dad’s?”
“Dad�
��s,” Hayden answered. “I was always a root beer fellow myself, just like you, Gramps.”
“Root beer is mighty good,” the older man said, “especially when you drink it out of a Sunshine glass.”
“Right you are,” Hayden said. “Coming right up.”
Soon they were pouring root beer into tall blue glasses with SUNSHINE, NORTH DAKOTA, on the side.
“We used to have these by the boxful,” Hayden said. “Now we’re down to just a few.”
“You’d better order some more, then,” his grandfather said.
“We don’t need them,” Hayden reminded him. “Sunshine closed as a resort two years ago.”
“End of an era, end of an era.” The old man sighed.
“So,” Hayden said, looking directly at her with eyes that were an amazing light blue, “you’re considering buying Sunshine, Miss Moore?”
“It’s Livvy, please. If you’ll sell it to me, I’ll buy it.”
She heard her own voice speaking the words, but it all seemed like a dream. This was so out of character—but maybe she didn’t know what her own character was, having had it buried under the heavy thumb of Michael Evans for too many years.
“Why?” Gramps’s question was direct.
“Because I—” She faltered. How could she explain the series of circumstances that had led her there?
She looked at the two men sitting across from her, and began. When she had finished telling the story of the windblown paper, she said, “I think it was one of those God things. Do you know what I mean?”
In the Boston agency, with the people she usually dealt with, the answer would have been a benevolent chuckle, but here the reaction was different. After a moment, both men nodded. “We do know,” Hayden said.
“God works in mysterious ways,” Gramps added. “Very mysterious. Sometimes I wish I knew what He had planned for us, but this life is one long voyage to our reward. He’s given us a map, and we can stay on the road and enjoy the ultimate destination, or we can do like most of us do and meander all over the countryside, taking wrong turns and finding dead ends.”
“So you believe that God led you here,” Hayden said.
She swallowed. It sounded as if they had lived their lives as Christians. It wasn’t that she hadn’t, but she had taken many of those wrong turns.
“Maybe,” she said slowly, “it’s about time I listened to Him.”
Hayden leaned back in his chair and ran his fingers through his straw-colored hair, bleached by the summer sun. “Sunshine was always run by His principles, you see. One of our favorites is: ‘Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.’ ”
“That’s the Golden Rule, kind of,” she said.
He laughed. “You’re right—kind of. We have it right up here in its traditional format, the one everybody learns as a kid. The Golden Rule isn’t just something we have on the wall.” He pointed to one of the many plaques displayed beside them. “Those words are the foundation of everything we’ve done here for three generations.”
“Do unto others,” she said, and as she spoke the words, her stomach twisted. It was such a basic tenet of living—one she’d let herself forget.
“As you would have others do unto you,” Hayden finished. “I know that in some businesses, the rest of the line is Before they do unto you, but that’s not the way we operated.”
“Our customers were family. Some still are, but the fact is that there’s not money to be made in this any longer,” Gramps added. “The big vacation spots have advertising budgets that we just couldn’t compete with.”
There was no rancor in his words. It was evident that he had come to peace with the fact that Sunshine wasn’t what it had been in the past.
“What do you plan to do with Sunshine?” Hayden asked.
The question brought her up short. It was the one part of her plan—if she could call her half-baked, spur-of-the-moment decision a “plan”—that she hadn’t developed completely.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I just know that I want to be here.”
“Because God sent you here?” Gramps asked, and his eyes, the same sky blue as his grandson’s, but clouded, met hers squarely.
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Maybe,” Hayden suggested, “you’d like to see Sunshine before you decide. Drain those root beers and let’s go out for a walk.”
She groaned inwardly at the thought of walking even one more step outside with her sandals on but she smiled and stood up. “I’m game.”
As if reading her mind, Hayden asked, “Do you have some sneakers you could put on? Those shoes don’t look very comfortable.”
She started to shake her head but then she remembered that in the borrowed truck was her suitcase, and in that suitcase was a pair of rubber-soled shoes that she’d tucked in at the last minute, in case there was an exercise facility at Sunshine. She almost laughed at how clueless she’d been.
Soon, with her feet in the shoes that had cost her a week’s pay, she began the tour of Sunshine.
“Here’s an outbuilding,” Hayden said, “and there’s another one, and there’s another one, and there’s another one.”
“What are they all for?” she asked.
“For storing lumber from torn-down sheds in case we want to build more.” He grinned at his grandfather.
“This larger one was once the canteen,” Gramps said, ignoring the good-natured gibe. “That’s where kids used to come in from swimming and buy taffy and pop.”
“And the parents would gather in the late afternoon or evening for a rousing game of Monopoly or Clue,” said Hayden. “In the evening, we’d grill hamburgers and hot dogs or serve some of Gran’s famous tater tot hot dish. On rainy days, which were rare but they did happen, everyone would gather there and we’d play charades.”
“Now it’s a storeroom.” Gramps opened the door and led them inside.
Boxes were piled haphazardly around the perimeter of the room. On one end, a counter divided a small kitchen from the rest of the building. Dust motes danced in the midafternoon sun, and Livvy thought that if she stood still and listened hard enough, she’d be able to hear the laughter of the years of customers.
“We had some good times here,” Gramps said, running his hand over the back of a chair draped with what seemed to be an old curtain. “Do you remember, Grub?”
“I do.”
The two men were lost in memories, touching the doorknob, the windowsill, the scattering of tables. With the kitchen and the bathrooms, now marked LADS and LASSIES in an old-style block print, it was easy to see what it had been.
Livvy walked around the room, her real estate training clicking into place. The canteen was a mess right now, but it had possibilities. For what, she wasn’t sure, but it was there.
“Let’s show her the swimming hole,” Hayden said, breaking the silence.
They left the canteen and reentered the bright afternoon.
“This is beautiful,” she said, looking at the vista that was so incredible it was almost overwhelming.
The Badlands, touched with coppery tones, surrounded them. Overhead, only one stray cloud drifted lazily, the sole break in the endless blue sky. In the distance, a bird trilled, its melody gracing the air with a song.
They passed a cluster of cabins, each one painted a different color that had probably once been bright but had faded to a softly muted hue. Each one sported a worn sign declaring its rather prosaic name: the GREEN CABIN, the YELLOW Cabin, the RED CABIN, the BLUE CABIN, and so on. She counted quickly: There were eleven of them.
A chicken, startled from its hunt for bugs in the dirt, flapped off in a great display of wings and feathers and screeching squawks that shattered the afternoon stillness.
The path to the small swimming area had been permanently etched in the ground by countless feet making their way to the water.
Hayden provided the narrative as they followed those long-gone footsteps.
; “It’s part of Little Starling, the river that goes through here. It makes a little bend here, and with the help of a tractor, a dredge, and some good old-fashioned elbow grease, that became Sunshine’s version of a lake. Today it probably wouldn’t be legal, but the river’s adapted to it, so it’s all good.”
Around a straggling set of trees, the glistening water was a surprise in the dry landscape.
The pier, now weathered to a soft gray, was missing some of the boards, and it leaned to one side. A lifeguard station was near the sandy beach, but it was missing most of the steps to the top. Only a foolhardy soul would attempt to climb it.
Algae-laced waves lapped at the shore, and in the stillness, Livvy could hear more birds and the faint sound of insects buzzing along the water’s edge.
“It needs some work,” Gramps said.
“The whole thing needs work,” Hayden said. “I don’t know, of course, what you plan to do here, but the fact is that except for Gramps and me and our friends, no one comes here. Sunshine hasn’t had any customers for two years now.”
It was such a difference from the hustle of Boston. There were no car horns honking. No radios blaring. No one talking.
Livvy stood motionless, letting the nothingness of it all overtake her. She felt tiny and yet part of all creation. The soft breeze lifted and dropped her hair around her cheeks and forehead.
And, as she listened to the sounds of God Himself—the soft splash of the waves, the trill of the birds, the hum of the insects—she fell in love.
“I want it.”
The words hung in the air. She saw the exchange of a glance between the two men, felt their sadness, and knew in her heart that with those three words, she had sealed all of their fates.
“Let’s go back to the house,” Hayden said at last.
She reluctantly tore herself from the idyllic scene and followed Hayden and his grandfather back up the path, past the odd assortment of outbuildings, and to the house with the ancient pickup truck parked in front of it.
Martha Washington acknowledged their return with the flick of an ear, but otherwise didn’t stir as they walked through the living room and back into the kitchen.