On the Right Side of a Dream (5 page)

The teachers had initials behind their names. They were “Master Chefs” and “Chefs de Cuisine” and “Culinary Fellows.” They had studied in London and Paris and New York. Not Dave’s Coney Island or Peggy’s Steak and Stop but restaurants that had lots of diamonds and stars below their names, restaurants that were located all over the world. These chefs had won awards for culinary excellence. I could pronounce “excellence” but “culinary” still got me tongue-tied. In the photos, they wore white coats and tall hats. The class list was not what I was expecting, either. I had thought, maybe “Baking 101” or “How to Keep Your Soufflés from Falling Down and Your Pie Crusts from Rising Up.” Instead, there was “Business Mathematics,” “Food and Beverage Cost Control,” and “English Composition.” I closed the booklet. Maybe the admissions office had sent me the wrong course list.

But the potential pay was many times more than I had ever made in my whole life. And, for whatever reason, there is a shortage of nurses and a shortage of trained chefs with credentials. Maybe I could go to the South of France, Australia, New York, Scottsdale, Sonoma Valley . . . little old Juanita Jackson Louis from Columbus, Ohiya, living extra-large in California wine country. I could manage a dining room. I could teach. That picture made me smile. I could go anywhere or do anything that I wanted. I would have a . . . profession.

Like the Scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz,
I could only do so much with the cooking I was used to and with mother wit. “If I only had a brain . . .” Both the Scarecrow and I found out that it wasn’t the “brain” at all. What we didn’t have was the diploma.

Ok, I’ll fill out the application. I don’t have anything to lose,
I told myself.
It’ll make me feel better, at least I will have tried. Besides, I won’t get in anyway.
I pulled out one of my three-for-a-dollar, fifty-cent ink pens.

I glanced over at Jacki. She’d turned over. I guess her front side was done.

“To restore my spirit,” she’d said.

I didn’t need any spirit restoration; Paper Moon had done that for me. But what are you supposed to do with a restored spirit? It was a question that I asked myself over and over again as I filled out the application. Eventually, I did get some answers.

I just didn’t expect to get so many of them.

Chapter Four

A
fter one week at Nina’s, I started making suggestions. Just little ones. Nina did all right but some of the little things that Millie did at the B&B had made an impression on me. Cool towels for the pool when it was hot, warm ones for the chilly desert nights, a trimmed-down menu for the trim size zero types who stayed with her. (Why buy pancake mix for folks who don’t eat pancakes?) I’d told her to think about giving the rooms names to match the decor. Nina liked that idea—Suite Four became “The Elephant Suite” because of its Indian decor and row of antique mahogany elephants, and Room Two became “The Dove Room,” in honor of the doves who’d nested just outside the window, waking up the guests with their morning cooing.

Millie slipped a
Paper Moon Gazette
onto the breakfast trays. It wasn’t a real newspaper, just a 4-1-1 on the doings in town and the surrounding areas. Millie even included a catalogue for Bob’s Shop ’n Play, a bait shop combined with an adult bookstore, for guests who’d forgotten to bring their own videos or fishing tackle. I didn’t think Nina had to go that far but she appreciated the idea and started cranking out
Nina’s Nuggets
for her guests.

By the fourth week, I was hardly cooking at all because (a) Nina’s guests barely ate and (b) I was too busy taking reservations, managing the housekeeping staff, and pulling together tidbits for Nina’s newsletter. Nina’s readings had picked up.

“Darling, I’m exhausted. Just ground to pencil dust!” If she wasn’t giving a reading she was recovering from one. “So much negativity!” she’d exclaim.

“Nothing Metamucil can’t cure,” I’d mumble out of her hearing.

Nina and I disagreed on this point. It’s not that I don’t believe in spirits, I do. But I just thought that the folks who’d come to Nina needed to try a laxative first. They may be full of evil spirits. Or they may be full of something else.

Out of the blue, Nina said, “Darling, my cousin’s not coming back. She’s moving to New Zealand with her new husband.”

Nina was calm when she said this, which surprised me. I expected a “Oh, my Goddess!” or something like it.

Her eyes, through a pair of cranberry-red eyeglasses trimmed in rhinestones, probed my face.

“Have you ever thought about going into the inn-keeping business, Juanita?”

Yeah, I had . . .

In true Nina-style, she did not give me time to answer.

“You’d be mah-va-lous here, just mah-va-lous. I did the cards last night. We’ll be partners. You manage the inn part of the business, I handle the psychic stuff, and we share the rest. What d’you say?”

“Wait up, Nina!” She was talking ten miles a minute. Business? Partners? “You’re goin’ way too fast, girl. I don’t know nothin’ about running a business.” I thought about Jess’s receipts and spreadsheets and appointments with the accountant in Missoula. Me, I just wanted to cook.

“It’s nothing!” Nina exclaimed, with a snap of her ever-changing nails now polished a tangerine shade called “Tropical Orange Freeze Punch.” “You’d pick it up just like that!”

“But what about your cousin?”

Nina shrugged and a tinkling sound filled the room. Nina wears armloads of bangle bracelets, long dangling earrings in her double-pierced ears, and tiny little silver bells on her ankle bracelets. You can hear her coming and going. When she breathes, it sounds like a choir of wind chimes with cow bells keeping the beat.

She gave me a look that was very un-Nina like. It was steady, unblinking, and wise.

“I’ve offered to buy her out,” she answered in a calm, low-pitched, businesslike tone. “My attorney’s drawing up the papers. If she accepts, the deal could close by the end of May.”

She pushed a very thick heavily printed document across the desk toward me. I didn’t try to read it. Except for the numbers that followed the dollar sign.

“You’re the best thing that’s happened to me since tarot cards, darling,” Nina continued. “Reservations are up, the word of mouth has been very productive, and your inventory control enhancements have markedly improved the bottom line. A fifteen percent savings on food alone! I just needed someone to keep things organized!”

Inventory control enhancements? Bottom line? Who was this woman?

“But I can’t operate the hacienda by myself,” she continued. “Once I get the buyout wrapped up, I want you to work with me.” Nina’s four-tiered chandelier earrings danced around her swanlike neck. “You have the talent, darling, and a real aptitude for this work.”

I slid the intimidating papers back to her.

“You want me to work for you? Take Butterfly’s place as the cook full-time?” That didn’t surprise me. I am a good cook and Nina’s guests seemed to agree, the few times any of them had eaten enough food to count for anything.

Nina’s answer surprised me.

“Noooo, darling, not as the cook. Weren’t you
listening
? As my
partner.
My spirit guide, Ramona, says it’d be a good idea for us to go into business
together.
”

Well,
namaste,
darling.

Ever hear people talk about their lives turning upside down? You would think that my life flip-flopped like that when I left the Midwest and ended up in Montana. Or that it happened when I met Jess or later when I took off with Peaches to see the Pacific Ocean. I thought that too, once. But I was wrong.

My life flip-flopped while I was in Arizona.

The “consulting position” that I took with Nina started out as four weeks that stretched out to six, then a few months—and I squeezed as much into it as I could with two weeks here in Arizona, up to Salt Lake City, down to Tucson, with three weeks in Paper Moon in between. I visited Chaco Canyon—big, mysterious. I took a donkey tour of the Grand Canyon—bigger and more mysterious. I peeked over the edge of the Canyon, arm wrestling with my fear of heights all the way. I was amazed. The tiny thread of blue-black silk that was the Colorado River wound its way through the canyons like a decorative ribbon through the hair of Mother Earth. Beautiful. I mean, what else can you say?

Peaches was impatient.

“Tell Nina to get someone else because I’m picking you up in two weeks,” Peaches bellowed over her cell phone. “Nina’s one of those give ’em an inch, take four miles people. Jess gave me hell the last time I was there and I don’t intend to go through that again.”

But I wasn’t worried about Jess. He just growls sometimes just to see if he still can.

“If you’re in the mood to cook that badly, you might as well come back to Paper Moon before I run off all the customers,” Jess grumbled. “Fish Reynolds nearly took my skin off, complainin’ about the tuna salad. ‘It ain’t good like Juanita’s. Tastes like you forgot something.’ ” Jess mimicked Fish’s flat, tweedy voice. “I told him if he wants to have Juanita’s tuna salad, he’d better head to Arizona and fast.”

I laughed. Jess and I had this conversation a lot. Whenever we talked, I had to remind him of some ingredient that he had forgotten. It was either the tuna salad, or the meatloaf, or the sweet potatoes.

“You forgot to add sugar to the tuna salad,” I accused Jess.

“Juanita, it just don’t seem right adding something sweet to a bowl full of flaked tuna. It’s against the Gospels.”

“You didn’t add it, did you?” I said. I couldn’t help but grin. A long pause. I could see Jess’s jaw set like a boulder in a mountain.

“No. And I didn’t put maple syrup in the sweet potatoes either.” He sounded proud of that.

“I’ll bet Mountain had something to say about that.” I could see Mountain now, shoveling my sweet potato casserole into his mouth with a ham-sized hand and getting the marshmallows all over his top lip.

“Yes, he did. You get your aura read yet?”

“It’s the color of fresh-picked irises. Deep purple.”

“Humph. Must be those hormone pills,” Jess countered. “I miss you, Miz Louis.”

“I miss you, Mr. Gardiner.”

And I did miss him. But not once did that man say, “Come home, Juanita, and stop this foolishness,” or try to make me feel bad because he missed me.

“You got things to do, you go do ’em. I’ll be here when you get back,” he’d told me when I left. “Course, the diner might not have any customers left . . .”

I liked to take long walks and, sometimes, if it wasn’t too hot, I meandered up the trails in Boynton Canyon and nearly cracked my neck looking up at the cliffs. That’s how I think things over, just put one foot in front of the other—away from cars and noise and people and their nonsense. I walk along the edge of a small canyon and study the red rocks. Sometimes, I think I can hear them hum. I have a theory about mountains and red rocks and rolling hills and thick, dense forests: God put them there to break up our line of sight so that we can’t see too far ahead.

The phone call came in the morning before breakfast.

I wasn’t any damn good the rest of the day. I threw out the omelet I made, burned the bacon to a black, nasty crisp, and put hot sauce on the French toast instead of maple syrup. After I mixed up a batch of chicken salad using yellow mustard instead of mayonnaise, I called it quits. I just couldn’t think about food anymore.

Millie Tilson was dead.

I’d seen her last at Thanksgiving when I was in Paper Moon, Millie and her seventy-year-old “boy toy.” The town was still in an uproar about it. I think it might have been the age difference, as if any of us had been able to figure out what that
was.
Millie’s family had been sworn to secrecy.

“Juanita, she would skin me like a red deer if I told you,” her nephew, Horace Patterson, had admitted sheepishly.

Millie had been enjoying herself. She and Doc Hessenauer loved to gamble and went to Las Vegas for long weekends. They raced their convertibles (she in the Caddy, he in a neon yellow Boxster) on a small, out-of-the-way stretch of State Route 35 at the speed of light. Horace, a state trooper, could never catch them. They enjoyed “clubbing,” but that wasn’t easy in Paper Moon. The only place that loosely qualified as a “nightclub” was Em’s Place at the northern edge of town and that was because it was open at night and sold beer. So, Millie and the Doc spent Christmas in Cancun and New Year’s Eve in Palm Springs with friends from her Texas days. Montana was way too “provincial” for them. I like that word. I’ll have to look it up.

“I want to go at lightning speed,” she’d told me once when she was in a philosophical mood. “Out in a flash, no lingering around in the hospital with bedpans or those morphine drips.” She’d waved her arms and the white boa-trimmed silk gown swished. “On to the next journey like the snap of a finger!” And she popped those well-manicured fingers loudly to emphasize her point. “And Juanita,” she instructed me, her eyes sharp, her expression serious. “Make sure that they do my nails and touch up my roots. I don’t want people looking into the casket whispering about how bad my hair looks! I’d like to be wearing my white Mainbocher suit, too, if you think you can remember.”

Maine sashay? Maine bockshay? Whatever. I didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking so I quickly agreed to what Millie was telling me. I told her that I would remember to get her to shut up. I just didn’t think I would need to remember so soon.

She and the Doc had been taking tango lessons.

“I did the tango with General Peron once in Buenos Aires, the old fascist, but that was a few years ago,” Millie had said. “The Doc and I are talking about taking a cruise around Latin America.”

One of her two-inch heels skidded on the polished floor at the dance studio and Millie went down. She wasn’t much bigger than a half second anyway and those bones cracked like dry twigs. It had to hurt but Millie laughed it off, at least that’s what the Doc said, until she tried to get up. That’s when he called the EMS squad.

“All of that fuss!” Millie had told me later. She was very annoyed. “The noise and those damn lights blinking off and on. Such a to-do!”

After the surgery, she couldn’t get up and move around right away (and not for lack of trying, you know Millie), so the bedpan became a part of her daily beauty ritual. “The ultimate indignity, Juanita,” she’d said. It was one of the few times that I ever heard her sigh or heard anything close to resignation in her voice.

Millie was the patient from hell. People who have never been flat on their backs in their lives don’t take to hospitals. Four days in the hospital, four and a half weeks at a rehabilitation extended-care facility (≴Extended-care facility, my wrinkled ass,” Millie had grumbled. “It’s a damn old folks’ home!”), and then back to Paper Moon with a nurse. She would have spent more time in the rehab center but was discharged early. I later learned she was put out “due to bad behavior.”
Her
bad behavior. It wasn’t the wheelchair races in the halls or the poker games in the sunroom that were the problem, so Millie explained to me later, probably leaving out most of the bad stuff she’d done. But she’d had Inez smuggle in Turkish cigarettes and the fixings for her favorite drink, the Bourbon Old-Fashioned, so that when her surgeon made his two-week postsurgical visit and found his patient puffing away and sipping on a cocktail, well, you can just imagine. Millie said that his eyes bulged and his ears flapped out as if they were going to turn into wings and take off—without his head!

“I think the man had an apoplectic fit,” Millie wrote me. “He told me that I shouldn’t mix the alcohol with my medications. I informed him that I
wasn’t
mixing them since I took the pills well before cocktail hour.”

She graciously accepted her expulsion and went home, promising, with her fingers crossed behind her back, to behave herself and suspend her cocktail hours until she was completely off the heavy-duty Tylenol.

Besides deciphering Millie’s letters like an archaeologist trying to read Egyptian hieroglyphics for the first time, I got to hear about it all from Jess, Inez, and Barb, the nurse who was taking care of Millie. Millie was not the kind of woman to lie around the house and get well eventually. She wanted everything to happen right now. She’d threatened poor Dr. Novak with malpractice if he didn’t have her up and salsa dancing by Easter because she and the Doc had “plans.” They were off to Palm Springs for Valentine’s Day and she had already bought her ticket and didn’t want the money to go to waste. But the going was slow: a wheelchair, a walker, and, then, a cane. She had to sit down a certain way and sleep only on her side. She limped and, worse than anything, I think, she couldn’t wear the high heels or the filmy nylons that she loved. They had been replaced by low-heeled, sensible block-looking clodhoppers and thick, milky-looking white support hose. Millie was mortified. “Ugliest damn things you ever saw!” She was hobbling back to life and, even though we didn’t say it aloud, she hoped, as we all did, that she’d hobble fast enough to outrun the things that could hurt her.