Whistlin' Dixie in a Nor'easter
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Authors: Lisa Patton
Whistlin’ Dixie
I N A N O R
’
E A S T E R
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
WHISTLIN’ DIXIE IN A NOR
’
EASTER
. Copyright © 2009 by Lisa Patton. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Patton, Lisa.
Whistlin’ Dixie in a nor’easter / Lisa Patton.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-5783-0
1. Women—Southern States—Fiction. 2. Hotelkeepers—Fiction. 3. Bed and breakfast accommodations—Fiction. 4. City and town life—Vermont—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3616.A927 W47 2009
813'.6—dc22
2009016845
First Edition: October 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
eISBN 9781429957830
To Michael and Will, my true pride and joy.
And to each and every single mother:
Go after your dream, no matter how unattainable it may seem.
Whistlin’ Dixie
I N A N O R
’
E A S T E R
Contents
Preview:
Southern as a Second Language
Prologue
A Miserable Freezing Cold New Year’s Day
W I L L I N G H A M, V E R M O N T
No one ever told
me
you can’t bury somebody up north in the wintertime.
So when my little fifteen-year-old Yorkie, Princess Grace Kelly, decided to pick New Year’s Eve to go to doggie heaven, we had a problem. My handyman Jeb had the nerve to tell me that Gracie would have to wait in a shoebox on a garden shed shelf until spring, or the Thaw, as the Vermonters call it. I told him, in no uncertain terms, that I could never make Gracie do that and his solution was simply not an option. I mean, the least I could do was give her a proper burial with a funeral and all, after dragging her 1,473 miles away from home,
in her golden years
no less, to a place where tee-teeing outside was not an option for her. The first time I ever set her down “to go” on top of the four-foot snowdrift outside our door at the inn, she was nearly buried alive.
The first thing you need to know about me is that I am not a pushover. I’ll admit to being a little naïve,
maybe
, but I am no doormat. My girlfriends thought I was a huge doormat, but moving all the way to Vermont changed that forever.
Anyway, here I was living in subzero Vermont, but bound and determined to get Gracie into that ground. The night before Jeb informed me about this Yankee oddity I had called my best friend Virginia to give her the news about Gracie’s passing. My nose was completely stopped up from crying when I dialed her number at two thirty in the morning, my time.
“Gracie’s gone,” I wailed into the phone as soon as she answered.
“What’d you say? I can barely understand you.”
“PRINCESS. GRACE. KELLY. IS.
DEAD
,” I screamed.
“Gosh, Leelee, you scared me. I thought something terrible had happened.”
“This
is
terrible.”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry. When did it happen?”
“She took her last breath in the middle of New Year’s Eve dinner at the inn. The busiest night of the whole year.
It’s all my fault!
” I sobbed.
“It’s all
what
? You’re gonna have to blow your nose.”
I reached over for another Kleenex and honked into the phone. “I said . . . it’s all
my
fault!”
“What do you mean? Gracie was
old
, Leelee. It was her time.”
My bottom lip started to quiver. “
She hated it here
. And that’s only the beginning. Not only did Gracie just drop dead out of nowhere, but four of my guests at the inn caused a blackout in the middle of dinner.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I wish I was.” I sniffed a few more times. “Then—to top it all off—this couple showed up just before midnight to check in to their room.
I didn’t have a room for them, Virginia.
I overbooked the inn by mistake and there wasn’t a room to be had in all of southern Vermont.”
“Wha’d you do then?” Virginia sounded scared for me.
“I did the only thing I could do. I made room for them.”
“Oh my gosh, Leelee, this would only happen to you. Don’t tell me they bunked up with y’all.”
“It’s a long story. Have you got an hour?”
“I’ve got all the time in the world, but before you get started I wanna know one thing.”
“Okay, what?”
“When are you gonna finally give up this ludicrous notion of being the only Southern belle innkeeper in the state of Vermont and
come home
?”
“I’m always thinking about home, Virgy. Always.”
Chapter One
A Wonderful Hot July Evening
M E M P H I S, T E N N E S S E E
Memphis is my home. It always will be no matter where I live. In the South we have a tendency to be possessive of our hometowns. A Memphis girl can marry a Birmingham boy, raise her family there, and live out the rest of her days in Alabama. But when her obituary runs in the
Birmingham Post-Herald
, it will still claim Memphis as her home.
The only other place I’d spent any time at all was Oxford, Mississippi. Going to college at Ole Miss was more like “a four-and-a-half-year vacation,” according to Daddy. But the point is, I had no desire to ever leave my home again. I was perfectly happy.
Memphis gives me a peaceful feeling just thinking about it. Downtown sits way up on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi. The city itself is as flat as a pancake, which makes it the most beautiful place in the world to watch the sunset. Pinks, reds, yellows, and oranges streak the sky and you can watch the entire fireball melt into the cotton fields of Arkansas right across the river.
When you drive down parts of Poplar Avenue with the windows rolled down and smell barbecue cooking, it’s impossible not to turn into Corky’s
or Little Pig’s for a sandwich. Daddy would order his “white pig strictly lean.” I order mine the same way all because of him.
If you come to Memphis it would be well worth your while to visit in the springtime. Azaleas and dogwoods color the town white, pink, and red as far as the eye can see. It’s nice and warm, with the temperature hovering between seventy-five and eighty-five degrees. I know people say the summer is sweltering, but it never bothers me.
Probably our biggest brag is Elvis. Everybody over the age of thirty has some sort of an Elvis story, whether it’s driving by Graceland and seeing him in his front yard or knowing somebody who knew one of his stepbrothers personally—or even still, knowing someone who went to his doctor, Dr. Nick. Elvis drove a truck for Daddy once before he was famous. That’s our claim to Elvis fame.
I fell in love with a Memphis boy when I was sixteen years old and married him eight years later. I first had a huge crush on him way back in the tenth grade. Baker Satterfield hardly knew I was on this earth until my bosoms finally popped out our senior year in high school. I went from an A-cup to a D-cup in nine months. No wonder I attracted his attention.
At our graduation party Baker spent most of the evening trying to flirt with me. He ignored his date and threw popcorn at me and pinched my butt, very sneakily, every chance he could. But too bad for him. I had a date with one of his best friends, Jimmy Hudson. Jimmy Hudson didn’t ignore me and I
certainly
didn’t ignore him. When we weren’t talking or slow dancing . . . we were making out. I’d have one eye shut and the other slightly open trying to see if Baker was watching us. Without fail, he’d be boring a hole right in our direction. So I’d lay it on extra thick. I’d start giggling at whatever Jimmy said and run my hands through his hair or kiss him playfully on the neck.
You should have seen the way I gloated when I got home that night, just thinking about finally having one up on Baker Satterfield. It served him right for overlooking me just because my chest was flat. Baker told me later that he spent four frustrating years at the University of Tennessee dreaming about my newly blossomed bosoms.
We met up again after college graduation, and two years later his dreams
were nestled right next to him every night in Memphis. As far as I was concerned they could stay nestled that way forever. But when Baker decided to chase another dream, my life was transformed almost overnight from an unswerving line onto a collision course at the Indy 500.
The evening Baker shared his new dream with me occupies a permanent place in my memory. He was in a terrific mood, like he’d just hit a hole in one on the back nine at the country club with all his buddies watching. He was whistling and snapping his fingers and sliding his loafers across the kitchen floor as he helped me clear the dinner table. Normally he would have had the remote control in his hand by this time, flipping through the channels for any show remotely connected to sports. He never actually sat down to watch until the kitchen was clean. He’d stand in front of the TV like he was pausing just to get the score. “I’ll be right there, honey. Hold on. Scores up next,” he’d shout from the den. But I always knew what he was doing.
I was an all-sports widow. What really gets me is there is never a break from sports. In the summer it’s baseball, which slides into fall, overlapped by football, which passes into basketball before anyone has a chance to breathe. Football and basketball run side by side for a while, and as if that’s not enough, golf has to iron its way in between the two every Saturday and Sunday afternoon.
But this particular July night, he never even turned on the TV. He took Gracie out for an evening stroll instead of opening the back door and letting her run outside for her final potty break. I was reading to the girls when Baker returned from the walk and popped his head into their bedroom.