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SOMETHING WAS DEFINITELY up, but I was damned if I could figure out exactly what it was.
Holly and I had been having a great time, I thought. We were even bordering, if not having tumbled right on over, into relationship territory after we slept together. Going to the festival was supposed to be a solidification of that, and indeed, it felt like it was for the first part of the time we were there. I even got to look like the coolest dude ever with the clown dunk and then dipped her for a kiss.
Then, out of nowhere that evening, she just decided she wanted to go home, and I had barely seen or heard from her since. And when I had, she was cold and distant, like something I said bothered her or I had done something to upset her. I knew enough about women to know that asking what I did was tantamount to doing it all over again, so I dedicated quite a bit of mental space to going over the last few days and figuring out what in the world I possibly could have done to make her so angry and upset.
Days later and I still had nothing.
She had barely spoken to me on the way back to the bed-and-breakfast, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t something I’d said then. She also didn’t kiss me good night, and though I waited up for her, she didn’t come back into my room after finishing up downstairs either. I had hoped for another night of being curled up with her, but apparently, that wasn’t in the cards.
The next morning, I woke up to silence and realized I hadn’t even changed out of my clothes, hoping she would join me for the night and I could get undressed then. It was presumptive, sure, but I liked the idea of not getting comfortable until I knew for sure she wasn’t going to make it, and then I just dozed off in the bed with cooking shows on TV.
Over the next few days, she was elusive. It was like trying to catch a wet dog; she avoided me or slipped out of rooms right as I got in them. I couldn’t seem to get a bead on her, and she was usually gone well before I got into rooms she had been in. I tried not to think something was wrong and that she was just busy, but it was hard not to think it. It was almost as if there was a glaring sign in her absence that said whatever we had was gone or at least was on pause.
Breakfast was just sad. I tried to find her by getting up early and meeting her down there, but she had already come and left, leaving behind a phoned-in breakfast of bland breakfast cereals, apples, and toast or a basic pastry. There hadn’t been any coffee on those days, and I didn’t know if she had just not made it because she didn’t feel like it or if it was meant to be some sort of message.
I’d been making the coffee and occasionally surprising the guests with the coffee toppings bar since I got to the bed-and-breakfast. It had become part of my daily routine, and Holly knew that. Maybe by not making the coffee on the mornings when she got breakfast finished so early, she was trying to subtly express to me that there was a place for me and I needed to fill it.
Or that she had accepted that was my responsibility and she wanted me to keep up with it, even when she wasn’t there to see me do it.
Or that she was acknowledging my role in her life and projecting to me that she felt the same way.
Or maybe I was just reading far too far into her not making coffee early when she knew the guests would have no problem whatsoever speaking their minds and letting her know if they were missing their usual cup.
So I made the coffee like I always did, and Holly disappeared into various parts of the house or her office.
Holly was apparently locked in her office most of the time, and when she wasn’t, she was somewhere on the grounds doing some task. More than once, I went out looking for her, finding myself having just missed her putting up a ribbon on a window or taking out the trash to the curb. If I didn’t know any better, I would think she was keeping an eye out for me specifically and anytime she saw me was diving behind a hedge or something.
Sometimes I would get downstairs, look for her, and realize her car was gone. Hours later, it would have returned, but there was no sign of her, and guests would mention that she had come by their room to ask if they needed anything and then disappeared. Whatever she was doing, she was getting her steps in for sure.
Another morning and another sad breakfast seemed doomed to be my reality when I headed down the stairs toward the kitchen that morning. I was half-tempted to go into my own pocket and order something for delivery for the guests and myself, but I had hope that maybe something would be different. The distinct lack of smells coming from the kitchen was enough to tell me that was not the day.
But there was one very specific change. When I walked into the kitchen, the coffee was already there. Along with an extra carafe. Maybe this was the message.
The table had fourteen chairs, but there weren’t that many guests there. Vint and his family sat where they usually did in the center of the table, while the newer guests were mostly gathered together on one end, and I got the impression they were together in some way. An elderly lady sat at the head of the table, likely the matriarch of the crew, eating what looked like toast with shredded cheese melted onto it with an expression somewhere between age-wise calm and hot, seething, religious rage. The kind of rage most people only work up when they talk about their enemies from high school.
High school enemies would be familiar to the girl at the farthest edge of the gathered group. She couldn’t be more than fourteen, with the trappings of youth and sullenness that generally come from the onset of acne, too many hormones, and not enough experience to know that every inconvenience isn’t the end of the universe. She looked down at the plate in front of her and sighed in the way that only teenagers can manage and rolled her eyes so hard I thought she might have had a stroke.
“I thought everything in this place was going to be festive,” she whined, not even bothering to take out the wireless earbud in both ears or her eyes from the phone that was likely one step from being surgically grafted to her palm. “We don’t even have any eggnog.”
It was at that moment that I noticed Holly was in the room. She was standing at the other end of the table with a carafe of coffee in one hand and a plate with a stack of unbuttered toast in the other. She was wearing an expression I could only compare to that of a lion in front of an injured zebra. Whatever was about to come out of her mouth would be eviscerating, mean, and most likely filled with four-letter words that tended to catch FCC fines on television.
She was about to snap. I could see it in her eyes. She was roughly a second or two away from throwing the coffee and morphing into a real-life grinch right before our eyes. I wondered if the sudden lapse in Christmas boot camp training was the reason she had become unhinged. She was left out in the cold with the expectations of Christmas-goers and no direction to help them in.
Then it hit me that I made that whole thing up. It really wasn’t all that intense, after all. Not nearly as intense as the fistfight Holly was about to start with a girl who still had some baby teeth left.
“This way,” I said softly as I came up beside Holly and took one elbow, leading her away and back to the kitchen.
She didn’t hesitate or pull away from me, not at least until we were through the archway to the kitchen and she was out from the watchful eye of the old woman at the head of the table. Thankfully, she seemed to resist the temptation to slam the carafe down and instead shoved it onto the heater. The plate of toast wasn’t as lucky. It was tossed onto the kitchen counter, and bread went everywhere.
Holly threw herself into a chair and sat, staring into the center of the kitchen table, eyes wide, but not saying anything. I looked back from her to the table, where the guests were starting to whisper amongst themselves. Then I looked back to Holly and took a breath.
“You stay here and cool off for a sec, okay?” I asked. I didn’t wait for a response before I was through the arch and back out in front of the breakfast guests and their sudden silence upon my return. “So, Holly wanted to keep this a secret, but the reason there isn’t eggnog now is because we are going to have some later.”
“Later?” the girl asked, apparently able to hear me over whatever was playing on her phone.
“Yes, and it won’t be the old store-bought stuff that’s all thick and sweet,” I said.
“I hate that stuff,” the old woman said. “Back in my day, eggnog was proper. And had whiskey in.”
I cleared my throat and nodded.
“Right, well, no promises on alcohol, but we are going to make some that will be waiting for you this evening. I promise, it will be good. We will have it available in the living room for an old-fashioned singalong around the campfire.”
I saw the slight veil of approval cross the old woman’s face, followed by a prim smile. Even the teenager looked happy about it, though I was sure she would be thoroughly embarrassed and tweet about the experience as if she were encountering alien life forms later. Still, a patch over the disappointment.
As I was speaking, I caught sight of Holly, back in the doorway, and I could just feel the thousand lethal icicles her eyes were digging into my back at that moment. I didn’t need to turn around to see them. I could feel their heat as if Superman were burning a hole in my back with his laser vision.
“Well, that sounds just fine,” the old woman said, nodding. “Reminds me of old Leroy, God bless his soul.”
“Was that your husband?” I asked, desperate to find something to talk about that didn’t involve turning around and seeing Holly.
“Indeed, he was,” the old woman said. “Gone these thirty-five years next March.”
“Oh, wow, he must have been very young. I am so sorry,” I said.
The old woman waved the comment away and scratched behind her ear. When she did, I noticed the giant diamond earring being complimented by the even larger diamond on her finger.
“No, he wasn’t,” she said. “He was a cantankerous and frugal old man. He just wasn’t one for very long when I married him.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Did that old woman murder her husband?” I asked quietly as I picked up one of the empty plates.
The guests had finished their breakfast and retired to do whatever it was they planned on doing for the morning. The old woman—Nancy, I learned—had simply gone back to bed. Part of her daily routine was to get up, get breakfast, and then nap for an hour before continuing her day.
“I don’t know,” Holly said briskly, stacking a plate on top of another and swinging them off the table to head back to the kitchen.
“I just would like to know if I was sleeping under the same roof as a character from Arsenic and Old Lace,” I said.
There was no response from the kitchen.
