As they left the restaurant, the Hostess smiled at them, apparently pleased that her assumption when they arrived had turned out not to be a mistake after all. “I hope the three of you come back to see us again real soon.”
“Sure will. And thanks for fixing me up with such a beautiful lady,” Josh joked.
Her ghostly concerns temporarily forgotten, Honor quickly glanced away, hoping to hide the fact she was blushing over the compliment.
In the lobby, two bellmen pulled the heavy doors open and Honor exited the hotel into the perfect November Florida sunshine. Not wanting to spoil her good mood, she decided to leave her cell phone off just a little while longer. Besides, visualizing William freezing his butt off in Chicago, frustrated she wasn’t instantly available, gave her a sense of guilty pleasure.
Minutes later, she pulled into the driveway of her childhood home and turned off the engine. Honor stared at the two-story, light yellow Queen Anne with white gingerbread trim, pretending her mother was still inside, alive and well.
For the first time since the funeral, she thought about her mother’s burial. Faith Macklin had always been adamant about being buried in Florida, where “her bones wouldn’t freeze in the dirt” and years ago, she showed Honor the small cemetery she had chosen as her final resting place. Honor had been incredulous. The cemetery, located just outside the town of Belleair, had probably once been charming and quaint, but over the years it had become crowded by commerce on all sides and divided by a busy road.
Aghast, Honor questioned, “Why in the world would you want to be buried here?”
“Because I’ll be with those who remember when these surroundings were peaceful and glorious,” her mother explained. “And I can enjoy listening to their stories throughout eternity.”
Honor still didn’t understand, but she made sure her mother was laid to rest among the old headstones, with the urn containing her long-dead husband’s ashes tucked securely at her side.
Honor swallowed the lump in her throat and unlocked the front door. The foyer was empty, except for the Grandfather clock that her mother had insisted Honor, as the eldest daughter, was to inherit.
After the funeral, Honor encouraged her sisters to divide the antique furniture and other keepsakes among themselves. But she hadn’t realized how peculiar the house would look without its furnishings and the valuable collectibles that used to line the shelves and fill every corner of the home.
Honor walked from empty room to empty room. Her sisters had taken everything except some miscellaneous dishes, their mother’s clothing, old bedding and large stacks of miscellaneous paperwork. They hadn’t bothered to throw away their empty soda cans or vacuum the carpet before departing, which irritated Honor. It struck her as being rude. After all, their mother had been such a fussy housekeeper. She decided to make a quick trip to the store to purchase some cardboard boxes, cleaning supplies and a shredder.
As soon as she returned, Honor sat on the living room floor and forced herself to call William. Braced for his heated tirade, she couldn’t believe her good fortune -- she got his voice mail again. Like a child hiding from an angry parent, she left him a short message and quickly turned her phone off before he could call back.
Next, she rolled up her sleeves and got to work cleaning, sorting and packing what was left of her mother’s possessions, starting with the kitchen. This had been the heart of their home throughout her childhood and even without furniture, the familiarity of the kitchen was comforting. After packing a few cabinets, Honor took a break and sat on the floor in the bay-windowed nook where the round maple table had always been.
She pretended she and her mother were chatting over a cup of coffee and a cookie. “Gosh, Mom, so much has happened in the short time you’ve been gone, I don’t know where to begin.” Her eyes welled with tears. “William cheated on me and accidentally got a girl pregnant. Well, either it was an accident or he didn’t care enough about our marriage to take precautions. I guess it doesn’t matter. We’re divorced but still working together, which is every bit as awful as it sounds. And the cherry on top is that I just learned he’s been telling people our marriage failed because I wasn’t…” She paused and bit her lip. “God, my life sucks!”
Honor imagined her mother listening sympathetically, offering her another cookie. It was a consoling thought. When she was growing up, her mother had used cookies like emotional Band-Aids. She smiled, wondering what size clothing she would be wearing today, if she had eaten every cookie her mother ever offered.
“Mom, I sure do miss you,” she mused. She rolled her pearl back and forth on its chain, remembering the day her mother gave her the necklace.
The gem was said to have come from a stunning triple strand of natural pearls that once belonged to Honor’s widowed great-great-grandmother. She had taken the necklace apart during lean times, selling several of the pearls to help pay for her only child’s upbringing and education. That child, Honor’s great-grandmother, Hope, had raised four daughters of her own. In her will, she decreed the remaining pearls from the necklace were to be divided equally among her daughters; a symbolic connection to their ancestors.
Subsequent generations continued the tradition, so when Faith Macklin’s daughters reached the age of sixteen, she gave each of them one pearl on a gold chain, and added another pearl each time a daughter was born to them. Honor was the only sibling still wearing a single pearl. She idly wondered how many pearls her mother was still safekeeping at the time of her death, hoping Honor would “earn” them someday. She sighed, “Mom, I don’t think this pearl is bringing me the strength of my ancestors like it’s supposed to.”
She clambered to her feet and went back to work, packing-up mismatched dishes and old glasses. Over the years, Honor had tried several times to convince her mother her dishes were no longer stylish and offered to go shopping with her to buy replacements. Her mother tolerated her criticisms and sometimes added a few new dishes to the cabinet, but she never replaced anything that wasn’t broken beyond repair. She said the dishes reminded her of when Honor and her sisters were little girls, eager to help-out in the kitchen. Honor had scoffed at her silly sentimentality… until now. She smiled and set aside a favorite glass to keep for herself.
From one of the lower cabinets, Honor began to unload cookbooks. She was fascinated with the yellowed and tattered pages, contemplating fondly how her mother, grandmother and even her great-grandmother used these recipes over the years. They had been wonderful cooks and their gourmet cookies were almost legendary.
Honor smiled. The internet had changed the way she found, exchanged and stored recipes, so these cookbooks were headed for Goodwill. Still, she had a hard time dumping the whole pile of them into a box. Instead she combed through the pages of the old books, reading little notes written in the margins by her ancestors and unfolding and reading several hand-written recipes.
An hour later, she looked up and was surprised to discover that she had absently set aside a little pile of handwritten cookie recipes she didn’t want to let go. Somehow it was as though the words written on those scraps of paper kept the people she loved with her.
On the floor of the deep cabinet, buried beneath the mountain of cookbooks, Honor discovered an old soda cracker tin. She lifted it out and carefully opened the lid. Inside she found an old journal, written by a woman whose name Honor didn’t recognize: Darcy Loughman. The ink was quite faded on the yellowed pages and the verbiage was difficult to decipher, but she could make out the date:1896. She wanted to read the entries, but recognized she would never get her work finished at this slow pace. She opted to set the journal aside to serve as bedtime reading material, and went back to work cleaning the kitchen.
Late in the afternoon, she took her checklist list out of her pocket and with a triumphant flourish, checked off the item “Clean-out Mom’s Kitchen.” Then she gathered up the day’s treasures and put them in her car. Remembering her hotel room had seemed quite chilly the night before, she went to her mother’s closet and grabbed an old-fashioned flannel granny-gown to sleep in, and then drove the short distance back to the hotel to order room service.
Belly full, bathed and dressed in her mother’s old flannel gown, Honor snuggled under the goose-down comforter, against the oh-so-soft pillows and began to read the faded text in the old journal. It began, “I long for a world so different than the one I inhabit…”
As she began to drift off to sleep, Honor became aware of a chill in the air and she heard voices coming from… coming from where? The hallway? Her suite? She tried to focus on the conversation.
“She has the journal. It’s time for her to know everything,” a woman’s voice said.
Honor rose from her bed to investigate and was amazed to find two women sitting in her parlor, clothed in full Victorian dress. Then it slowly began to sink in. They weren’t exactly what you would call solid.