Amanda spotted the sign for Maeve’s B&B almost by chance as they were driving through a tiny village comprised of a handful of streets, an abandoned gas station, a post office, a realtor, and an all-purpose general store. Like the village, the B&B looked as if it had been around since before the First World War and had endured a century of gale-force winds. It had a curling gabled roof and a sagging wraparound veranda cluttered with potted plants and aging wicker chairs. There was little sign of life, but an eighties Chevy truck was parked out front and a Welcome, Come in! sign hung on the door, so Chris and Amanda decided to risk it.
Once Amanda’s eyes adjusted to the dim interior, she could see the room was stuffed with antique knickknacks and mismatched furniture. Grainy black-and-white photos of farm scenes covered the walls. A little bell had rung when they opened the door, but it was several minutes before Amanda heard footsteps shuffling down the hall. She was expecting a little old lady huddled under crocheted wraps, but although the woman who finally appeared looked at least eighty and had a face like a dried prune, she was dressed in blue jeans and a faded sweatshirt with John Deere stencilled on the front. Amanda assumed this was Maeve.
The woman’s blue eyes twinkled with amused disbelief. “You’re wanting a room?”
Amanda looked around doubtfully. “Are you still open?”
“Sometimes, if I like the looks of you,” she said as she rummaged around in the battered antique desk for her record book. “Not too much traffic comes through here these days, but fifty years ago, believe it or not, this village was a beehive of prosperity. We had stores, a dance hall, and a drive-in theatre. It serviced the whole surrounding farming community. Now folks hop in their truck and drive to Calgary, the Hat, or the big-box stores in Drumheller. That where you’re headed?”
Amanda nodded. “We’re here for a day or two to do some business at the museum.” She didn’t feel like elaborating. She just wanted a comfortable bed for the night and was beginning to doubt she’d get that here. There was a pervasive smell of old dust that tickled her nose. Maeve was now hunting for her record book in a bookcase overflowing with tattered paperbacks.
“Most of my business now is people visiting the dinosaur museum and the park,” she said, pushing her grey hair out of her eyes. She grinned as she pulled out a book. “Ah-ha! I guess I’m a bit of a dinosaur myself. Eighty bucks a night. How many nights did you say?”
“Probably one. It depends how our meetings go.” To change the subject, Amanda gestured down the road. “We were just out for a walk on a farm near here. It looked abandoned.”
“Yeah, lots of the small homesteads are closed up around here. Damn hard life, broke many a family that settled here in the old days. If the drought and the winters didn’t kill you, the grasshoppers and sandstorms did. But nowadays it’s big business, eh? You need a big spread and lots of fancy equipment. So lots of folks sold their land to the Hutterites or the big agro companies and moved to the city. That’s progress.” Maeve peered past them out the front window and spotted Kaylee perched in the driver’s seat, watching them intently. She nodded. “Your driver coming in with you?”
“I hope that’s all right,” Amanda said. “She’s very well behaved and will sleep on the floor.” A blatant lie, she knew, but she’d packed blankets to protect the beds and sofas.
Maeve hooted. “No dog worth its salt sleeps on the floor when the owner’s not looking. I don’t mind. Pretty dog. Golden?”
“She’s a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. A ridiculously long name that no one remembers. Duck Toller for short.”
“She good for hunting?”
Amanda sidestepped possible controversy with practiced ease. “They’re up for anything.”
“And too smart for their own good sometimes,” Chris added.
“Well, there are some nice tracks you can walk on, out back. It’s leased lands, and the farmers are miles away. As long as she doesn’t herd cattle, you’ll be fine.” Maeve handed an old-fashioned key across the desk. It was attached to a heavy wooden shape that formed a stylized MW. “I gave you the room downstairs so you can enjoy the patio. It’s at the end of the hall there. The key is stubborn — like pretty much everything around here —” she gave a sharp, barking laugh “— so just fight with it.”
Chris parked the SUV at the edge of the gravel lot beside colourful flowerbeds overrun with day lilies and summer phlox. Kaylee bounded through the front door, raced around smelling every corner, and made fast friends with Maeve before scampering down the hall in search of toys.
Once they’d wrestled their door open, they spilled into the darkened interior. Like the main hall, the room was stuffed with furniture from decades ago: a threadbare couch, an old-fashioned poster bed covered in a flowery quilt, an antique chest of drawers and matching dressing table, and a braided rag rug of indeterminate colours on the floor.
The place smelled of must, and Amanda wondered when the last customer had occupied it. She fought open the window to allow the prairie wind to blow through the lace curtains.
Chris sat on the bed and laughed. “Wow.”
“That bad?”
“On our first romantic night.”
“We won’t even notice.” She sat beside him. Bounced. “Hmm …”
Kaylee was busy snuffling in corners, as if checking out all the critters that had passed through. Amanda hoped there were none still in residence. She took the dog bowl and filled it with water.
“We’ll have to ask Maeve where we can eat around here,” she said.
“We might have to go into Drumheller.”
As it turned out, Maeve jumped at the chance to barbeque them some burgers. Amanda suspected she hadn’t talked to a soul in days and relished the company. The smell of smoke and seared meat still triggered frightening memories, but her hunger won out. She did give passing thought to how long the burgers had been hiding in her freezer, but the meal was surprisingly tasty. Maeve served it with a couple of craft beers from her fridge and fresh vegetables from her garden.
“I live in the back here,” she explained as she served the food in a vintage gazebo behind the house. “This was my family’s farm house, and I moved it to town when I sold the farm.”
After dinner, Chris and Amanda returned to sit on the patio behind their room. Decades earlier, trees and gardens had been planted to create a lush oasis in the dry, empty landscape. Maeve kept them lovingly tended. Overhead, the violet shimmer of twilight was sprinkled with early stars, and in the distance a lingering smudge of coral marked the western horizon.
The quiet was broken by the symphony of crickets and other creatures that came awake at night. Amanda took a deep breath, feeling small in the vastness. In that moment, the years of hardship slipped away. She was no longer a battle-scarred, thirty-something aid worker but instead a little girl on the brink of new discovery, her freckled face upturned and her blue eyes wide with wonder.
She undid her ponytail and shook her chestnut hair free around her shoulders. Could this moment be any more idyllic? Was it real? Was she truly here, far from the gunfire, acrid smoke, and terrified screams of Nigeria, revelling in the quiet company of a perfect man?
Chris propped his huge feet on the wicker coffee table and caught her fingers in his. “Do you have anything you need to do tonight to get ready for your museum visit tomorrow?”
His tone was hopeful. She smiled and caressed his palm with her thumb. “No, but I think I’ll give my Aunt Jean a quick call.”
“Why?”
“Just curious.”
He knew her well enough not to argue. Just curious meant full steam ahead until she had answered the questions on her mind. He was silent as she pulled out her phone, but when she began to dial, he unfolded himself and stood up. He drew his finger down her cheek and bent to whisper in her ear. “I’ll meet you in the shower.”
Amanda’s Aunt Jean was a busy woman who lived alone and answered to no one. She travelled around the world on an obscure job that she had never fully explained. Consultant, she’d mutter when pressed, but she was so secretive that Amanda had often wondered if she was a spy. It was an amusing fantasy. Jean would have made a good spy. No family entanglements, a modest cottage in Quebec’s Laurentian mountains far from neighbours and prying eyes, a sharp intelligence, and a memory that rivalled an elephant’s. She was a woman of few words but had a knack for getting others to babble on foolishly to fill the silence. If Aunt Jean had any opinions, she kept them well hidden.
She couldn’t have been more different from her older sister, Amanda’s mother, who threw herself into causes with a noisy passion that brooked no opposition. Ever since she’d developed a taste for protest as a young high school student in the dying days of the Vietnam War, she’d drafted petitions, organized rallies, and marched with placards against every evil mankind could perpetrate. Against nuclear weapons, against famine and drought, against corrupt dictators propped up by American corporate interests, and most recently against oil pipelines and the systemic abuse of Indigenous rights.
She was a senior tenured professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, trained in biology but having made a smooth transition into ecology and environmental science. In her view, we were ruining our world and running out of time to fix it. From the safety of her academic ivory tower, she wrote powerful essays and contributed to worthy causes around the world. She was vocal, deeply committed, and judgmental as hell. How the two women could have emerged from the same gene pool was a mystery to Amanda.
Perhaps that was why Aunt Jean kept all her opinions to herself.
Amanda expected her aunt to be off on some clandestine jaunt across the globe and was surprised when she actually answered her phone. Amanda had barely managed a few words of obligatory social preamble before Jean cut her off.
“Nice to hear from you too, Amanda. Why are you calling?”
Amanda dropped the chitchat. “Have you ever been to southern Alberta?”
“No. Why?”
“There’s a framed photograph on your bedroom wall of an old house in a field. Now that I’m here, I see a resemblance. The same kind of outbuildings, the same flat land.”
When Jean said nothing to help her along, Amanda pressed on. “The similarity is quite striking, so I wondered.”
“Wondered what?”
“If the photo was taken out here in Alberta.”
More silence.
“Do you know the photo I mean? The one over your bed, along with the Great Wall and the Ganges at sunset.”
“Yes, I know the photo you mean. It could have been taken anywhere in the prairies. A friend sent it to me years ago. I liked the moodiness, so I framed it. That’s all.”
It was an unusually long speech for Jean, which piqued Amanda’s curiosity further. As far as Amanda knew, Jean had few friends, at least that the family had ever met. As long as Amanda could remember, she’d always been a dour semi-recluse, but what did Amanda know about what she was like as a young woman? She tried to remember the man in the photo. He’d been smiling at the camera, his cowboy hat tipped back at a saucy angle and his dark hair curling over his open collar. The image stirred a vague memory of playful chase, as if Amanda had met him as a young child.
Had there been a man in Jean’s life all those years ago?
“What happened to this friend?” Amanda asked. “Maybe I could look him up.”
“I don’t know why you would.”
“Well …” Amanda cast about. “I’m always on the lookout for local contacts.”
Jean grunted. “I have no idea where he is. We lost touch years ago.”
“Maybe —”
“And frankly, I don’t want to discuss it further.”
Aunt Jean’s tone conveyed its usual no-nonsense clip, but there was a chill that hinted at more.
“Was it a family friend? Would my parents know him too?”
“Ancient history. And don’t go asking your mother about it either.”
Jean ended the phone call abruptly after that, leaving Amanda more curious than ever. Her family was a maze of barriers erected between each other to avoid conflict and shut down intimacy. Amanda herself was no different. She talked to her parents a few times a year and saw them only at holiday dinners. She shared little with her father, who’d long learned to keep his head in the clouds, and kept her mother to safe topics. As for her brother, who now ran a business in China, she felt as if they were barely related.
She knew other families had no such walls. The families she met through her work overseas might have lived in huts or shantytowns, but their lives were nonetheless filled with warmth and chatter. Chris’s family had shown her more warmth and enthusiasm in the four days she’d spent with them than her own family did in a year.
It irked her that this photo had provided a glimpse into the life of her aunt as a young woman, maybe full of hope and vulnerability, only to have the door to her dreams slammed shut.
Yet the door had clearly been slammed shut, and Amanda had no excuse to pry it back open. No reason to go searching for an old friend who’d possibly broken her aunt’s heart years ago. It’s best to get on with taking care of your own life, Amanda, she told herself as she went back inside to where Chris was waiting.