Page 70 of Wine & Dine

28

There’s no place like home

[Dolores]

Within fifteen minutes of Garrett’s silent exit, I’m on my way to Magnolia’s. As I near her home, it looks like something from another dimension, and it’s a similar sensation as when I entered my diner. I feel like I’m in some kind of Twilight Zone episode. Scaffolding on the outside of the three-story house proves work has been done on the roof and repairs are being made to the clapboard. All the shutters have been removed and stand propped along the side of the house. The front porch has been rebuilt with new, unpainted columns holding up a repaired overhang.

When I enter the house, brown paper covers the hardwood floors leading down the hallway to the kitchen. I pass the front two parlors, one on either side of the main hall, then the dining room and the grand staircase opposite it.

“Who’s there?”

I don’t answer as I enter what looks like the makings of a kitchen straight out of a home improvement magazine. A half wall has been taken down, opening the area and allowing for a better breakfast bar. The original cupboards have been removed, and white base cabinets stand in a new configuration to fill the space. A light gray wood flooring gives the old kitchen a fresh look. Countertops and modern appliances are missing, though.

“Magnolia?” Our grandmother has never allowed us to call her grandmother, and as I stand in the nonfunctioning space, I wonder where she is.

“Breakfast room.”

I walk through the second entrance to the kitchen and into a little nook of a room with a green-painted built-in cabinet to my right and a small circular table situated near a bay window. Magnolia sits within the window area. Both Mati Rathstone, Denton’s girl, and her best friend, Cora Conrad, are present.

Mati’s a petite woman with an athletic build and a fiery spirit to match the lion-like red hair. Her bark-brown eyes give me a sympathetic look. Her new best friend, on the other hand, is a platinum blonde, thin and snarky as ever after all these years. Her temper has settled a little since her divorce, which is the connection between the unlikely pair. The death of Mati’s husband and Cora’s divorce drew the two single women together, though Mati isn’t single anymore. She has Denton.

Mati stands to hug me, and I let her envelop me, though I don’t return the embrace. I feel empty inside, and although her arms touch me, I can’t feel the comfort she’s trying to give me.

“Are you mad?” she asks, pulling back and searching my face.

“I don’t think mad describes it.”

Cora sets a mug of tea on the edge of the table near me, and I take in my surroundings. The breakfast room is a substitute kitchen with a Keurig machine on the table. A toaster oven sits on the built-in cabinet next to a single old-fashioned hot plate.

“What’s going on here?” I ask, tired of all the topsy-turvy construction I had no say in. I step back from Mati, skip the offer of tea, and swipe my hand through my hair, holding a clump of it at my neck.

“Denton wanted to fix the place up a bit as he…we…live here.”

“You live here?” I shriek, questioning Mati who had her own home near town. At least, when I left for California, she did.

“The university plans to rent me an apartment at the beginning of the semester, so I sold my house to Jaxson…” Her voice drifts, and she glances down at her feet. Mati has a new job. This I already knew, but I wait for more details about why her son bought her home. She doesn’t explain. “A few changes have happened since you left.”

“I can see that,” I snap with sharp sarcasm, twisting my head to look around the breakfast room. I’m expecting Martians to walk in any minute and punk me. Joke’s on you, Dolores. You’ve entered an alternate universe. I’m losing my mind.

“He had the best of intentions,” Mati offers, interrupting my thoughts, and defending Denton. “But I think he got in over his head with two projects at once, and as the diner is yours… well, I no longer thought it was right for him to take over without you. I thought you might want a say in what happens.”

“Ya think?” I bark again, dragging out my Southern drawl to match hers. Sarcasm mixes with the exhaustion catching up to me. “I just don’t understand why you didn’t call me sooner. Why no one thought to call me before anything ever happened?” I’m speaking to the air because neither Mati nor Cora are at the heart of my issues. Neither is my grandmother who addresses me.

“Girl, come give me a hug and take a load off those shoulders.” This woman knows me. I’m ready to detonate all over this small room. “You look like you’re gonna run away again.”

I’d like to run again, only I have nowhere to go.

My grandmother’s words bring fresh tears to my eyes. I haven’t been very faithful to her as I left without a word and only spoke with her a handful of times in my absence. I round the table and reach down for the matron of my family. This woman is my everything. She saw my father for who he was and always found ways to go around his back. And she did it with grand gestures like gifting me the diner when he didn’t want to send me to college and giving Denton a guitar and letting him practice at her home because she knew he needed a way out of this town. Remiss in my behavior, I step over to her and wrap gentle arms around her frail figure.

When I pull back, her pop bottle-shaped glasses magnify her eyes, which seem extra wide and concerned behind her lenses.

“Missed you, girl.” The words break me again, and I swipe at loose tears leaking down my cheeks. She cups my face like she did when I was a child, and her eyes scan my face. “Take a seat.”

I sit where Mati was, and Mati sits next to me.

“Tell me all about California,” Magnolia says with hesitant encouragement as if I’ve been on an adventure. She’s trying to distract me, but I don’t want to think about California, or Denton’s apartment, or the man who lived across the hall. He was my adventure, not the destination of where I was. I won’t know where to begin on my journey of self-discovery without spilling all the glory and guts of being with him.

Garrett.