KERFUFFLE, SNOWY THOUGHT, turning her Subaru onto Lakeside Road and driving past cottages on Lake Winnipesaukee, the autumn’s dark blue water seeming more intense than ever without the competition of bright foliage colors, the leaves of the trees now old gold or rusty brown or fallen. A new septic system at the Inn on East Bay was causing a kerfuffle. Had she ever used that word before, while talking or in a poem? Why had it popped into her head?
Henrietta Snow Sutherland Forbes was a poet, the owner of three general stores, a new bride as of June, and a first-time grandmother as of August. But on this sunny Sunday afternoon, October 26, 2008, she was mostly feeling like a best friend.
Sundays, the Woodcombe General Store closed at noon. Right after she had locked the door behind the last customer and had pulled a fleece vest over her blue Woodcombe General Store sweatshirt, the telephone beside the cash register had rung. Caller ID had told her it was Beverly Lambert’s cell phone.
Bev, her best friend, wailed, “Snowy, there’s a gigantic gaping hole in the lawn, and creatures are swimming and drowning in it! Frogs, moles, mice, terrible, and Roger just says not to look!”
“Oh, no!” Snowy said. “Why are they drowning?”
“It’s too steep for them to climb out, they can’t tread water forever! I’m indoors now but I can’t stop picturing them! The hole is part of the new septic system, the tank will be delivered tomorrow, supposedly, but meanwhile—Snowy, this is the last straw!”
Snowy realized that over the past few months she’d been too distracted by the pregnancy of Ruhamah, her daughter, and then by the bedazzling charms of her grandson to have paid thorough attention to Bev’s plight. She said, “I’ll drive down. I haven’t seen the renovations, you can show me those. Do you have any guests this weekend?”
“Nobody since the foliage peaked. There’s nothing but an awful mess to show you. You mustn’t waste your afternoon off—”
Snowy heard Bev gulp back a sob. She reassured, “I’ll be there soon,” and left the store and hurried up Main Street to the North Country Coffins barn in which she and Tom lived in the apartment over the workshop. After telling him about Bev’s meltdown, she drove south out of Woodcombe to Gunthwaite. Her hometown, where she and Bev had met in second grade. Best friends ever since.
Yes, this was her afternoon off. Three years ago Ruhamah had insisted she take Mondays off as well, but this summer Snowy had insisted on working Mondays so that Ruhamah herself could have Mondays free—and whatever other days she felt she needed when the delivery date drew near. Ruhamah had stuck to Mondays but did agree to a maternity leave after the baby’s arrival.
Bev’s mailbox on Lakeside Road used to be a small one, dented by snowplows, with discreet lettering that said Waterlight. This had been the old name of the big place Bev had bought in 1995, having discovered it during her work as a real-estate agent and getting a good deal on the purchase of what she’d called her dream house. She and Roger, her husband, had been separated for eight years; she was living in a ranch house in Gunthwaite while Roger stayed in their Connecticut home. Into Waterlight she had moved. Five years later Roger had retired from his law practice and moved here without, Snowy gathered, really being formally invited by Bev. Yet they had formally renewed their wedding vows and resumed their life together, for better or worse. During the past year this “worse” happened: the nation’s economic crisis; their dwindling savings. Roger had a brainstorm and decided to turn Bev’s dream house into a bed-and-breakfast and change its name. After balking, Bev had given in. But there wasn’t time to transform the place completely into a business, so this summer they’d only rented two of the three bedrooms with adjoining bathrooms. The third was Bev and Roger’s room, which had the best views of the lake from upstairs, and, Bev had told Snowy, she would die before she’d give it up.
The new mailbox’s larger lettering said The Inn at East Bay. A strident sign now hung from a tree branch overhead, repeating the new name.
The economy. Last month the stock market had “crashed.” Panic seared Snowy as she swung the car down the circular driveway, hearing the lines from Yeats’s “Second Coming” that nowadays were pacing heavily through her mind:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold . . .
Behind the tennis court and brown-shingled garage was an expanse of overturned earth—the leach field?—from which a raw trench disappeared around the right-hand side of the classic summer cottage (winterized long ago) whose brown shingles and green trim blended into the surrounding pines—eek! Snowy braked at the sight of a wooden ramp leading from the driveway to the screened porch, spoiling the look of the entire front of the house.
Bev came rushing off the porch, down the broad stairs, wearing a faded green flannel shirt and old jeans. “I forgot!” she said. “I forgot it’s lunchtime, did you have any lunch?”
Snowy clambered out of the car, her back aching. The goddamn scoliosis. Below the lawn on the left side of the house, a lake breeze was jiggling the water around the brown-shingled boathouse and along the small beach. On that lawn Bev and Roger had renewed their vows, Bev in an elegant outfit, a green jacket and green ankle-length skirt to match her eyes, Roger in a navy blazer and gray pants (not intentionally to match his receding gray hair and his gray mustache). She hugged Bev; up close, she could tell that beautiful white-haired Bev had been crying, smudged mascara mingling with exhausted livid puffiness below those green eyes. She replied, “No lunch, but I’ve been making breakfasts and brunches all morning, nibbling. You and Roger go ahead.”
“He’s off to Home Depot, he’ll stop at McDonald’s. When Parker left Friday after digging the hole for the new tank, he asked us to use as little water as possible over the weekend, so we aren’t doing dishes and Roger said I could dash naked through yesterday’s rain instead of taking a shower but I certainly did take a shower and today too, though quick. Yesterday’s rain! Rain filling up that hole, along with the underground water seeping in, and the poor creatures drowning! I have no appetite.”
Snowy remembered Bev had mentioned that Parker Danforth, of Danforth Excavations, was installing the new expanded septic system. The name had lodged in her memory because a sister of her first boyfriend, Ed Cormier, had married a Danforth, and if Ed had lived after being paralyzed in a football game, he would’ve been Parker’s uncle. Hugging Bev again, Snowy said, “I don’t want to see the septic hole. Show me what else is new. Is that a handicap ramp?”
“Oh, God, isn’t it a ghastly eyesore! Leon built it for us.”
Bev and Roger’s younger son, Leon, a handyman and the father of Bev’s older grandson, Clement, lived with Miranda Flack, Bev’s housecleaner, in a mobile-home park across town. Snowy asked, “But a handicap ramp is an essential amenity, isn’t it?”
“Roger says we’ve got to offer everything to everyone, after just making do this summer. TVs and mini-fridges, we’ve bought them for the bedrooms and stored them in the cellar, waiting for the new bathrooms we’re adding, but the contractor and his gang have hardly begun, they’ve been so busy elsewhere this summer right straight through the foliage season, the carpenters, the flooring man, the tile man, not to mention our plumber—”
Snowy took Bev’s arm, as if she herself were the hostess, and led her up the stairs and opened the screen door. The porch circled the house, the front section furnished with four wicker armchairs, their green cushions in need of plumping. Suspended from a ceiling painted sky-blue, a mobile of a black-and-white loon drifted gently, the first loon the B-and-B guests would see of the many loons Bev had collected over the years. The real loons had now migrated from the lake to spend the winter on the ocean.
Bev said, “A welcome mat. Roger says we must get a big welcome mat for the porch. I’ve seen mats in catalogs that say ‘Go Away.’ I want one of those.”
Snowy tried a lighthearted reminiscence. “Remember the time we saw in some store a mat that said ‘Gone Shopping’ and we both were tempted to buy it?” She opened the front door and stepped into the large hallway.
Bev had claimed the house was a mess, but the hallway looked normal, and the only change was the presence of Roger’s prodigious mahogany desk; on it sat an optimistically thick leather-bound book that identified itself on the cover in gold lettering that Snowy could read without her reading glasses: Guest Book. Beside it was stack of pamphlets. Snowy picked up the top pamphlet, which showed the cruise ship Mount Washington plying the waters of Lake Winnipesaukee.
“Roger’s idea,” Bev said. “He loves telling the guests about all the tourist attractions in the Lakes Region and the White Mountains. I think he tells them more than they want to know.”
“Oh, lord,” Snowy said, and put the pamphlet down.
© 2020 by Ruth Doann MacDougall; all rights reserved.
Chronologically, LAZY BEDS picks up where SITE FIDELITY concluded. Ruth continues the ongoing stories of many characters met in earlier books, but this story is told from two points of view: Snowy's and Bev's.
LAZY BEDS, the eighth title in Ruth Doan MacDougall’s Snowy Series, continues the stories of Snowy and Bev as they weather this century's Great Recession. Snowy is worried about the financial health of her three small stores, while Bev, owner of a well-known real-estate agency, is finding that real-estate sales have essentially ceased.
Snowy and Bev share their adventures and challenges in equal measure, but Puddles, and many of the friends that readers have come to enjoy, have not been neglected. In LAZY BEDS, readers will catch up with the Gang they first met in THE CHEERLEADER—still going strong after all these years!
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