Hannah put down her fork and tried to find the right words to tell her grandmother that instead of spending time and money on advertising, they needed to be thinking about finding a good real estate agent. Then it occurred to her that a little renovating would give the place the kind of curb appeal needed to result in a quicker sale. Maybe she didn’t have to discuss selling it just yet. She could wage that battle another day, when she wasn’t quite so exhausted.
“I’ll think about it,” she said at last. “First thing tomorrow, you and I can take a look and see what needs to be done, okay?”
“Why wait?” Gran said, bouncing up, her eyes spar-kling with enthusiasm. “Daylight might be scarce at the end of January, but we’ve got an hour or so till the sun goes down. We can check out the exterior first. I’ve been thinking a new coat of paint should be the first order of business, something bright and cheerful, maybe a nice turquoise with white trim.”
Hannah winced, envisioning a garish result that would rob the inn of whatever tiny scrap of class it had.
“Well, come on,” her grandmother called back. “Daylight’s wasting.”
With a sigh, Hannah followed her outside.
Over the years, the inn had grown from the original sprawling, two-story beach house that had been built in the thirties as a private home. Because of its size and her great-grandparents’ enthusiasm for meeting people, they’d opened their spare rooms to paying guests. That first experimental season had been so successful, they’d officially named it Seaview Inn and expanded over the next few years, adding one section in the early forties, another in the fifties, operating much like the bed-and-breakfasts that had come along later.
Unfortunately, there hadn’t been much attention to architectural detail in the additions. Wings jutted out haphazardly, one on each side, angled so that the guest rooms on the right and the big formal dining room on the left, with its soaring windows and hodgepodge collection of antique tables and chairs, and the second-floor family quarters all had a view of the beach across the road. To Hannah’s disapproving eye, it looked like a cross between a halfway decent home and a seedy motel. It would take more than a coat of paint, no matter the color, to fix it.
Her favorite part was the porch, which stretched across the front of the original house with a row of white rockers and a collection of antique wicker chairs with fading flowered cushions. In past years there had been hanging baskets of flowers, but this year neither her mother nor grandmother had had the time or energy to spare on such things.
As a child, Hannah had had tea parties with all her dolls on the porch. Sometimes her mom and her grandmother had joined her. Those afternoons had been the best. Later, as a teenager, the porch had been a place for sharing dreams and plans with her friends over sodas and snacks. Eventually her first kiss had been in the shadows on the porch.
Now, bathed in the light of a spectacular sunset, the inn didn’t look as bad as it had at first glance. She could almost see its idiosyncratic charm and understand why her grandmother wanted to keep it open and in the family. The problem was that Grandma Jenny couldn’t possibly do it alone and there was no one in the family to help her. Hannah didn’t want to leave New York, especially with her team of physicians there, to say nothing of the demanding career she loved. Her twenty-year-old daughter, Kelsey, would probably wind up staying in California once she completed her studies at Stanford. Why keep the inn now, only to sell it to strangers in a few years, anyway? Her grandmother deserved to enjoy whatever years were left to her, not to spend them working her fingers to the bone waiting on strangers.
Hannah turned and caught her grandmother eyeing her speculatively.
“It’s a good time of day, isn’t it?” Grandma Jenny said quietly, her expression nostalgic. “Your grandfather and I spent many an evening out here watching the sunset with music drifting out the downstairs windows. And before that, my parents would spend their evenings doing the same thing. We didn’t sit inside and stare at a TV screen the way folks do today. We talked, getting to know the people who stayed here. We enjoyed the beauty God gave us in this place.” Her gaze met Hannah’s. “You loved it, too, once. Do you remember that? There were nights we could hardly drag you home from the beach.”
Suddenly Hannah remembered being maybe five or six and working all day on a sand castle, then being called inside. The next morning she’d rushed across the road to see her handiwork, only to discover that the tide had washed it away overnight. It had been her first hard lesson in the fact that some things simply didn’t last, no matter how well built and solid they seemed. Sometimes it was the foundation that mattered, not the structure, and sand had a way of shifting underfoot, much as her own parents’ marriage had crumbled a few years later.
As the years had passed and she’d developed more insights, there’d been little question in her mind that after the divorce her mother had felt trapped here by circumstances. What else could she do with a daughter not yet in her teens and no work experience beyond the family inn?
“I remember,” she said at last, but it was said in a faintly bitter tone that drew a sharp glance from her grandmother.
“There were good times, Hannah, whether you choose to remember them that way or not.”
“I wonder if Mom felt that way after Dad left. Wasn’t there a time in her life when she dreamed of going away and doing something else? He got to run away from her and from all of his responsibilities, but she was stuck.”
“What are you suggesting?” her grandmother asked indignantly. “That I kept her here when she wanted to go? Nothing could be further from the truth. She loved it here. She knew it was the best place to raise a child, surrounded by family and friends.”
“Dad obviously didn’t love it,” Hannah said.
“Oh, Hannah, that’s not so. Surely by now you’ve learned that relationships are complicated. Your parents were happy for a time, and then they weren’t. It had nothing to do with Seaview Key or the inn.”
Hannah didn’t waste her breath trying to argue. How could she? She’d been so young, just on the verge of adolescence. It was entirely possible that she’d been totally oblivious to whatever rifts there had been in her parents’ marriage. She relented now just to keep peace. “I suppose.”
Her grandmother’s shoulders seemed to sag. “I need to sit down,” she said flatly, clutching the railing tightly as she climbed the steps to the porch. She sank into her favorite rocker as the sun slowly slid into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, leaving the sky painted with streaks of orange and gold.
“Gran, are you okay?”
“Just a little tired. You go on in, if you want. Get yourself settled. I’ll just sit here for a while and enjoy the evening. Leave the dishes. I’ll do them when I come inside. Won’t take any time at all.”
“But we haven’t even started the list of renovations you want to do,” Hannah protested, feeling vaguely guilty for dampening her grandmother’s high spirits.
“You said it yourself. Tomorrow’s soon enough.”
Oddly reluctant to go inside and leave her grandmother alone, Hannah stood in the doorway for a few minutes.
As twilight fell and a breeze stirred, the streetlight on the corner came on, illuminating the porch and yard. That was when Hannah noticed the tears glistening on her grandmother’s cheeks.
* * *
“Mom, what on earth are you doing in Florida?” Kelsey demanded when she called Hannah’s cell phone later that night and woke Hannah out of a sound sleep. “I called your office earlier and your secretary told me you’d taken time off again to go to Seaview. I’ve been trying to call all day, but you must have had your phone turned off. When you didn’t return