Chapter 1 #2
And then me, at all my various ages. Five years old in a tiny dress, practicing my curtsy. Sixteen, showing how to do a proper tea service. Twenty-two, officially joining the business as my mother’s partner.
I look at that last photo of my mother and me standing in front of this very desk, both of us smiling.
She is wearing her signature pearls, the ones that I keep in a velvet box because I just cannot bear to wear them.
Her posture is perfect, her expression serene and confident.
She never doubted herself, not a day in her life. If she did, she never let it show.
“I’m trying, Mother,” I whisper to the empty room. “I’m trying so, so hard.”
The studio does not answer. It just sits there, beautiful and useless, a monument to a world that no longer exists.
* * *
I am in the small kitchen at the back of the studio, stress eating the shortbread cookies I baked at three a.m. last Tuesday, when my phone rings and scares me.
I glance at the screen, thinking it will be Archie again or maybe one of my few remaining clients, but the number is unfamiliar. A Georgia area code, but definitely not Atlanta.
I swallow the last of the cookie and answer with my professional voice.
“Whitfield Etiquette, this is Eleanor speaking.”
“Ms. Whitfield? Ms. Eleanor Whitfield?”
The voice is male, older, and with an accent that sounds like honey poured over gravel. Deep South, but not Atlanta South.
“Yes, this is she.”
“Well, I am mighty glad I reached you. My name is Harlan Tucker, and I’m an attorney up here in Copper Creek, Georgia, calling you about your great aunt Mavis Flanigan.”
I blink, searching the memory bank of my brain. Mavis. The name sounds familiar, but only barely, like a shadow at the edge of family gatherings or maybe a name my mother mentioned with pursed lips and careful disapproval, as she did most people.
“I’m sorry, did you say Mavis Flanigan?”
“Yes, ma’am. Your grandmother’s sister, if I’ve got my genealogy right. She passed away last week, and I’m the executor of her estate. She’s left you something in her will, but I’m afraid you will need to come on up here to Copper Creek to sort it all out.”
I sink onto the small stool that we keep in the kitchen, my mind racing. Great Aunt Mavis. I think I met her once, maybe twice, when I was really young. I remember her big hair, loud laughter, and my mother hustling me away with an unusual urgency.
“I am very sorry for your loss,” I say automatically, the words feeling strange. “But I am not sure I understand. My mother never really spoke about her.”
Harlan chuckles, a warm sound that crackles through the phone.
“Oh no, I don’t imagine she did. Mavis was, well, she was something else. Your grandmother’s family was not too pleased when she moved up here to the mountains and bought herself a bar.”
“A bar?”
“Well, more of a honky tonk. The Rusty Spur. Been a fixture of Copper Creek for going on almost fifty years now. Mavis bought it about thirty-five years ago and ran it right up to the very end.”
I have no idea what to say about any of this. I feel like I am in some sort of fever dream. My great-aunt, whom I barely remember, lived in a town I had never heard of and ran a bar. Sounds like the setup to a joke, except Harlan’s voice is gentle and serious.
“Mr. Tucker, I do appreciate your calling, but I do not think this has anything to do with me. I mean, surely Aunt Mavis had other family or people who were closer to her.”
“She did not, actually,” he interrupts. “Mavis never married and never had children. Your grandmother, of course, passed on years ago, and your mother.” He pauses delicately.
“Well, Mavis kept track even if they did not speak. She knew that your mother passed. Sent flowers to the funeral, though I suspect you never even saw the card.”
I did not. My mother’s funeral was a blur of white lilies and murmured condolences. I was much too numb to notice anything.
“Ms. Whitfield, I do not want to get into too many details over the phone, but Mavis left you her entire estate - the bar, the property, everything. There are some conditions attached, which is why I need you to come up here in person. So, can you make it to Copper Creek sometime this week?”
I look around the kitchen, at the pile of bills on my desk, at the empty studio that is slowly bankrupting me. What do I have to lose? A nice little trip to the mountains might reset my brain and give me some new ideas.
“I can come tomorrow,” I hear myself say. “What is the address?”
* * *
That night, I could not sleep. I lie in my bed, this queen-sized four-poster piece of furniture that came with my apartment and is too formal for any actual comfort, and I stare at the ceiling.
My mind keeps circling back to the phone call, to the name that apparently was buried in my memory for decades. Mavis Flanigan. The wild one. The black sheep.
I remember now. Fragments are resurfacing like debris after a shipwreck.
My mother’s voice, tight with disapproval. “We don’t discuss Aunt Mavis, Eleanor. She made her choices, and those weren’t choices that a lady makes.”
I was maybe seven years old, asking why we never visited the great aunt who sent me birthday cards with five-dollar bills tucked inside. My mother had taken the card from my hands, looked at it with distaste, and dropped it in the trash.
“Your grandmother’s sister decided that propriety wasn’t important to her. She left a perfectly good life in Atlanta to run some sort of ‘establishment’ in the mountains, and we don’t associate with people who make those kinds of choices.”
So I never asked again. My mother’s word was law, and her disapproval was a force of nature that shaped my entire existence. So if she said we did not talk about Aunt Mavis, then Aunt Mavis simply did not exist.
But apparently Aunt Mavis did exist quite thoroughly. Enough to run a bar for thirty-five years. Enough to build a life in a town called Copper Creek. Enough to remember her great-niece in a will despite decades of family silence.
I get out of bed and walk to my laptop, opening it on the kitchen counter. I do a quick search for Copper Creek, Georgia, which brings up a modest Wikipedia entry.
Population one thousand eight hundred forty-seven. Located in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Known for its annual Bluegrass Festival and “charming small-town atmosphere.”
I search for The Rusty Spur and find a Facebook page whose cover photo makes me physically recoil.
It is an old wooden building with a big neon sign featuring a cowboy boot and a spur, the kind of place that probably has peanut shells on the floor and plays country music at volumes that violate noise ordinances.
The most recent post advertises a “Two-Step Tuesday,” with a photo of people wearing jeans and cowboy boots line dancing.
Oh my goodness. My mother would have had a stroke.
I close my laptop and pour myself a glass of wine, a respectable Sancerre, because even at midnight, alone, I am my mother’s daughter.
I walk to the window and look out at the Atlanta skyline, familiar and glittering.
What could Aunt Mavis possibly have left me? I mean, just the bar itself. I cannot imagine what I am going to do with a honky tonk in the mountains.
Sell it, probably. I can use the money to pay off my debts, keep the studio afloat for maybe another year while I figure out a new business model.
The thought brings a small flicker of hope, the first I have felt in many months.
Maybe this is the universe throwing me a lifeline. Maybe Great Aunt Mavis, in her death, will save me from the slow-motion disaster that my life has become.
I finish my glass of wine and go back to bed, but sleep still eludes me.
Instead, I find myself thinking about the birthday cards. The ones that my mother threw away. Five dollars every year, plus a note in handwriting I can barely remember.
What did those notes say? What did Aunt Mavis think about year after year as she sent cards to a great-niece she would never see?
I will never know.
She is gone, this woman I never really knew. And all that is left is whatever she decided to leave behind for me.
Tomorrow, I will drive to Copper Creek. I will meet with Harlan Tucker, sign whatever papers are needed, and figure out how to turn Aunt Mavis’s legacy into something useful.
A few days. A week at most. And then I will be back in Atlanta. Back to the stack of bills and the empty studio and the slow, genteel failure of everything my mother built.
I can feel her criticism from beyond the grave.
I mean, it is a plan. It’s not a good plan, but at least it’s something. It is more than I had when I woke up this morning.
I finally fall asleep around three a.m., and I dream about my mother.
She is standing in the studio, arranging flowers in a vase and shaking her head slowly.
“Really, Eleanor?” she says in that voice that could cut glass. “A bar? After everything I taught you?”
“I’m just going to sell it,” I tell her, but she is already turning away, disappearing into the shadows of the studio.
And when I wake up, my pillow is damp. I cannot remember if I was crying.