Forbidden Guest House novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Opening Night
At the season-opening dinner Erik announces Kari sold the inn to Northshore; she never signed, says so in front of the room, drops the ring in his champagne and throws him out, then a stranger asks for Room Nine with a 1981 reservation in Gran's handwriting.
My fiance stood up in the middle of my dining room and sold my house.
I was carrying four plates of walleye when he tapped his glass.
Forty people turned to look at him.
It was opening night at Solberg Guest House, the first one without Gran.
Every table was full. The windows were open to the lake. The loons were calling out past the dock.
I had been on my feet since five in the morning, and it was going perfectly.
"Can I have everyone's attention?" Erik said.
He had on the blue polo I bought him for his birthday.
His mother sat beside him at the round table by the fireplace, in her pearl earrings, smiling.
Marlys Moen ran the only bank in Loon Lake.
"Most of you know Kari and I have been engaged for two years," Erik said.
A few people clapped. Somebody whistled.
I set the walleye down at table four and wiped my hands on my apron.
"What you don't know," he said, "is that we finally have a wedding date. And a new address."
He held out his hand to me.
I didn't take it.
He laughed and kept going.
"Kari has signed a purchase agreement with Northshore Resorts. This place closes on the Fourth of July. We're moving to Minneapolis!"
The room went silent.
Then an old woman at table six said, "You're selling your grandmother's house?"
Hedy came out of the kitchen with a ladle in her hand.
She looked at me.
I looked at Erik.
"I didn't sign anything," I said.
He kept smiling. "Babe. You signed it Tuesday."
He only called me babe when he was lying.
"I didn't sign anything on Tuesday. I was unclogging the toilet in Room Four on Tuesday."
A couple of people laughed.
Erik's smile got thinner.
Marlys set down her fork and dabbed her mouth with her napkin.
"Kari, honey," she said, in her soft church voice. "Let's not do this in front of everyone. It's notarized. I notarized it myself."
"Then you watched somebody else write my name."
That landed.
I heard it go around the tables.
Marlys didn't blink.
"You're three payments behind on this place," she said, still soft, so soft that everyone leaned in to hear it. "Your grandmother left you a mess. Erik found you a way out of it. You should be thanking him."
I thought about Gran in the hospital bed in Duluth, asking me if the porch had been painted yet.
I thought about the seventy-one hours I'd worked last week.
I pulled my engagement ring off.
It stuck at the knuckle. It always did.
I worked it loose, held it over his champagne glass and let go.
It dropped to the bottom with a little clink, and the bubbles came up around it.
"Here's the deal," I said, loud enough for the porch to hear. "I'm not selling this house. I'm not marrying you. And I'm not serving you dessert."
Somebody at the bar table said, "Oh, damn."
Erik stood up so fast his chair went over.
"You're making a huge mistake. You can't run this place alone. You can't even make the payments."
"Watch me."
"You'll lose it by August!"
"Then I'll lose it by myself. Get out of my dining room."
He looked at his mother.
Marlys folded her napkin into a neat square and laid it on her plate.
She stood up and smoothed her cardigan.
"Thirty days," she said to me, very quietly. "Then the bank will take this house, and the sale goes through anyway. All you did tonight was embarrass yourself."
She picked up her purse and walked out.
Erik fished the ring out of his champagne with two fingers.
Then he followed her.
The screen door banged behind them.
Forty people stared at me.
My hands were shaking, so I put them in my apron pockets.
"The pie is rhubarb," I said. "It's on the house."
The whole room clapped.
Hedy pointed her ladle at me from the kitchen door and nodded once.
I got as far as the front hall before my knees went soft.
I leaned on the front desk and breathed.
Gran's chalkboard hung over the desk where it had hung my whole life.
Breakfast 7 to 9. Canoes at your own risk. Quiet after ten.
And at the bottom, in her paint that never washed off: Room Nine is not for rent.
The bell on the front door rang.
A man came in out of the dark with a duffel bag on his shoulder.
He was big enough to make the hall feel small.
Dark beard, flannel shirt, rain on his shoulders, gray eyes that took in the whole room in one look.
"Sorry," he said. "I know it's late."
"Kitchen closes at nine. We're full tonight, I'm sorry."
"I have a reservation."
"Under what name?"
"Mattson. Leif Mattson."
I ran my finger down the book. "I don't have a Mattson."
He reached into his shirt pocket and took out a small card in a plastic sleeve.
He set it on the desk and slid it across to me.
The card was yellow at the edges.
The handwriting was Gran's. I would have known her loops anywhere.
Solberg Guest House. Room Nine. July 3, 1981. Held for Leif Mattson.
"That's forty-five years old," I said.
"I know." He put his driver's license down next to it. "So's the name."
Leif Mattson. Duluth. Thirty-four years old.
He looked up at the chalkboard behind me, at the line Gran had painted.
"I'd like my room," he said.
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