“Forget the car. For now. Put Myrna on the phone.”
Goldie heard the soft snerfle sound of Myrna breathing into Tally’s smart phone.
“Hello darling, I miss you. I love you!”
Myrna barked in response.
“She totally recognizes your voice.”
“Thank you, Tally. Make sure she gets her nighttime treat.”
She ended the call.
She walked into the sitting room lobby, walked back to the kitchen, and then in a circle around the main floor. She was pacing.
Goldie processed the information from Hedda and Tally. She’d avoided the gossip sites and social media. The image of the angry horde of superhero fans was nightmare fuel, but she hadn’t really allowed herself to think about the long-term situation.
All she’d worked for really was gone, at least right now.
She’d always been in demand. And now she was, what did Hedda say? Oh yeah, her name was mud.
Having an open schedule was weird, and it made her antsy. Having no plan past the very next hour, was not her natural state.
Goldie felt jittery. She was unmoored in every sense. As she stood in the middle of the room, looking at the expanse of the lake, she watched a blue heron skim the surface near the unkempt beach. She had no idea how to be herself in this nothingness.
But the view was pretty. She focused on it a few minutes more. She stopped pacing. She took a deep breath. Goldie couldn’t honestly say she was confident that she’d figure all this out. But at least she had calmed her jitters. At least she’d stopped pacing.
Twenty years of yoga classes apparently did more that tone muscles. They helped her be in the moment, be in this moment. What came next was unknowable.
She heard a car pull into the parking lot of the Two Lakes Grove Hotel.
She walked to the kitchen service entrance and looked out. It was Joe Cassidy’s Cassidy Contractors pickup truck. The whitetruck was muddy, the simple black logo slightly obscured by dirt. He needed to wash it.
Goldie watched Joe for a moment. He was good-looking; she’d give him that. He was strong and unkempt in a way no one in California was. You didn’t just groom yourself in California. You hired a professional groomer. Just like a dog groomer here, she supposed. But fifty times as expensive. Joe’s touch of scruffy was sexy.
She snapped out of that line of thought. She didn’t need to fill the sudden quiet in her life with a totally ridiculous love affair.
Goldie watched as he started to unload his truck. As a distraction, more than anything else, she decided to greet him and find out what was on the plan for the place today.
She hoped he wasn’t going to need her to get out of the way. If he did, she’d have no clue how to do that.
“Hello, looks like you’ve got big plans for the day.”
“Yeah, late start too. Jared didn’t have all the cans mixed yet.”
“I love that Lil Pudding owns the hardware store now.”
“What?”
“That’s what we used to call him back in the day.”
“Ha, I forget you’ve got roots here, Hollywood.”
She brushed off the comment and watched as he made three trips with paint cans, drop cloths, and a ladder. Goldie’s curiosity got the better of her.
“What room are you painting?” She followed Joe into the hotel.
“Main room, just white. Rooms all need it too, but big project first.”
