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.
CHAPTER 2
I spend the morning packing a small bag, just enough for a few days, and canceling all of my appointments. It doesn’t take long, since I have only two appointments scheduled all week.
I choose my outfit carefully: a cream silk blouse, navy slacks, and low heels. I want to be professional without looking ostentatious. I do not have any idea what one wears to inherit a honky tonk, but I refuse to show up looking anything less than put together.
Before I leave, I stand in the doorway of my studio one more time. The morning light catches the crystal chandelier my mother installed in 1995, sending little rainbows dancing across the walls. It is beautiful. It has always been beautiful, but it is also a cage, I realize suddenly. It is a gilded, elegant cage that I have been trapped in my whole life, trying to live up to standards set by a woman who never once told me I was enough.
I shake off the thought. This has to be grief talking, or exhaustion, or the stress of impending financial ruin in front of all of Buckhead’s elite. My mother loved me. She just showed it through correction rather than praise, through pushing me to be better rather than just accepting me for who I was.
And who am I really?
I lock the door and head to my car, a sensible three-year-old Lexus sedan that’s almost paid off. I enter Copper Creek, Georgia into my GPS and watch as the route pops up on the screen. Two hours north into the mountains, away from everything I know.
I have only been to the North Georgia mountains once, many years ago, when we had a meeting there at a winery. I do not remember much about it other than the beautiful blue hills off in the distance and the subpar wine that I drank.
