With nearly all the guests still in their rooms, Caleb found this quiet hour the most peaceful of the day. He carried his guitar through the front door and headed to his secret porch. The sweet-smelling lilac bushes nearly hid the little porch that led tothe narrow wooden employee staircase. But they couldn’t muffle the sound of boat motors on the harbor gearing up for a day of fishing, waterskiing, or just puttering around giant Lake Huron.
As he had every morning since his arrival, he sat on the white-painted wooden step and quickly tuned his guitar. Granddad used to rest here at sunrise, wanting to hear the early-morning birdcalls. Today Caleb would rather make his own music.
First he looked out on the harbor, its surface flat today in the still air, the sun rising higher in the sky. As a teen, he’d loved the view of blue water, sailboats and motorboats lined up in slips, and the old gray yacht club building, back when Granddad, Grandma, Mom, and Dad lived and worked together here. Even Uncle Augo helped as he could, when he wasn’t pastoring his little island flock or performing tourists’ weddings in Little Stone Bible Church.
How did everything change so fast, with Mom and Dad gone for twelve years now and Uncle Augo retired and working the inn’s reception desk some evenings and doing what he pleased? Pretty soon, Caleb would need to face the fact that his grandfather couldn’t come back to work. Couldn’t take care of himself.
Couldn’t hear the birds from the porch.
A melancholy tune quickly came to Caleb, and he hummed along as he played a simple chord progression, improvising a melody. Thinking of Granddad and his beloved songbirds again, he changed up his tune and slid his hand up the guitar neck, plucked a few high notes, his own rendition of the song of the whippoorwills that used to live in the island’s state park.
Until the porch door opened and broke his rhythm.
“Caleb?” Sarah’s voice held a note of distress. “I need you inside.”
He shot to his feet and took the seven steps two at a time. “What’s going on?”
“Your grandfather’s in the lobby, and he’s not happy.”
Well, what was new?
Caleb hurried inside. Sure enough, there sat the elderly Jacob Kennedy in front of the reception desk, wearing dark trousers, a white collared shirt, buttoned-up black sweater, and black house slippers, shouting orders from his wheelchair and glaring at the brass chandelier that had hung there for a hundred years. Or so they said.
Worse, it looked as if every one of their guests had shown up at the breakfast bar.
Then Granddad caught sight of Caleb. He wheeled his chair around and stared Caleb full in the face.
“Look at all those burned-out bulbs,” he shouted as if Caleb still sat on the porch step. “We don’t just wait around for them to go bad. Last week, I told you to change them all.” The wavering voice boomed, echoing off the walls.
At least Caleb had gotten to play a little music before the fun started.
He strode around the middle of the room, checking for spent bulbs, then back to Granddad. “I see five. Out of sixty. Nobody will notice, but I’ll change them tonight.”
His grandfather’s face turned an even deeper red. “You’ll change them right now. Before the guests see how inept you are at innkeeping.”
“Fine.” On the off chance that the guests hadn’t seen Caleb’s incompetence before, they sure heard it now. The hush of seventy people in the room proved it.
He turned to Sarah, lowered his voice. “Rufus is probably in the maintenance room already, so call him and tell him to bring me the rolling ladder. I’ll get some light bulbs before Granddad has another stroke.”
As the older man blustered on, Caleb drew a huge breath and let it out slowly. The one thing he would not do was to argue with his grandfather, especially in the hotel lobby with dozens of guests hanging around.
He started toward the maintenance room and met tall, lanky Rufus Helming coming his way, making a racket while rolling the giant ladder down the hall’s wooden floor.
“This contraption’s gonna wake up anybody who’s still asleep.” Rufus’s long white beard and shoulder-length white hair made him look like a Duck Dynasty stand-in. But the man loved the island, and he loved Island House Inn. He knew everything about the old hotel and could fix anything in it.
However, Caleb refused to let the seventy-year-old man climb a fifteen-foot ladder to change light bulbs unnecessarily. He grabbed a package of bulbs, caught up to Rufus in the lobby, and climbed the ladder.
“From now on, change the bulbs after eleven o’clock at night or before five in the morning,” Granddad bellowed. “That’s to keep you from monkeying around up there in front of the guests during business hours.”
“Well, Granddad,” Caleb called from his perch, digging deep for patience and compassion, “at least this morning you’re not accusing me of monkeying around with music.”
“Not yet. Hang on to those bulbs so you don’t drop one.”
“You know, they make telescopic light bulb changers.”
“You’re screwing them in too tight.”
“I’m doing it just like you always did.”
