“Ruth, my darling, if you are reading this out loud, then someone has tried to take what we built.” I read the first sentence of Walter into the microphone, and my voice did not shake. Not once. Two hundred people on the terrace had stopped with their champagne flutes in the air. The lanterns swung. The jazz trio sat motionless with their instruments in their laps. Beside me Mr. Pickens leaned on his cane, nodding slowly, and across the stage Brad stood with his smile still fastened to his face like a cheap sticker, though his eyes had begun to go glassy. “Keep reading,” Mr. Pickens murmured.
I turned the page. Walter wrote in the plain blunt style of a man who had fixed the roof of that building with his own hands. He wrote that in 1998 we had placed the Magnolia in a trust, that I was its sole trustee for as long as I lived, and that no person could replace me, sell any part, or put a new name on the door without my written word. “When Ruth is gone, the Magnolia passes to Stephanie, but only if she has worked here five full years with her own hands. And if any spouse of a beneficiary ever tries to seize control, that beneficiary shall be set aside until the spouse is gone.”
Silence. A fork clinked somewhere. Brad cleared his throat. “That is absurd,” he said. “Stephanie, that cannot be legal. A man cannot rule from the grave.” Mr. Pickens chuckled. It is a dry little sound, like paper rubbing. “Young man, I drafted that trust myself. It has been reviewed by two judges and a tax court. It is as legal as a Sunday sermon.” He tapped his cane on the stage. “And Walter told me, when we signed, that he knew exactly what kind of fellow might one day come calling. He said he could smell it.”
A cream colored envelope from a husband long gone stopped a boat salesman in white linen from taking over a bathhouse.
Brad turned to Stephanie. “Honey, you knew about this?” Her face had gone white. “No,” she said. “I did not.” “But you must have. Your father.” “Brad.” She said his name quietly. “When did you print the menus?” He opened his mouth. At the back of the terrace, Kayla, my front desk girl, stepped out of the crowd in her good black dress, holding up one of the glossy menus between two fingers. Under new ownership, Brad and Stephanie Carter. The crowd shifted. A woman in pearls said, audibly, “Well.” Somebody in the back started to laugh and then, thinking better of it, coughed.
“I was only trying to help,” Brad said. His voice cracked on the last word. “Ruth is seventy three. The place needs updating. Nobody wants cucumber water.” “I want cucumber water,” said the mayor, from the front table, in a voice that carried. A ripple of laughter ran around the terrace, and Brad flinched as though slapped. I should have enjoyed it more than I did. Mostly I felt sorry for him, the way you feel sorry for a man who has built a house on a floor that was never there. “Brad,” I said, “you may have a good idea or two. You never once asked me.”
Stephanie stepped forward. She did not look at her husband. She stood beside me, small and straight in her blue dress, and she took the microphone gently from my hand. “Mother,” she said, “I did not know about the menus. I want everyone to hear me say it. But I should have known. For two years Brad has been bringing me papers to sign, little ones, and I signed them because I trusted him.” Her voice caught. “I have been a stranger in the bathhouse of my own father. I am so sorry.” Applause began, tentatively, from the mayor. It spread.
I asked Brad to step down from the stage, and he did. I did not have security remove him. I did not call the police. I asked him to hand me the menus, which he did, with a face like a boy returning a stolen bicycle. I asked him, before two hundred witnesses, to apologize, and he said it, thickly, to the floor. Then I told him he was no longer welcome at any function of the Magnolia until Stephanie said otherwise. He nodded. He took his white linen jacket from the back of a chair and walked out through the lanterns, the photographer lowering his camera as he passed.
That night, in my office, with the party still humming outside, my daughter sat on the edge of the desk and cried until she hiccuped. She said she wanted to learn the business. She said she wanted to start as a towel girl, if I would have her, and work up from the bottom the way her father had. I said yes before she finished the sentence. She started the following Monday at six in the morning, folding towels in the steam room, in a white uniform two sizes too big. She did not complain once. By March, she knew every pool by temperature and every regular by name.
The party went on. I will not say it was the same, but it was better. The jazz trio struck up a slow number, and the mayor presented me with a brass plaque, and Mr. Pickens, eighty two years old and blushing like a schoolboy, asked me to dance. We turned slowly under the lanterns, his cane hooked over his arm, while two hundred people stood and watched. “Walter would be pleased,” he said into my ear. “He always said you were the only person in Hot Springs who could silence a room without raising her voice.”
The letter ended with a line I did not read aloud, though everyone asked. I read it later in my kitchen, with a cup of tea. Ruth, whatever they say about the cucumber water, do not change it. It was always the best thing you made. I laughed until the tea went cold. The cucumber water is still on the terrace every afternoon, in a big glass jar with a spigot and sliced lemons floating on top. Stephanie pours it herself. She wears a name tag that says Steph, Towel Girl, and she is prouder of it than of anything she has ever worn.
