“Yes, well, those napkins aren’t going to iron themselves, my friend.” Mary hopped to her feet. “Take a shower, and I’ll tell Mom you’ll be down soon. I can buy you twenty minutes, maybe.”
“Thirty?”
“The wishful thinking again! I wish I could be aspositive as you, Georgie, I really do. And so early in the morning!”
She left me, thankfully, alone. I propped my pillow up behind me and leaned back against the bed so I could finish eating my muffin. Five hours until check-in and I needed about forty-seven showers and twelve more muffins. And another half-dozen cups of coffee too. I finished what I had, shoved the remaining bit of muffin in my mouth, and stumbled down the hall to the bathroom.
It was just us up here: my bedroom, Mary’s bedroom, our bathroom, and a room of storage stuffed so full of boxes you couldn’t take more than two steps into it. The Fernweh Inn had four floors, including this one, and for ten months of the year they sat abandoned. By-the-Sea had a short tourist season, but it was also a busy one. We would make enough in two months to get by until next summer.
In the bathroom I got naked and waited for the water to heat up, jumping from foot to foot to help myself wake up. When it was hot enough, I stepped into the shower and stood directly under the stream, letting the water hit me in my face until I was sure that all the salt and sand from the night before was washed off my skin (although it would never be all washed off, not really). I felt better afterward, albeit marginally. I toweled off and then made my way back to my bedroom to get dressed.
I took my coffee cup downstairs to the kitchen for a refill. Aggie, Mom’s best friend and the official cook ofthe Fernweh Inn, was prepping that day’s dinner in the kitchen. When she saw me, she burst out laughing. Aggie’s laugh was like a bus horn, loud and sharp. She was a tall woman who always wore a scarf wrapped around her long gray hair. She was like a second mother to me, especially during the summer months, when she practically lived at the inn. She laughed again now at the sight of me; Aggie was always either laughing or cooking, and often both at the same time.
“Georgina, you look like something the cat dragged in,” she said. I poured more coffee and yawned.
“It was the solstice last night. I didn’t want to go. Mary made me.”
“Ah, it’s tradition. You’ll feel fine after you wake up a little. Do you want an omelet?”
“I had a muffin.”
“That’s a new recipe; you like ’em?”
“Really good. Thanks, Aggie.”
“Well, they won’t cure a hangover, but they might help a little.”
“I sure hope you didn’t say ‘hangover’ in reference to my daughter, who is, last I checked, underage,” my mom said, bustling into the kitchen in her usual flurry of motion. She wore an ankle-length dress the color of midnight.Which is not exactly my cup of tea, but adds to the aesthetic. Old inn, old island, old scary dress, you get it, she’d once said. “Georgina, you’re late,” she added.
“I’m sorry. I set my alarm wrong.”
“Well, I need you on silverware duty for now, okay? Wash and polish, honey, that stuff hasn’t been touched since last August.” She pointed to the sink, next to which was a massive pile of the good silver forks and spoons and knives. I spent five seconds of freedom staring at the pile, unmoving, and then I went and filled the sink with water.
It took ages to wash the endless pile of silverware (endless largely in part because Mom kept finding more of it and bringing it over to me with an evil, joyous smirk plastered on her face), and when I was done I set up a station in the dining room where I could polish and shine.
For not the first time in my life as a Fernweh woman, I wished magic was more like it was in the movies. On TV, people snapped their fingers and piles of silverware obligingly sprang to life and washed themselves. On By-the-Sea, not so much.
Sure, we all had our specialties (except me, who had none): My mother could make any potion she set her mind to. My great-grandmother Roberta had controlled fire; her mother before her could walk on water and breathe underneath it. My sister, with absolutely no practice or seemingly much interest at all, had mastered the act of jumping out her bedroom window, and here I was, stuck washing silver by hand.
It wasn’t that I hadn’ttriedto make my powers come. I had. Especially when I was younger.
I used to put myself in the weirdest situations, just to see if anything would happen.
I’d stuck my head in the full bathtub and taken a tentative breath.
I’d placed my hand over an open flame to see if it maybe wouldn’t hurt, if maybe fire was my thing.
I’d tried to talk to animals.
I’d tried a hundred things over the years, and then I’d given up, resigning myself to the fact that it would either happen or it wouldn’t, and I probably had no say either way.
It was only just getting light outside when I started polishing; I was on my fourth cup of coffee (to be fair, Aggie’s coffee was notoriously weak), and I had only caught glimpses of my sister as she jumped from one task to another, never in one place for very long, always with an extreme eye roll for me as Mom followed closely behind her, barking instructions. I had just managed to find a way to fall half-asleep while still mechanically polishing forks when I finished. Almost immediately, my mother was upon me with the next thing I had to do.
Hours later—yearslater—I was somehow done washing and polishing the silverware, ironing and hanging a hundred million curtains, dusting off the room keys (seriously), sweeping the front porch, beating out the cushions on the wicker furniture on said porch, and making sure Fernweh Inn’s twelve grandfather clocks were all wound and set tothe correct time. By then it was eleven-thirty and time for a quick lunch before the guests started arriving.
I’d checked the register earlier; of the inn’s sixteen rooms (floors two and three held the guest rooms, eight apiece), I knew all but six of today’s arrivals. That was to be expected: our crowd was mostly repeat birdheads, mixed in with a few random tourists who usually stayed a weekend or a week and left disappointed and confused about our priorities. The birdheads would be here until August. You’d be surprised at how easily these birdheads afforded my mother’s not-shy room rates. I knew one guy—Tank Smith—who routinely sold photos of Annabella’s Woodpecker to theGeographic Timesfor more money than most people make in a year. He spent the rest of the year doing God knows what, came to By-the-Sea for two months, snapped a picture, and made a cool hundred Gs.
I met Aggie, Mom, and Mary in the kitchen for lunch. Mom handed me a gray, curiously smoking drink. I looked into the glass skeptically. It smelled like a match the moment you blow out the flame. Acidic and bitter and hot.
