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He shook my hand. “Hi. I’m Colin Colfax, and I’ll be your host for the foreseeable future. Come on, I’ll show you to your palace.”
I thought he was kidding, but when I’d moved my car down to the last unit on the left and he’d unlocked the door for me, I walked in and stopped in my tracks.
Anemone had evidently decided that the Shady Rest was now a luxury hotel.
“My god,” I said, trying to take everything in.
“Yeah,” Colin said, surveying the paneled glory with me. “Our friend takes ‘spare no expense’ to extremes. Of course, that includes how much it costs to rent one of these.”
“How much?”
“For you, it’s free. For everybody else, it’s three hundred a night.”
I turned to him appalled. “InBurney?”
“I’m not from around here,” Colin said, “so I was a little taken aback when I saw the town. Evidently our friend has big plans, as usual. And strangely enough, some people are paying it. We’ve been open less than a week with no advertising, but we’ve had a couple of takers.”
“She always has big plans,” I said, surveying the splendor that Anemone had wrought in the burned-out remains of Burney’s only motel. “She paints with a wide brush.”
“She does indeed,” Colin said. “And her plans usually work out quite well.”
“She never misses,” I agreed, still distracted by the room. “Your future is in good hands.”
I know.” Colin handed me the key to the room. It was an honest-to-God key, too, not a card. “Anemone says you need a place of your own to write in. Call me if you need anything.”
“I’m pretty sure this place has everything I need,” I told him. “So is she meeting me here?”
“No idea,” he said and went out, closing the door behind him, and I went back to surveying the room.
It had been completely gutted after the fire, and the pitched roof, now finished like the walls in beautiful pale wood, rose up in a triangle over a king-sized brass bed that appeared to be ninety percent fluffy white pillows and fluffier white comforters, piled up in an orgy of softness. I wanted to throw myself on that bed, but I was afraid I’d sink in and never be found again. The floor was a polished rose-tinted concrete with a rose-patterned rug covering most of the room, and there were two pale pink-striped love seats across from each other on each side of the door where I was standing, the windows there spilling the afternoon light onto the thick cream throws and cushy cream pillows, an upholstered pale green ottoman next to each loveseat with a tray to double as a side table.
The whole place screamed, “Take a nap! Take two! Wallow in me!”
The bed just said, “Sex. Sex.Sex. All kinds of sex. More sex.Sex!”
I lay down on the bed and took out my cell phone and called Anemone.
When she picked up, she said, “Are you at the Shady Rest?”
“Yes, boss,” I said. “What is it I’m supposed to do here?”
“Rest,” she said. “Think without anybody around to distract you. Figure out what you want. Finish our copy edits.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I read up on Virginia Woolf,” Anemone said. “Well, just Wikipedia mostly, I don’t have the time to go deeper, but I know she said that a woman writer needs a room of her own. So now you have one. Stay there for a while until you can sort things out and finish the memoir I knew we could write.”
“So, I’m supposed to stay the night and collect my thoughts and finish the edits? I can do that.”
“Several nights, as long as you like,” Anemone said. “We can talk about it tomorrow at breakfast. That’s an order, not a suggestion. You’ve had a lot happen to you in the past months. Recharge and think things through and start again.”
That made me sound like Peri, and I was going to protest and say that I was perfectlyfine, but the thing was, it appealed a lot more than it should have. I was Anemone’s guest at the Shady Rest, so technically not a room of my own, and I was doing what she told me to do, so not a goal of my own, and the room wasn’t blue, but it was quiet and the bed was a dream, and . . .
“Liz?”
“Thank you, Anemone,” I said, and hung up.
I still had those papers to sort at the factory and the copy edits, but I was also alone in a space in Burney that didn’t belong to my mother or Vince. The fact that it belonged to Anemone meant it wasn’t a solution, but as a stopgap, it was fabulous. It had everything I could possibly need, except Vince.
