On the Right Side of a Dream Page 19

  Dracula barked to let us know that we had another customer then went back to his nap. The rig stirred up a lot of gravel and dust but its wax job was still in place. The truck finally settled itself into its city block–sized parking space and the engine idled down. I heard a door slam. Stacy walked around the front of the truck cab, waving.

  “There’s Stacy!” I exclaimed, heading for the door. It had been awhile since I’d seen her—Stacy usually drives the eastern routes. I liked Stacy—she was as gregarious as Peaches and just as hardworking. When she drove, she liked to listen to Stephen King thrillers and opera. The Shining and The Magic Flute were her favorites. She said that the horror stories sometimes scared her so much that she was afraid to get out of the truck!

  “Juanita, you’re a sight for sore eyes!” Stacy said, giving me a warm hug. Tall and slim where Peaches was shorter and stockier, Stacy has short, dark curly hair and green eyes.

  “It’s good to see you and good to see this place.” Stacy rubbed her hands together. Stacy only looked like a toothpick—this was a woman who could throw down some food. “What does Jess have good to eat?”

  “Yeah, what’re the specials? I’m starving half to death!” Peaches yelled from the cab. She had her elbow on the windowsill and was grinning like a fool. “I hope you have some grub, Miss Juanita. None of that highbrow stuff you’re learning about in coolin’ airey school.”

  I held my hand up to my forehead to block the late-afternoon sun.

  “We might have a crumb or two. Are you going to come down from your throne, Your Highness?” I shouted up at her. “ ’Cause if you think we have curb service, you are going to be disappointed.”

  “I need to report y’all to the Better Business Bureau,” Peaches commented, shaking her head in mock dismay. “Surly cook and no curbside service. What’s happening to this country? Not at all like the good old days.”

  I laughed. Peaches is so silly. And then I stopped laughing. Stacy had swung the purple door open and was now helping a very pregnant Peaches maneuver down the steps. My mouth dropped open.

  “Well, this is a fine thing,” Peaches said loudly to Stacy, using a sarcastic tone. She grunted a little as she slowly put one foot then the other down on the ground. “You would think she’d never seen a pregnant woman before. It isn’t polite to stare, Juanita.” Her eyes sparkled. Beside her, Stacy smiled proudly.

  I don’t think I had ever seen a belly so big!

  “How did this happen?” I asked, and then shut my mouth. I gave her a hug. Well, I tried to give her a hug. I ended up hugging her from the side because her belly was in the way!

  Peaches gave me a sideways look.

  “OK . . . but I thought that . . .” I looked at Stacy. She grinned and started rubbing Peaches’s back.

  They had talked about Stacy having a baby last year but I didn’t hear anything more about it for a long time. So I just forgot about the whole thing. Then I remembered Arizona and Peaches’s visit to Nina, her giving up cigarettes and beer, all of a sudden, and the fact that she’d looked under the weather for several months in the spring. Not to mention that her appetite had fallen off. The day Peaches eats a piece of toast and ginger ale? I should have known then but, with all of the bugs and viruses going around, I just thought she was having a hard time getting over that flu.

  Peaches shrugged as we moved toward the diner. Stacy and I walked, Peaches waddled.

  “We had some tests done. Stacy had some issues.” Peaches sighed and stretched a little. “I didn’t have any issues sooooo . . .” She gave her belly a gentle pat. “Here we are! All of us!”

  “Lord, yes,” I said. Together Stacy and I helped Peaches up the steps. “And should you be gallivanting around the countryside in that truck?”

  Both women laughed.

  “This is her last trip, doctor’s orders,” Stacy answered. “The baby is due in early November but they don’t think she’ll make it until then.”

  “I don’t think I’ll make it until tonight,” Peaches groaned. “I feel as if I’m carrying around the Superdome.”

  “Baby?” I looked at the Mount Everest–sized mound around Peaches’s middle. “Are you sure that there is only one in there?”

  Peaches chuckled.

  “Some days it feels like a rugby team, fighting and wrestling. But the ultrasound shows one child. The little twerp rolled up into a ball so we can’t tell whether it will be a girl or a boy.”

  Jess had opened the door for us and shook his head when he saw Peaches.

  “Guess we’ll have to open a day care center,” he commented. He had Teishia in his arms. They were both eating Popsicles and had sticky faces.

  “You see what I have to deal with.” I sighed. Where was that pack of Wet Ones?

  “How do you feel about being a godmother?” Peaches asked.

  “Oh, I think I can squeeze you in,” I said, giving her another sideways hug. “Somewhere between the puffed pastry and petits fours, Millie’s bed-and-breakfast, and Big Bird.” Business, Math II, Menu planning, Labor Day, my Spanish lessons . . . and a trip to Mexico.

  Once upon a time, I had a COTA bus life. I got up, ate the same kind of cereal, smoked the same brand of cigarettes, and got on the same bus every day, going to the same job. I thought the same thoughts and figured that, if I lived long enough, I might have thirty more years or so of the same thing: bus passes, empty Coke bottles, a blaring TV, fried chicken, and church twice on Sundays and once on Wednesday nights to eat up the long empty moments when I got old. It was a safe enough life, if you could call it a life. Without hopes or dreams, you don’t have much to look forward to. I didn’t allow myself to hope. Dreams were something that other people had.

  Fat chance of that happening to me now. I have so many hairpin turns, sudden starts and stops, that it is a wonder that I don’t have whiplash. And I don’t have any more answers about the secret of life than I did when I started. If anything, I have more questions.

  The inn is booked every week until it closes in October and I’m busier than a sand flea on a beach. For the first time in my life, I am a businesswoman.

  Millie’s son, Rick, has been as good as his word, better, actually. The old house got a face-lift as soon as the weather broke: roof, air-conditioning, sidewalks, paint, everything. A very fancy and very expensive magazine ad has kept the phones ringing. And I am going to write a cookbook. I already have the title: Juanita’s Put-Your-Foot-In-It Cookbook.

  Randy is spending his vacation in Montana. He and Jess are “refining” the dinner menus at the diner. They are quite a pair.

  “Just don’t get too fancy,” I have warned them. “A slice of blood-rare meat and a sprig of parsley do not a decent meal make. Especially in this country.”

  They ignore me, but as I walk away, I hear Jess ask Randy, “What does ‘suddity’ mean?”

  Teishia is staying with us for a while and she is a joy. Randy brought her with him for a visit. She starts Saint Dominic’s Pre-School in September. I guess Bertie was listening to some of the things I said.

  There are no heartwarming endings there. Bertie has come a long way: She has a new job making almost twice what she did at Kroger’s. She has a new apartment and gets “A”s in the business courses that she takes. Randy knows her boyfriend, Victor. Says that he is a gentle, hard-working man who is good to my daughter and good to Teishia.

  But Bertie and I don’t have cozy mother-daughter chats. I wish we did. We don’t call each other to chitchat about something we saw on the TV. She does not ask me for advice. When I said good-bye to Bertie last winter, we did not hug. I see Mary and Mignon together and I wish that things could be different. But wishing is not enough.

  Rashawn is still a businessman—the demand for his products has yet to dry up. He is coldly polite when we talk on the phone, which is hardly ever. No sunshine and blue skies there, either.

  I graduate next year in May. I will have an associate’s degree. It’s not a PhD but it is a start. Chefs are a
hot commodity. I have received offers from resorts, spas (including the Yellow Cactus because Nina refuses to give up on me), hotels, and luxury cruise lines. Next spring, I become a woman with credentials. I will have to decide what to do with them.

  “The Ritz-Carlton? Humph. That sounds suddity, if you ask me,” Jess said, smugly.

  My mother said that I was a slow learner. It took me nearly forty years to figure out that she was right. I have been living life backward, picking up pieces and parts of the lessons of living in the afternoon of my life, lessons that other folks learned in morning kindergarten. My head got real hard from the knocks, bumps, and bruises. And my soul had no protection, because I had forgotten that I had a soul until it was hardly there at all, just a small puff of smoke left over from a match struck two minutes ago, the rumor of a memory. Just before it was too late, I reached out with both hands, grabbed at my soul, and pulled it back before it slipped away and left me forever. Souls don’t stick around to see if you’re going to grow into them or not. They have better things to do.

  I’m starting over now, going off to taste and see what I missed. Some of my destinations are new and unfamiliar; others are roads worn down by my footsteps but now I walk them wearing a different pair of shoes. Not all of my trips are journeys of the foot. More often now, I am a voyager of the spirit, and those are the journeys that can hurt the most but bring the most joy.

  I move, slowly and with aching joints, but I move, even if I don’t know exactly where I’m going. I know that I will be OK. I have found my place in this world. And it has nothing to do with geography. A fish doesn’t drown in water and birds don’t fall out of the air. Every creature that God makes flies best when it flies in its own way and in its own space. And I have found mine.

  Jess and I don’t talk about the future. We take each morning as it comes, we work hard, we love hard, and we get on with life. There is a fork coming in the road in a few months—for both of us. I might be cruising in the Mediterranean next year this time or I might be flipping crepes for spa guests in Sonoma Valley, or baking pecan brownies for the Eagle Scouts in Mason, and popping toast for breakfast guests at Millie’s place. Lately, Jess has talked about selling the diner and retiring. To go into business with me.

  I still read when I have the time. But I have noticed something about the endings of my books. Maybe it was there all the time and I wasn’t ready to see it. At the end of a romance novel, the money is in the bank, the villain has been locked up forever, and the heroine has her man. Love triumphant. The endings of the sci-fi sagas are not as sugary—the villain is lost in space somewhere but he, she, or it will be back in the sequel. In the meantime, though, the two suns are shining, the galaxy is safe, and there is, finally, enough food and water to feed the colony for a while until they can figure out what to do next. In the westerns, the cattle can graze, the coyote are dead, and the water rights have been protected. And in highbrow literature, the protagonist or the antagonist (it depends on your point of view) is either ready to commit suicide or close the draperies and sit in the dark, enlightened and alone but not lonely.

  This is fiction. Real life falls somewhere between “they lived happily ever after” and “life is hell and then you die.” So you dance along the edge of a tin roof and the rain soaks you and you dodge the lightning bolts and you slip once or twice in your high heels and, sometimes, you almost fall off. But if you don’t, you’ll see a rainbow and it will have been worth it.

  I didn’t find a new life in Paper Moon, Montana. I made myself one. That wise woman who said that there are years that ask you questions and there are years that answer left out something. There are years that answer with more questions.

  Rick still offers to buy Millie’s place. He says that it has become his second home.

  “Same terms, same price. Whenever you’re ready.”

  I think about it once in a while. It’s an offer that allows me to keep some windows open, to let impossible possibilities inside. The beat-up blue suitcase sits patiently in the back of the closet. Waiting . . .

  I look out across the highway at the cool, dark-green forests of Kaylin’s Ridge. I watch the dancing raindrops on Arcadia Lake. And, beyond the forests, I remember the plains and the snow-capped Rockies and the skies that go on forever. And the summer storms that Idaho sends eastward with their lightning and thunder and rains. I treasure the way Paper Moon makes me feel. This is Juanita’s place, the home that I will always carry with me in my heart.

  On the Right Side

  of a Dream

  * * *

  A Reader’s Guide

  Sheila Williams

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND

  TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  Reader’s Guide questions developed by Patricia Hooks Gray. Ms. Gray is a graduate of Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, and Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio. She taught in the Princeton, Ohio, school system and is an adjunct professor at Xavier University, where she teaches graduate- and undergraduate-level reading courses. Ms. Gray also writes units for the Core Knowledge Foundation on subjects involving reading and social studies.

  1. How did fear, anger, and quiet shame nearly suffocate Juanita’s soul? What actions did she take to create an emotional balance?

  2. Why can’t Juanita and Bertie get past their differences? What advice would you give them?

  3. Take stock of Juanita’s life. Explain how her failures paved the way to her success and eventual happiness.

  4. Do you think Peaches and Stacy have set their souls free? Were they on the right or the wrong side of their dream?

  5. Colors permeated the novel and offered vivid imagery for the reader. What colors represented the different stages of Juanita’s personal development through the story?

  6. How did Juanita devalue her sense of self? When did the cycle of low self-esteem break for her?

  7. Would you consider Millie a modern “Renaissance” woman? If so, why?

  8. Millie turned out to be a mentor for Juanita. What lessons did Juanita learn from Millie that affected her life?

  9. As Juanita made changes in her life, how did she gain a sense of serenity and control? Some of her dreams turned into reality. How did she spread her “wings” and fly?

  10. How did Juanita’s growth enhance her children’s lives? What is likely to happen to Rashawn?

  11. Money was dangled in front of Millie and Juanita. Discuss how the decisions they made concerning money affected their lives.

  12. “Money is at the root of all evil.” Should Millie have taken her child? Was it more about the money, herself, or the baby?

  13. Did Hayward-Smith have every right to feel the way he did about his mother? How were love and forgiveness key in his feelings for her?

  14. Jess was a rare jewel. How had Juanita found real love in him? How was he her soul mate?

  15. Share how the novel exposes the internal hurts of the characters that gnawed away large bits of their hearts.

  16. If you could create your ideal life, what would you dare to dream?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SHEILA WILLIAMS was born in Columbus, Ohio. She attended Ohio Wesleyan University and is a graduate of the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky. She and her husband have two grown children and make their home in northern Kentucky.

  Also by Sheila Williams

  The Shade of My Own Tree

  Dancing on the Edge of the Roof

  On the Right Side of a Dream is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A One World Books Trade Paperback Original

  Copyright © 2005 by Sheila Williams

  Reader’s Guide copyright © 2005 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by One World Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  One World is a registered trademark and the One World colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Williams, Sheila (Sheila J.)

  On the right side of a dream: a novel / by Sheila Williams.

  p. cm.

  1. Bed and breakfast accommodations—Fiction. 2. Inheritance and succession—Fiction. 3. African American women—Fiction. 4. Haunted houses—Fiction. 5. Women cooks—Fiction. 6. Montana—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.I5633O5 2005

  813′.6—dc22 2004059566

  www.oneworldbooks.net

  eISBN: 978-0-345-48437-6

  v3.0