Spare Change (Wyattsville #1)(22)

The next nine days went along pretty much the same way. When Olivia finally crossed the border into Georgia, she figured it to be a milestone and decided at two o’clock in the afternoon to stop for the night.

Welcome to Hopeful, Georgia—Pop. 387 the sign at the edge of town read. After she’d driven past numerous peanut farms, Olivia came upon the town. She was hoping for something such as a Howard Johnson Motel—a place with air conditioning and room service, a place where she could throw herself onto an overstuffed mattress and cry for as long as she wished. Of course, there was nothing of the sort in Hopeful. The town was barely two blocks long; there were no restaurants, no movie theatre, and most certainly no Howard Johnson’s. The only place to offer a person an overnight accommodation was the Main Street Motel. Given the state of her weariness, Olivia parked the convertible in front of the weathered building, slipped the bottled up Charlie into her overnight tote and walked inside.

There was no one behind the counter, so Olivia rang the bell and waited. She stood there a good five minutes and still no one came, she then tapped the bell a second time. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” a voice hollered out. Minutes later a woman, bent from the waist and leaning heavily on a walking stick, poked her head out from behind a calico curtain. “Sorry,” she said, “I was tending to business in the johnny.”

Olivia had expected a young man wearing a uniform, or at the very least a badge with his name spelled out in bold letters. This woman was wearing a flowered housecoat; she was little more than a skeleton with a top knot of snow white hair and a coverlet of loose skin—how, Olivia wondered, could they expect a person such as this to carry bags in?

“Need a room, Sugar?” the woman said.

Olivia nodded.

“Just you?”

“I’ve got my husband…”

“Oh. Then you’ll be wanting a double bed; all I’ve got is three singles.”

“A single’s okay.”

“Sweetie,” the woman who’d introduced herself as Canasta Jones, said apologetically, “much as I need your business, there’s no possible way two full grown people could squeeze into one of them beds; why, they’re narrow as a cat’s whisker.” She gave a wink that made her seem far younger than her years, “Honeymooners maybe could, nobody else.”

Olivia was going to mention that she was indeed a honeymooner, but the thought of being a honeymooner without a husband brought tears to her eyes. She’d planned on waiting until she could throw herself onto a mattress and weep the night away, but all of a sudden there she was, squatted down on a bench, sobbing hysterically.

“I say something wrong?” Canasta asked.

Olivia took the hem of her skirt and swiped the droplet hanging from her nose. “Not you,” she snuffled, “Charlie.”

“Charlie?”

“He was a man who was truly in love with me,” Olivia sobbed, “we could’ve been happy for a thousand years.”

The old woman scooted down alongside Olivia and leaned in closer. “Your husband run him off?” she asked.

“He was my husband.”

“Was?”

“I killed him. Oh, the opal pendant may have been partly to blame, but I think it was mostly the jinx. He died twenty-one days after we were married; so on the twenty-second day I became a widow.” Olivia saw the puzzlement on the old woman’s face and explained; “Twenty-two—that’s two elevens!”

“What’s eleven got to do with anything?”

Olivia gave an exasperated sigh. “It’s only the unluckiest number in the universe,” she said. “If anything horrible is going to happen, guaranteed it will happen on the eleventh of something!”

Canasta scrunched her face, adding a few more wrinkles, “Who told you such hogwash?” she asked.

“Nobody told me. I learned from experience. I’m a person who’s jinxed!”

“Hogwash!” the old woman repeated. “Nobody’s jinxed. Specially not by no number eleven.”

“A lot you know,” Olivia growled. “I could name dozens of bad things tied in to some sort of eleven.”

“Yeah, well I could name some good things!” Canasta shot back.

“Such as?”

“Me. I was brought into this world on November eleventh and year after year I get a slew of presents on the eleventh day of the eleventh month. I’m ninety-nine years old—and that’s nine elevens! I got me eleven grandkids, and Lord knows how many great grandbabies, every one of them, sweet as pie.”

“You’re lucky; you missed out on the jinx.”

“There is no jinx!” Canasta said with an air of impatience. “You’re just reasoning a way to feel sorry for yourself.”

“What about Charlie—a perfectly healthy man one day and dead the next! That’s not jinxed? That’s not a true misfortune?”

“It’s a true enough tragedy, but not a jinx,” Canasta answered wistfully. “Nobody knows better than me, the pain of losing a husband; I buried four and cried a bucket of tears for each and every one.”

“Four?” Olivia repeated, she stopped sobbing and turned to the old woman.

Canasta nodded. “The last one was Elmer; he died a month ago.”