On the Right Side of a Dream by Sheila Williams Page B

you’re more resourceful than most foxes I’ve seen.”
    I guess that’s a compliment.
    “But I don’t know anything about business and accounting and reservations and . . . besides, I’ve already . . .” I shut my mouth. Nina’s quirky face appeared. The thick white envelope from Arcadia Valley Community and Technical College was still unopened. And there was Bertie.
    “Juanita, you just concentrate on keeping that inn from going under until after the probate hearing. Then you can sit back and decide just what you’re going to do in the long run.”
    “What kind of people would take a vacation in Montana in the winter? This is stupid!”
    “No, this is business,” Jess barked out. “Folks don’t wait on the weather to break as much as they used to. Millie saw the trend and rode the wave. Smart old lady.”
    “Crazy old lady,” I said.
    “Don’t say that to anyone else,” Jess warned. “If the probate judge agrees with you, you’re out of an inheritance.”
    By the end of that week, sitting by Nina’s pool in Sedona doing nothing was beginning to look real good.
    Millie’s was a crazy house.
    Inez was so upset that half of her sentences were in English and the other half were in Spanish. The “to do” list was longer than a giraffe’s neck. Millie had been sick a long time and things had just been left to take care of themselves.
    The refrigerators hadn’t been stocked in a while, the parlor furniture had a half inch of dust on it, and the bedrooms needed to be aired out. There were stacks of unopened mail, newspapers, and magazines from as far back as Christmas, and twenty telephone messages to return. Millie’s e-mail box was “full,” whatever that meant, and . . . did I mention the half inch of dust in the parlor?
    I wanted to scream. I wanted to run back out the door and down the road to the diner and lock myself in the pantry. I wanted to tell God, or whoever else was listening, that I was grateful for the gift but that it had been given to the wrong woman. I couldn’t do this. I am not a businesswoman. I didn’t have what it took. I didn’t know how.
    I stood in the doorway of Millie’s suite. I hadn’t been here since my last visit to Paper Moon over the holidays. Everything was the same except for the empty space in the middle of her bedroom where the hospital bed had been. I walked around the room and could smell a faint thread of fragrance, the Secret of Venus perfume that Millie wore. Books were stacked on top of her nightstands and her tortoiseshell-tipped cigarette holder was perched on the delicate bone-china ashtray. And, on top of the delicate lady’s desk, which sat in the corner in front of the tower window, were her laptop and her files. Like a quiet spirit, Millie was in every corner of this room. It kind of got to me and, for a moment, I just stood there, frozen, with just my memories of her in my head. Suddenly, I heard bumping on the third floor above, probably Inez running the sweeper, and remembered that I was supposed to be organizing, cleaning, and managing, whatever that meant—not crying.
    I wiped the tears from my eyes and headed toward the door. I went down the back staircase. What would Millie have done first? Make a list. She always said that no project was too difficult to put down on paper. The rest of it, I would have to worry about later.
    Inez and I worked like fiends, there is no other way to say it. We called in Gwen, who sometimes worked at the inn, and we all worked hard for the next three days to get the place ready for its weekend guests
and
for Broderick Tilson Hayward-Smith. I didn’t cook during that time. Instead, I called out for pizza or gobbled down the meals that Jess sent over from the diner, including a tuna-salad sandwich that he made. He had remembered to put in a pinch of sugar.
    “Everything has got to be perfect,” I told Inez later for the three hundredth time. “Millie’s son will stay here for the hearing. I want