He dragged the wicker chair over with one hand while deftly holding to a cocktail with the other. Draped in a dingy chef’s jacket with the name, Tom, stitched in cursive on the upper left-hand corner, the proprietor of the Asheville B & B sat on the porch slightly askew beside us and immediately began to talk about himself. Needless to say, it didn’t take long before Tom became annoying, corralling subjects, using his dense, Minnesota dialect to own the entire space.
When we first arrived, Tom gave us a tutorial in the foyer. With bags still draped from our shoulders, he informed us about keys and room upgrades, about breakfast and times, sights to see, and how him and his wife had purchased the house five years ago. It took nearly thirty bloviated minutes before we were able to escape to our room.
Now on the porch, we questioned our decision about wandering in the open. But Tom provided us with as much Trader Joe’s Pinot Noir as was needed, so we were polite, graciously nodding at his stories of being a chef on a private pull car owned by so and so, or having the opportunity to cook dinner for the President of the United States, or regaling about his cookbook published ten years back on gourmet dishes for the common man entitled, The New Meat and Potatoes for Your Homebound Lumberjack. One story dovetailed off the last, and between each epic, he had a habit of wearing this look as if he were burdened by his own history.
“But now,” he said after a terminally long pause, “I’m alone.” He raised his drink, stared at it for a second, then took a sip. “Lynette died on me last month.”
My wife abandoned looking at her iPhone screen to glance my way. Then we both stared over at Tom. He showed us his profile, starring back toward the front door as if any minute he would see her come out and join us all on the porch.
“Lynette bought all the furniture in this place,” he went on, rubbing his swollen fingers across the wooden armrest on the rocker. “All those antique stores and auctions she went to. You can’t believe the deal she got on that Persian rug in your room. She had a knack for things like that.” Tom let a laugh escape. “The funny thing is, there are six rooms under this roof, with six mattresses, but we both hated sleeping in beds.” Tom’s voice was tinged in an aching quality as he continued. “We discovered it was good for our backs to sleep in recliners. You may have seen them when you refilled your wine…they’re both still right there, situated in the first room. The brown leather one on the right is mine, hers is the pastel fabric on the left. Her last years were good. Yes, I do believe they were. We had our trays for dinner and cocktails. The TV was where it needed to be so we could watch our shows. The morning she left, I had to get up early. We had a full house, so breakfast had to be prepared. Lynette looked exhausted. I covered her with a blanket—I believe it’s the same one at the foot of your bed. She was still there hours later. Never moved. And the thing is, I never did know the exact hour she passed, and for some reason it bothers me I don’t.”
For the rest of the night we ran with our senses blunted. We both felt numb inside as if Tom’s incessant stories and the mountain air had clipped nerve endings. The dinner in downtown Asheville was just good, wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t great. And the streets churned like river eddies, flowing around us but never taking it in. Later, back at the B & B, we kept taking turns observing the furniture relics that surrounded us, questioning the blankets intent at the foot of the bed. With the lights outed, we each stared at the ceiling, wondering what grain of wood or stitch of cotton sheltered Lynette’s soul.
In the morning, Tom presented a rich tapestry of breakfast drizzled or fry or baked. Afterwards, weighed down with the promise to walk off the meal, we headed out on a meandering stroll. I let my wife set the pace. She pointed at homes she wanted to live in. I joked with her about our abysmal credit score as well as her aversion to cold winters. We both did agree that the air should be bottled and sold to the lower states plagued with humidity.
Around us was a view of a hobbled land dimpled and pinched where turn-of-the-century homes nestled and quaint streets were framed by verdant colored trees. It was the sort of land mysteriously gifted with declivities and ascending knolls that seemed to lead us toward the ridge where the grounds of the Grove Park Inn rested.
We had stayed at the Grove Park just once—a small room a few doors away from the equally small room Fitzgerald occupied as he stitched pieces of his mind together—but that was before our bankruptcy, before my aneurism, and our son’s imprisonment in a wheelchair.
Now we couldn’t afford the Grove Park except as polite trespassers. We walked through the cavernous atrium, borrowing their cold water, soaking up the ambiance of the rock fireplaces, lounging out on the verandah like all the other so-called guests.
Squinting with our cheeks sun-kissed, we both stared out then settled, she closing her eyes, me with my thoughts wandering.
“I still don’t know why they did it,” I said.
My wife stirred in the lounger, briefly opened her eyes, then quietly tucked them back behind her lids. “Did what? And who are they?”
“The architects, that’s who. The one’s who designed this crappy addition to the original hotel. They should have listened to the topography and flared the added sections toward the mountains instead of boxing the place in.”
Stealing what we could of the place, we left the Grove Park as we came in, but instead of trekking straight back down the hill, we diverted toward an outcropping of buildings. Historic to be sure, the buildings owned a camp feel. Painted in natural hues, the place seemed swallowed in evergreens and was bracketed by a sculpture garden that we were leaning towards when we were stopped.
“Hello folks,” said man in his sixties who stood outside one of the buildings. His eyes beamed through stainless-steel glasses, and his wave was accompanied with a genuine smile. “Have you checked out our little museum?”
Beyond the eager way he cornered us; it was the name penned to his shirt that likewise gave us pause. Tom was carved on a tag clipped to his shirt, and I immediately thought of tainted Kool-Aide and cults, or a whole colony of Toms collectively produced to cannibalize our souls. Despite our inhibition, we chanced it and followed him inside.
The building housed a museum of cars. It was decades of Detroit steel on display—bulky, hard to miss vehicles with welded fins and white walls, wood-grain dashboards and leather seats. Most were monochromatic, but a baby powder-blue Cadillac drew us in.
“She’s beautiful...isn’t she,” this second Tom said, a proud parent, scanning the hood for flaws. “Not too many with a stainless-steel top either. And will you look at that; it was the first time GM put suicide doors on a model.”
Tom spoke in an easy, unflinching tone as to how this collection came about. He talked of a prominent Asheville family and a GM dealership, the long-collected acquisitions of the models, and the trust which keeps this museum admission free long after the owner has died. This Tom was different; nothing hubris or self-absorbed. He was an erudite, a factotum of his environment, stitching the past to some connective idiom to help us understand...What exactly? we didn’t know but we still listened.
From the cars he detailed the buildings themselves, how they came into existence, the textile industry and its workers who thrived here and how it was connected to the famous and wealthy Biltmore family who had made it all possible. Along the wall, he pointed at old photographs and named industry giants clad in hats and white leisure suits; men of the twenties who had walked the very ground we stood on. Near the front door, I peered up into one of the large black and white photos of the Grove Park Inn in its original state and couldn’t help but laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Tom asked.
“That addition they added back in the seventies, the architects ruined it.”
“Oh honey,” my wife said, “he doesn’t want to hear your opinion about that.”
Tom settled beside me and was staring at the photo of the Grove Park. “No, he’s right, the material is all wrong. They should have waited to make improvements until they got out of the seventies.”
“I guess that decade ruined the mystique of the place.”
Then Tom whispered, “In more ways than you know.”
“Why? did the seventies ruin you as well?”
Tom eyed us both for a second, evidently seeing us as driftwood he could confess to and then push out to open sea. In the museum of cars from a dead man’s collection he confided his first love being the granddaughter of the Biltmore family. Laughing, he said his claim to fame was that he was the only one who had walked away from that kind of money. But then his mood sobered, told us about the summer they had together, an unspoken fealty which college, distance and a second love interrupted. Tom even spoke of how they had an affair with one another, years later, but had come to their senses and now have three thousand miles between them to keep their sanity in check.
There was such a longing in Tom’s voice, and when he finished, the echo of what he had said and how he said it—quietly regretful—followed us out. On the stoop our hands impulsively found one another, and like coiled snakes, our fingers interlocked. Across the way the sculptures—those headstones of many impulses—waited. My wife curiously stepped toward them, but in my own wild abandon, I dragged her the other way. I pressed her gently against those old buildings housing old things and photos of people no longer here. Like a bubble of the living surrounded by museums of the dead, it was the now I wanted to possess, own, sink into. My finger obliged me, gently touching her chin, steadying her head before my lips pressed to hers. Together we embraced against all those who came before us that was so desperate to be remembered. Our promise to exist for the sake of existing was sealed with a kiss.
About the author
Stan has been shortlisted and a finalist in numerous contests for his short stories and his work has appeared in Northwestern Indiana Literary Journal, Charleston Anvil, Valient Scribe, The Wisconsin Review, Seems, Tribes, and he has two short stories in 2025 Wordrunner anthology, with the novel except, Minder Root, being selected as editor’s choice.
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