CHAPTER EIGHT
Zane
The rest of my breakfast didn’t taste nearly as good as I wanted it to after that little lecture from Becca, courtesy of yet another person who considered it their goal to tell me how awful I was. Instead of the eggs and bacon filling me up as they should have, my meal just left me feeling empty.
And her words left me more than a little irritated. Who did Becca Fox think she was coming into my business and telling me how to run this damned place?
A single day without people jumping down my throat wasn’t too much to ask for, was it? Was I really such a terrible person that everywhere I went people, mostly women, should be telling me what garbage I apparently was?
It should have been easy to dismiss Becca Fox’s ideas about being nice to the help, but I couldn’t do it. I wanted to simply blow her off and continue life as I had been, but something wouldn’t let me. Her words stuck in my head, and no matter what I did to push them out, they remained.
By the afternoon after I had spoken to Becca, things began to unravel. During the lunchtime rush in the dining room, both the ovens decided to stop working on me along with two cooks who couldn’t seem to get over their egos and admit that one of them had broken the damned things.
I stood in the inn’s kitchen looking at the ovens in disgust that I had to deal with yet another problem in this fucking place while the two cooks sniped at one another like two Chef Boyardee divas. How my mother willingly stayed here for years baffled me.
“Maybe if you had set the timer correctly…” Tim mumbled under his breath as he glared at the far bigger man who stood opposite him on the other side of the oven.
Frank pointed his finger at him, his beefy face growing redder by the second and making me hope he didn’t stroke out right there in front of me. He was on the chubbier side, so it wasn’t out of the question. “It isn’t a timer issue, you idiot. Did you even go to culinary school? Seriously, did McDonald’s just give you a degree?”
“Yes, of course, master chef, because you’re just rolling in Michelin stars, right? Please tell us all about the days of cooking for the Queen, you pretentious fuck!”
“One more time, Tim. Say one more damn thing, and I swear, pal…” Frank growled.
As if any of those words should set him off, Tim took a giant step toward his fellow chef and puffed his thin chest out. “What are you going to do? Be pretentious to me? Big fucking surprise there. And I am not your pal, so you can stuff it, you fat piece of shit!”
I stood in the kitchen trying to talk to the repairman who had come in to fix the ovens while those two argued like two high school girls. But instead of going off like I wanted to, I rubbed my temples and didn’t blow up on anyone.
Damnit, I was trying. That had to count for something, right?
“Could you two do me a favor and take this out back? I don’t care if you need to fight it out, but I can’t hear myself think, nevermind what this guy needs to tell me, so take it somewhere else and cool the hell down,” I said, keeping my tone as measured as I could as all the while I wanted to knock both of their goddamned heads together.
The cooks looked at me, surprised and clearly waiting for a bigger blowup, but I stayed cool. “I don’t have the time for this. Seriously, get out. Take the rest of the day off while I hire a catering company to come clean up after your mess, and in the future, I don’t give a flying rat’s ass who broke things. Just don’t.”
“Sir…” Tim said quietly as if speaking louder than a whisper could set me off.
Ordinarily, it would have, but I was trying to be nicer. Seriously, I was trying, and these two were testing my patience.
“Just leave. Please,” I said, struggling to keep my composure.
In truth, I wanted to bark at them until they both decided to quit so I could hire new people, but I was dedicated to making an effort. I wanted to prove Becca wrong. Why I even cared, I had no idea.
But I did.
I turned back to the repairman and took a deep breath. “Sorry about all that. I’ve got too many cooks, it seems. Please go on.”
After pointing out a handful of areas of the oven I never knew existed until that very moment, he explained they both could be fixed by the next day. Resigned to the reality that I wouldn’t have either oven for the rest of the day, I told him to do whatever he had to and called a local catering company to ensure the guests could eat.
It wasn’t the end of the world. It would be fine. The catering company arrived quickly, happy to help quickly for a premium price, and only a handful of guests grumbled that the food that day hadn’t tasted like the typical fare they expected at The Gilford House Inn. In the end, it was handled. Some guests seemed more than pleased with the food options, so I breathed a sigh of relief.
The next day, however, turned out to be worse.
“Mr. Gilford, the guests in the outer bungalows are reporting leaks in their bathrooms. Water’s all over the place, and well, it isn’t good,” Mandy, the front desk clerk, said to me in a panicked tone as she held the phone to her chest, muffling our conversation from the person on the other end of the line.
I could still hear the angry guest screaming through the phone at her. I had barely finished my breakfast and was not in the mood for such bullshit, but it needed to be handled. I ran my hand through my hair and stared at the ceiling for a moment, wanting nothing more than to explode like the pipes in the bungalows, but I kept it in check and calmly took the phone from her hold.
“Hello? Who am I speaking to?” I asked in my nicest, sugar-sweet voice.
“You’re speaking to Joseph Andrews in Bungalow 4. Who is this?” a man’s voice barked.
“This is Zane Gilford, Mr. Andrews. I’ve just been told about the problem in your bungalow, and I’m happy to tell you that I’ll have a plumber here in just a few minutes. He’ll get this whole problem straightened out for you.”
“Well, I should hope so! The water is dripping out of the wall, for God’s sake! It’s just not acceptable. Not acceptable, I tell you.”
I imagined from the sound of Mr. Andrews’s raspy and strained voice that he looked a lot like Humpty Dumpty—round, overweight, and dopey-faced. While that amused me slightly, it didn’t help me deal with him.
“Mr. Andrews, I’m so sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you. I will be sure to see that your bill is adjusted to show today is on us at The Gilford House Inn. I’ll make sure the plumber comes out to you first thing after he arrives.”
“Thank you. We love coming to this place, and I have to say I’m pleased that you’re following in your mother’s footsteps, son. She’d be proud of how you’re handling things here.”
“Well, thank you for that, Mr. Andrews. I can only hope she’s looking down at her beloved inn and seeing I’m trying to do right by her. If you’d like, we can move you to a different room, but unfortunately, there are no more bungalows, so the room would be here in the inn proper. Would you like me to do that?”
I knew full well that Mr. Andrews with his nearly-out-of-breath complaining didn’t want to switch rooms. In fact, I suspected when I spoke to the plumber later that he’d tell me the water coming out of the wall was nothing much at all. But I intended on killing the current pain in my ass with kindness.
“Oh no, that’s okay. I’m sure we’ll be fine as soon as the plumber fixes things here.”
“Very good, Mr. Andrews. And I hope you’ll be joining us for dinner. The cooks are making something extra special today, and you won’t want to miss it.”
“We certainly will. Thank you, Zane.”
“My pleasure, Mr. Andrews. Just hold tight there and the plumber will be out shortly.”
I handed the phone to Mandy and rolled my eyes. “Hang it up, call the plumber, and tell me that Frank and Tim are in the kitchen.”
Mandy’s eyes opened wide, and she placed the phone on the desk. “They’re here, yes. Should I get them for you?”
Holding my hand up, I shook my head. “No need. Just call the plumber and tell him he needs to get out here right now.”
As she did as I ordered, I headed toward the kitchen. I found the two cooks hard at work preparing food for lunch. Poking my head in through the doorway, I said, “Gentlemen, better make dinner something pretty damn incredible. I have leaky pipes in the bungalows and other than sweet-talking the guests when they call to complain, I’m promising them a special dinner. So get to it and make the damn meal great so they forget they’re fucking swimming in their rooms!”
Both of them stared at me with their mouths hanging open, but I didn’t have time for their surprise. I turned on my heels and headed back out to the front desk with the desperate hope that Mandy had gotten that damn plumber to come out and soon.
Just as I reached her, she hung up the phone and smiled nervously, like she expected me to explode at any moment. “He said he’d be out in a few minutes. I told him it was an emergency.”
“Thanks. Good job, Mandy. I’m going outside to head him off so I can direct him to the bungalows. If anything else breaks, floods, or becomes screwed up in any way, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
That wasn’t a lie. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to deal with not one more fucking problem.
After meeting with the plumber and directing him to Bungalow 4, I walked up to my room and sat back on my bed with a grunt. It was turning out to be one hell of a week. Silently, I swore if one more thing went wrong, I would leave this place and forget that damn inheritance.
I hadn’t realized I had fallen asleep until a sharp knock on my door let me know that I was needed. I jumped up and opened it to see two of the maids staring at one another and me angrily.
“What is it?” I asked, feeling utterly defeated.
How was I supposed to put up with all this shit? They clearly were unhappy, and it was yet another stupid thing to deal with in my week of hell.
“I really hope this is important because I’m having a bad day, and the last thing I need right now is some high school drama from my staff, so make this quick.”
“Sarah stole my tip,” the one with the crazy curly brown hair said to me.
She had to be kidding. Didn’t they have a supervisor they could take this shit to?
I looked at Sarah and waited, but she said nothing more, like just accusing someone of something in the most general terms was enough.
“Meagan’s a liar. I didn’t steal anything. I was in charge of the third floor, and the tip was left in 301. That means the tip is mine. It’s pretty basic. If the room number begins with a three, then it isn’t yours. Duh!” Sarah said, tilting her head back and forth like a bobblehead out of control.
I rolled my eyes, not wanting at all to be dealing with this kind of crap. The inn had a manager I had hired specifically to handle this kind of problem, but she was an older woman and was always calling off for one medical issue or another. Unfortunately, today was one of those days.
Still, she’d been a friend of my mothers, and I couldn’t just fire someone for being a sick old lady. I wasn’t that terrible.
Meagan shook her head angrily. “No, the third floor was mine today. You had the first and the outer bungalows.”
“No one is in the outer bungalows since the pipes are all messed up! I had the third floor. Kathy said so.”
I couldn’t take it anymore. It was too much. I tried to push past them, but I barely made it into the hallway of the second floor where I stayed before they were following me and bickering like two spoiled children behind me.
“Mr. Gilford, she can’t just take my money like that.”
“It’s not your money. Stop lying!”
“Are you kidding me? You can’t talk to me…”
“I can do whatever I want, and you don’t get to tell me what to do. He does!”
Something in my brain snapped, and I lost it. I turned around and roared at them, “Shut up! Shut up, both of you. Do you know how long this week has been for me? I’ve got a kitchen that doesn’t work, a schedule no one seems to be able to follow, shit literally backed up in my bungalows, and guests who paid for them and can’t stay there who think I’m their personal fucking concierge, and now you two can’t seem to manage to figure out a simple tip dispute between the two of you. How is it I seem to employ the biggest fucking idiots on the planet at this godforsaken place? I’m so sick of this with you people. Figure it out yourselves. I can’t imagine they tipped you that much anyway given how damned incompetent you are!”
I turned and walked back to my room, slamming the door behind me. I saw the clock read two o’clock. As good a time as any to start drinking. I didn’t even grab myself a glass and opted instead just to start chugging the Jack Daniels straight from the bottle. I punched the bed frame, and something about the wave of pain that raced through my knuckles soothed me.
Tilting the bottle up, I let a mouthful of whisky roll down my throat and closed my eyes. Nothing I had changed about myself for the past couple days had mattered. This place still ran like a pig on fucking stilts, and it didn’t matter what I did. Nothing would fix that.
I had tried. I really had. I’d kept my cool through all the bullshit that flew at me at warp speed, but somehow those bickering women behind me in the hallway had just set me off. Why couldn’t they have just resolved such a minor issue between the two of them? Would they have acted that way with my mother? What magical touch did she have that kept everything running so smoothly?
The papers she left me offered some advice and mostly financial and legal information, but there hadn’t been anything in there about how to manage these fucking people. I refused to coddle them, and I was beginning to think that was what she had been doing. Otherwise, why would they act that way? How hard was it to just settle a problem between themselves?
I punched the frame again, wishing none of this had ever been forced on me. I didn’t want to be in this place. I didn’t want to deal with idiot cooks who couldn’t get past their pride and dumb help who couldn’t figure out how to handle a simple fucking tip dispute or to not bring the dispute to me in the first place. My whole life had become one big mess bigger than the shit backed up in my bungalows, and every part of me wanted just to pack up and bail on it all.
The doilies on the bedside table flew off as I stood up and paced angrily past them and they somehow brought with them a new wave of anger. They were a perfect representation of this inn. Pretty and nice but ultimately useless. I wanted to go back to California. I wanted to be let out of that stupid deal.
After a few more swigs from the bottle, I lay back down on the bed and let a sense of defeat take me over. I hadn’t wanted to blow up on the maids. Even worse, I had wanted to impress Becca with how I could treat my staff.
It hadn’t worked, though. I’d been able to keep it together for a few issues, but what did it say about me that after just a few setbacks I ended up blowing up on people?
I didn’t want to be that guy all the time, but none of them understood what I was going through. At the end of every day, the majority of them got to clock out and go to their normal lives, see their friends, and do things that they wanted to do. I couldn’t remember the last meal I hadn’t eaten in the dining room of the inn, and I certainly couldn’t recall the last time I had been with anyone other than people I worked with.
Covering my eyes with my arm, I admitted the truth. I didn’t want my name even associated with the place anymore. When people came to stay, they were expecting some warm and motherly woman at the front door waiting to give them a hug and a fresh baked blueberry muffin just for being there. I didn’t even want to talk to them. They irritated me almost as much as the staff. I didn’t want to keep being that person, but I was beginning to think it was just the man I was always going to be.
Maybe Becca was right. Maybe I couldn’t be anything but all the bad parts of me. Maybe I was just an asshole like she clearly believed me to be.
Becca. She was a whole other issue. I had thought for a long time that I didn’t care about her anymore and that any lingering feelings for her had disappeared. It seemed I’d been mistaken.
I smiled slightly to myself as I thought of one of the first days we spent together at the beach. It had been too cold to swim, but we had walked on the sand with our shoes off, talking like we’d known each other forever. When the water came up around our ankles, we ran back toward the beach and collapsed on the sand next to one another, laughing and out of breath.
I’d never been happier in my life.
She was beautiful. There was no denying that, but it was more than just physical beauty with Becca Fox. I’d never been a huge fan of intelligent women, and if I told the truth, she was probably too good for me, but I loved talking to her and listening to what she had to say.
The next day we’d eaten at some restaurant she’d adored that was all fifties throwbacks and retro with vinyl records decorating the walls and red Formica tabletops. She’d beamed as we’d walked in the door, and it seemed foolish, but when she’d taken my hand in hers as we followed the host to a booth, I had felt something powerful for her.
Something sweet that I’d never felt for any other woman. Like a feeling inside that I didn’t want to be alone anymore.
I had genuinely tried to be better to the staff, mostly because I wanted her to know I was capable of doing so. I wanted to show her that no matter what I’d done in the past, I wasn’t just the asshole she believed I was.
Word that I had exploded on the maids was sure to have already made its way around the building, but I couldn’t do anything about it at that moment. Instead, I finished off the bottle and waited for whatever bullshit was sure to find me next in that damned inn.