Poor Rock

Colleen Rafferty ran her husband's hotels for twenty years.

He kept the hotels. She took her half of the money, bought the cheapest inn in Michigan from an airport bar, and did not look at the pictures.

It has a view of a bay the government has never heard of, a sign with half its letters gone, and a cellar the listing called unfinished.

On her first week, somebody starts fixing the place. The front steps are reset overnight, true and dry. A chimney is re-pointed. There is never a note. The only person she ever sees is a big, plain man at the edge of her lot after dark, polite, patient, and completely unwilling to leave.

Rocco Barone is as patient as the stonemason he used to be. He will carry anything for her as far as the threshold and not one step past it, and when she asks him why, he gives her an answer that is true and is not the reason.

He cannot come through her door unless she asks him in.

She is not in the mood to ask.

Then the Inn gets its first paying guest: charming, well dressed, cash in advance, here for the month. He asks, very politely, about the cellar.

Colleen has spent twenty years making sure everyone else was looked after. She has never once been the one who decided who gets to come in.

She is about to find out what that is worth.