Page 11 of Touch the Sky
Still, we’ve got an inn to open, and I’m not about to skip out on my best friends over something a cold beer and my trusty heating pack won’t fix tonight.
“Ah,ouais?” Maddie says, teetering in front of me with her own stack of toilet rolls. “Can your story wait until I’m not about to fall over?”
Natalie rushes out the front door and grabs the edge of the package before Maddie has a chance to join the bruised tailbone club.
“Let’s just put them down here for now,” she says, walking backwards until we’re all huffing and puffing inside the lobby.
Maddie and I dump our packages on the hardwood floor, both of us sighing with relief.
I wipe a trickle of sweat off my forehead and glance around what used to be a dim and cramped entryway into a spooky old house that was definitely haunted by the ghost of Natalie’s great aunt.
There are no ghosts hanging around today. I hope it’s because we’ve done Natalie’sTanteManon proud with the renovations. The whole place is bright and airy, filled with the smell of fresh paint and lavender cleaning spray. The dark oak floors are gleaming with new polish, and a couple of the old walls have been knocked down to turn the entryway into a fancy little lobby with a brass chandelier, an upholstered bench, and a vintage oak reception desk that perfectly matches the floors.
I can’t even blame Natalie for boning our interior designer and falling head over heels in love with her; Brooke has done a very good job on the place.
She’s also turned out to be a very good girlfriend for Nat.
“You okay?” Natalie asks, narrowing her eyes when she spots me rubbing my lower back.
“Ça va,” I say, waving off her concern. “It’s nothing. Just part of the story I have to tell you guys.”
She keeps squinting at me. “Well, now I’m intrigued.”
“You should be,” I tell her. “It’s very exciting. I almost died.”
Maddie snorts while she finishes tightening up her ponytail. Her glasses have slipped down her nose, and she shoves them back up when she’s done fixing her hair. The lenses make her already huge eyes look like something out of a Pixar cartoon.
We might both have the whole dark hair and dark eyes thing going on, with the signature upturned Gauthier nose, but my little cousin is definitely one of the more delicate-looking members of our family. Everybody is always telling me they can hear me coming from a mile away, whereas we’ve been calling Maddiepetit fantôme—little ghost—since she learned to crawl.
“You’re always almost dying, you drama queen,” she says with a shake of her head.
I gasp and clap my hand to my chest. “Moi? A drama queen?”
I pretend to swoon and keel over onto the reception desk.
“Watch the oak,” Natalie warns, but she’s chuckling.
She’s usually down to give me at least a chuckle, even for my stupidest jokes, which is just one of the million reasons she’s my best friend. She’s practically as much of a family member to me as Maddie, even if her own family is a product of the Anglophone invasion, when a bunch of hippies from out of the province swooped in a few decades back to turn La Cloche into the artsy tourist haven it is today.
The three of us grew up together, sharing the typical La Cloche childhood of building tree forts in the summer, making snow forts in the winter, and coming up with a whole sideshow’s worth of dumb songs and secret handshakes during the long bus rides to school in Saint-Jovite.
Maddie is four years younger than me and Nat, but once we all grew into teenagers, we turned into a little trio of besties, and we only got closer after realizing we’re all super fucking gay.
Nothing like being young lesbians in a small town to bond you forever, even in a town as accepting as La Cloche.
Natalie looks like she’s been working on the inn all day, her poofy ponytail gone all frizzy and the golden brown of her hair coated with construction dust from the last-minute renovations still happening in the kitchen. Her plaid shirt is buttoned on crooked, the sleeves shoved up past her elbows and what looks like a coffee stain splashed across the front.
Still, she’s smiling, her eyes lit up with a mixture of caffeine, adrenaline, and pure excitement for the next phase of Balsam Inn. I’m running on the same cocktail of brain chemicals, and I’m pretty sure Maddie is too.
It’s been months of bank meetings, grant applications, supplier phone calls, renovation setbacks, contract negotiations, shopping trips, and good old manual labor, but the light at the end of the tunnel is now so bright we’re about to shoot out into the sun.
Of course, there’s a chance all our hopes and dreams will be burnt to a crisp once we get there, but I’m trying not to think about that. I want to believe the teenage girls who used to dream about running a business together while getting overworked at underpaid tourism jobs every summer have grown into the kind of badass women who can open the best damn inn the Laurentians have ever seen.
I have to believe that. We’ve got too much riding on this for it not to work.
We spend the next twenty minutes piling the lobby up with soaps, shampoos, and enough toilet paper to host a whole battalion of the Canadian army. There are only six guest rooms at the inn, but all our research told us to double whatever we thought was a reasonable amount of supplies.
“Is the sink working yet?” I ask once we’re done. The evening air is cooling off, but I’m still sweating through my t-shirt. “I need some water.”
