Bay Inn at Moon Bay
Novel by Thomas Knobel
Copyright 2006
Bay Inn is a romantic comedy set in a quaint, backwater town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore where a lonely innkeeper and her young lover unite the town to battle a heartless developer.
Chapter 1: Cinderella
Not far from the ocean in a tiny town on a bay, an elderly widower remarried. He hoped his new wife could help raise his little daughter. The woman, however, turned out to be selfish and cruel, and even in the absence of wicked stepsisters, his daughter was saddled with all the cleaning, cooking, and laundry; no small task for a young girl at a ten-room B&B.
When the old man finally kicked the bucket…spilling soapy water as he fled forever from the inn, hands over his ears…Darla Nelson, at nineteen, inherited Bay Inn.
In fifteen years, no royal invitations arrived, no fairy godmothers materialized in clouds of silvery dust, no glass slippers were misplaced, and few bills were paid on time.
But Darla was a “good lookin’ woman” as Chesapeake watermen were wont to say, doubly desirable since she had income of a sort, anchored in dry land. Every waterman’s waking fantasy began with a woman who’d provide the means for them to quit the hard life on the bay.
“You’re a good lookin’ woman, Darla,” they’d begin, gimme cap in hand, chins and cheeks nicked and bloodied during a rare encounter with a straight razor.
Darla was no fool and had watched friends cave to this crude seduction. And she understood how no waterman worth his salt ever gave up the bay. These women, townies and mainlanders alike, were sucked in by the great bilge pump, trading glamorous lives as secretaries, schoolteachers, or shop clerks, for the scarred hands, sun-crinkled faces, and dicey season to season expectations of unpaid crew on their husbands’ workboats.
“Just lend a hand for a few days, darlin’, ‘til I can sign on more crew…”
Bay Inn’s mimeographed brochure describes St. Martins as timeless, its buildings as vintage, equivocal terms favored by real estate promoters and romance writers:
The Inn’s rooms are comfortable and affordable, each unique, furnished with period antiques. Breakfast is home--cooked, favored with family and local specialties. A broad screened porch wraps around the salmon-colored Georgian house, a pleasant place for afternoon tea and watching workboats returning to our snug little harbor. Why you can pick your seafood dinner right off the boats!
Summed up, the pitch wasn’t a formula for phenomenal success. For decades the inn’s summer clientele tended to be adventurous widows, history buffs, and local family relations attending reunions, weddings, and funerals. Winters, Darla’s father let rooms to itinerant oystermen for twenty-five bucks a week. Darla thought these off-season rentals more trouble than they were worth, given oystermen’s habits of drinking all night and sleeping in the same rank clothes for days on end. She’d never known one who could be trusted to pee standing up. A toilet bowl is after all so small a target compared to the open bay viewed from a boat transom where your only goal was to keep piss off your boots and the skipper’s deck.
But since Bay Bridge opened in 1952, twenty-five years before, timelessness became a draw, no longer just a smothering blanket of ennui and creeping decay. Station wagons, campers, and tour buses now made their way to Maryland’s Eastern Shore spring, summer, and fall, crowding the villages’ narrow streets and restaurants, warming beds at little inns and guest houses, and fomenting antagonism and competition. Now with easing of gasoline shortages, the invasion brought new investment, new construction, and new people: wealthy yachties, dilettante shop owners, and lordly hoteliers who call themselves ‘innkeepers’ in order to fit in. Darla had work enough keeping her old place together without the complications of high occupancy and faceless competition. Change was in the air.
It isn’t easy being quaintly shoddy, when shoddy had sufficed so many years. A thin coat of pastel house paint hides unsightly blemishes and shady mildew but few structural flaws. Tourists love its creaky floors, breakfasts on chipped china, and archaic rotary phones. They praise to heaven fading, curling wallpaper, dusty chandeliers, tarnished silver plate, and threadbare Turkey carpets.
“Gosh, hon, these rugs must be a hunnert years-old!”
Provide a warped, untuned piano and a couple of wobbly bicycles and they’ll return five years running. These tourists refer friends and send along their parents or grown children. The right kind of tourist, that is: the type who senses a sufficient measure of tradition beneath the clapboard and history in the sea breeze...tourists weirdly drawn by the moldy musk and stagnant funk of a three hundred year-old fishing village.
A sage once wrote: “Tradition grows ever more venerable but the more remote its origin the more confused the origin is.” But tradition also grows burdensome to those who live with it and maintain its faded trappings, increasingly distanced from truth, as the man said, by time, sweat, fish stories, and outright fabrications.
No longer certain about truth, innkeepers, business people, and local residents now leave the big questions to the tourists themselves. Let them differentiate what was old, what antique, what restored and what repaired, what historic and what inconsequential, irrelevant, or fake, what was tradition and what was mindless routine. A few care and refuse to pay a premium…most don’t: deception and self-deception happily married.
But visitors from the mainland have their own customs, like daily showers, that clash with local traditions like corroded pipes, low water pressure, and doll-house size water heaters. Or like the plumber who ignores urgent appointments when blue crabs are running. It’s a hard life ashore, too.
Darla’s attic mice couldn’t pull a carriage and her basement rats don’t moonlight as coachmen ball nights. Like everyone else on the shore, her pumpkins were u-pick-um at local truck farms starting three weeks before Halloween.
“Sorry, Miss Nelson. Debra, wasn’t it? My husband puked last night and missed the can. Cleaned up best I could. Must have been bad oysters. Guess we need more bath towels. Here’s…sorry. Watch out…sorry. Here’s the dirty ones.”
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