Page 37 of The Night We Lost Him

My father was up against something that maybe, for the first time, he couldn’t find his way through.

The Late-Night Special at the Holiday Inn

We settle on going to The Ranch.

Neither of us wants to go back to Windbreak or to Uncle Joe’s. And it’s too far, and too late, to start the 140-mile drive all the way back to Los Angeles.

It’s a little after nine when we turn onto The Ranch’s long cobblestone road. I drive past the guardhouse and head around to the circular drive that houses reception, where I spy the nondescript WELCOME sign by the front door.

Sam pops out to get the room keys. I stay behind the wheel and stare at the stone main house, lantern-lit and quaint. Nothing about it suggests what lies just beyond it: forty-eight vine-covered cottages, surrounded by mountain trails and gardens, graciously spaced over a five-hundred-acre estate.

After my father rebranded Hayes as Noone Properties and Resorts, he opened The Ranch. It was his first new property and the way he announced the shift in the company’s mission. They were no longer a small, regional hotel chain. This West Coast hotel, his flagship property, stood as the model for what he wanted all his hotels to deliver: luxury comfort and seminal design. Even more than that, he was rebranding the idea of what a small hotel could be. Each hotel would not only stand on its own, holding on to the specificity found in individual hotel ownership, but also adhere to global standards not historically seen in small properties, offering as many amenities as hotels three times their size.

And he was going to do it while providing the thing even the most luxurious large hotel couldn’t—complete and total privacy. No property would have more than fifty rooms, each hotel revolving around the singular principle of total retreat and sanctuary, but the type of retreat where all your needs were anticipated and cared for. The way my father described it to me (one of the few times we talked about it): He wanted to provide the opportunity to disappear from your life for a while. Or, you know, to become someone else entirely.

I would love, at this very moment, to be here for that kind of a visit. Apparently, I don’t get to stay at The Ranch under those conditions. Despite how seminal this hotel was to my father’s work life (or maybe because of it), I’ve only been here twice before—once with my parents, shortly before they told me they were separating; the next time for my father’s wedding to his second wife, Sylvia. For entirely different reasons, but in equal measure, each of those visits created the same kind of dread as I was feeling now.

“We’re all set,” Sam says, walking back to the car.

Sam called on the way and the receptionist had our keys waiting. There is only one cottage available for us to share. We’re lucky it has two bedrooms. We’re lucky, really, that the hotel has anything vacant at all, even if the reason they do is that the cottage we are staying in had a short-circuit earlier in the week and is still without electricity.

Sam hands me the map, and we head on foot toward our cottage, white lights strung through the oak trees, orange magnolias lining the trails. The nighttime air, soft and bright, centering me.

“Under different circumstances this is a vacation I could really use,” he says.

Then he keys the front door. And races to pick the better bedroom.

I stand in the foyer, take in the living room. The electricity may be out, but someone has lit the fireplace in the living area, placing candles around the room, so we aren’t walking into the pitch-dark. And it’s hard not to feel like I’ve walked into a kind of refuge—the comforting smell of that fire, those soft lights.

It’s different from the other cottage I remember staying in when I was a child—different from the cottage I stayed in a few years later attending Sylvia and my father’s wedding. And yet it carries a similar cozy and rustic feel, that nod to the Arts and Crafts Movement, full of the thoughtful fixtures and antiques that make it feel more like a home than a room frequently visited.

I get it, being here as an adult. I get why people would want to disappear here for a while.

I text Jack to let him know where I am—that I’m not making that red-eye after all. Then I drop my phone on the end table and head into the bathroom to take a shower, put on fresh clothes for the first time in eighteen hours.

When I come back into the living room, Sam is sitting by the fire, wearing a jersey and track shorts, the brace visible on his wrist. Maybe it’s that combination, but he looks like the little-boy version of himself about to head out to a Little League game, his baseball bag too big for his body.

I sit down on the couch across from him and he looks over, nods in my direction.

“Nothing from the Coopers yet,” he says.

“Is that a question?”

He shakes his head. “Not really. I looked through your phone while you were in the shower.”

“I’m choosing to ignore that.”

I lean back on the soft cushions, crossing my legs beneath myself, when I notice the covered trays on the coffee table between us.

“What’s all this?”

“I ordered dinner while you were in the shower,” he says.

He pulls the lids off the trays.

“Lettuce and tomato sandwiches, and beer.”

I look down at the tray of sandwiches, unable to hide my surprise. They’re just like the sandwiches my father used to make for me—for me and for Sam, the few times Sam and I had been at our father’s apartment at the same time. It may sound like a weird sandwich, but I relished it when I was a kid, at least the way my father would make it (which, incidentally, was the way my grandmother made it for him): thick tomato slices on griddled rustic bread, crisp romaine lettuce, mayonnaise, and flaky salt.

---