Page 21 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
As wildly complicated as my feelings about my childhood and my ‘home’ were, I’d never much minded the business aspects of it. I actually liked most of the work of running the Sea-Mist. Don’t get me wrong—there are decidedly gross and unpleasant aspects of every hospitality business. When you serve the public in the most personal ways—housing them, or feeding them—you get to see their most personal oddities. And there is always that subset of humanity who thinks that they have free rein to be as disgusting as possible at a restaurant or motel because somebody else has to deal with the results.
However, the property was gorgeous, the cottages were cute and cozy, and I enjoyed meeting people from all over the worldand being the source of all knowledge for the area. I even liked helping Mrs. Greyfather tidy up after the (not disgusting) guests and make the cottages pretty for the next batch. The idea of being the owner of the Sea-Mist was largely a pleasant one.
Yes, there was also an element of pettiness, taking over my mother’s business. It was what she’d always expected would happen, but she’d died before she could see it. I liked that. When I say I hated my mother, I am not exaggerating or being dramatic. I mean that sincerely.
Do you think I’m a terrible person for hating my own mother? Well. I’m sure you’re not alone. But maybe you’ll change your mind down the road. Or not, whatever.
Anyway. Wyatt and I had the main cabin livable—only livable, mind you; there was a lot of work we wanted to do to make it ours, but we could take our time with that. So we turned our attention to the guest cottages.
We’d been in the nearest ones, to steal a fridge from one, and just out of raw curiosity in a couple other instances, and those had looked pretty good. Dusty and stale, but with the windows boarded and the roofs intact, all they required was cleanup (and one fridge, hopefully a used one).
We had not done more than a cursory tour of the whole property, however. When we were ready to focus on the cottages, the first thing we did was get into all twelve and make a job list for each one.
The cottages are arranged in a kind of meandering path. The order seems a little bit random—the small, medium, and large cottages are mixed together—but it’s really not. The bigger, more expensive cottages have better views and more privacy.
Each cottage is unique in terms of its specific look and floor plan, but they fall into the three basic sizes, and within those groups, they have similar amenities. Four small cottages that are basically motel rooms: one room with a bathroom, sleepsfour, with a queen-size bed, a fold-out sofa, a round table and two chairs, a mini-fridge and a coffee and tea station. The small cottages have a little covered front porch, but it’s basically a stoop. No room for chairs or anything like that.
There are six medium cottages: a bedroom, a main room with living area and a kitchenette, and a bathroom. The medium cottages can sleep six; there’s a foldout sofa and two fold-out armchairs as well as a queen-size bed. The medium cottages also have covered front porches—all the cottages do—and these are big enough for a couple of Adirondack chairs.
Finally, there were two large cottages. Cottage 8 sleeps eight. It has two bedrooms, a small but complete kitchen, one full bath and one half bath. The porch is covered and screened, and spans the front of the cottage, with enough room for a comfy two-seat rocker and a redwood table with four chairs. The cottage is positioned so the porch looks out at a stand of redwoods.
Cottage 12 was nicer than the main cabin. Three bedrooms, two full bathrooms, an eat-in kitchen, a living room with a stone fireplace. The porch was about the same as Cottage 8, but 12 was located at the back of the property, shielded by the forest so that no view from any point showed anything but forest. A gently flowing creek forms the back boundary of the Sea-Mist, and 12 was the only building on the property with a view of that creek. It was really nice.
I was feeling pretty good about things as we went from cottage to cottage, making our job list. Each one was sealed up snugly and mainly needed some cleaning and freshening. A couple showed signs of have entertained some of the forest’s smaller creatures, but nothing that concerned me especially.
And then we got to Cottage 12. The showpiece of the Sea-Mist.
Wyatt and I stood just inside the door and stared dumbly. We were watching and listening to that gently flowing creek, butnot through any window. We could see it straight through the kitchen wall.
At some point, either from a storm or simply old age, a tree had fallen and taken out most of the cottage’s back half. And not recently; the damage was extensive and layered. Several storms had clearly occurred since the tree had fallen, and the forest had made strides toward reclaiming the whole thing.
It wasn’t a redwood but a Douglas fir. Firs can get really big, but this one looked like it had been only about twenty or thirty feet tall. Its top lay on the floor of the cottage like a giant’s discarded toilet brush.
“Can we fix it?” Wyatt asked quietly.
“I have no idea.” I sighed. “Technically, I guess probably somebody on this earth would know how to repair all this damage, but I can assure you it is not you or I.”
“Somebody on this earth? You don’t think we can narrow that down to somebody within driving distance?”
Sometimes that kid sounded like a full-grown man, and I was sure I’d never get used to it.
His dry tone added some humor to the moment and saved me from spiraling down into a new brain hole. “I guess I’m going to have to figure that out. And also if we can afford to pay that person to do all this.”
“Maybe we can teach ourselves?” Wyatt suggested.
“Maybe,” I conceded, though I was very far from believing that possible.
“Hello? Leo? Wyatt? Anybody around?” came a male voice from outside. The voice was familiar enough that I wasn’t alarmed, but I couldn’t place it right away.
Wyatt was standing a little behind me, so he turned and stepped onto 12’s porch. “We’re here—oh, hi, Mr. Mendoza.”
Roman. That was why I’d recognized the voice.
We’ve established, I think, that I knew it was dumb and embarrassing that my long-ago crush was coming back to life. I also understood that, for multiple reasons, it was a completely terrible time to be even crushing on anyone, much less ever thinking about actually dating anyone. And none of that took into consideration how seriously unlikely it was Roman Mendoza had any interest in me. In his mind I was probably just the kid he’d hired to babysit his son twenty years ago. So we all know I should not have cared he’d dropped by.
However, my brain has always chased after my heart. It rarely catches up in time, and almost never gets out in front.
Before I bothered to wonder why he was here, before I even turned around, I glanced down at myself and sent a curse into the cosmos. I wore the jeans I considered my ‘work pants’: faded and tattered, with holes made from wear rather than style—so, like, at the knees, the bottom of my ass, and so on. My t-shirt—from a CSNY concert a decade ago—was in similarly terrible shape, as was the once-red, now-greyish- pink hoodie tied around my waist. A bandana covered my hair, tied in the cutesy-country way. And I had my glasses on because contacts had felt like too much trouble that morning.
