Page 3 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
He sounded a little disappointed. My intuition told me it wasn’t painted bears smothering his enthusiasm; it was my lack of engagement. I’d been lost in my head most of the day.
Remembering my Mom Face, I smiled and brightened my tone. “They are cool. They’re not the original bears, actually. A little farther downstream are two big black bears that stood at the original bridge. A flood took out that bridge, and the whole town of Klamath, about ... I don’t know, maybe sixty years ago?Something like that. When they rebuilt, they moved the road and the bridge up here, and put up the golden bears.”
Wyatt didn’t respond, but I glanced over and saw him nodding, his attention fixed on his window. As the redwood forest enfolded the highway again, he murmured, “It’s so pretty here.”
On that we could agree. Chief among the few things I had missed in the past two decades was the world of Humboldt and Del Norte counties itself. Majestic redwoods walled in the highway, and the lowering sun shone through the narrow gaps around their rough-hewn trunks, turning the world into a pirate’s treasure of glinting gold. The air wafting through our half-open windows was a potpourri of rich wood, eucalyptus, and sea spray. Somewhere above us, an osprey cried out for its mate, its piercing cry overcoming the noise of the U-Haul’s engine.
Nowhere else I have ever been is as beautiful as the place in which I’d been raised.
“Yeah, it is,” I said softly, speaking as much to the forest as to my son.
“Forests and mountains, and the ocean, too,” Wyatt enthused, oblivious to his mother’s melancholy musing. “And it’s not hot!”
“No, not hot. It hardly ever gets hot here—in fact, a lot of places around here don’t even have AC.”
Wyatt had been born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. I looked over at him again and chuckled to see his mouth hanging open.
“It’s true. The cottages don’t—at least they didn’t when I was here. But don’t worry, you won’t melt. Even in August you’ll need a hoodie, at least in the evening and early morning. And there’s lots of fog, almost every morning.”
“So cool!” he said again.
“Literally.”
“Ugh. Mom. We talked about this. No puns.”
“Is that even a pun, though?”
He answered with a look, and I laughed fully—and felt sincerely a little better. Wyatt always found my sunshine. I turned back to the windshield and focused on the final stretch of our long journey.
Only a few more miles to go. Back to a world, and a life, I’d been desperate to escape.
But this time, I would make this place my home.
For my son.
And because I had no choice.
“DOES IT LOOK ANY DIFFERENTfrom the way you remembered it?” Wyatt asked as we drove down Bower Street, the main drag through Bluster, California. My hometown.
Bluster started off life as a camp during the Gold Rush, named Bluster after a squall tore the camp to bits mere days after the first tent stake had been sunk. Those first settlers—first of European descent, anyway—were plucky enough to cross the whole country in wagons, so a little wind hadn’t scared them off. They’d simply sunk their stakes twice as deep the next time.
Gold went bust pretty quickly in the northwest corner of California, so those hunting for their fortunes turned instead to the forests. Logging became the big game, and with that, a camp became a town.
All those miners and loggers needed to eat, and the ocean was right there and full of all kinds of seafood, from crab to halibut. Those who couldn’t get into logging learned how to fish.
A town made up of lumberjacks, commercial fishermen, and disappointed gold-rushers was not what one might callsophisticated. From its earliest days, Bluster’s been rougharound the edges and pretty okay with folks who didn’t quite fit in society. Maybe because of that, it never really became a destination with the tourist crowd, despite some of the most spectacular coastline in California, and it hasn’t grown much, either. Bluster doesn’t have anything like a suburb. Once you clear the town line, you hit forest, rocky coast, a scatter of homes and businesses, and a few cattle and sheep ranches. Oh, and weed farms. Lots of those.
As a place on the map, it's not much, really, and that had definitely not changed while I was away.
To answer Wyatt’s question, I shook my head. “The McDonald’s got one of those sad beige remodels, I see, but otherwise, nothing’s really different. Catherine’s”—I pointed to the diner on the other side of the street—“has been there since before I was born. Looks like it got a coat of brighter pink paint, but it’s the same.” Nodding at the carniceria to our right, its windows filled with brightly painted paper signs advertising the day’s prices, I added, “Mendoza Meat & Fish is exactly the same, though probably the Mr. Mendoza who ran it when I was here is retired by now. I bet his son is running it now. I used to babysit the younger Mr. Mendoza’s little boy when I was in high school.” A little chuckle escaped me, as I remembered, “All us girls crushed hard on young Mr. Mendoza back then.”
It was funny— Roman Mendoza was a good-looking guy, but not breathtakingly gorgeous, like you might expect the town heartthrob to be. He had been a totally normal kind of good-looking, with typical features nicely arranged; it was his personality that sent him to the top of the heap. He’d been so freaking nice, and to everyone. Young or old, friend or stranger, he listened when people spoke, and he remembered what was important to the people in his wide circle.
That he was wildly in love with his wife and also was the kind of dad who had no compunction whatsoever about making a foolof himself to entertain his child had pretty much broken every girl, woman, and anyone else who was into guys.
I sighed out the weight of nostalgia. That was a good memory of my life in Bluster. I’d forgotten I had any of those.
Feeling my son’s attention on me, I turned to him when I pulled up at a red light—one of three traffic lights in town. He was giving me his too-wise-for-a-teenager look. That look had joined his expressive repertoire within the past year or so, after our life had been shaken like an Etch-a-Sketch and my fifteen-year-old child had decided that he needed to be a man and protect his mother.
