Page 46 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
I don’t know if the flatness of his tone came of anger or wariness or weariness, but there was a hard stop to that one small word, a finality, and I didn’t like that at all.
So the next thing I said was the important thing. “I’m sorry.”
At that, an apology both complete and insufficient, he visibly warmed, though he didn’t come closer. “Are you okay?”
I stayed at the foot of the steps. “Physically, yes. Existentially, I don’t know.”
He nodded at his door. “Do you want to come in and talk about it?”
“Only if you want that.”
I know it sounds like I was being wishy-washy, but I’d already fucked up, and I didn’t want to impose. It’s that middle part of an apology that’s the hardest, I find. Saying the words when they’re warranted isn’t hard for me, but letting the apology actually fill in the rift that made it necessary is a lot harder—and knowing if the other person is ready to let things go is harder still. It’s the whole ‘bygones’ part I don’t get.
Probably because I am a champion grudge-bearer.
But Roman smiled that warm, intimate smile and opened his door. “Come on in, Leo.”
I went up the steps, onto his cozy porch, and met him at the door. Before he ushered me into his home, he brushed a hand down my arm, a little awkwardly. I got the sense he’d intended to hug me and changed course at the last second.
My little outburst had done some damage. But there was still a voice in my head suggesting that a bit of new distance between us might be a good thing. The night of the town meeting, our ‘first date,’ was less than a week in the past. We’d spent a lovely Saturday with Wyatt. And then he’d been there when I got home tonight. That, and three kisses (okay, one of those was more of a mild make-out session than a single kiss, but anyway), were the sum total of our romantic time together. If we were in a relationship it was in its infancy, but he had an outsize presence in my thoughts, and he’d shown a strong impulse toward taking care of us.
I was in a scary place in my life. It would be far too easy to let him take over and take care. I needed to make sure I kept the reins of my own life in my own hands.
Wyatt wasn’t wrong; we needed to be able to trust in someone beyond ourselves. I didn’t want to become my mother, suspicious of everyone around me. Roman is a good man, and I’ve always known that. I wanted to trust him.
As I crossed the threshold into a house I hadn’t seen for nearly twenty years, I finally understood the real truth. It wasn’t Roman I was afraid to trust.
It was myself.
WE SAT AT HIS KITCHENtable, where I apologized more completely, was forgiven more directly, and then debriefed him on my meeting with the mayor.
When I was done, Roman stood. “You want coffee?”
I shook my head. “No, thanks. I’m already as jittery as I can bear.”
“Wine, then?” He gestured at an impressively full wine rack built into his kitchen cabinetry. “Or I’ve got the hard stuff, too. Pick your poison.”
“Wine is good.” Before he asked me to be more specific, I added, “Whatever you have open or want to open is great with me.”
He grinned and pulled bottle of white from his fridge.
When I’d first arrived, Roman had led, and I’d followed, straight to the back of the house and his kitchen, a path that wound through the living and dining rooms and past his study, the door of which had been closed. My journey through the most public parts of his home was made of recollection and surprise. So much was as I remembered, but laid over that familiarity were twenty years of life.
The front door opened into what had always been my favorite room. It might have been intended as a mud room—a smallish space with two walls, those facing south and north, made ofcasement windows on the top half, and benches with shelving on the bottom. The walls, floor, and ceiling, were all made of the same narrow pine planks, all painted a bright, cheery warm color like Irish butter.
But the Mendozas had never used this room as a mudroom. Instead, it was a library. The shelves under the benches were packed with books, almost all of them novels or collections of short stories, most of them paperbacks, and almost all of them popular fiction. A comfy, puffy armchair and ottoman were tucked in a corner near the door into the rest of the house, and a big, round paper lantern hung from the ceiling above it. A plush round rug with a riotous pattern of flowers covered most of the floor. It was just a perfect, cozy little treasure of a room, and it looked exactly as I remembered.
There was a reason I’d become an English teacher; and it wasn’t because I thought I’d have summers off. (Teachers don’t really get summers off, by the way. Just to clear that up. We’re working most of that time, finishing off the previous school year through June and prepping the next one from about the middle of July.) Reading was my escape as a child, and I’d kept that feeling all through my life. So this room was like Narnia to me.
That coziness, and the aesthetic of soft textiles and bright colors, carried on into the living room and dining room. There, a lot of the furniture had been replaced during my life away, and there were, sadly and of course, no signs of anyone else living here but Roman now, but still I knew these rooms. The sofa and big chair were different, but in the same places as the ones I remembered. The television now hung on a wood-plank exterior wall, rather than sitting inside a big ‘entertainment armoire.’ The large case that Roman had built and stained himself to hold all his LPs was in the same place, but now the turntable sat on a unit below the television, with other electronic components, including an Xbox.
The wall hangings and other décor were mainly familiar to me. There were more family photos, showing Gabriel as a growing boy and his parents maturing, but those photos stopped far too soon.
The dining room looked precisely the same as I remembered it, all the way to the centerpiece in the middle of the table, a colorful Mexican bowl full of assorted wooden fruit. But the dining room was obviously in disuse. I don’t know why it was so obvious—the room wasn’t dirty or dusty or falling into disrepair—but there was something that made me sure Roman never used this room anymore.
That realization had made my heart ache. Roman still lived in the house he’d made a family in, but his family had been taken from him. There was no one to sit at that beautiful antique table with him and laugh with over a family meal. When he woke in the morning, the house was empty. When he went to bed, it was the same.
He had family, his father and sister were alive, but the elder Mr. Mendoza had gone to Mexico in his retirement, and his sister, Emilia, lived south, around Santa Barbara. Roman was alone here.
