Page 56 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
Jessie plowed forward anyway. “How many times did we wonder where she was and hope she was okay? All these years, we’ve been wondering and hoping.”
Erin looked straight at me when she said, “Twenty years, wondering and hoping. And she never let us know. Not once in all those years.”
We stared at each other for a few seconds that felt like a few centuries. Jessie was quiet as well; we’d managed to subdue our irrepressible girl. Maybe it was that, seeing Jessie look so suddenly disheartened, that prodded Erin to ease up a millimeter. “Does yourexplanationcover that?”
As I opened the brie and fruit, I nodded. “It’s the feature. Would you like to hear it?”
Erin’s attention had shifted to the box I’d just opened. “Is that brie?”
“With figs and peaches.”
“No crackers, though. Jessie said you were bringing crackers.” Her voice carried a challenge, as if the fate of the world rested on the availability of crackers for the brie.
I pulled a box of water crackers from the bottom of a bag. “Will these do?”
She unfolded her arms and reached for the brie. “If you want to talk while I eat, I don’t guess I can stop you.”
Jessie enlivened at once. “I’ll get a corkscrew!”
As we commenced the first meal the three of us had shared since our high school graduation dinner, I started the story of the past twenty years.
And hoped I told it well enough to reclaim the best thing in my life before those years: the Three Fates.
TWENTY-TWO: Tiny Intimacies
Roman came around from behind the meat case and slipped an arm around my waist. “How’d it go?” he asked after he kissed my cheek.
We were ‘out’ now, as a couple. From the reactions of most of the people we’d seen who’d mentioned it, I understood that we’d been ‘out’ since our first date. Town gossip doesn’t really allow for casual dating; once you’re seen together in anything approaching a romantic situation, the grapevine brands you a couple, and, like an actual brand, it’s nearly impossible to remove.
In a brief moment over lunch, when Jessie was handling a business call and Erin had scooted off to the bathroom (I suspect to avoid being alone with me), I’d texted Roman about the ambush lunch had been. His immediate response had been to ask if I was okay, which is a pretty good indication of how damaged Erin and I were as friends.
So I’d stopped by the carniceria afterward.
“Promising but not life-changing,” I answered, brushing a scatter of dried herb flakes from the front of his apron. He must have been working on pre-seasoned cuts. “I wouldn’t call us friends again yet, but there was no violence, and we did share a meal together. We even did some talking.”
He grinned and kissed me. “That’s great! I knew you two would work it out.”
“We’re not there yet,” I stressed. “No violence is a pretty low bar for friendship.”
“But talking,” he insisted. “That’s good.”
Our talking, where it bore on the state of our friendship, had been me explaining my reasons for leaving without a word and staying no-contact all that time, my apologies for doing so and acarefully worded plea to understand that at eighteen, growing up as I had, my fears about my mother’s power were outsized and my understanding of how important I could be in anybody’s life was undersized.
Erin’s reaction had been mainly stony silence, not a single question asked, not even a challenge made. But when I was done, there had been a measurable thaw between us—largely, I’m sure, out of love for Jessie—and we’d eventually managed a lighthearted chat among the three of us, with even some laughter. So a détente, but not yet a rekindling. Promising but not life-changing.
“Yeah, talking is good,” I conceded. “Enough to keep hope alive, anyway.”
A customer, someone I didn’t know, stepped up to the counter and looked over at us with an unspoken question—he wanted to buy some meat.
Before he let me go, Roman kissed my head.
Tiny intimacies like that are important to me. I guess you could say they’re my ‘love language’; I’ve always felt more love in a touch like that than in the spoken words themselves. Roman and I hadn’t talked about that, but he either recognized it in me or shared the feeling himself.
It was too early to speak of what was between us as love, of course. I needed to make sure I was strong and steady on my own, for both myself and my son. I didn’t want to be rescued and end up swallowed up in someone else’s life again. I had very rational, carefully considered reasons for proceeding with caution.
My heart, however, is a wild thing with a mind of its own. When Roman pressed his mouth to my head and held there long enough that I knew he was filling his senses with the aroma of my shampoo, my heart did a little pirouette and threw its arms wide.
“My house tonight, yeah?” he asked as he went back to the business side of the meat case.
