Page 10 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
Moving refrigerators is a lot harder than it looks, even with a hand truck. But eventually, Wyatt and I got the one we were afraid to open onto the back porch, down the single step to the paved path, and around to the parking lot.
The parking lot was gravel. We made it about three feet on that rough surface and stopped. The U-Haul was still full, anyway, so we decided to worry about the fridge later.
Getting the fridge from the nearest kitchen cottage to the main cabin proved to be the greater challenge, though the fridge itself was smaller. The guest cabins had only front entrances, and they were raised from the ground about eighteen inches.
Accounting for the bit of slope in the land beneath the nearest cottage, the steps up to that little porch numbered seven. We bounced the fridge down each one. On the last two, I heard some worrisome metallic rattling, like we’d shaken something loose.
“I hope we’re not breaking the thing,” I muttered as the hand truck finally reached the path.
“If you’d let me go first ...” Wyatt said, leaving the rest of his frustrated accusation unvoiced. He’d insisted he was the stronger of us, so he should take the weight of our cargo.
But I was not going to risk dropping a refrigerator on my child. “That was never an option, bud.”
“Ugh. Soannoying,” he groused.
“That’s moms for ya. Go ahead and push it ...” I heard something and stopped, focusing on the sound. Tires on gravel. “Somebody’s here. Stay with the fridge.”
Without waiting for my son to reply, I turned and headed toward the parking lot. I hoped it was some random tourist who’d either missed or ignored the ‘Closed’ sign at the road. Alittle cluster of nerves grabbed my spine and squeezed; the Sea-Mist was far enough from Bluster and tucked deep enough into the trees that we’d had a few issues with weed growers over the years; illegal growers could be as violent as any other black market drug producer. What if they’d been squatting on the property somehow while it was empty?
I was being silly—weed had been fully legal in California for years. They didn’t have to hide anymore. Were they making more money or less, now that they were just normal businesspeople?
As I turned the corner at the front of the cabin, I pulled up sharply. Parked directly in front of the porch steps was a shockingly familiar vehicle: a 1970 Dodge Challenger with a high-flake violet custom paint job.
Oh, the fun I’d had in that ridiculous car. I could hardly believe it was still on the road.
The driver, a height-challenged woman with long, messy, flaming red hair and black cat’s-eye sunglasses, slammed the driver’s door, and the whole car rocked.
“You BITCH!” Jessie Geller yelled in a much deeper smoker’s rasp than I remembered. She flung her arms wide. “Get over here. You’re fucking LATE!”
I laughed and hurried to my old friend. We met at the front of the Purple People Eater and clenched in a hug that held two decades.
“You’re home,” Jessie whispered, clutching her tightly. “You’re home.”
I wasn’t sure we were staying, so I wasn’t sure it was true that I was home. Except right now, it felt like the only truth in the world.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered back, red hair tickling my lips.
“Shut up. It doesn’t matter.” Leaning back to look me in the eye, Jessie added, “You’re here. Everything else is ...” She lifted a hand and blew on her palm, as if sending sand back to the sea.
If anyone in Bluster was going to welcome me back unconditionally, it was Jessie—and I should have remembered that. Jessie took everyone the way they came. She made no demands, delivered no judgments, offered no advice but that which was asked of her. From her earliest days, she’d been that way. Her whole philosophy of life and the world was ‘Everybody’s got their own journey.’
“I missed you,” I said now and pulled my old friend back into the clench. “Every day I missed you.”
Jessie smiled. “I know. And same, bitch. Same.”
I knew that was true. Though after the first few years away, I hadn’t overtly thought of anyone in Bluster every single day, I’d felt the hole in my life where my best friends belonged. In nineteen years I’d had plenty of friendships but never anything approaching the closeness I’d had with my two best childhood friends.
The third of our little squad, however, had a wildly different personality from Jessie’s—and from mine, for that matter.
“Does Erin know yet?” I asked as Jessie and I finally let each other go.
Her short chuckle and wry smirk were an answer before she spoke. “She knows. She’ll need some time, Lennie.”
My heart heaved painfully at the sound of the name only two people in the world had ever called me. But I wasn’t surprised that Erin wasn’t rushing to the Sea-Mist to hug me. Nobody could nurse a grudge like Erin O’Grady.
Our threesome had been famous in Bluster, everybody knowing that where one could be found, the other two were likely nearby. Catherine had called us the Three Fates: Jessie, the artsy wild child, was Clotho, the spinner; I, the careful,responsible one, had been Lachesis, the delegator. And fiery Erin was Atropos, death-dealer.
Something greater than a little Greek mythology bonded us as well: all three of us were what we’d called ‘half-orphans.’ We each had only one parent, and we were only children. Erin’s mother died in childbirth. Jessie’s father skipped out on her and her mom before she was five. The space for ‘father’ on my birth certificate is blank. None of our remaining parents had ever been serious with anyone else, though temporary ‘uncles’ had floated through Jessie’s life.
