Page 24 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
Staring at the copse of firs before us, I shook my head. “I had a life I liked, one I thought was completely mine. I didn’t want anything she’d touched.”
“But you’re home now. Can I ask what happened?”
I turned to look him in the eyes. He watched me intently. “I lost the life I’d made.”
His nod told me he understood. With a glance at his ringless left hand, I wondered if maybe he did. I still didn’t know what had happened to his wife and son, but it had become keenly apparent they weren’t in his life anymore—at least not as they had been.
“I’d be glad to go to the council meeting with you, Roman. Thank you.”
He smiled. “How would you feel about getting some dinner beforehand? There’s a good Italian place on Marina Street that wasn’t around when you were here before.”
I wasn’t sure if he was asking me on a date or just inviting a friend to share a meal, but at that moment, it did not matter. “Sure. I’d like that.”
ROMAN LEFT SHORTLYthereafter. He didn’t ask about the work we were doing or express any interest in Cottage 12, and I didn’t show him the disaster we’d discovered right before he’d thrown a detour in our day.
He lived a little farther north on the 101, so we made a plan that he’d pick me a couple of hours before the town meeting, we’d eat at this new Italian place, and then head over to the town hall.
If I was about to face some kind of gossip tribunal, I didn’t really want my kid there to witness it, but then I felt guilty about excluding him. So while we stood in the main cabin’s kitchen, side by side at the counter, I told Wyatt the dinner-and-a-meeting plan and asked if he wanted me to change it so he could go to the meeting.
Wyatt started shaking his head before I got the question all the way out. “A town meeting sounds boring, and I don’t want be a third wheel on your big date.”
I plucked a green grape off the stem. We were sharing a bunch I’d placed in a big stoneware bowl. “It’s not a date, Wy. Just eating at the same table.”
My son dropped his head and looked at me like he had bifocals to peer over. “Mother. Mr. Mendoza looks at you like you’re a model on a magazine cover or something. He likes you.”
I shook my head. It felt really important, like for safety reasons, for that not to be true. Also, I most assuredly did not look like a model on a magazine—if I ever have in my life, it wasn’t on that day. “He’s just a pathologically nice guy. He looks at everybody he talks to like they’re the most interesting person around.”
Wyatt popped a handful of grapes into his mouth and chewed them contemplatively. I leaned back against the counter and waited. There was a water stain on the ceiling, in the corner behind the door to the living room, traveling the wall to a point about halfway down. It was normally obscured by that door we never closed, so I hadn’t seen it until now.
Maybe the roof wasn’t in the decent shape we’d thought. Sigh.
“It’s okay if you go on a date, Mom,” Wyatt said softly. “It won’t make me mad if you get a boyfriend.”
I returned my full attention to my kid. He had on that damned grown-up expression. There are no words in any language or all of them together that can contain how much I love that boy.
I reached out and cupped my hand over his cheek—and I felt the faintest hint of stubble there. As a girl desperate to be grown enough to make myself free, childhood had felt endless. As a mom, I know how scant those years really are.
“I love you, buddy. And I thank you. But I’m not ready for that.”
He nodded in my hand. “Okay. But when you are, I’ll be okay with it. I just want you to know.”
There’s a thing I’ve heard every now and then. The first time, it completely laid me out. Every time I’ve heard it since, it makes me cry. I think it’s one of the most poignant, bittersweet truths about being a parent, and it’s this: you never know the last time you pick up your child and hold them in your arms.
Probably the last time I picked Wyatt up, I did it without thinking, because I had other things on my mind. Maybe I was irritated, because he was getting heavy and I was busy. But I vividly remember the feel of him, the way he always settled in, the way he’d hook an arm over my shoulder, the way his chubby little fingers liked to play with the hair at my nape.
The thought that I will not, cannot, ever feel that again is a grief to this day. It is an end of something important, a loss that deserves commemoration, yet we all let it go by without realizing we’ve lost it until it’s too late.
At fifteen, Wyatt was pushing six feet tall. My days of picking him up were far behind us. But he was right here beside me, and every aspect of my life was better because he was in it.
I drew him to me and held him close.
He settled in.
ELEVEN: Back To School
After a day spent making a job list for the cottages, and a day spent making appointments with contractors to figure out what to do about 12, Wyatt and I took a break from demoralizing home improvement projects and headed toward town to register him for tenth grade.
Bendixen High School is named after Hans Bendixen, some historical guy who did something I can’t remember but was important enough to have a school named after him. Maybe something about ships? Or lumber? I don’t know. Anyway, the high school is, I suppose, a typical semi-rural high school. It’s average size, with a student body of about four hundred or so. The main part of the school is the original building, a big brick thing with a clock tower at the center that hasn’t actually kept time since the Seventies. A couple of modular ‘satellite’ buildings were put up in the Eighties, I think, but for the most part, Bendixen is a traditional hulking brick behemoth.
