Page 31 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
“He probably did. He acted like a man who doesn’t respect women, so when I wasn’t cowed by him, yeah. That’s hate in a guy like that.”
“You don’t think he’d try to hurt us, do you?”
“Physically, no. But I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him trying to get this place. I need to talk to the mayor and try to understand the situation better.”
“Do you think he could take it from us?”
“No,” I told my son, and I spoke with the confidence of truth. “My mother died without a will. I’m the only Braddock left, and her next of kin. Darryl Whathisname might not like it, but weown this place now. And he knows that—remember, he wants to make an offer. He wouldn’t do that if he thought he had a rightful claim somehow, or that I did not.”
“Okay. Good.” The sound of tires on gravel wafted in from the open windows, and Wyatt jumped up to see. “Wifi guy! It’s the wifi guy! Yes!” He did a little fist pump and ran to the door.
Smiling, I got up to follow. I cannot tell you how relieved I felt every time he downshifted from far too old for his years back to goofy teenager.
THIRTEEN: Reacquainting
Istood in the bedroom that had been my mother’s and was now mine, and I stared at the open closet. What does one wear to a dinner that might be a date but is probably just old sort-of friends getting reacquainted?
I am not, and I have never been, especially into fashion. I’m sure part of that has to do with how I was raised. Running a motel is not a get-rich-quick scheme, and the Sea-Mist isn’t a luxury resort. My mother and I lived a fairly spartan life of just enough but rarely more.
Also, when I started babysitting at the age of thirteen, she decided that I could pay for my own personal items, so beyond a one-hundred-dollar bill handed to me every August the week before school started, which was her contribution to my school supplies and anything else I needed for school and life for the year, I had to buy my own stuff.
I got really good at thrifting and repurposing. Working in the school office in high school also gave me first-look access to the unclaimed stuff in the lost-and-found box at the end of the year, and I managed some real scores there.
In high school, with such limited resources at a time when one’s appearance could be the difference between getting to your locker unbothered or ending up on your ass with your belongings tossed hither and yon, I leaned in to the emo/goth thing. That vibed well with my generally bleak and disaffected outlook, too.
My life as an adult, after the first couple of years away (and until it all went to hell), was pretty calm and comfortable, and I sort of evolved away from the sharp edges of my look, too. I landed smack in suburban mom territory, shopping mainly at Target for casual and places like J. Jill for work. I’m moreinterested in being comfy-cute than having a ‘style.’ As far as I’m concerned, the best thing to happen to clothes since I started wearing them is spandex in jeans.
T-shirts, jeans, and yoga pants make up at least half my wardrobe. The other half is made up of teacher clothes—slightly nicer jeans, dress slacks that are basically thicker yoga pants, a few skirts, and an array of blouses. Work or casual, my clothes are all built for comfort.
My shoes, too. I will confess to a real weakness for boots, but otherwise my shoes are sneakers, Birkenstocks, and flats with good arch support. I have two pair of black heels: basic three-inch pumps and one torturous pair of four-inch strappy sandals, for rare dress-up events.
Micah had one or two social functions with his company every year, for which I had two little black dresses: a cocktail dress, for more formal functions, and a Michael Kors sheath for client dinners.
The sheath was probably the best thing in my closet to wear to dinner. It was just a plain, sleeveless sheath, so I could dress it up or down with accessories. (This was how I’d rationalized spending five hundred dollars on a dress at an outlet mall.) If I wore it with flats and simple jewelry, and Roman showed up in jeans, I could grab my denim jacket and not look overdressed.
However, the last time I’d worn the sheath, I’d been standing at Micah’s open grave. I was not ready to put that dress on again. Maybe I never would be.
So teacher clothes would have to do. I finally settled on a pair of black slacks, a dressy tee with a drape neckline in plum, a color I thought worked nicely with my dark hair and eyes. My trusty pair of black ballet-style flats with the teacher-approved arch support and some simple silver jewelry finished it off. For makeup ... okay, I went a little heavier than I would have for work, adding a bit of winged eyeliner to the usual routine.
Leaning in close to the mirror to try to add liner to my water line without blinding myself, a flaw in the old glass caught my attention, and all of a sudden twenty years disappeared. I sat back and my mother was alive again, and I was in her room.
That’s not quite the right way to say it. I knew she was dead, I knew I was in the present, but the past overlaid itself in my head somehow, and I felt like I was going to get caught rummaging through her things any second.
Wyatt joked about wishing the Sea-Mist were haunted and being disappointed that it wasn’t. But for me, it was. I mean, I was glad to take it over, and there was no small amount of pettiness in that feeling. I liked the idea of erasing her from this place and finally making it my home. A clean sweep.
The price for that, however, was my mother sometimes emerging from a blind corner and sending me spiraling.
A screaming fight with her in the kitchen, one of many times she’d called me a whore, or a demon sent to punish her, or simply a burden. That time in the living room when she’d backhanded me so hard she’d opened my cheek with her ring. The electric zing I felt every time I heard Wyatt close his bedroom door, the room that had been mine—remembering thesnickof the lock on the outside of that door. Or now, this quaking sensation of guilt and fear of discovery.
I was in her room, where I’d never been allowed.
Maybe that was why I’d kept some of her bedroom furniture. The echo of the girl I’d been wanted to smear my presence all over these things I’d not been allowed to touch. I’d replaced the bed—hers had been a full size and mine was a queen—and brought my own dresser and lingerie chest in, but I’d kept those pieces which had drawn me to peer through the narrow slit of an ajar door when I was young.
I breathed out that icy blast of haunting and looked around. I sat at the antique vanity table that had been my mother’sgrandmother’s. An art deco style, it wasn’t my preferred style now, but as a girl, every glimpse I’d caught of it had made me think of movie stars from the old studio system days—Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, Grace Kelly, Myrna Loy—in slinky satin, perched on a satin puff while they fussed with their hair.
When Wyatt and I were moving in, there had been no question in my mind that I’d keep it, but now, as I prepared for a maybe-date, it felt like Marilyn Leonora Braddock the First was perched on the mirror like a gargoyle, looking for a way to hurt me from the beyond.
And yes, if you noticed and are now wondering, the woman who had never wanted me named me after herself. My legal name is Marilyn Leonora Braddock II.
