Page 83 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
I stood before those graves for quite a while, honoring the young family I’d known. Roman’s love for Carla and Gabriel didn’t threaten me. I wasn’t jealous. I understood. He wouldn’t be the man I loved if his love for Carla wasn’t eternal.
As I stood there, I had a new thought: We actually don’t live only one life. We live a series of lives, each one shaped by our experiences, the people around us, our circumstances. We take the lessons with us from one to the next, but every time we make a change, or a change happens to us, is a fresh start. A new life.
That was what Roman meant when he’d said he’d closed the book on his life with Carla and Gabriel, and it was why he could love Carla as fervently as ever and still love me just as fervently, in the life he lived now. Our love was the story of a different book.
The lives I’d lived before this one—my life with my mother, my life with Micah, the brief lives I’d lived between—were notthis life. I did not have to be—I was not—the same person who’d lived those lives. I was no longer my mother’s daughter. I was no longer Micah’s wife. I was Leo, and this life was in my hands.
I sent Carla and Gabriel a silent wish that they were together and happy, and I continued on my way.
I found my mother very near the end of the last line of graves. Though she’d died more than two years earlier, only four graves continued past hers, at the base of a hill. No trees nearby.
Her marker was plain granite and had nothing etched in the unpolished grey stone but her name and dates. No indication that she would be missed, or that she’d made an impact anywhere, only that she had lived and died.
That was fitting, I thought as I sat on the dry, golden grass before her stone. I supposed I was sitting on her casket and wondered what kind she’d been buried in. Polished walnut? Or plain pine? Had there been any kind of service? Who’d paid for her burial?
Again I was struck by the thought that she must have been lonely all her life. Even the most committed introvert needs some kind of human connection, some bond to center their existence and give reason and purpose to their life. Yet my mother had wanted no such thing, not even from her own child.
Something must have happened to her to make her so bitter, so constantly suspicious, soangryevery day. In her eyes, every single person she’d encountered was trying to take advantage of her in some way. Nobody was good, nobody was kind, nobody was helpful. Everybody was working an angle. To have been so judgmental, she must have been judged terribly harshly.
It must have been exhausting to live that isolated, angry life every day.
As a child, I’d never considered that my mother might have been in tremendous pain, or at least had once been in such pain, to be the woman I’d known. I’d never wondered what had madeher the way she was; I went from thinking I was either bad or stupid or both, unable to be good enough to deserve her love, to realizing that nothing I could ever do would make her love or even care for me and resenting, then hating, her for it.
Not once had I felt sympathy for her.
As the victim of her abuse and neglect, I knew it wasn’t my responsibility to feel sympathy or to identify the source of her pain. But as the woman sitting before her gravestone, I understood something crucial: finding sympathy for my mother wasn’t about my responsibility to her.
It was about me. What I needed.
That was the reckoning I had come here to find: understanding that my mother’s treatment of me had never been about me. It wasn’t my weakness, my insufficiency, my stupidity, my clumsiness, my badness, or any other thing she’d claimed about me.
My mother’s demons were her own. She’d set them on me, yes, but they were not mine. Maybe she’d done so because shehadneeded some kind of human connection, and all she’d had to share was suffering.
But since the night I’d left her, I’d been in control of my own life. She had no more control over me than I gave her. Only I could decide whether I kept her demons or cast them off.
I had kept them for far too long.
“Goodbye, Mother,” I said, the only words I’d spoken in the fifteen minutes or so I’d been sitting before her marker. “I hope you found some peace.”
As it turned out, that was all I had to say to her. I stood up, brushed my ass off, and headed back to the entrance.
I left my mother’s demons behind.
THIRTY-FOUR: This New Life
Wyatt had rehearsals for the fall play that evening—he’d been cast as Happy Loman inDeath of a Salesman—and I was already in town to drop Jessie off after our trip to the cemetery.
My blood thrummed with energy; I felt twenty years younger and a thousand pounds lighter. I could have used that energy to get some work done at the Sea-Breeze, but that wasn’t what I wanted.
Instead, I drove to Mendoza Meat & Fish. It was almost five in the afternoon, and the carniceria closed at four. His usual practice was to be at the shop for at least an hour after closing. He opened at six in the morning, and he didn’t like to take work home with him, so he did his books after closing, when the shop was tidy and whichever of his three employees had gone home.
Roman’s truck was the only one in the small employee lot at the back of the shop. I parked beside it and went to the back door. It was locked, so I rang the service bell and waited.
About a minute and a half later, the door swung open, and Roman was there. He had his reading glasses on and his apron off. He stood there in faded jeans, a pale yellow Oxford-cloth shirt, top two buttons undone, cuffs rolled to the tops of his forearms.
Salt-and-pepper curls, dark stubble with a pinch of salt. Beautiful, warm smile.
That smile shaped his deep brown eyes as he looked at me with absolute delight.
