Page 8 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
Maybe my ghosts and demons were gone. Maybe I could find some hope for myself here, now, too.
“THIS PLACE SLAPS!”Wyatt cheered as he scanned the interior of Catherine’s Diner.
I smiled as I looked around as well. The place did ... uh ... ‘slap.’ I was pretty sure it had been redecorated since I’d left town, everything was a bit too bright to be more than twenty years old, but if so, Catherine had simply replaced everything with its duplicate. As I remembered, the booths and chairs were a peaceful sage green, the walls a complementary butter yellow. Café-style curtains were white cotton. The countertop and tabletops were faux pine. All sedate and attractive, but hardly remarkable.
The remarkable stuff was on those pale yellow walls: they were packed with Bigfoot memorabilia spanning decades. Everything from framed newspaper clippings to a set a fuzzy Bigfoot slippers encased in a Lucite box like a work of art. Posters, photographs, lunchboxes, you name it.
And a 7-foot carved wooden monster stood in the corner, near the restrooms.
Not entirely by accident, we’d arrived with perfect timing—too late for the early-morning rush and well before the lunch rush. Locals filled the tables at those times. Now the place was only about half full, and I didn’t recognize anyone but Catherine.
I didn’t want my return to be some kind of mega-event. It would be better if the grapevine wound slowly through town with news of my arrival. For that reason, I’d punted the idea of a grocery run right after breakfast. We’d eat here, see Catherine, and head back to the Sea-Mist to get started unloading the truck. Groceries could wait until we were moved in.
The kitchen here was open, stretching behind the counter, and I saw Catherine Allman at the stove, her back to the restaurant. Her fair hair had gone white since I’d last seen her—wow, she had to be pushing seventy by now—but it was in the same familiar pair of long pigtails.
My style had changed fairly dramatically since high school, of course. Would Catherine recognize me? Would anyone?
A young server, clearly a teen, came around the counter with a full plate in each hand. Wyatt stared after her. As he hadn’t yet exhibited a great deal of interest in dating, I figured his attention was on the meals. We hadn’t had a proper one since breakfast yesterday.
I set aside existential questions and decided it was time to break my son’s heart. “This is a vegetarian diner.”
This part of California is a weird and wonderful place, full of the complete range of weird and/or wonderful folks. It earns its reputation for a stoner’s paradise; weed is cultivated all over the area and has been since long before it was legal—and it hadn’t been legal in my time. But there are so many other kinds of counterculture weirdos around. In the mountains live preppers, survivalists, gun nuts, and hermits, all of them the testiest misanthropes one might imagine. Closer to the coast live hippies of every stripe, young and old, living in communes orramshackle huts, or just camping in their ancient vans, calling the land itself their home. Mixed in among those extremes are the folks of the Yurok tribe, immigrants from both north and south of the border and elsewhere on the globe as well, generations-deep families of fishermen, businesspeople keeping the little bit of tourist trade going, a few absurdly wealthy people in glass houses on the bluffs, and just regular folks who live here because they always have. There’s a place for just about everybody in this corner of the world.
Catherine’s wasn’t the only restaurant in town, and the others—I knew of two, not counting McD’s—served meat. But this diner has always been, by far, the most popular place to eat. People call it the ‘town hall,’ because a lot more town business gets done over lunch at Catherine’s than at any formal town meeting.
Most of Catherine’s clientele are meat-eaters. The week before a major holiday, you have to make an actual appointment to get into Mendoza Meat & Fish. But Catherine is not a meat-eater, and around here, where weird is normal, it’s totally normal that the main diner in the town of Bluster is vegetarian and McDonald’s can barely compete.
In response to my heartbreaking announcement, Wyatt turned and hit me with a wide-eyed look of betrayal. “What?”
I answered with a solemn nod. “We can go to the McDonald’s instead, if you want.”
Wyatt gave Catherine’s another estimating scan. “Vegetarian, not vegan?”
“Last time I was here, yes.”
“So that means eggs, right?” He nodded at the plates the cute young server was unloading onto a table of obvious tourists. “They have eggs and bacon.”
“The bacon is fake, I guarantee. There’s such a thing as vegan eggs, though, too, so I can’t promise Catherine didn’t go full granola while I was away.”
“There is no such thing as vegan eggs, Mother. There is only somethinglabeledvegan eggs.”
I conceded the point with a chuckle. “So, what’s the call? Where are we having breakfast?”
Before Wyatt answered, door behind us opened, and I stepped aside to make way for the new patron. I glanced over, vague smile of stranger-greeting already on my face—and my breath caught and brain froze.
“Mr. Mendoza?” I said before my brain broke free of its ice.
The man before me, my high school crush—nearly twenty years older now and somehow even hotter, like actually, physically hot—frowned and tilted his head, clearly not recognizing me. “Yes?” he said—and then, before I could think what to do or say next, understanding dawned on his face. “My god. Leonora?”
I had heard my full name so rarely in the past two decades, it gave me a jolt when I did. Something akin to Mr. Mendoza’s jolt now—as if it took me a beat to remember that I was Leonora.
“I go by Leo now,” I said.
“Wow! I’d heard you might be coming back, but I figured it was just another round of the rumor. But here you are! How are you? You cut your hair!”
A mortifying little titter escaped my lips as I dragged my fingers through my pixie cut. Suddenly, I was eighteen again, with a bad case of the flirts.
But I was actually thirty-seven and not interested in flirting with anyone, so I stomped on that ditzy dope from yesteryear and shut her up.
