18. Sylvia
SYLVIA
I draw dahlias and zinnias all morning Tuesday, trying not to think about the man who brought them to me then seduced me so brilliantly on the chaise lounge right there . I also try to think about the future and what I want.
I want a fairy tale ending and a happily-ever-after.
But I don’t believe in either.
I want Mike, but I don’t trust him to keep from breaking my heart again.
I got what I thought I wanted last night, but it wasn’t enough.
By lunch, I can’t stand my own company any longer, so I pack up and drive down to Port Cavendish to check out the trailers.
They’re fabulous.
Does Mike have the answer to every question? I don’t know but he’s brilliant at finding solutions. A natural problem-solver. What would he be like as a partner? Thoughtful. Helpful. Consistent. Reliable. Someone to count on. All the things I want in a man .
And a great lover, too.
Have I messed up? I hate that I’ve let fear guide my decision and yet I can’t dismiss it. I tell myself that if anyone would let a person recover from a mistake, apologize and start again, that person would be Mike.
I want to believe that, but need to try harder.
The women who own the trailer refurbishment company are very friendly and helpful, as well as patient with my questions.
Mindy, the one with the purple hair, guides me through the half dozen available trailers they have on the lot, explaining composting toilets and solar panels so well that I almost understand all of it.
They’ve added a lot of great storage features to the trailers and it’s easy to imagine living in one – even with a teenage daughter.
Then I go into their office – in a refurbished Airstream – and look at the photographs of all the other trailers they’ve restored and sold. Mindy shows me the projects in the works and the trailers waiting for their attention, and her enthusiasm for what they do is contagious.
I have my eye on a vintage trailer that’s been redone in turquoise and black, with a rounded roof and a smaller size.
It’s still too heavy for me to pull with the Subaru, but I really like it – and Mindy says they could deliver it locally for me.
It has a striped awning and I can envision it with a little patio.
Candles. A barbeque and a picnic table. We’d be close to Una, just thirty feet away, but have our privacy.
And our own bathroom.
Lynn, the more conservatively dressed partner, reviews costs with me, both the initial outlay and what I can expect in terms of running costs.
This is the kind of math that I dislike, the money kind, where I don’t have enough.
I have a little bit saved for a rainy day, but clearly, I can have that or the trailer.
I’ll need a mortgage, small by anyone else’s terms, but the prospect still makes me twitch, as does a visit to the bank.
Meanwhile, Lynn calls someone in Havelock to check on the by-laws for Una’s place, though she’s pretty sure it would be okay.
It is.
I promise to come back with Sierra on the weekend and we shake hands all around.
In the parking lot, I take a deep breath then call Mike. I plan to thank him for the suggestion, but I get his voice mail. I leave a message, unable to ignore my disappointment. It would have been nice to talk to him.
He doesn’t call back by the time I get back to Empire.
Not when I get to Una’s either.
I check that my phone is on and charged.
He hasn’t called by the time I’ve made dinner or even when I’ve settled on the porch to read while Una goes to bed.
Mike doesn’t call at all.
His meaning is pretty clear.
He thinks I only want sex and he’s not interested. I made my perspective pretty clear, I guess, and lost the chance of having a friend. If it’s just sex or nothing, I’m not getting either.
Sometimes it stinks to get what you asked for.
The week passes in a blur of debating what Merrie calls ‘the chicken conundrum’ – the roast chickens just aren’t selling and we have no idea why – and crazy traffic.
The café is so busy, which is both blessing and curse.
A big contributing factor is all of Luke’s crews at the theatre, and we decide to push off our first chef’s table until July.
That was supposed to fill the slow times and we don’t have any.
Una is making a slow recovery from the chemo although she won’t admit it.
She’s spending a lot of time napping, which just makes me more determined to move out soon so we don’t disturb her rest. On the other hand, I don’t want to be far away.
Footsteps across the yard is a great solution.
I take Sierra to see the trailers before her guitar lesson with Luke on Saturday morning, and she picks the same one I like.
I’d told Lynn that I’d need financing and she has all the paperwork ready for me to go to the bank in Havelock and apply for a mortgage. I’ve always fantasized about having a cash buffer and about having a home. Both. Simultaneously. Turns out it’s a choice of one or the other.
I’ll crunch the numbers again later and hope I’ve missed something.
In the meantime, it’s back to the café. Lunch is a blur and we clean up together before the dinner rush starts.
“Where’s Mike?” Sierra demands as we’re setting tables.
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know? Weren’t you going to see him this week?”
“I saw him Monday.” All of him. Mmm hmm.
Merrie starts to whistle in the kitchen, but I ignore her and keep my attention fixed on forks and knives, nicely folded linen napkins and five tables to go.
“Is he coming for dinner?”
“I don’t know. I think he goes to Havelock on Saturdays.” I get a look for that so I reply firmly. “He has a life, Sierra.”
My daughter heaves a massive sigh of discontent. “He said he would update me on the greenhouse this weekend.”
“There’s still time.”
I’m not going to admit that it’s my fault Mike’s scarce. Two tables to go.
“I thought we maybe could visit Rupert tomorrow. ”
“Well, we can’t just invite ourselves out there.”
“He said we could.”
I don’t want to visit Mike’s friend without him, or face Mike for the first time after our disagreement in front of Sierra and Rupert. “But Una might need help.”
“Una will be sleeping. Rupert said we could come anytime.”
“Rupert was being polite.”
“You should check on Mike.”
“Mike has a family and a whole company of people to check up on him.”
She leans across the last table, her expression fierce. When her eyes blaze like this, it’s easy to see the Cavendish in her. “Mike said he would tell me about the greenhouse this weekend and Mike does what he says. He’s not, so something is wrong .”
I don’t want to undermine her trust in her father, but she doesn’t know the whole story.
“You don’t know that. He could be busy.”
“You could call him and find out.”
“I called him Tuesday, after I went to see the trailers. He never called me back.”
“Ha!” Sierra is triumphant. “There is something wrong!”
“The man works every day,” I say. “He’s busy. With tomatoes.”
“What did you say to him, Mom?”
I blush as Merrie whistles louder and I turn away from both of them.
The thing is that Sierra’s got me wondering.
Oddly enough, while I can believe that Mike will ignore me – he has justification for that – I don’t think he would deliberately disappoint Sierra.
If he said he was going to talk to her this weekend, he would have come into the café already .
I check but he doesn’t have a dinner reservation. Sierra is watching me, proof that she already checked.
I call him when she can’t see what I’m doing, but it goes straight to his voice mail.
I assume he’s on another call, but leave another message.
He doesn’t call back.
I call again after the dinner rush dies down. Same thing. Maybe he’s away. Maybe he has a date. Maybe he’s working some crazy overtime. Maybe he took a vacation. I try to stifle my rising concern.
I call again before I go to bed and again the next morning. Voice mail both times.
Sierra catches me when I call Mike at lunch time Sunday. “Voice mail, again,” I tell her. “This has to be the fourth time since last night.” It’s more like the tenth. “Maybe he doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
Maybe he really really doesn’t want to talk to me.
“Maybe he’s been robbed, stabbed, and left to die, but no one is coming to help him,” she replies.
“You watch too many movies.”
“You don’t watch enough of them.”
“Okay. I’ll stop at his place after I take you to the bus in Havelock.”
“We could go on the way.”
“He might be…entertaining.”
She is visibly shocked. “Mike can’t have a girlfriend.”
“Why not?”
“Because he can’t, that’s why. Promise me that you’ll go and that you’ll tell me he’s okay.”
She’s really agitated, although I can’t completely explain it. Okay, he is her father and she knows it, but he doesn’t believe it, and they haven’t exactly spent a lot of time together. She’s more upset than I would have expected. “All right. I’ll do it. ”
“Promise!”
“I promise!”
And so, I find myself at Mike’s family home in the early evening Sunday. I’ve already had two texts from Sierra reminding me of my promise.
I haven’t been to the Cavendish place since high school, but it’s exactly where it used to be.
It’s a two-storey house built in the seventies, a classic family home like you’d find in a million other places.
It’s changed, though, and doesn’t look much like a family home anymore.
The fence around the backyard is gone and the pool has been filled in.
The gardens around the house are untended. It looks solid but abandoned.
There’s also an enormous greenhouse right behind it, a sheer wall of glass that extends far to both the left and right and stretches up to the sky. There’s a big parking lot beside the house, although it’s empty now, and a warehouse and office building to the right.
All of that used to be tilled fields.