Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Bea came through the door twenty minutes after she'd left. Her jacket was still on, her cheeks flushed from walking fast, her eyes bright in the way that comes right before crying.
Stella looked up from the couch. "What happened?"
Bea walked past her into the living room and sat down and pulled her knees up and pressed her face into them and didn't say anything. Stella sat beside her and waited. Lindsey would have been proud of the waiting.
Tyler came out of the kitchen holding a camera lens he’d been cleaning. He looked at Bea on the couch. Looked at Stella. Stella shook her head—not now—and Tyler, to his credit, set the lens down and went to the kitchen without a word.
He came back with tea. Three mugs, carried in a triangle that was structurally unsound and nearly resulted in a disaster on the coffee table.
The tea was too hot and too strong and possibly the wrong kind—Tyler’s tea-making skills were on par with his pre-eggs-Benedict cooking, which was to say they were committed but unreliable.
“Tea,” he said, setting the mugs down.
Bea lifted her head from her knees. Her eyes were red but she wasn’t crying. She was past crying. She was in the place on the other side of crying where everything was very clear and very sharp and the words were right there.
“Michael was at our house,” she said.
Stella’s hand stopped on her mug.
“Mom invited him for dinner. At the house.” Bea picked up the tea, looked at it, set it back down. “She didn’t tell me.”
Tyler sat in the armchair. He didn’t say anything. His eyes went to Stella—the translator look, the one that meant “help me understand what’s happening because I’m an old man and teenage girls are a foreign country.”
“At the kitchen table?” Stella asked.
Two places. Pasta. The Florence pasta — the one she only makes when something matters.” Bea’s voice was steady now. Too steady. “She was going to tell me after. Or never. I don’t know. I wasn’t supposed to be home until eight.”
“She was trying to—”
“I know what she was trying to do. She was trying to make it easy. Make it normal. So by the time I found out, it would already be a thing and I’d just have to accept it.” Bea looked at her hands. “Nobody asked me.”
The living room was quiet. Tyler’s bungalow at night—the creak of the floorboard by the window, the distant ocean.
“Nobody asked me if I wanted a consultant at our kitchen table,” Bea said.
“Nobody asked me if I was okay with Mom spending every Thursday night doing paperwork with someone who doesn’t smile.
Nobody asked me about the focaccia she started making dairy-free or the olive oil she adjusts or the way she hums differently when he’s in the room. ”
“Bea—”
“I’m not done.” She picked up the tea. Took a sip.
Made a face—Tyler’s tea was truly terrible—but held onto the mug because she needed something warm in her hands.
“I’ve been ‘okay’ about this for weeks. I’ve been ‘processing.’ I’ve been watching my mother fall for someone and telling myself it was fine and adjusting and being mature about it because that’s what you do when you’re sixteen and your mom hasn’t dated anyone in your entire life and suddenly there’s a man with a legal pad at the counter. ”
Tyler leaned forward in the armchair. “Bea.”
She looked at him.
“I get it,” he said.
“You don’t—”
“I do. I spent three weeks terrified that dating Lindsey would make Stella feel like she wasn’t enough.” He glanced at Stella. “I didn’t even ask her out until she basically ordered me to.”
“I literally told him he had to,” Stella confirmed.
“The point is—” Tyler rubbed the back of his neck. “The point is I was scared too. That adding someone would mean taking something away. That Stella would look at Lindsey and think I was replacing—something. The life we’d built.”
“Did she?” Bea asked.
“I pushed him to do it,” Stella said. “Because I could see he needed it. He was happier. Calmer. He’d been alone for sixteen years and he didn’t have to be anymore.” She pulled her feet up on the couch. “But that’s different.”
“How?”
“I chose it. I saw it coming and I pushed for it.” Stella looked at Bea. “You didn’t get to choose. Anna just—did it.”
“Right. Exactly,” Bea said to Tyler. The words came out raw. “My mom is the only parent I’ve got who shows up every day. My dad left before I could remember and my mom stayed and it’s been us. Me and Mom. For sixteen years. And now she’s—”
Her voice broke. Not dramatically—a hairline crack, the sound of something that had been held too tight for too long finally letting go.
Tyler got up from the armchair, crossed to the couch, and sat on Bea’s other side. He didn’t hug her—Tyler wasn’t a hugger usually—but he put his hand on her shoulder and left it there.
“She’s not leaving,” Tyler said. “Anna doesn’t leave. That’s literally the thing about Anna.”
“I know.”
“She’s not replacing you. She’s not choosing him over you.”
“I know.” Bea pressed the heel of her hand against her eye.
“I know all of this. I know it in my head. I know she deserves to be happy. I know Michael is—whatever he is. Thorough. Reliable. He bought an easel, for goodness sake.” She laughed, which was worse than crying because it was mixed with everything else. “I just wanted her to ask me first.”
The room was quiet. Tyler’s hand on Bea’s shoulder. Stella on the other side. Three people on a couch in a small bungalow, two of them sixteen and one of them forty, all trying to figure out the same thing—what happens when the people you love change the shape of the life you built together.
“She should have told you,” Stella said.
“Yeah.”
“She was probably scared.”
“I know.”
“She’s probably standing in the kitchen right now feeling terrible.”
“Good.” Bea took another sip of Tyler’s awful tea. “This is the worst tea I’ve ever had.”
“I know,” Tyler said. “I’m sorry about the tea.”
“You should be. This is a crime against beverages.”
“In my defense, I’m better at eggs.”
“You’re better at everything than tea. Toast would be better than this tea. Your burned toast would be better.”
"Want ice cream?"
Bea looked at him. "It's nine o'clock at night."
"You know the rule."
Bea almost fought it. Stella could see her trying.
But the rule was the rule—when things got bad, you got ice cream.
It had been true since Stella's second day in Laguna, when Tyler bought her mint chocolate chip and she thought maybe California wouldn't be terrible. It had been true every time since.
Bea looked at the tea. At Tyler. At Stella. At the bungalow that held them—this small, creaky house where Stella had landed from Sydney and Tyler had learned to be a father and the fridge had photos clustered on it like a family in formation.
Bea set the terrible tea on the coffee table and stood up. Her eyes were still red but her shoulders had come down from her ears and her hands had unclenched.
“Okay,” she said. “Ice cream.”
They walked to the place on PCH—the one that stayed open late, the one Tyler and Stella had been going to since the summer. Bea got salted caramel. Stella got mint chocolate chip.
They sat on the bench outside with their cups and the November night around them—cool, salt-smelling, the ocean audible but not visible. The three of them sat on a bench, eating ice cream because someone was hurting and this was how the family handled it.
“I’m not going to be weird about it,” Bea said after a while. “About Michael. I’m not going to make it hard for Mom.”
“You don’t have to be anything,” Stella said. “Just tell her the truth.”
“The truth is complicated.”
“The truth is always complicated. That’s why we have ice cream.”
Bea almost smiled. Not quite. But close.
They finished their ice cream and walked home—Bea peeling off toward her house at the corner, Stella and Tyler continuing to the bungalow. The night was quiet. The Shack was dark down the street, closed and waiting for tomorrow.
“She’ll be okay,” Stella said.
“Yeah.” Tyler put his arm around her shoulders—briefly, the way he did, more acknowledgment than embrace. “You were good in there.”
“I learned it’s best to wait.”
“What?”
“The waiting. Not filling the silence. Letting Bea say the thing.” Stella looked at him. “You did it too.”
“Did I?”
“You sat down and you didn’t fix it. You just... sat with her.”
Tyler thought about this. “Is that what you do with me?”
“Every single time.”
“Huh.” He opened the bungalow door. “Goodnight, Stella.”
“Goodnight, Dad.”
She went to her room and texted Bea.
You okay?
A long pause.
I’m home. Mom’s in the kitchen. She looks terrible.
Are you going to talk to her?
Tomorrow. Tonight I’m eating ice cream feelings.
She put the phone down and looked at the ceiling and thought about Bea saying “nobody asked me” and Tyler putting his hand on her shoulder and the ice cream melting faster than any of them could eat it.