THREE Homecoming
I checked my phone for about the thousandth time and decided that quarter to six was deep enough into the morning to give up on the night. I sat up in the near-complete darkness and sighed, rocking the kinks from my neck and shoulders. Nearby in the shadows, Wyatt snored lightly.
After a speedy tour of the rest of the cabin last night, we’d decided to use our sleeping bags one more night and camp in the living room. The two bedrooms were both full of landmines: my mother’s unmade bed and pile of dirty clothes over her old wing-back chair was even more disconcerting than the living room, and my own old bedroom still looking precisely as I’d left it was a full-on existential crisis waiting to happen.
To Wyatt, I’d suggested that the beds were too dusty for use.
He’d agreed readily, and we’d made a little camp on the braided rug near the fireplace. For dinner, we’d finished off the last of our peanut butter and jam. Then we’d played chess on Wyatt’s tablet until we were too tired to think.
Now I needed coffee. Getting to town would be a major production, so I kicked myself free of my sleeping bag and used the flashlight in my phone to plot a course to the kitchen. Surely my mother had coffee. It would be stale and likely taste like the sole of my sneaker, but it would be caffeinated.
In the kitchen, I flipped the switch and turned on the overhead fluorescents. This was the only room that showed significant change since I’d lived here. The counters and cupboards, the flooring, even the paint color (the kitchen and bathroom were the only rooms with plaster walls rather than log paneling) were all the same, but all the appliances were white. When I’d lived here, they’d been an 80s-era set in a dull, dark brown my mother had insisted was ‘burnt sienna.’ Those old workhorses had apparently finally given up.
The countertop appliances, like the coffeemaker, were newer as well. And instead of the rack of hooks under the cupboards to hold the cooking utensils, they were all gathered in a blue crock with a cheerful daisy painted on the front. New canisters matched it, each one with a word at the bottom in white script: Flour, Sugar, Coffee, Tea .
I went to the one labeled Coffee and peeked in. The grounds inside were in a plastic bag, its top twisted closed. I opened it and gave it a sniff. Oh yeah, that was stale.
No matter; still caffeinated. And sugar could cure a lot of ills—I checked the sugar canister and saw it was half full. Hard as a rock, but I could scrape off a couple spoonsful. Okay, then. I went to the coffeemaker, found the filters in the cupboard directly above it, where they’d always been, and got busy making some artificial energy.
As I filled the carafe, an ancient habit flared up, and I lifted my eyes to the window over the sink. I’d stood here many mornings, watching the fog swirl around the guest cabins nestled among the trees. This morning, all I saw behind the white curtains with tiny sunflowers—also new—on the other side of the glass was plywood, and I remembered that the house was so dark not because it was before six in the morning but because the windows were boarded up.
When the coffee was brewing, I opened the junk drawer and pulled out the hammer. In my bare feet, I went out the kitchen door, stepped onto the small back porch, moved the metal glider that had been under the window all my life, and got to work prying the first window free. I’d need to grab a ladder from the toolshed to get the topmost nails out, but a good start could be had while I stood on the porch.
I had the bottom and most of one side loose when the back door screeched open, and Wyatt stumbled sleepily onto the porch, barefoot and wearing basketball shorts and the ratty Dragon Ball Z tee he loved to sleep in. His hair was mussed, and for this first moment of the day, he looked like my baby boy, without a care in the world.
“Mornin’ lollipup,” I said, greeting him with a silly nickname I hadn’t used for years.
It made him laugh. “Mornin’.” He shivered and pulled his arms into his tee through the sleeves. “You weren’t lying about the chilly mornings.”
I gave him a dramatically intense look. “I would never lie to you about something so important.”
“You’re a dork,” he smirked. As another nail squealed free of the board, he added, “You’re getting an early start.”
“Yeah. Couldn’t sleep, and I need some sunlight.”
He looked around; fog coated the floor of the woods and swirled around the trees all the way to their brushy tops. “Sunlight?”
“It’s there. It’s supposed to be sunny by noon today, and by then, we’ll have the windows clear.”
“Can I do that for you?” Pushing his arms back through his sleeves, he stepped close and offered to take the hammer.
“No, I got it. It feels good, actually, to be doing something physical after sitting behind the wheel for most of a week. If you’re ready to get busy, you can pack up our little living-room campsite.” As Wyatt nodded and grabbed the screen door again, I added, “There’s coffee in the pot—but beware, I found it in a canister, so it’s stale. I do not vouch for flavor. There is sugar, though.”
“Milk?”
I laughed as I worked another nail free. “I think I saw some powdered creamer in the cupboard above the pot, next to the filters. If there’s milk in that fridge, we don’t want it. In fact, if there’s any food in there at all, we are going to deeply regret opening that thing. It’s been without power for years. Might be better to junk it and get another one, just in case.”
Considering the state of the house, abandoned suddenly, of course the fridge was full of rotten food. Having been sealed so long, the stench would be waiting to knock us unconscious at the first chance. Then the whole cabin would reek of decay and ozone for weeks.
“Can we afford a new fridge?” Wyatt asked.
Technically, yes. We could, but we shouldn’t. It would put a dent in my savings, which was meant to support us and pay for repairs on this property so I could either get the motel up and running again or get it in shape for sale. Which of those choices I preferred would depend largely on how things went once everybody knew I was back. Either way, my cash on hand needed to last for months.
I could use my credit card; I’d been guarding it with my life for the past year, and it still had almost no balance. But who knew what kind of expenses lay in wait ahead of us as we worked on this place? It felt like a bad idea, not to mention a bad omen, to start sucking up my credit on our first day.
“You know what? The two biggest cabins have kitchens with full-size fridges. Those will all be empty. We’ll use the hand truck we rented and haul one of them up here. We can take the one we’re afraid of to the dump on the way to return the truck.”
“ We’re not afraid of the fridge,” Wyatt teased. “ I’m curious. Who knows what kinds of things have been growing all this time. It’s like a science experiment!”
“Look, Bill Nye. If you want to do science, I’ll get you some baking soda and vinegar, and you can make a volcano like in grade school. Leave the demon fridge alone.”
“No fun,” he sighed and turned back to the door. “You want a cup?”
“Please. Lots of sugar. And start a grocery list. After I get this window done and we’ve had our terrible coffee, we’ll free the car and head into town.”
“Excellent!” The pure delight on my son’s face as he went into the house warmed my heart and my mood, and again I remembered that for Wyatt, this was all new. More than that, it was our destination. We’d arrived at the end of a long, scary road, and for him, Bluster held no ghosts or demons. For him, Bluster was hope.
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 or ramshackle 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 he’d been only a baby when I’d sat him.
Mr. Mendoza’s expression darkened dramatically, and he gave his head a brisk shake. Something bad had happened, maybe divorce. I was curious, but I didn’t pry. I knew what it felt like to be asked painful questions.
When he spoke, the cloudburst had passed, but he didn’t answer my questions. “I think you can call me Roman now, Leonor—I mean Leo. You’re not a kid anymore.”
How much older than me was he? Maybe something like ten years? He’d seemed a lot older when I was a teen, but mainly because he’d had a wife and a kid and a mortgage—and a minivan. The complete Dad Mode starter pack. Now, though, despite the kiss of tinsel in his dark hair and scruff of beard, and the rays of lines at the corners of his eyes, he seemed much closer to my own age. The span between eighteen and twenty-eight is considerably wider than between thirty-seven and forty-seven, I guess. Obviously, it was silly to keep calling him Mr. Mendoza.
I laughed. “No, I haven’t been a kid for a long time. So hi, Roman.”
“Hi,” he echoed with a small, warm smile, his dark eyes caught with my own. Then he looked to my right, and I remembered I had a child. “Hello,” Roman said, “and who are you?”
“This is my son, Wyatt.”
Roman offered his hand. “Wyatt. It’s good to meet you. I’m Roman.”
Wyatt shook with him, and I smiled internally at his studied, firm grip. “It’s good to meet you, too, sir.”
As they released hands, Mr. Mendoza—Roman—focused again on me. “Are you back to stay?”
The complexities of my escape from and return to town landed on me all at once. I’d fled in the night without a word. Then, years later, my mother had died and I hadn’t known it for a year afterward. I doubted I’d have come back then even if I had known right away. I did not mourn that death, and I’d thought I’d left Bluster behind for good.
But the residents of Bluster had had a different relationship with my mother. Though she’d been difficult and demanding in general, only I had been an actual target, and most of the folks around here had considered Marilyn Braddock to be at least a neighbor. No doubt they were appalled that I had ‘abandoned’ her.
Reminding the first person I’d seen in town about all the reasons people might be angry at me or even disgusted would be an inauspicious beginning, certainly.
“Um, I’m not sure. We’re ... we’re at the Sea-Mist, and we’re going to get the place cleaned up. But I’m not sure if it’s better to open it again or sell it. We’re feeling our way, I guess.”
He gave me a closed-mouth smile and nod, and I wondered if I’d picked up a hint of judgment in that reaction or if I was simply paranoid.
“Understood. Well, I need to get my coffee and get back to the shop. If you need anything, let me know.”
The abrupt conclusion to our encounter suggested I was not paranoid.
“Sure. Thanks, Roman. It’s good to see you.” A kick of intuition stopped me from sending his wife my regards.
“It’s good to see you, too. And it’s good to meet you, Wyatt. I hope you like Bluster.”
“I already do, sir,” my perfect son replied.
“Leonora Braddock? Is that you?”
We all three turned to the reedy voice I remembered, though it had gained some cracks since I’d last heard it. Catherine stood at the cash register, looking at me with naked shock.
“She goes by Leo these days,” Roman informed her with a smile.
“Hi, Catherine.” Though I had been raised to always call my elders by their honorific, Catherine was the exception. She would not countenance being called by anything but her first name, insisting that surnames were for bureaucrats.
“Well, hi, honey!” The slim old woman hurried around the counter and didn’t slow until she’d wrapped her arms around me and squeezed. “You’re home! Finally!”
Out of nowhere, I was in real danger of crying. I’d forgotten Catherine’s wholehearted and uncomplicated affection and the way she and her diner had been a safe place to be when home was not. Then, I’d understood only that much and no more, but now, looking back, I saw that Catherine had known young me had needed that safe space. Maybe she’d even known why.
I’d forgotten a lot about Bluster, it seemed. In my memory, the whole town had been buried under my disdain for my mother and my desperate need to forget her.
“Hi, Catherine,” I said again, my voice muffled against the older woman’s shoulder. “I missed you.”
“Oh, honey,” was all Catherine said in return.