EIGHT Sparks
T hat encounter with Erin girded me for the market. I went through the doors shielded against whispers and recriminations.
But the shield was unnecessary.
The market itself was a charming surprise. The original IGA had had its charms, too, I suppose, if one is a fan of ancient, cracked linoleum and narrow aisles hemmed in by workaday shelves crammed full of boxes, cans, and jars. But I was wrong about the Whole Foods comparison. Instead of that hyper-stylized, do-gooder aesthetic, the Granary seemed more like giant pantry. The shelves were wood and finished with decorative moldings. Produce was arranged in crates and baskets. The aisle signs hanging from the ceiling were framed wood with painted lettering in a serif font. The floor was wood plank. And there were a lot of locally-sourced options mixed in with the name-brand, mass-produced stuff.
The ’café’ in the store name was more like a tiny coffee shop. A little counter in a front corner, with an array of coffeemaking equipment and a small case of baked goods. Three two-tops, of brightly painted wood, sat before the counter in a cluster. The coffee smelled great, so I got myself a cup to drink as I shopped. I didn’t know the girl in her late teens who made my macchiato, but her two long black braids and chin tattoo suggested she was Yurok.
In a major city, a market with such a ‘cottagecore’ aesthetic would have pricing to make Whole Foods seem like a discount grocery. But here, the prices seemed average—average for California, at least. I filled up one of their cute little shopping carts pretty quickly as I drank my delicious coffee.
And, though there were at least a dozen other shoppers, I hadn’t yet encountered anyone I knew—unless the years had aged us so much we didn’t recognize each other.
I was mostly through my serpentining tour of the store and standing before an impressive array of honey and honey-infused spreads as I tried to decide between the local honey brand in the adorable beehive-shaped jar or the local honey brand in the adorable bear-shaped jar, when someone carrying a large box came around the corner and almost ran into me.
We both gasped and jumped back at the same time.
The man holding the box said, “Oh. Excuse me, I’m sorry.”
He was in his twenties somewhere, I figured. Definitely younger than me. He had long, black, ruler-straight hair, dark eyes, and a tan complexion. Jessie had told me that the Greyfather family, citizens of the Yurok tribe, had bought the building not long after the IGA closed, so I figured I was looking at a Greyfather kid. I suppose it was just as likely that he was from another Yurok family and simply an employee, but my brain must have recognized something in him, because I immediately assumed Greyfather.
Those kids had been little when I lived here before. Mrs. Greyfather had worked as a housekeeper at the cottages, and I’d watched her boys from time to time, when she’d had to bring them to work and I was home. Very cool that from those humble roots (I guarantee my mother did not pay well), Mrs. Greyfather now owned an important town business.
I took a guess about who’d almost run into me. “Peter?”
He tilted his head and put on one of those uncertain smiles we use when we’re not sure how a conversation is going to go. “Yes. Do I know ...” His eyes narrowed, and then his smile settled naturally on his face. “Leonora! We heard you’re back!” He set the box down and offered open arms. I stepped into them for a quick, warm hug.
I’d expected glares and recriminations from the people of Bluster, but, so far, the only person who’d been blatantly unhappy to see me had been Erin, who had good cause. Had I built up a baseless anxiety about how people felt about my disappearance? Had they understood more than I’d known about who my mother was and why I’d leave like that? Or had enough time passed that such things didn’t matter anymore?
Those were not questions I could answer right now, so I set them aside.
As I gave Peter a friendly squeeze, I told him, “I go by Leo now.” I’d shed as much of my past self as I could when I’d left Bluster, and I’d been gone from that self for so long my full name was like an old scar, forgotten despite the mark that remained, but sore when it was bumped.
“Leo. I like it,” Peter said as he stepped back. “Are you two-spirit?”
For some reason, the question made my cheeks warm a little. I mean, I’m a Millennial, and I never had any heartburn about people starting to use they/them or neopronouns and claim different gender identities. I know I lived in Arkansas a long time, but the actual people living there are a lot more diverse than the nutsos who get elected make them out to be. There are plenty of nonbinary and other LGBTQ+ people in Arkansas, just like everywhere else. Still, though, I think Peter was the first person I’d ever encountered who heard my preferred name and asked about my gender. It felt momentarily weird.
“No, no. I’m cis—just the one spirit. I just like Leo better.”
He accepted the correction with a nod and moved on. “You look good, Leo.”
Peter had been a second-grader when I last saw him; my weird feeling shifted to focus on the way he was eyeing me. But I let that thought roll on by and accepted his words as a simple compliment—as they’d probably been intended. “Thank you. You’ve grown up well yourself.”
He thanked me with a charmingly humble shrug. “Have you come back home to stay?”
“That’s an open question at this point. I’m going to figure out what to do with the cottages. I might open them back up, or I might sell. I’ll decide when I understand more what those choices mean.”
“Makes sense. Well, welcome home, however long you stay. My mom is away from the store today, but when you come again, she’ll be glad to see you, too.”
That was an obvious sign that this little greeting was over—which was fine; we didn’t need to be exchanging a lifetime’s worth of stories in front of the honey and jams. Not that I’d want to get that deep with Peter regardless. He was still a little kid in my mind, despite the evidence of his maturity standing tall before me. Probably exactly the way Roman saw me.
“Thanks, Peter. It’s good to see you.”
As he got back to work, I chose the beehive-shaped honey jar and got on with my shopping.
ONE THING THE GRANARY did not have was a meat counter. They had packaged deli meats, but nothing fresh. They didn’t have even the plastic-wrapped, Styrofoam-trayed stuff. No ground beef, no chicken breasts, no pork chops, no ribeye steaks. When I asked the checker—a young blonde I did not know—about it, she said the Yurok had always had an arrangement with the Mendozas, and the Greyfather family had seen no reason to disrupt that, since Mendoza Meat I had never seen him before in my life. And we hadn’t collided—I’d done some fancy footwork to make sure of it, while he’d stormed forward like a snowplow. There was no reason on earth for the man to be angry with me.
I was so stunned by that strange encounter I could only stand where I was and gape at the closing door.
“That’s Finn Nyberg,” Roman said. “Don’t mind him. He’s just like that. Davy there says a bad mood is Finn’s brand.” His voice was close; when I swiveled my head, he was standing within three feet of me and smiling.
Even wearing a bloody apron and smelling of halibut, the man was hot. It was his smile. Such a good smile. Handsome, but more than that. It didn’t just go all the way to his eyes, it went all through him. Roman Mendoza was a good man, and his smile was bone deep.
It wouldn’t take much to revive my crush on this guy, and this time it wouldn’t be some dumb schoolgirl fantasy, something to write in my diary with a pink pen. But I wasn’t going to do that, was I? No , I told myself, I am not . I had far too much to straighten out in my life; I needed no additional complications.
“How are you, Leo?” he asked, his eyes diving into mine. He looks that way at everybody, remember. He cares about everybody. He’s basically Jesus—whom you also, admit it, thought was hot when you were in high school. “You getting things arranged at the motel alright?”
“I’m good, thanks. And yeah—we’ve got the main cabin mostly livable. It was in surprisingly good shape, considering.”
That was true—it needed a lot of work, but mainly of the cleanup and update varieties, getting it to look like our home. Right now, it made a good shelter. The roof seemed solid, none of the windows were broken, and the largest intruder we’d discovered so far was a fat house spider with an extremely well-developed web. We’d razed that poor girl’s house and sent her on her way to build another somewhere else.
There were a few signs of mice, but only their leavings. We hadn’t come across anything excessively gnawed yet. We’d got off easy.
I hadn’t gone into all the guest cottages; I didn’t know it yet, but soon enough, I wouldn’t feel like things were so easy around the Sea-Mist.
“In fact,” I continued, “we’re thinking of getting the old fire pit going tonight and, I guess, christening the place. We need animal flesh. What’s good today?”
His grin spread wide. “Everything’s good at Mendoza’s, Leo. But I have some beautiful flat-iron cuts that will grill up like a dream.”
“Sounds perfect. I’ll take two.”
“Great! Come on over.”
He went around the counter and pulled a length of white butcher paper from the roll. I stood before the case, taking in the delicious-looking meat, as he selected two steaks and wrapped them for me.
“Is Finn a local now?” I asked, still smarting a little from the encounter with the grump.
“Well, he’s only been around about five years, so no, he’s not a local. But he lives here—he mans the lighthouse.”
I looked up and let my jaw fall open. “He does what?”
Bluster Cove had a lighthouse, yes—a cute little one with tall, paned and beveled windows around the lamp and a cozy red-roofed cottage at its foot. It sat on a rocky islet about half a mile beyond the entrance to the cove itself. It had been around since before Bluster was an official town. But it had been automated when I was a little girl—and more to the point, it had been declared unnecessary by whatever state bureaucrats made those decisions. The town had kept it running for a while just for the historical factor, but they’d eventually decided it was too expensive to maintain the equipment, so it went dark when I was about thirteen.
“The lighthouse is running again? And there’s a keeper?”
Roman set my steaks on top of the case. He kept his hand on the package as he answered. “Yeah. About five years ago, the Chamber of Commerce made a big push to try to increase tourism, and the council agreed to start the lighthouse back up. Tourists were always disappointed that it was dark, you know. The council decided it would be cheaper in the long run to hire somebody to live there, run the light, and keep the place maintained than to get the machinery running again and keep that in good shape. I don’t know if that’s true, but the town PR makes a fuss about our ‘manned lighthouse.’”
“Well, that guy seems like the type to prefer living on a rock in the ocean, so I guess they picked well,” I replied.
Roman laughed. I tried hard not to be affected by the musical good nature of that laugh. I failed.
Ten years or so wasn’t much of an age gap in this point in our lives, was it?
I should have pushed Jessie for more gossip. She didn’t like gossip for schadenfreude’s sake, but obviously we’d routinely talked about people we knew back in the day, and she’d been full of talk yesterday. Mostly about herself and getting me to talk about myself and Wyatt, but we’d covered town news I’d missed, too. If I’d told her about seeing Roman at Catherine’s, and that brief, dark reaction he’d had when I’d asked after his wife and son—and the fact that he hadn’t answered me—she would have told me enough so I understood.
His left hand still rested on the package of steaks. There was no ring on his finger. He’d worn a ring before.
If I hadn’t asked about Mrs. Mendoza and Gabriel yesterday, I would have felt able to do so while I stood before him now. But I had, and he hadn’t answered, and I didn’t know what to do with that.
Wait. Why was it so important that I know the man’s marital status? I was still digging my son and myself out of an avalanche of grief and trouble caused by my husband’s death not much more than a year earlier. I was not interested in anything but getting us—Wyatt and me—on a stable course. Giving my child a good life, where he felt safe and loved and happy. Maybe that was in Bluster. Maybe it was not.
I was not interested in Roman Mendoza, no matter if I’d crushed on him as a teenager . His marital status was nothing more than gossip to me.
I reached up and took hold of the package of steaks. “Well, thanks for this. I guess I pay over there?” I nodded toward the register, where his employee, apparently named Davy, was wiping the counter down.
Roman didn’t move his hand right away, and our fingers brushed together. See, no. No! I was not living in a romance novel, so I absolutely did not feel a little thrill at that touch. Jesus, what was wrong with me?
Finally, he pulled his hand back, and I gathered the package of raw meat to my chest.
“Yep, Davy will take care of you.” He paused and did that deep-dive into my eyes again. “It’s good you’re back, Leo. Real good.”
I reminded myself that he looked at everybody that intensely and I hurried my butt over to the register. I needed to get back to my kid.