THIRTEEN Reacquainting
I stood in the bedroom that had been my mother’s and was now mine, and I stared at the open closet. What does one wear to a dinner that might be a date but is probably just old sort-of friends getting reacquainted?
I am not, and I have never been, especially into fashion. I’m sure part of that has to do with how I was raised. Running a motel is not a get-rich-quick scheme, and the Sea-Mist isn’t a luxury resort. My mother and I lived a fairly spartan life of just enough but rarely more.
Also, when I started babysitting at the age of thirteen, she decided that I could pay for my own personal items, so beyond a one-hundred-dollar bill handed to me every August the week before school started, which was her contribution to my school supplies and anything else I needed for school and life for the year, I had to buy my own stuff.
I got really good at thrifting and repurposing. Working in the school office in high school also gave me first-look access to the unclaimed stuff in the lost-and-found box at the end of the year, and I managed some real scores there.
In high school, with such limited resources at a time when one’s appearance could be the difference between getting to your locker unbothered or ending up on your ass with your belongings tossed hither and yon, I leaned in to the emo/goth thing. That vibed well with my generally bleak and disaffected outlook, too.
My life as an adult, after the first couple of years away (and until it all went to hell), was pretty calm and comfortable, and I sort of evolved away from the sharp edges of my look, too. I landed smack in suburban mom territory, shopping mainly at Target for casual and places like J. Jill for work. I’m more interested in being comfy-cute than having a ‘style.’ As far as I’m concerned, the best thing to happen to clothes since I started wearing them is spandex in jeans.
T-shirts, jeans, and yoga pants make up at least half my wardrobe. The other half is made up of teacher clothes—slightly nicer jeans, dress slacks that are basically thicker yoga pants, a few skirts, and an array of blouses. Work or casual, my clothes are all built for comfort.
My shoes, too. I will confess to a real weakness for boots, but otherwise my shoes are sneakers, Birkenstocks, and flats with good arch support. I have two pair of black heels: basic three-inch pumps and one torturous pair of four-inch strappy sandals, for rare dress-up events.
Micah had one or two social functions with his company every year, for which I had two little black dresses: a cocktail dress, for more formal functions, and a Michael Kors sheath for client dinners.
The sheath was probably the best thing in my closet to wear to dinner. It was just a plain, sleeveless sheath, so I could dress it up or down with accessories. (This was how I’d rationalized spending five hundred dollars on a dress at an outlet mall.) If I wore it with flats and simple jewelry, and Roman showed up in jeans, I could grab my denim jacket and not look overdressed.
However, the last time I’d worn the sheath, I’d been standing at Micah’s open grave. I was not ready to put that dress on again. Maybe I never would be.
So teacher clothes would have to do. I finally settled on a pair of black slacks, a dressy tee with a drape neckline in plum, a color I thought worked nicely with my dark hair and eyes. My trusty pair of black ballet-style flats with the teacher-approved arch support and some simple silver jewelry finished it off. For makeup ... okay, I went a little heavier than I would have for work, adding a bit of winged eyeliner to the usual routine.
Leaning in close to the mirror to try to add liner to my water line without blinding myself, a flaw in the old glass caught my attention, and all of a sudden twenty years disappeared. I sat back and my mother was alive again, and I was in her room.
That’s not quite the right way to say it. I knew she was dead, I knew I was in the present, but the past overlaid itself in my head somehow, and I felt like I was going to get caught rummaging through her things any second.
Wyatt joked about wishing the Sea-Mist were haunted and being disappointed that it wasn’t. But for me, it was. I mean, I was glad to take it over, and there was no small amount of pettiness in that feeling. I liked the idea of erasing her from this place and finally making it my home. A clean sweep.
The price for that, however, was my mother sometimes emerging from a blind corner and sending me spiraling.
A screaming fight with her in the kitchen, one of many times she’d called me a whore, or a demon sent to punish her, or simply a burden. That time in the living room when she’d backhanded me so hard she’d opened my cheek with her ring. The electric zing I felt every time I heard Wyatt close his bedroom door, the room that had been mine—remembering the snick of the lock on the outside of that door. Or now, this quaking sensation of guilt and fear of discovery.
I was in her room, where I’d never been allowed.
Maybe that was why I’d kept some of her bedroom furniture. The echo of the girl I’d been wanted to smear my presence all over these things I’d not been allowed to touch. I’d replaced the bed—hers had been a full size and mine was a queen—and brought my own dresser and lingerie chest in, but I’d kept those pieces which had drawn me to peer through the narrow slit of an ajar door when I was young.
I breathed out that icy blast of haunting and looked around. I sat at the antique vanity table that had been my mother’s grandmother’s. An art deco style, it wasn’t my preferred style now, but as a girl, every glimpse I’d caught of it had made me think of movie stars from the old studio system days—Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, Grace Kelly, Myrna Loy—in slinky satin, perched on a satin puff while they fussed with their hair.
When Wyatt and I were moving in, there had been no question in my mind that I’d keep it, but now, as I prepared for a maybe-date, it felt like Marilyn Leonora Braddock the First was perched on the mirror like a gargoyle, looking for a way to hurt me from the beyond.
And yes, if you noticed and are now wondering, the woman who had never wanted me named me after herself. My legal name is Marilyn Leonora Braddock II.
Maybe you’re doubly surprised I didn’t take Micah’s name when we married or even completely changed my name when I left Bluster. But names are strange things; like ants, they carry far more weight than their size. For all my desperation to cleave myself from my mother, I’d had that name from the day of my birth. It was braided into who I’d grown to be and how I understood myself. I’m not an Ashley or a Kiera or a Bonnie. I am Marilyn Leonora Braddock, daughter of a woman with the same name.
Leo to friends and strangers alike. Lennie to a special two.
It was far more potent a break, and far safer for my own sense of self, to simply call myself Leo. That name felt like mine at once. And it would have enraged my mother to know I’d turned ‘her’ name into a ‘boy’s name.’
The doorbell rang. That would be Roman.
“Got it, Mom!” Wyatt called as he trotted up the hallway.
I closed my eyes and forced all thoughts of that woman back into the shadows where they belonged. Then, with one more check of my look in her antique mirror, I fluffed my hair, stood and did a quick spritz-and-walk through my favorite cologne, and went out to meet my ... whatever he was.
ROMAN WAS DRESSED FOR a date.
He wore black trousers and a medium blue button-up shirt that I thought was silk at first glance (it turned out to be a really nice, high thread-count cotton). Over the shirt he wore a fashionably weathered leather jacket in that cool color like a baseball glove. His usually tousled hair was neatly combed, and his close-cropped beard had extra sharp edges. Also, he smelled of expensive cologne. I hoped our ‘scent profiles’ didn’t clash.
Wyatt had let him in, and they both stood on the other side of the guest counter, seeming to have already dived into a big conversation. Roman looked over as I came into the living room, and his smile was warm and intimate and for only me.
I almost had another of those time-machine moments, complete with guilt and fear, as I realized I’d seen that kind of smile on his face before. For Mrs. Mendoza, when she’d come out from getting dressed for date night.
Roman and I really had a lot to talk about.
“Hey,” he said, as I came around the end of the counter. “You look great.”
“Thanks,” I answered, smiling—and also thinking that ‘great’ might be something you told a friend about their look, so maybe this wasn’t a date after all? “You look good, too.”
“You ready to go?”
I grabbed my denim jacket off the coat rack. “Yep.” To Wyatt, I instructed, “Stay in the house, and call me if you need anything. There’s cold fried chicken in the fridge for supper.”
My dear son rolled his eyes at me. “I know, Mom. I put it there. And where would I go? I don’t have any friends yet. Or a driver’s license.”
“Fine. Don’t set anything on fire or destroy anything.”
“Well, I’m gonna be bored, then.”
Roman laughed as I tugged Wyatt’s ear. I noticed that his gaze lingered on Wyatt a few seconds longer, while his amusement seemed to fade away. Then he smiled at me and opened the door. “After you.”
ON THE WAY TO THE RESTAURANT , Roman and I kept the conversation to small talk. I was feeling awkward, possibly being on my first first date in close to twenty years and not even sure I was on a date, and I think maybe Roman was feeling awkward as well. Or I was projecting. In any case, as we buckled our seat belts, I complimented his ride—a Rivian electric pickup—and he thanked me, and then we were quiet for a few minutes until Roman asked me how Wyatt and I were settling in at the Sea-Mist. I considered mentioning the damage to Cottage 12 and that weird encounter with Manfred but ended up choking and only saying we were settling in fine.
It was weird and uncomfortable, that drive to the restaurant.
But finally we were in town, on Marina Street. Roman pulled into a small lot next to Trattoria Siciliana.
When I lived here as a kid, this building had been a kind of seedy, extremely popular taco shack. I could not tell you if it had an actual name; the only designation on the building had been a big piece of hand-painted plywood over the door, dominated by the word TACOS in big, vivid red letters. Everybody simply called the place ‘the taco shack’—but we kids were more likely to turn to our friends and go, “Tacos?” To which they’d invariably answer, “TACOS!” and everyone knew what we all meant.
Trattoria Siciliana was several steps higher on the ‘nice’ scale. The stucco building, which had been painted an eye-popping yellow with electric blue trim, was now a calmer, more natural stone color. The trim was stained wood, and the door—also stripped of its Crayola color and stained something like walnut—was sheltered by a pergola, with grapevines wrapped and draped over it. A sign with the restaurant’s name in elegant script hung from a beam of the pergola.
Roman led me through the front door with his hand at my lower back (date?), and we entered a place that looked as if it could not possibly have once housed a seedy taco shack with cheap Formica tables and stackable chairs shoved at the walls as indoor seating. The walls were now distressed plaster, and landscape paintings (probably of Italy) and plants that were either real or excellent fakes provided the décor. The floor was smooth flagstone. Seating was square tables, four-tops and two-tops, each covered with a white linen tablecloth and matched with upholstered chairs. The lighting was romantically low, and each table had a wicker-wrapped chianti bottle with a lit taper in its mouth. Pretty instrumental music played at a soothing volume.
Definitely not a shack. A date place.
The host, a slim twenty-something woman dressed in the usual host uniform of a little black dress and ballet flats, led us to a table snugged into a cluster of tall potted plants in a secluded corner. It was looking likely that we were on a date.
But then Roman sat without pulling my chair out. Normally, I don’t care about or even notice stuff like that, but on that evening, when I was trying to figure out what this dinner was, it seemed like a not-date sign.
I was very confused.
We sat, and the host handed us each a menu in a handsome leather folder. I was starting to get worried that Trattoria Siciliana was a three-dollar-sign place, but the menu had prices, and they weren’t awful. It wasn’t the taco shack, but it wasn’t the French Laundry, either.
The menu was extensive, with some emphasis on seafood, like most coastal restaurants. It was a fair guess the chef bought fish straight from a local fisherman; I wondered where they bought their other meats.
“Do you see anything you like?” Roman asked after we’d quietly studied our menus for a few minutes.
“Several things. The Sicilian swordfish with linguine is one thing catching my eye.”
“That’s a great choice. That fish was probably swimming this morning. Rico, the chef here, buys right off the boat every day like I do, but we supply their beef, pork, and chicken.”
I almost apologized and said I’d pick a dish with a Mendoza meat, but then I decided that was dumb. I didn’t know if we were on a date—and even if we were, I wanted the swordfish. So instead I focused on what he’d actually said, and how closely aligned it was to what I’d been thinking right before he’d said it.
“I was just wondering that. Do you supply all the restaurants in town?”
“In town, almost. McDonald’s obviously get their meat shipped in, but the others, yeah. In the region, we have a decent share. We’re not big enough to supply too many commercial kitchens, and we’re too expensive for the cheap places that don’t have personal relationships with us, but we do okay.”
The server, a twenty-something man in the usual black-chinos-white-oxford-black-tie server uniform, stopped at our table then. He set a basket of sliced bread down and said, “Hi, Mr. Mendoza.”
“Hi, Dustin. How are you?”
“I’m good, thanks.” He set a small plate on the table, picked up the olive oil cruet and the balsamic vinegar cruet, and made a little bread dip.
Nodding at me, Roman said, “This is my friend, Leo Braddock.” And yeah, I heard the word friend and added it to my mental notes. Still no idea what this dinner was.
Dustin turned to me, and I watched enthusiasm pink his fair cheeks. “Ms. Braddock! You moved in at the Sea-Mist! Your mom was Mrs. Braddock, right?”
“Dustin ...” Roman said quietly but firmly.
But I wasn’t bothered by it. As gossip goes, that was some very basic information. So I smiled and said, “Hi, Dustin. Yes, that’s me. Nice to meet you.”
“You, too. Um ... sorry. I should ask if you’d like to order wine or a cocktail?”
Roman smiled, his eyes fully focused on me. “You’re thinking the swordfish for dinner?”
“Oh—are you ready to order?” Dustin cut in.
Lifting his eyes to the young man (whose age I was mentally downgrading to late teens), Roman said, “No, Dustin, we’re not planning to rush dinner.”
The town meeting was a bit more than two hours off, so we had some time. But did his wanting to linger land in the date column or the not-date column?
“Yeah, I’m thinking swordfish,” I told him.
“Would you like to share a bottle of wine?” Roman asked.
“That sounds great.”
“Do you mind me ordering it?”
“Go right ahead.”
Again, he smiled at me before he looked up at Dustin. “We’ll have the 2016 Grillo—and we’ll be ready to order when you bring the wine.”
“Sounds good. I’ll be right back with your wine service.”
“He’s an eager beaver, isn’t he?” I observed as Dustin departed.
Roman chuckled. “He’s a good boy. He and his folks moved to town about ... uh, ten years ago? His father has the Allstate office on Bower, and his mom runs the florist shop next door to that.”
“Oh, that’s cute.”
Our menus were still open before us, and we were still perusing them. I realized that I didn’t know if we were going Dutch, either. I had to get some answers here soon.
Oh, hell, I thought, just freaking ask.
“Would you like an appetizer? I’ll brag a little and say the antipasto platter—”
“Are we on a date right now, Roman?” I blurted, cutting him off.
And cut him off I certainly had. He went still, mouth still partly open, frozen in the middle of his sentence. We sat there staring at each other for about a year—okay, ten seconds, maybe, but it felt like a year.
When he replied, he hedged. “How would you feel if we were?”
How would I feel? Glad. A little giddy, even. But hesitant as well. Part of me still felt like the teenager babysitting his kid. That’s dumb, I know it now and I knew it that night, but feelings are not always smart, you know?
Also, and more importantly, I was only guessing about his marital situation, and I needed the real answer. “To know how to answer that, I need to know about Mrs. Mendoza. When I left Bluster, you were very married. I noticed you don’t wear a ring anymore, but ...”
He looked at his bare left hand and didn’t look up again as he answered. “I took the ring off about a year and a half ago.” He met my eyes and dived in. “Carla and Gabriel died seven and a half years ago. They were coming back from her folks’ place in Redding, and a logging truck on 299 took a switchback too fast. Hit them head on and sent them all over the cliff.”
I was instantly sick and sad and profoundly guilty. I’d been thinking divorce! “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I asked!”
“Don’t be. It’s been long enough that the pain is an old ache. For the most part, I’ve grown used to it. Besides, it’s common knowledge here, and it’s relevant. I should have said earlier.”
“No. That’s a thing you say in your own time.”
That made him smile a little. “Is the time right for me to ask about your ... situation?”
My loss was fresher, and the ache maybe keener, but there was more than grief in my feelings. There was anger and betrayal as well. “Micah—my husband, Wyatt’s dad—died about fifteen months ago. He was an avid climber. That day he was free-soloing a cliff face and lost his grip. Dropped about eighty feet.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. And then, right after he died, I found out he’d drained all our assets on stupid investments. Wyatt and I lost everything while we were still in our funeral clothes. It’s a big reason we’re here.” There was more to the story, like the implosion of my career, but for now, those were the important points.
Dustin was back with the wine. Roman and I sat back and let him do his thing. I watched as Roman performed the Ritual of the Fancy Wine. Personally, I’m content with wine in a box, so all that sniffing and swishing and swirling is lost on me. Kinda hot watching Roman perform, though.
He approved the wine, and Dustin filled our glasses. We ordered—the antipasto to share, swordfish for me and halibut for Roman, and a finish of caprese salad.
When Dustin left, Roman honed his attention on me again. He set his elbows on the table and leaned in a little. “This is a date if you want it to be a date, Leo.”
I got that good little flutter at the base of my throat. “Because that’s what you want?” I asked as I leaned in a little, too.
He nodded. “It’s what I want.”
So here’s the question that crawled unwanted into my head at that moment: Why ?
Two weeks ago, it had been two decades since we’d laid eyes on each other. Way back those two decades, I’d been a teenager and he’d been a man with a family—a young man with a family, but still. It would have been creepy—it would have been inappropriate—for him to be attracted to me then. I had a pass because teenage girls are supposed to crush on older guys, but it doesn’t work the other way.
I know he hadn’t liked me that way back then. He’d been manifestly in love with his wife. I don’t mean performatively, like he doted on her ostentatiously when people were looking. You could just tell, even if he wasn’t around her. He loved her. To me, he’d simply been a nice, handsome man who’d trusted me with his child when he took his beloved on romantic dates. Like this, probably.
But I’d been back for about a minute and a half, and Roman had decided he wanted to date me? That seemed a bit strange. Had he been with anyone since he’d lost Mrs. Mendoza and Gabriel? Why now? Why me?
Again, I couldn’t deal with so many questions, so I simply asked. “Why?”
He frowned and sat back a bit. “Why? Why what?”
“Why do you want to date me?” Too late, I saw that it would have been better, safer, to ask why he wanted this particular dinner to be a date, but the broader question was already out, so I let it stand.
Roman didn’t seem to care about the distinction between the particular and the broad. Even more interesting, he’d picked up on the root of my question. “If you’re asking if I was attracted to you before, the answer is no. I saw that you were pretty, of course, and I ... I suppose I felt something like ... I don’t know, maybe protective of you, but no, I wasn’t attracted to anyone but Carla for as long as I had her, and for a long while after that.”
“Protective of me? Why?”
His head dropped to the side an inch or two. “Because of your mom.”
It’s so weird how it affects you—or me, at least—when you learn that something you thought was a secret, a bad thing that happened to you that you thought no one knew, was actually an ‘open secret’—which is a really fucked-up term, by the way. It means all of the shame but none of the protection. First, there’s the shame of realizing that people knew you were a victim. There’s also some relief, to know that your tormentor had been seen for who she was. But then there’s the understanding that people knew. They knew and yet no one saved you.
Since I’d been back in town, I’d had a vague, broad sense a few times that people knew more than I’d realized. But that sense had been dinged a few times as well. Until this dinner, I was still pretty sure people thought my mother had simply been particularly strict with me.
Maybe that was all Roman meant now.
“What about my mother?” I asked.
There must have been something in my tone to warn him he’d waded into waters infested with shrieking eels. I noted a shift in his expression, too subtle to identify the location of the shift, but apparent nonetheless.
“Nothing in particular,” he began, “but everybody struggled with Marilyn, Leo. We all knew she was difficult and demanding, and nobody thought it was easy to be her daughter. Carla pointed out to me that you seemed to buy things for yourself, even food, and not in the recreational way most teenagers spend money on themselves. It was her idea to hire you to watch Gabriel—I thought you were too young to be trusted with our son. But she was right. You were great with him, and we were glad to help you out financially.”
“This is very much not feeling like a date,” I said when I could no longer keep my head up.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “Would it help to change the subject?”
I forced myself to look at him again. “Yes, it would, but I don’t want to. How old are you, Roman?” My suddenly intensely ambivalent feelings gave me the power to be more direct. I didn’t care quite so much in that moment if Roman wanted to date me.
He smiled, unaffected by the rudeness of the question. “I turned forty-eight in May. And you’re thirty-seven. Is that too big a gap for you?”
Micah had been more than six years older than me, so really, eleven years wasn’t much. Especially as we were both in the range of middle-age. “If you hadn’t known me as a kid, I’d say it’s not a problem at all. But—”
“But it is a problem because I did know you?”
“No, you didn’t let me finish my sentence. But it’s a problem if your interest in me now is in any way because you feel protective of the teenager I was, or guilty because you didn’t do more to help me.”
He frowned deeply. “Did you need more help? Would you have taken it?”
Of course, Dustin arrived then with our antipasto platter.
Great timing, kid.