SIXTEEN Rough Day
I was screwed.
Early in the week following that town meeting, I sat in the mayor’s office—a much more humble space than you might imagine of a mayor’s office, but Bluster is a humble town—and stared at the paper in my hand: the property tax bill for the Sea-Mist. Mayor Holt sat in his chair across his Office Depot desk and looked at me with sympathy. Or maybe just plain pity. There’s a fine line between those emotions.
If I had to guess? Pity.
My mother had last paid her property taxes six years earlier. California allowed foreclosure proceedings after five years of unpaid taxes. This was the crux of Manfred’s smug antagonism: if the administrations of Bluster, Del Norte County, or the state of California so chose, they could foreclose on me right then. My one saving grace was that Mayor Holt was Team Leo. He didn’t want to foreclose, and nobody at the county or state level had noticed me.
Yet. No doubt Manfred had started addressing that oversight the minute he left the town meeting.
I was learning very quickly, sitting here in the mayor’s office, how ruefully ill-informed and ill-equipped I was for taking on this ‘inheritance.’ Until right now, I’d had no clear sense of the property’s value. I’d figured thirty Northern California acres of mainly redwood forest, half a mile from the Pacific coast, was probably worth some money, whether or not the business itself was an asset or a deficit to the value. But that was an unsubstantial, half-believed notion floating around in my head.
When I was a kid, I’d thought we were essentially poor. Like I’ve said, we lived at a level not far above subsistence, and I was responsible for most of the cost of my own upkeep from the time I was thirteen. Certainly there had not been a lot of money going toward living expenses, much less any kind of indulgence. And maybe it was true; maybe the upkeep of the cottages devoured any profits from the business.
But I was looking at a property tax statement that showed an assessed value of the Sea-Mist and the land it stood on of almost three million dollars. Not the sales value of the property, the tax assessment. That very delinquent tax bill, with accrued taxes, interest, and penalties, was nearly two hundred thousand dollars.
If I liquidated my pension account from teaching in Arkansas, drained all the funds I had at my disposal now, and maxed out my credit card, I could maybe pay half that bill. But I’d have no way of getting the Sea-Mist in shape to open—or to feed Wyatt and myself, for that matter.
Or I could take Manfred up on the offer he’d made that day in Cottage 12, sell the place to him and buy a little house in town and start over that way. Maybe I could get a teaching job at Bendixen or somewhere else within commuting distance.
I didn’t know the details of the offer Manfred had made—his card was still lying where he’d dropped it—but if the assessment was almost three million dollars, the sales value was significantly more. Millions of dollars. For a property that I owned free and clear, except for the property tax.
The decision was a no-brainer, obviously. Behind Door Number One: panic, struggle, and hopelessness as I tried to scrounge up two-hundred grand to clear this bill and then to figure out how to get the Sea-Mist earning again without any resources to make that happen. Behind Door Number Two: a likely windfall of millions of dollars, with which Wyatt and I might build a new life anywhere we wished. His college would be secure. Even if he wanted to be a neurosurgeon or something and study for ten years, his college would be secure. (He didn’t; at fifteen, he wanted to be a journalist. Or an archeologist.)
Behind Door Number Two was nothing but sunny skies and dreams fulfilled.
Only a fool would choose Door Number One.
So ... yeah. I guess I’m a fool.
We’ll get into the reasons I made the choice I did, but I swear I did not make my choice while I was sitting in Mayor Holt’s office, staring at a poster-size framed photograph of him grinning on a golf course, his hand on the shoulder of a portly, tanned, balding man in red striped golfing pants and a navy sweater vest with white stars over a white polo. Stars-and-Stripes seemed vaguely familiar to me, in an in-the-news sort of way, which was probably why that photo was so obnoxiously huge.
“Can I have some time to figure out what to do about this?” is what I asked the mayor.
“Of course,” he replied, wearing a smile I had in my own repertoire. It was a teacher’s smile, the gently firm expression we use when we’re conferencing with a student who has blown off most of the semester and is now trying desperately to save their grade. “Nobody on the council—nobody in town, I imagine—wants you to be foreclosed on. There’s not much interest in the development Manfred and his associates have planned.”
Before I could feel relief at that, he added, “But, Leo, please understand. The property is seriously in arrears, and Manfred is determined. I imagine he’s working above my head already, and probably has been for some time. If the county or state start proceedings, there’s not much I can do to get in the way.”
“How much time do you think I have?”
He shrugged. “Luckily in this case, the legal system is slow. Two weeks? Three, maybe? Once the process starts, you’ll have until five days before the sale to pay in full, so that’s another few weeks. Maybe six weeks in all.”
Six weeks seemed more like some space to put off the inevitable than time to actually accomplish anything, but in that moment being able to put off the inevitable felt not unlike a gift.
That tiny atom of not-horrific news softened the muscles in my neck and shoulders and stretched my lungs back to full capacity. I sighed. “Okay. Thank you for your time today, sir. I’ll figure out what to do next.”
When I stood, so did he. He offered his hand, and we shook over his desk. “I hope things work out for you, Leo. Whatever you decide to do.”
My smile was sincere. “Thank you. You’ve been very kind, and very helpful.”
“Of course. You’re one of us—and I, for one, am glad to have you home.”
MY brAIN CHURNED ON the drive home. I have to sell was a refrain bouncing off the inside of my skull, shouted by the sensible, mature, realistic version of me. The woman I’d been for the past twenty years. That version had only the one line, but she had a megaphone.
Obviously I had to sell. I owned a multi-million-dollar property that I would lose, would get zero dollars for , over a $200,000 delinquent property-tax bill I could not pay. Ironic, right? Selling, even selling for less than its value, could set Wyatt and me up comfortably. Possibly for the rest of our lives. Sensible, mature, realistic Leo was right. Obviously I had to sell.
But the stubborn, angry version of me, who’d been around much longer but who had, for those past twenty years, been mainly locked up in my brain’s cellar with the childhood that had formed her, crossed her arms, sucked her teeth, and reminded me that Darryl Manfred would win if I sold, even if I didn’t sell to him—and let’s be honest; his was the only offer on the table. That skeevy, sexist, self-important shithead would get his way. The thought made the back of my throat itch.
Worse than him, angry teen me said, my mother would win if I sold.
That thought pulled me up a little. How would my mother win?
As that question rolled to the fore of my churning mind, dusty echoes of my mother’s voice rose in a chorus: Worthless . Stupid . Ugly. No good. Clumsy. Failure. Parasite. Nothing.
What do you think a dumb little bitch like you is ever going to make of your life? What do you think you have to offer anybody? You’ve been hanging around my neck for eighteen years, so I know—I know better than anybody. Nothing. You never been nothing. You’ll never be nothing. You were born to be a weight around my neck. That’s all you’ll ever be.
I had made something of myself, I thought. On my own, I managed college, and later got a Master’s. I was a tenured teacher, a career I loved. I’d married a man who loved me. We’d made a beautiful child. We’d been financially comfortable. Away from my mother and her poisonous soul, I had made something of myself, and I had been happy.
I’d also thought I’d been secure, but it turned out that the main supports of that successful, happy life had been made of balsa wood. That financial comfort had been Micah’s smoke-and-mirrors magic act. I hadn’t seen behind the mirrors because I’d let him ‘handle our books,’ which really meant ‘control our finances.’ He was better at that stuff, I’d thought, so I’d let him handle it and skipped along happily thinking everything was great.
Really, I understood on that drive from the mayor’s office, I’d been so thoroughly dominated by my mother (teen Leonora scoffed angrily at that notion, but it was true; my ‘rebellions’ had all been small and cautious, thus really just symbolic) that I hadn’t understood how much control I’d handed right over to Micah without a qualm. I hadn’t even known what being in charge of myself would look like.
My teaching career, too, had given way after one blow from the Arkansas legislature, when they’d declared basically any book written by, or about, African Americans was the scary bogeyman they conjured out of whole cloth: ‘CRT’—and I guaran-damn-tee you not a single one of those chicken-fried good ol’ boys in the Legislature have the foggiest notion of either what Critical Race Theory actually is or what actually happens in K-12 classrooms.
Hint: it’s not CRT. Ever. Nor is it “grooming” when teachers assign book that include LGBTQ+ characters and themes. Indoctrination isn’t going on in public-school classrooms, unless you count compulsory recitations of the Pledge—or there wasn’t before legislative reactionaries got hold of it. Indoctrination happens when information is narrowed to one point of view, not when it’s widened to include many. Ahem.
Anyway. I hadn’t intended to puke politics all over this talk. I will always be salty about losing my career for the offense of being good at it, but the point right now is that I lost it. Wyatt was the only real thing that happened in my whole life away from Bluster. Now I was back here, with almost nothing to my name but the shitty motel that had been my prison for my whole childhood.
I wanted to make it mine . I wanted to turn it into something my mother could never have dreamt of.
I wanted to make her the failure.
And if I didn’t, if all I did was sell the business that had been in the Braddock family for three—now, with Wyatt, four—generations and use the proceeds to rebuild my life, that felt like relying on my mother to take care of me. Hanging around her neck, just like she always said.
That was how she would win if I sold.
But how could I not? Even if I sold every single stick of furniture, every book, every dish, every stitch of clothing, the car, all of it—my own things and the things she’d left behind—even if I emptied my retirement account and the little bit of money Wyatt and I had scraped up from already selling most of what we’d owned, I’d be lucky to pay half that bill. And then I’d have nothing to live on, much less restore the Sea-Mist.
Sensible Leo in my head lowered her megaphone and nodded sagely.
“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered aloud. “But you’re the one who thought you had it all together two years ago, so what the fuck do you know?”
I was so wrapped up in my schizophrenic mental argument, I didn’t see the whole-ass steel bumper lying in the road until I was just about on it. I swerved sharply—I was alone on that stretch of road, which was lucky, since I didn’t look before I swerved—but didn’t quite get around it. The Golf went over the end of the bumper with a sickening series of thumps.
My mental chaos forgotten, I was fully focused on the car and the road as I drove on, checking the rearview often to see if any parts of my car were about to fall off, or if I was leaving a scary wet trail in my wake. Nothing fell or dripped onto the road. After half a mile or so, I started to relax, thinking I’d had at least one small stroke of good luck.
That was when the tire pressure light went on.
Obviously.
AS FAR AS I COULD TELL , only one tire had been ruined by my little mishap—and that was good, because I only had one emergency donut tire. Also lucky: sensible, mature Leo knew how to change a tire and always made sure the spare was in good shape. Still, by the time I pulled into my driveway, in addition to the stress I’d started my drive home with, I was also dirty, frustrated, exhausted, and half an hour later than I’d told Wyatt was the latest that he could expect me.
Roman’s truck was parked in front of the cabin. That was unexpected. We’d spent most of Saturday together, going down with Wyatt to Eureka for lunch and a turn through the Arcata Farmers Market, and we’d texted through most of Sunday while he worked at his shop and Wyatt and I got Cottages 2 and 3 in shape, but we hadn’t spoken today and had no plans to see each other. In fact, knowing about my meeting with the mayor, Roman had told me he was there if I needed him, but he’d wait to hear from me.
My feelings upon seeing his truck were ... complicated. A whole lot of relief, first and foremost. I wasn’t sure what I wanted of Roman beyond attraction and companionship, but those were powerful draws. If nothing else, with Jessie out of town since almost the moment I arrived and Erin still not speaking to me, Roman was my only friend in Bluster. I enjoyed his company very much; he was kind and good-humored, and, best of all, he was mellow. I am not mellow, no matter how far you stretch the definition, but together we balance each other out and arrive at an enthusiastic kind of calm.
And yes, he is really attractive, in that comfortable, unassuming way that draws attention without demanding it.
But all that was why my feelings were complicated. Especially right then, as I climbed out of the Golf, rumpled and smudged with road dirt, my head full of fretful noise about the Sea-Mist, my past, and Wyatt’s and my future. Roman is a natural caretaker, and right then, god , I wanted to be taken care of. I wanted somebody to lift all my crap off my shoulders and set it up on a shelf I couldn’t reach, so I couldn’t try to pull it back onto myself, so I couldn’t even see it anymore.
But there was Micah, standing in the shadows of my mind, a reminder of what happened when I let somebody take care of me. And farther back in the gloom, my mother, nodding with obvious satisfaction; she’d always known I was incapable of doing anything on my own.
I’m explaining what was going on in my head so maybe what I did a few minutes later makes some kind of sense.
I went into the cabin, but nobody was in there. As I moved into the kitchen, though, I caught a whiff of smoke and meat. I went to the window over the sink, which looks out at the pretty, park-like area that serves as our ‘back yard’ and the common area for the cottages. Where the fire pit, a few picnic tables, and some Adirondack chairs are.
Roman and Wyatt were back there, standing near the fire pit, on which was arrayed a fine selection of steaks and skewers. Roman had a bottle of Corona in his hand, and Wyatt also had a clear bottle in his hand. A clear bottle of— what the fuck, did he give my fifteen-year-old son a —Orange Crush.
The nearest picnic table had a red-and-white-checked cloth spread over it. A short stack of plates and flatware sat at one end. On the ground at that end was an aluminum tub full of ice, beer, and soda.
Well. He’d made himself right at home, hadn’t he?
I stood at that window and watched them talking and laughing together. I couldn’t really hear their actual words from where I stood, but it looked like Roman was teaching Wyatt about grilling.
Micah had been a fairly competent camp cook, but he had not been a grillmaster. I’d been the cook of the family, and I knew my way around a grill, but Wyatt had never expressed much interest in helping me out. He’d clean up without complaint, but he’d never asked to learn to cook or taken me up on my offers of lessons.
Something about his rapt attention while Roman spoke, gesturing occasionally with the tongs in his hand, set off an alarm bell in my head. No, not an alarm bell—a freaking air-raid siren.
He was moving straight into my life, both mind-versions of me screamed in unison. Taking over, taking control. Taking control of my son .
I stormed to the back door, shoved the screen door open, and stomped down off the porch. Wyatt and Roman both smiled when they saw me, and their expressions were just beginning to morph into confusion at whatever my face was doing when I shouted, “What the fuck are you doing here?”
They both flinched. I think Wyatt made some kind of face at me, but my attention was on Roman, who was at that moment sinking fast in my estimation. An intruder, just like Darryl Manfred. Somebody else trying to control me and my life for his own ends.
Roman set the tongs aside and started to come toward me. Worry, not offense or defensiveness, crimped his brow. I saw that but didn’t care. Micah had used worry as a gentle cudgel.
“Are you okay? What happened?” Roman asked, coming near enough to reach out to me, as if he meant to touch my face.
I reared back. “Why are you here?”
“Mom, stop!” Wyatt said, his tone sharp. I heard him but gave him no heed.
Still worried, but now showing confusion as well, Roman stopped where he was and answered, “I wanted to be here in case you needed to talk after your meeting with Jerry. It was about dinner time, so Wyatt and I decided to try to have dinner ready when you got home. I see now that I made some assumptions and took liberties here. I’m sorry, Leo. I didn’t mean to overstep.”
“You didn’t!” Wyatt protested. “It’s good you’re here. Mom, tell him it’s good he’s here!”
Again, I heard what my kid was saying. I understood that he was glad Roman was here. We’d had fun, all three of us, in Eureka on Saturday, and I’d been glad to see how easy they were with each other. But at this moment, standing behind the cabin while the scent of barbecue surrounded us, all I could think was Roman was taking over. I’d been back for only about three weeks, and already he was taking over. He was even trying to parent my son.
Because, my churning mind decided, he still saw me as that damaged, neglected kid I’d been. He didn’t think I could handle things myself.
“I need you to go,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. I think the result was more of a growl, though.
Roman looked at me, diving deep as always, for about five seconds. I stared back, my chin up. Then he nodded and headed toward the path that would take him to the parking lot. As he came up beside me, he paused and said, softly, “I really am sorry, Leo.”
I said nothing.
He continued on his way.