EIGHTEEN Understanding
R oman still lived in the same house he’d had when I babysat for him—a couple miles farther north on the 101, on the east side, tucked up on a hill in the forest. It was near dark as I arrived, and the amber glow from his front windows glinted through the redwoods.
I pulled into his secluded drive and headed up the hill. The house was a log-cabin style, pretty common in these parts, but it was substantially nicer than the main cabin at the Sea-Mist. It was about twice the size, for one thing, with a story and a half, and the wide covered porch wrapped around to a cozy back yard sheltered by an ancient stand of redwoods and carpeted by eons’ worth of their needles.
He also had a detached three-car garage off to the side. All three doors were closed, and his Rivian was parked before one. My Golf looked like an actual golf cart as I parked beside that beast.
As I climbed out and stood, I saw the front door opening, and Roman stepped onto the porch. He closed the door and stood right before it. Then, silent and still, he watched me approach.
I stopped at the foot of the porch steps, which were on the near side of the porch. Clearly, I was going to have to speak first.
“Hi,” was my scintillating first volley.
“Hi.”
I don’t know if the flatness of his tone came of anger or wariness or weariness, but there was a hard stop to that one small word, a finality, and I didn’t like that at all.
So the next thing I said was the important thing. “I’m sorry.”
At that, an apology both complete and insufficient, he visibly warmed, though he didn’t come closer. “Are you okay?”
I stayed at the foot of the steps. “Physically, yes. Existentially, I don’t know.”
He nodded at his door. “Do you want to come in and talk about it?”
“Only if you want that.”
I know it sounds like I was being wishy-washy, but I’d already fucked up, and I didn’t want to impose. It’s that middle part of an apology that’s the hardest, I find. Saying the words when they’re warranted isn’t hard for me, but letting the apology actually fill in the rift that made it necessary is a lot harder—and knowing if the other person is ready to let things go is harder still. It’s the whole ‘bygones’ part I don’t get.
Probably because I am a champion grudge-bearer.
But Roman smiled that warm, intimate smile and opened his door. “Come on in, Leo.”
I went up the steps, onto his cozy porch, and met him at the door. Before he ushered me into his home, he brushed a hand down my arm, a little awkwardly. I got the sense he’d intended to hug me and changed course at the last second.
My little outburst had done some damage. But there was still a voice in my head suggesting that a bit of new distance between us might be a good thing. The night of the town meeting, our ‘first date,’ was less than a week in the past. We’d spent a lovely Saturday with Wyatt. And then he’d been there when I got home tonight. That, and three kisses (okay, one of those was more of a mild make-out session than a single kiss, but anyway), were the sum total of our romantic time together. If we were in a relationship it was in its infancy, but he had an outsize presence in my thoughts, and he’d shown a strong impulse toward taking care of us.
I was in a scary place in my life. It would be far too easy to let him take over and take care. I needed to make sure I kept the reins of my own life in my own hands.
Wyatt wasn’t wrong; we needed to be able to trust in someone beyond ourselves. I didn’t want to become my mother, suspicious of everyone around me. Roman is a good man, and I’ve always known that. I wanted to trust him.
As I crossed the threshold into a house I hadn’t seen for nearly twenty years, I finally understood the real truth. It wasn’t Roman I was afraid to trust.
It was myself.
WE SAT AT HIS KITCHEN table, where I apologized more completely, was forgiven more directly, and then debriefed him on my meeting with the mayor.
When I was done, Roman stood. “You want coffee?”
I shook my head. “No, thanks. I’m already as jittery as I can bear.”
“Wine, then?” He gestured at an impressively full wine rack built into his kitchen cabinetry. “Or I’ve got the hard stuff, too. Pick your poison.”
“Wine is good.” Before he asked me to be more specific, I added, “Whatever you have open or want to open is great with me.”
He grinned and pulled bottle of white from his fridge.
When I’d first arrived, Roman had led, and I’d followed, straight to the back of the house and his kitchen, a path that wound through the living and dining rooms and past his study, the door of which had been closed. My journey through the most public parts of his home was made of recollection and surprise. So much was as I remembered, but laid over that familiarity were twenty years of life.
The front door opened into what had always been my favorite room. It might have been intended as a mud room—a smallish space with two walls, those facing south and north, made of casement windows on the top half, and benches with shelving on the bottom. The walls, floor, and ceiling, were all made of the same narrow pine planks, all painted a bright, cheery warm color like Irish butter.
But the Mendozas had never used this room as a mudroom. Instead, it was a library. The shelves under the benches were packed with books, almost all of them novels or collections of short stories, most of them paperbacks, and almost all of them popular fiction. A comfy, puffy armchair and ottoman were tucked in a corner near the door into the rest of the house, and a big, round paper lantern hung from the ceiling above it. A plush round rug with a riotous pattern of flowers covered most of the floor. It was just a perfect, cozy little treasure of a room, and it looked exactly as I remembered.
There was a reason I’d become an English teacher; and it wasn’t because I thought I’d have summers off. (Teachers don’t really get summers off, by the way. Just to clear that up. We’re working most of that time, finishing off the previous school year through June and prepping the next one from about the middle of July.) Reading was my escape as a child, and I’d kept that feeling all through my life. So this room was like Narnia to me.
That coziness, and the aesthetic of soft textiles and bright colors, carried on into the living room and dining room. There, a lot of the furniture had been replaced during my life away, and there were, sadly and of course, no signs of anyone else living here but Roman now, but still I knew these rooms. The sofa and big chair were different, but in the same places as the ones I remembered. The television now hung on a wood-plank exterior wall, rather than sitting inside a big ‘entertainment armoire.’ The large case that Roman had built and stained himself to hold all his LPs was in the same place, but now the turntable sat on a unit below the television, with other electronic components, including an Xbox.
The wall hangings and other décor were mainly familiar to me. There were more family photos, showing Gabriel as a growing boy and his parents maturing, but those photos stopped far too soon.
The dining room looked precisely the same as I remembered it, all the way to the centerpiece in the middle of the table, a colorful Mexican bowl full of assorted wooden fruit. But the dining room was obviously in disuse. I don’t know why it was so obvious—the room wasn’t dirty or dusty or falling into disrepair—but there was something that made me sure Roman never used this room anymore.
That realization had made my heart ache. Roman still lived in the house he’d made a family in, but his family had been taken from him. There was no one to sit at that beautiful antique table with him and laugh with over a family meal. When he woke in the morning, the house was empty. When he went to bed, it was the same.
He had family, his father and sister were alive, but the elder Mr. Mendoza had gone to Mexico in his retirement, and his sister, Emilia, lived south, around Santa Barbara. Roman was alone here.
“Did you ever get any dinner?” he asked as he brought two glasses of wine to the table. “I could throw a couple chops on the stovetop grill.”
I took a sip of my wine, a crisp chardonnay. “Please do not cook for me tonight, not after my display of bitchery. I’m fine.”
He smiled. “Well, I’m hungry, so I might as well cook up something for both of us. You’ll eat pork?”
It had not escaped my notice that the moment I’d finished explaining my property-tax crisis—which I’d done in some detail—Roman had leapt up and busied himself with completely unrelated tasks. I wasn’t looking for him to solve my problems for me, but it was a little disorienting to have him shunt the whole thing to the side with nary a word.
Still, not his problem—and anyway, I’d told him as an explanation for my mood when I’d arrived home, not for counsel or sympathy.
“I will happily eat pork, yes.” I stood. “What can I do to help?”
ROMAN GRILLED SOME butterfly chops with a zesty rub, and I foraged through his well-stocked fridge to put together a salad. Over a quiet John Coltrane soundtrack, we chatted about lighthearted things while we cooked, and Roman tossed suggestions my way that directed the salad toward Mexican. It was companionable and, in my mind, a bit intimate. Above all, I liked to see Roman’s one-of-a-kind smile while we cooked a meal we’d share.
His evident pleasure was contagious. Cooking this simple impromptu meal with Roman was the first time since Micah was alive that I felt relaxed and content.
By the time we had our plates loaded and our glasses refilled, and Roman suggested we sit out back to eat, I’d set my worries about taxes aside, and I’d just about forgotten the awkward beginning of my visit here. More to the point, I’d also just about forgotten my desire ... my intention ... my need to move slowly with him toward wherever we were headed.
As we stepped onto his back porch, he hit a switch, and the forest filled with golden light. He had strands of mini-lights wrapped around the trunks of the trees and strung across the eave of the porch roof.
His back yard was quieter and cozier than my own—no cabins trailing off into the woods, and no paths leading to them—but it was similar, too. The brick barbecue and Adirondack chairs were similar, though his were in better repair. Instead of a grouping of standard picnic tables, he had a round metal and glass table with upholstered chairs.
The most familiar thing, of course, was the world itself. We shared this forest; for all we knew, the roots of the trees around my house and his stretched beneath our feet and reached each other.
“This is beautiful,” I mused, wrapped in contentment, like floating in a soap bubble.
As soon as we settled at the table, Roman picked up the thread of my troubles, and that gentle bubble I’d been floating in popped.
“Do you think you’ll sell?”
I sighed as I landed back in my overwhelming reality. “I don’t know. Wyatt loves it there. It’s still new, and once he gets established here he might not care about the place so much, but right now, he really wants to keep it, and I really don’t want to deal him any more losses.”
Roman chewed a bite of meat before he asked, “What do you want?”
I shrugged. “Well, the only thing I know for absolute certain is I would rather burn the Sea-Mist to the ground than let Darryl Manfred get his sweaty paws on it.” I used a sip of wine to give myself another moment to think, then continued, “I guess I want to keep it, too. Different reasons, and maybe not entirely rational ones, but I want to make the Sea-Mist better than it ever was when my mother ran it. I don’t have one single shred of an idea how I’ll manage to keep it, but I have this powerful feeling like it would be the perfect ‘fuck you’ to make it over in my image and just ... erase her entire presence from it.”
Roman studied me carefully, chewing his way to another thought. I was surprised when he asked, “When we broached this topic at dinner last week, you didn’t want to talk about it, so tell me to mind my business if I’m out of line, but ... I’d like to ask what she did to you.”
It shouldn’t have, but to me that question came from left field. Answering it would be the emotional equivalent of standing up at this table and stripping naked. But I didn’t want to shut Roman down, not after my behavior earlier.
So I asked him a question instead. “What is your idea about what she did to me?”
He took a long, slow breath in and focused on the trees as he considered his answer.
“I don’t know details, just things I observed in you and her, and stuff I heard around town. Like I told you, I noticed that you seemed to buy a lot of things yourself that weren’t the kind of things I thought teen girls bought for themselves. Basics instead of extras, I guess is what I mean. Things parents are supposed to buy. Carla first pointed that out to me one day, and then I guess I started noticing. You almost never spoke when you were with her, or even made eye contact, and I saw the way she looked at you—which was, honestly, not much different from how she looked at everybody. Your mother was not an easy woman.” With a contemplative shake of his head, Roman turned and focused on me again. “I thought she was probably too strict and probably didn’t show you the kind of love I thought a parent should show a child. I didn’t think she was abusing you. I ...”
“You never saw a mark on me,” I finished for him. He nodded.
I finished the rest of my wine in a gulp, then reached for the bottle and filled my glass, emptying the bottle as I did. Then I went ahead and stripped naked, psychically speaking. I told him what I’d never wanted anyone in Bluster to know.
“She mostly made a point not to make anything more than a bruise, and mostly where nobody would see. I think she believed if I didn’t bleed, she wasn’t crossing the line into abuse. A plastic spatula was her favorite weapon, but really, she didn’t hit me that often, other than a quick slap across the face when she thought I’d been disrespectful. That happened a lot—especially once I started understanding that my life was wrong and stopped trying to be a daughter she might want.”
Roman’s dark eyes were round under his furrowed brow and fixed on mine. I had to look away again before I could continue. Now that I’d started, I wanted it all out.
“Her favorite punishment was to make me kneel on the furnace grate in the hallway. Sometimes for as long as an hour. My knees would ache for days after, and the grid of the grate would be bruised into my flesh for a lot longer than that. Once—it was the last time she did it, actually—I’d yelled back at her, called her a bitch, and I think she was angry enough to actually want to kill me. I was fifteen. She made me kneel on that grate for three solid hours, and she stood over me, hitting me every time I even tried to shift my weight. That time, when I was finally able to stand, blood ran freely. They’re faint now, but my knees are still scarred like a crossword puzzle.”
“Jesus Christ, honey.”
The word honey slipped from his mouth and lightly brushed my ear, a gentle caress just at the moment I needed one. I sought out the voice in my head that reminded me I had to be careful, go slow, be wise. I couldn’t be seduced by the illusion of rescue.
Still, I wasn’t done with my story, and I wanted it finished. I didn’t want to be blindsided ever again by the question of what my mother had done to me.
“This might sound twisted, but the grate, the spatula, the slapping, the pinching, the hair-pulling, all of that, it wasn’t the worst of it. That stuff hurt, but only until it healed. The worst of it was simple. But the hurt was constant, and I think the damage was permanent. My mother never bothered to even attempt to pretend that she didn’t hate me—and I’m not exaggerating. She was very direct with me from as young as I can remember: she had not wanted a child, she most certainly had not wanted a daughter, and I was nothing to her but a burden hanging on her neck. I don’t remember any day of my childhood when I thought my mother cared about me at all.”
Still focused entirely on me, leaning in over the table with laser-sharp attention, Roman looked stricken. He also looked like he was about to say something, and if I was interrupted I knew I wouldn’t finish, so I hurried on with my story.
“When I was thirteen, she decided I was old enough to start taking care of myself, so she stopped paying for the things I needed. I earned room and board by cleaning the cottages, and anything else I needed was up to me to figure out. Erin and Jessie helped a lot, giving me their hand-me-downs and making up dumb reasons to have bake sales in Jessie’s front yard, or in O’Grady’s, or whatever, then giving me the proceeds. I worked in the office at the high school for a little bit of money, and Mrs. Wong let me go through the lost and found at the end of each semester. But the worst thing my mother did to me wasn’t make me beg for clothes or tampons or toothpaste. The worst thing she did was hate me and make sure I knew it. That’s the scar that really fucked me up.” I finished the rest of my wine. “So ... yeah. That’s why I ran away on graduation night. That’s why I’m glad she’s dead. And that’s why I want the Sea-Mist to finally be my home. It never was before, and I want to have what she denied me.”
I met Roman’s eyes and held. “You can’t know what it’s like to grow up when your mother hates you so ... loudly . You can’t know how much that fucks up everything you perceive about relationships. I still don’t know how fucked up I am.”
Now I was finished. I’d gotten to the real point of my story.
Sadly, there wasn’t any wine left.