THIRTY Change of Plans
R oman came up behind me at the counter. He set his hand on my hip as he reached over me to grab the sugar bowl.
“I love that you still make Wyatt’s lunch,” he said, kissing my cheek before he returned to his coffee preparation.
“I like to do for him,” I answered. I felt a little defensive—not for Roman’s comment; that was sincere. But underpinning every parenting thought I’d had since Wyatt hit middle school was the worry that I was overcompensating for my mother’s neglect by not giving my son enough opportunities to become independent.
Should I still have been making a tenth-grader’s lunch? I don’t know.
It had been about two weeks since the Flooding of the Sea-Mist (to this day we speak of it exactly like that, like the title of an old-school epic film based on historical events). On the day of the cleanup, Roman had insisted that obviously Wyatt and I would stay with him until we were ready to move back.
I’d had misgivings (I was worried about turbocharging our speed as a couple and ending up in a fiery wreck), but I also had few options. Jessie lives above Coastal ArtWorks, in a wide-open loft situation. Erin has her father to take care of. My brand-new insurance was supposed to provide for hotel accommodations until the main cabin was inhabitable again, but let’s just say the insurer was a teensy bit suspicious about the timing of the flood, occurring within twenty-four hours of the insurance policy going into effect and while Wyatt and I were both staying elsewhere for the night. They were investigating the shit out of me and were in no rush at all to approve a payout.
So we were staying with Roman, and we’d fallen quickly into a homey routine that I both loved and feared. I had to make sure I didn’t lose myself in my relationship with Roman the way I’d lost myself with Micah—and I hadn’t even realized I’d lost myself with Micah, so how could I be sure I wouldn’t again?
I suppose Roman would call that kind of thinking ‘spinning out doomsday scenarios.’
At any rate, I was really enjoying the coziness of this arrangement, like a practice run for domesticity together, and Wyatt was as well. As much as he’d been excited by the property, a few days earlier he’d asked if it would be possible for us to run the Sea-Mist and not live there.
I didn’t know the answer. I mean, obviously yes, it was technically possible. I could hire a night manager. Hell, I could hire a day manager, too, and simply be the owner. But that was so far out of my experience growing up there and my expectations going forward that I didn’t know how to think about it.
So I decided not to think about it at all. After the flood, we were months, maybe more than a year out from running the Sea-Mist as a business. We were at least a few months away from being able to live there again. The main cabin was not the priority for the repair work.
Cottage 12, which had already been badly damaged by the fallen tree, had been almost destroyed by the flood. Now we were trying to decide if it was worth rebuilding it or if it would be better to simply raze it and have eleven cottages for guests.
That was one good thing about the timing of the flood, I guess: I had the approved line of credit and hadn’t used any of it except what I’d needed to pay the tax bill. So I didn’t need to wait for the insurance to get its boxers unbunched. I could use the line of credit to begin work on flood damage and use the insurance payout, when it finally paid out, for the repairs I’d gotten the line of credit for.
It all came down to this: the Sea-Mist was not a total loss. So long as insurance did eventually pay, I had the means to fix the damage that had been done by malice and that which had occurred by neglect, and I would someday be able to open it again for business.
I was officially unemployed, I guess, but for an unemployed person I was working my ass off, spending ten or twelve hours at the Sea-Mist most days, getting bids for big repairs, working with or around work crews, hounding the insurance company, and talking every few days to the sheriff.
Oh yes, the sheriff. Chad Howard had confessed and given all the details he had. Those details had not included anybody’s names (they’d had code names stolen from Reservoir Dogs : Mr. Black, Mr. Red, Mr. Green, Mr. White, and the man who’d hired them was Mr. Boss), and the sheriff had yet to make any further arrests. He kept telling me that the case was his ‘first priority,’ but as each day passed, I grew more skeptical. And more worried. The best way to get the insurance company to settle its own investigation into me was to arrest somebody else for the crime.
But most of that was out of my control, so I focused on what I could control: working on the Sea-Mist.
I was rarely alone with that work. Roman was there as often as he could be; Jessie or Erin or Peter Greyfather, or several other people from town, would drop in and offer to roll up their sleeves for a while. Finn Nyberg stopped by twice to ask if I needed anything hauled off to the dump. Wyatt wanted to help, too, but I wanted him to focus on school and building new friendships, so I only enlisted him for a few hours on weekend days.
In the evenings, Roman, Wyatt, and I had dinner together, watched TV or played a game, or Wyatt went back to ‘his’ room (Roman had offered him Gabriel’s room, which is a whole other thing), and Roman and I did something just the two of us.
We were acting like a family, in other words. It was wonderful and terrifying.
“What’s on deck for you today?” Roman asked as he added two spoons of sugar to his coffee.
“Another architect is coming by to look at 12,” I told him. “And I’m having lunch with Jessie and Erin. Otherwise, more ripping up carpet and scrubbing walls.”
“You’ve been working nonstop since you got back to town, Leo. How about we both take the weekend off? Wyatt, too.”
I looked over at him like he was crazy. “And do what?”
“Rest, hon! Rest! We can do whatever we want—sleep in, stay in our pajamas all day, binge TV, eat junk food, whatever. Or we can go camping, or—we could drive to San Francisco, if you want.”
“That’s like a four-hour drive each way. Too much for a weekend.”
He laughed and came back to me. Making me turn to face him, he set his hands on my shoulders. “Leo. You need to learn how to relax.”
“I know how to relax. It’s just that there’s a lot going on—”
“Which is exactly when you need a chance to relax. Reset. Recharge. There are probably other ‘re’ words that work here, too.”
“Restore. Recreate.”
He grinned. “Exactly.”
Just then, Wyatt came into the kitchen, dressed for school, his hair slicked back, still wet from his shower. The boy routinely took half-hour showers. I didn’t ask him what he was doing in there besides washing because I pretty much knew what a fifteen-year-old boy was doing in the shower when he wasn’t washing, and I did not want to have that conversation. We’d done The Talk. I consider that box checked for all time.
“Hey, Wy,” Roman said, “You got plans for the weekend?”
Wyatt ripped a banana off the bunch and started to peel it. He didn’t like a big breakfast before school most days. “Tryouts for the fall play are next week, so I’ll probably do some prep for that. Other than that, working on the Sea-Mist. Why?”
“I was thinking we all need a chill weekend. No filthy work at the motel. No work at all. Maybe camping, or just hanging around here and resting. Movies and popcorn and junk food. Thoughts?”
Wyatt was already grinning. “Can we pull a mattress into the living room and make a fort like we used to, Mom?”
Roman turned to me, wearing a very similar goofy expression of hope and anticipation. I couldn’t help but laugh. “Okay, yes. We will camp in the living room, eat crap food and soda, and be slobs for the whole weekend.”
Wyatt and Roman high-fived. It scared me how much I loved to see those two together.
It hadn’t escaped me that my son had stopped trying to be the man of the house. He was acting like a teenager again, and I loved that even more.