THIRTY-ONE Reckonings
“ I don’t know,” I told Jessie and Erin at lunch that day, “It’s great. Really, really great. But it’s happening so fast.”
We were having lunch at O’Grady’s. The tavern was routinely closed one day a week, which was Erin’s regular day off. But she didn’t yet trust the new home care nurse, so we’d agreed to have our lunch date in the empty bar right downstairs.
I liked it, and I’d been marinating in nostalgia since I’d entered the place. Daddy Ned used to let us play ‘saloon’ in the mornings before he opened up for the day, and the bar had changed so little in the years since that I could practically see our little selves pretending to draw pints and serve customers.
Jessie picked up the bottle of sauv blanc and topped us all off. “Roman Mendoza is the most perfect human being in Bluster, Lennie. Possibly in all of California. Not only does he have the whole hot daddy thing happening, he is a genuinely good guy. There is no black mold behind his walls.”
“Ugh. Please don’t mention that disgusting crud,” I lamented. Black mold is the bane of any flooded homeowner.
Jessie laughed sympathetically. “Sorry.”
Erin sipped her freshened wine and nodded sagely. “It’s true, though, about Roman. I mean, he’s kind of too good, if you ask me.”
“How can anybody be too good?” I asked with a laugh.
Jessie answered before Erin could. “Erin likes black mold.”
We all laughed, and Erin threw an apple at Jessie, who caught it and took a sassy bite.
“I do like some dark in my man, yeah,” Erin admitted. “I mean, come on. I’m not easy, I know this. I don’t want to be easy. Somebody like Roman, always understanding, always gentle, never getting mad enough to yell—the guy has, like, no edge at all. I need a good, loud fight every now and then. Cleans out the gutters, you know?”
I shuddered. “I’ve lived with enough edginess, thank you very much.” Jessie reached out to squeeze my hand, and Erin nodded with knowing sympathy. “Roman’s gentle positivity makes me feel safe.”
“Didn’t you feel safe with your first husband?” Erin asked.
The phrasing of her question caught me. “I’ve only been married once, Er.”
Jessie laughed. “I think she’s counting Roman!”
“Oh shit, I was!”
“See?!” Smiling, I raised my voice over their crowing laughter. “This is what I mean! We’re going too fast!”
Jessie leaned in. “You didn’t answer Erin’s question. Did you feel safe with Micah?”
“Yeah, I did. He was good to me. But the marriage I thought I had turned out to be at least partly a fa?ade. There was so much I didn’t know about how our life worked—or didn’t work—because he wanted to handle everything. Where I thought he was protecting me, really he was controlling me. Where I thought he was taking care of his family, really he was putting our future at risk. I think he wanted to protect us, to take care of us, I think he thought he was doing that. I think he was probably terrified when things started to go wrong, and he felt he had to deal with it alone. But I let myself get swallowed up in his life, and when his life was over, he’d left us with nothing but the rubble of broken promises and empty dreams.”
Erin stared at me. “Shit, that was fucking poetic. You should have kept writing, Lennie.”
“Roman isn’t like that, Len,” Jessie said with uncharacteristic quiet. “We can both vouch, but you know him, too. Maybe better than us now. And we’ve seen you two together. Especially in these past couple of weeks, since the flood. He’s not one to think he has to do everything—he’s supportive, not controlling. He’s not one to pretend things aren’t what they are. Unless we’re not seeing something you see. He and Carla were partners in everything. Do you feel like a partner with him?”
I did feel like a partner with Roman. I think maybe that was what scared me more than anything; I didn’t disagree with anything my friends were saying. Roman was always understanding, always gentle, never mad enough to yell. He was supportive. And he was also hot.
He took me as I came—and I was no longer in the business of trying to be whoever the person I was with would like best, so Roman took me, Leo, as I came, doomsday scenarios and prickly suspicions included. He was everything I wanted or needed in a partner. And he made me feel—made me know —I was everything he wanted or need in a partner as well.
From the start, he’d treated Wyatt like a son without ever crossing a boundary that would have made me or my son uncomfortable with that. He was not trying to supplant Micah; he was simply being the man Wyatt—and I—needed him to be.
But there was something, a worry, I had. I wanted to suppress it, and I usually tried, but I thought it was also valid.
“I do feel like a partner with him,” I told my friends. “But ... I worry ...” I was surprised at how hard it was to put into words for an audience. “Is it significant that Wyatt and I kind of fit the hole in his family?”
Jessie and Erin both stared at me with the same wide-eyed expression. I couldn’t tell if it was shock because they’d never thought about it or because it was a shitty thing to think.
“Am I an asshole for wondering that?”
Erin answered, glancing at Jessie before she sat forward to focus on me. “You’re worried that he wants to replace Carla and Gabriel with you and Wyatt?” I offered a sheepish shrug, and she sat back. “Yeah, you’re an asshole for wondering that.”
I took that hit quietly, but Jessie came to my defense.
“No, NTA. I get why it would occur to you. Wyatt’s pretty close to the age Gabriel was when he died, and not all that much younger than Gabriel would be if he hadn’t, so ... I get it. And yeah, Roman is the kind of man who’s happiest as a partner and father. But Lennie, no. Roman isn’t with you because he wants to have his wife and child back. He’s with you for you. He cares about Wyatt because of Wyatt. I think it’s more that he’s ready for that in his life again. He’s missed being a father and a partner, and he’s glad he’s found a chance to have both again. But that’s not replacing what he had—that’s appreciating the chance to have it again. Does that make sense?”
It did make sense. It wasn’t all that different from my feelings about mourning the loss of Micah while falling in love with Roman. And I absolutely was in love with him. I thought Wyatt was, too.
“That makes perfect sense—and it sorts it out in my head, so thank you. But I gotta ask: why are you both pushing this so hard? It’s like back in school, when Jeremy Saunders begged Jessie to make his case for Erin. Are you playing Cyrano again, Jess?”
“Oh my god , Jeremy Saunders!” Erin yelled dramatically. “What a fuckin’ dweeb. Whatever happened to that pencil neck?”
Holding her wine glass aloft, with her wrist in a twist like an old Hollywood star, Jessie smirked and said, “He runs a big medical technology company in San Jose. He’s a billionaire now.”
The group laugh that rose then had a touch of a groan in it.
“Damn,” Erin muttered.
“Missed your chance, Er,” I said with a wink.
“I don’t think kissing those floppy, chapped lips would have been worth even a billion dollars. I’m better off right here.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” I pointed out. “Why’re you both so invested in my love life?”
“Because we love you,” Jessie said, while Erin only shrugged. “We want you happy—and we want you happy here . And we love Roman, too. He hasn’t been interested in anybody since Carla and Gabriel died. He’s been different since then, too. He didn’t turn into a snarly asshole, but he withdrew. A lot of his shine dimmed. Since you and he started up, he’s been full-wattage Roman again. So yeah, speaking for me, I’m invested. And I don’t want you fucking something good up because you’re scared what could happen.”
“Again,” Erin muttered.
I turned to face her directly. “Something you want to say?”
She waved me off. “Sorry. I’ve said what I need to say. That just slipped out.”
“Because you’re thinking it,” I insisted. “So you must have more to say.”
“I don’t, Lennie. I said my bit. You know I was big mad about the way you left. I still think it was shitty, and you know that, too. But I also get it now, and I forgive you. It’s just a process, shoveling all that gunk out of my head, okay?”
I took the time to finish my wine before I answered. In that time, I remembered how worried I was about the reaction of people from my past to my return. I’d believed I deserved the hate and scorn I’d expected. Instead, I was almost entirely welcomed home, a prodigal daughter. Only Erin, one of the few people I had truly hurt by leaving as I had, showed me anger.
The welcome I’d gotten from the town as a whole had apparently dulled the memory of my own shame, but I had been shitty to these two friends by disappearing without a word. I didn’t deserve Erin’s forgiveness, but she’d given it anyway. She deserved time to process it in her way.
“Okay,” I told her. “That’s fair.”
AFTER LUNCH, AS I WAS about to drive away from O’Grady’s and head back to the Sea-Mist for some more filthy work, Sheriff Durbin called.
After I spoke with him, I took a detour and went to Mendoza Meat & Fish.
Early afternoons, when the fish was fresh off the boat, were Roman’s busiest times, but he did a fairly steady business throughout the day, with few spells where the shop was customer-free. When I went in at about 1:30, Roman and Deanna, one of his employees, were alone in the shop. Deanna was at the slicer, refreshing a tray of deli ham. Roman was butchering a pig.
He did most of his work behind the raw meat case, in full view of any customers. The only work he did in back was gutting and skinning—the parts that might put his customers off their food.
A lot of small butchers, maybe most, bought whole sides of meat from industrial slaughterhouses, with the grossest work already finished, and they simply separated the side into cuts for sale. Roman, however, was a traditional butcher, meaning the meat he sold had been breathing right up to the moment he’d bought it from the rancher. He did every bit of the butchering himself—or Manny, his apprentice/assistant manager, did it.
To me, this fact was both appealing and disconcerting. I enjoyed and admired the way he continued the ‘old world’ traditions of his family, but it did kind of freak me out at first that he spends his days cutting animals open and ripping their guts out.
I’m not a vegetarian or vegan by any stretch, but I will admit to some hypocrisy: I love animals. All animals (as long as they don’t have more than four legs), and maybe especially cows, with their big, beautiful brown eyes. I like me a cheeseburger, but I’d rather not think about where my meat comes from. I prefer a little distance between the sweet, soulful eyes and the delicious taste.
Roman loves animals, too—and he argues that the way he does his job as a butcher is consistent with loving and respecting animals. He knows the animals he buys don’t die in pain, because he sees their deaths happen. He deals solely with organic, free-range, humane ranches (there’s a fair number of those in NorCal), so he can be confident the animals lived a safe, gentle life beforehand. His argument is the distance people make between an animal’s soulful eyes and the meat in their bun is where the damage happens. It’s the distance that allows industrial slaughterhouses to operate the way they do. When people avert their eyes, they allow abuse to happen.
And he’s right, of course. I’m just saying it’s been a journey for me.
But I digress. On this particular day, he was carving up a pig while Deanna sliced cooked ham for the deli case. They both looked up as I came in, and Roman’s smile burst wide, as always.
“Hey, querida!” He set his big knife down and wiped his hands on a towel tucked into his apron. “Didn’t expect to see you until tonight. Did lunch go okay?”
We met at the front of the meat case, and he kissed me without putting his arms around me. He was careful about where he put his hands when he’d been working with meat.
“Yeah, lunch was good. How’s your day going?
“Good as always. What’s up?”
“Can we talk for a minute?”
He gave me a concerned frown. “Sure. You okay? Wyatt?”
“We’re good. The sheriff called. They arrested Manfred. He wants me to go to Crescent City and do a line-up to confirm it. I thought they only did lineups to identify a suspect.”
“I don’t know. Most of what I know about cops comes from TV and movies. But that’s great! They arrested him! Cam must have gotten enough evidence to satisfy him.”
“Yeah.”
News of Manfred’s arrest wasn’t as uplifting as I’d thought it would be. My primary emotion was wariness, like I expected the sheriff to pull a fast one on me. That was silly, sure, but wariness was like an old pair of jeans—fit me really well and so well-worn I barely noticed I was wearing it.
“They want me to go to Crescent City now, this afternoon—”
“You want me to come with you?”
I did. A lot. “I’d love that, but no. I might need you to pick Wyatt up, though. He’s got choir after school, so he doesn’t get out until five. I can probably do it, but—”
“Say no more. I got him. Why don’t we just plan for me to pick him up. Then you don’t have to worry about figuring out if you’ll be able to.”
“I want to pick him up if I can,” I told him. If this arrest was real, if Darryl Manfred had truly been behind the flood at the Sea-Mist, and if the sheriff had enough evidence to arrest, then this was a major turning point for me and Wyatt. The attack had been on us. We’d survived the past year and a half together, just the two of us. We had support now, and strong hope for a good future, but we’d sailed the choppy waters since Micah’s death alone. I wanted some time alone with my kid.
“Okay,” Roman said with a smile. “Just text or call if you need me to take over. I’ll be ready when you do.”
He really was a perfect human. I put my arms around his neck and thanked him with a kiss.