That thought gives me a burst of courage and hope as I press a hand to his chest to feel his heartbeat.
“I’ll come over around seven.” He gives me a gentle kiss and turns me toward the door. “Call me when you’re done at the café. I love you.”
After I leave, still practically floating after the beauty of a weekend alone with my husband, I stop at our apartment to change into jeans and a T-shirt before going to the café.
The windows are partly open, a radio is blaring, and the whole place is in disarray. Brent has recruited some of his friends to help with the remodeling, and the floor is covered with drop cloths and torn wallpaper.
After greeting everyone, I grab a bottle of remover solution and start pulling off the old wallpaper. Later, Allie and I go to the hardware store to arrange for deliveries of paint, window trim, and flooring. In the afternoon, we meet with Rita Johnson, the magazine reporter who wants to write an article about the café.
It’s a good feeling, even if it’s still scary, this working toward something both new and risky.
The sky is starting to darken by the time I head home. I can’t wait to see Dean again and tell him about the magazine article and our plans. Maybe he’ll have a few more plans of his own too.
Anticipation fills me as I hurry across Avalon Street. I pull open the door of our building.
And stop.
A woman is sitting on the stairs, dressed in a leather jacket and jeans. Long, wheat-colored hair spills around her shoulders. Her blue eyes meet mine.
“Hello, Liv,” my mother says.
CHAPTER TEN
Olivia
have only one picture of me and my mother, and one of me and my father. I keep both photos in an envelope tucked between the pages of a tattered paperback copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I bought the book for a quarter at a used bookstore when my mother and I were living outside Seattle. The name Lillian Weatherford is written on the inside cover in large, looped penmanship. I’ve always liked her name.
Lillian Weatherford, whoever she was, has guarded my photos for the past twenty years.
The picture of my father was taken at Christmas when I was five. He and I are sitting next to the tree—a small fir covered with lights and artificial snow. He looks handsome, young, a smile on his face. His arm is around me, and I’m holding a white stuffed bear with a red ribbon around its neck. I look happy.
In the picture of me and my mother, we’re in California. I’m thirteen years old. My mother and I are sitting beside a campfire, both of us smiling, our faces shiny and lit by the glow of the flames. We look alike, our hair pulled back in ponytails, our smiles almost identical. We look like mother and daughter.
I remember everything about this photo. I’ve shown it to Dean, of course, told him the story of where it was taken and who took it.
The man’s name was North.
“North?” I repeated after he’d introduced himself.
“Short for Northern Star,” he explained. “Parents thought I’d have a good, steady life with a name like that.”
“Do you?” I asked.
“Life is always good,” he replied with a shrug. “But rarely steady. Waves are always on the horizon.”
He was a medium-height, bulky man with long, graying hair, a bushy beard, and an open, kind face. He wore old T-shirts, torn jeans, and ratty sandals, when he bothered with shoes at all. A few strands of his beard were tied into a braid and held with a tiny, red ribbon.
North lived and worked on a Northern California commune called Twelve Oaks, a fifty-acre farm near Santa Cruz that my mother had heard about through an LA acquaintance. We stopped there en route to Oregon—hoping for a free meal and bed for the night—and ended up staying for seven months.
It was a weird place, but I liked it. About fifty people and their children lived there, and they made their own soaps and grew organic herbs and vegetables—all of which they sold at farmer’s markets and to local groceries.
“Heard you have rooms for visitors,” my mother told North when we arrived, her car keys dangling from her slender fingers, wide sunglasses concealing half her face.
North nodded, glancing from her to me. I stayed by the car, my arms around my middle. We’d just come from the urban sprawl of Los Angeles with its brown-smudged air and clogged freeways, but I was trying hard not to hope that we’d stay for a while in this farmland right by the ocean.
“Visitors have to earn their stay,” North told my mother.
“How?”
“Work in the kitchens or gardens. Help with laundry. Clean. Asha keeps the work schedule, so we can talk to her about it.”
My mother crossed her arms. She was wearing a yellow skirt and a purple tank top studded with yellow flowers. Her long, wheat-colored hair fell in waves to her tanned, freckled shoulders.