Beth had just enough time after work on Tuesday to race home, swipe on deodorant, and head back out to meet up with Martin. She’d agreed to get a beer and an arepa with him at the food truck in the marina parking lot. For a minute, she debated whether she should dress up. She didn’t want to give Martin the impression this was a date. On the other hand, she could hear her mother’s voice in her head telling her it was always worth making men want more than they could get. She grabbed her bomber jacket and a pair of ankle boots from the closet, inspected the shoes for spiders, and slid her feet in. She looked at herself in the mirror, combed her fingers through her short, wavy hair, and shrugged. This was as good as it was gonna get.
Beth drove down to the marina and parked behind the Kayak Shack. She gave a half wave to Paul Hanley and Scotty O’Dell, who were hauling Styrofoam coolers of something—sand dabs, maybe—into the yacht club.
A silver Maserati pulled into the marina in a long arc, avoiding the fisherman spraying mud off the eighteen-footer by the boat launch. Martin swept out of the convertible in the winter uniform of Silicon Valley males: a shiny blue puffy vest, crisp button-down, gray chinos, and complicated sneakers.
“Beth,” he called, a bit too jovial for the grimy parking lot.
She was still staring at his car. Even in the cold air, he had the top down.
“I know it’s ridiculous,” he said, following her gaze, “but my life is all work, all hustle. And I just . . . I love it.”
His honesty surprised her. It blunted the obscene ostentation of the convertible, turning it into a simple pleasure. The car was ridiculous, and it was beautiful. Beth found herself smiling back at him.
The two of them walked over to the arepa truck, arriving just in time to see the owner, Flora, flip the sign in the window from “Open” to “Closed.”
“Sorry, Beth,” Flora said. “We got cleaned out by a corporate retreat group. Those guys.” She pointed at a pack of men in matching fleece jackets headed into the yacht club. “They even bought all the vegetarian ones.”
She really did look sorry. Flora was one of the first friends Beth had made in Elkhorn, another single mom with two sons of her own, and they’d babysat and looked out for each other for years. But that didn’t change the fact that she was out of arepas.
“What about the yacht club?” Martin asked.
Beth shook her head. She wasn’t ready for a deep-fried sit-down dinner among a crowd of drunken tech workers.
“Let me think.” Nothing else in the marina was open at this hour, and most of the nearby restaurants were overpriced tourist traps. Then she had an idea.
“I’ll take us to a real local’s place,” Beth said, looking back at the Maserati. “On one condition.”
“What?”
“Let me drive your car.”
He hesitated. Beth knew it was possible the night was about to come to an abrupt end. There were plenty of jerks who didn’t think women were capable of driving any car, least of all theirs. Especially if it cost more than she made in a year.
Then Martin spoke. “You drive stick?”
“You like burritos?”
They both nodded.
He put his keys into her open hand, closing it in his.
The Maserati wasn’t nearly as obnoxious once Beth was in the driver’s seat. She zipped up her bomber jacket against the wind and took the back roads through the lettuce fields, the car dipping and purring around the curves.
Martin spent the drive telling Beth about his childhood, regaling her with stories about growing up on the ranch, chasing cows and runaway hay bales that flopped end over end down the hillside to settle in the creek. Beth was content to listen, and drive, her heart thrilling each time she pushed the sports car into a higher gear.
But when she turned inland, his farm-boy fairy tale turned darker. When Martin was fifteen, his mother, Cora, died, trapped in a burning barn with some workers. It sounded awful. After Cora’s death, the family unraveled. His dad was distracted. Diana disappeared to live abroad. Martin spent two long years in the ranch house with his father, alone with their ghosts.
“It didn’t get better when my sister came back,” Martin said. “I was seventeen then. She was twenty-four. Things didn’t work out for Di in England, and all she wanted to do was take her disappointment out on me. It got claustrophobic. I couldn’t wait to go to college.”
Beth slowed as they approached the outskirts of Salinas, fields giving way to a long line of blank-faced buildings. Martin stared out at the warehouses.
“But even that was hard.” Martin’s voice caught on the wind, dipping and wavering as it reached Beth’s ears. “When I left for MIT, it was like the last thread had snapped. Dad wanted me to stay on the ranch, go to community college, work with him. He wouldn’t even come east for graduation. Said it was calving season and he couldn’t get away. Implied I was neglecting my duties, that I should be with him pulling heifers out of some cow’s ass instead of walking across the stage.”
“But you did come back,” Beth said.
“To Silicon Valley. Now San Francisco. I’ve built three nanotech businesses. I have a restored loft with eighteen-foot-high ceilings and a guest room with a world-class view of the bridge. Not that my dad would ever come visit. It’s only a ninety-minute drive, but as far as he was concerned, it might as well be the moon.”
He gave her a quick, hopeful glance. Beth could see a request for validation, redemption maybe, in his eyes. She stopped at a red light and touched his forearm. “I know what it’s like to defy your parents’ expectations.”
“Big disappointment when you left home too, huh?”
Beth looked up into the rearview mirror and saw her mother sixteen years ago, doing her eye makeup in the front hallway of the house in Beverly Hills. Beth stood behind Lana, looking past her own unwashed face to her mother’s perfect reflection in the mirror. She tried to stand up straight, to speak calmly. But she was only seventeen, and there was no easy way to say this.
“Ma. I’m pregnant.” The word died in her mouth before it fully got out.
“Winners don’t mumble, Elizabeth.”
So she said it again.
Lana drew the eyebrow wand down from her face and stared at her daughter in the mirror.
“Is this some kind of joke?” Lana said. “Did you take that psychologist’s advice and join an improv group to boost your confidence?”
Beth kept her voice steady. “I’m not joking.”
“Say it again.”
“Ma.”
“Again,” Lana demanded.
“I’m pregnant.”
The dam broke. Her mother’s voice picked up speed and heat, calling her stupid, selfish, saying she’d ruined everything for the both of them. She didn’t ask how Beth was feeling (frightened), whether it was that baseball player Manny (it was), or what he thought (that it was her problem). Lana insisted on an abortion, in Palmdale maybe, somewhere fast and anonymous so Beth could go back to being the perfect Stanford-bound daughter to her perfect business-mogul mother.
Lana raged, and Beth kept her mouth shut. She knew she couldn’t win an argument with her mother. She couldn’t even compete. Lana was always on attack, never truly listening to or caring for another human being, even her own flesh and blood. Silence was the one form of power Beth had at her disposal. Silence, and her own intuition. Beth was scared, and angry, and there were tears sticking to her cheeks. But down in her belly, she felt a kind of tautness, a pressure building. Like she was pregnant with a storm.
And just like that, Beth knew what she wanted.
“I’m keeping the baby.”