Lana’s makeup bag fell to the floor with a clatter, sending compacts, mascaras, and lipsticks rolling across the buffed hardwood.
“So you’re going to ruin your life, is that it?” Lana was talking to her shoes, to the makeup strewn across the floor, looking anywhere but at Beth. “You’re going to throw away college and med school and your goals for what—a squawking pile of poop and need? Where are you and this baby going to live? Not here with me. Not with your father in Costa Rica or wherever the hell he is. What are you going to do?”
Beth had not considered this. But she did now. She took a deep breath and wiped her face with the back of her sleeve. Beth decided to behave as if this were a calm, normal question from her mother. She waited until the storm settled inside her before she spoke.
“I was thinking I could move to the beach house,” Beth said.
Lana snorted. “What beach house?”
“The foreclosure up the coast. The one that client dumped on you.”
Lana stared through her daughter.
“That bungalow is a disaster.” Lana’s voice cooled to its clipped, businesslike baseline. “I never should have accepted it. It’s probably slid down into the marsh by now. No one’s even been in there in ten years.”
Beth didn’t hear a no.
“I’ll clean it up,” Beth said. “I’ll pay rent if you need me to. Once I get a job.”
Beth bit down hard on the inside of her lower lip to keep herself from bursting into tears again. Her head was swimming. But her body felt sturdy. Beth held Lana’s dry gaze until her mother was the one to break eye contact.
“Rent won’t be necessary,” Lana said. “You’ll have your hands full as it is.”
And just like that, she went back to doing her makeup.
“Beth?” Now it was Martin’s hand on her forearm, bringing her back to the Maserati, idling at the traffic light. “You there?”
It had only been a flash, a moment lost to the past. She wasn’t the same person anymore. Neither, maybe, was her mother. Beth tore her eyes away from the rearview mirror to look at Martin, to wonder about the years he’d spent away from his father. And whether they’d been able to close the distance between them before the end, when it mattered.
When the light turned green, she gunned it.
She navigated them into downtown Salinas, to a quiet parking spot on a wide, dusty street. As they exited the car, Beth gave Martin back his keys, feeling a twinge of loss as she handed them over.
He looked around at the darkened storefronts, seemingly reluctant to leave his car.
“Where are we?”
“You’ll see.”
Beth walked up to a rough rectangular cutout in the restored adobe wall, between a check-cashing place and a thrift store. There was no ma?tre d’. No sign.
She turned to Martin. “You like spicy?”
He nodded.
She gave him a quick smile and stuck her head into the opening in the wall. “Dos burritos de camarones a la diabla, por favor. Y dos Modelos.”
A battered service door beside the window swung open, and Beth grabbed the proffered bag of food and beer. She led Martin down a narrow, dingy hallway to another door and opened it onto a hidden miracle: a cozy courtyard, crisscrossed with colorful flags and strings of lights. It was cool outside, but the bustle of families and couples crowding the picnic tables made it feel warm. Beth and Martin sat at the end of one table, side by side.
“I had no idea this was here,” he murmured.
“A lot has changed since you lived around here,” Beth said.
“Has it?” Martin smiled. “When I was a teenager, some drunk guy drove his tractor across the highway and barreled into the marina. People were still talking about it the last time I took my dad to a grange hall meeting.”
“It’s a quiet place. One of the things I love about it. That, and the food.”
She unwrapped her burrito, rolling back the top layer of foil into a barrier to keep the sauce from spilling out. Martin attempted to do the same. Beth took a bite, relishing the snap of the fresh shrimp, the oozing cheese, the crisp fine-diced onions. Smoky anchos and chiles de arbol filled her mouth with warmth. There were few things in life that couldn’t be improved with a shrimp burrito.
When Beth looked up, Martin was staring at her. “You look the way my dad looked when he bought a new horse.”
She grinned. “This is cheaper.” Beth tried to imagine Mr. Rhoads somewhere like this. He’d be out of place, but not uncomfortable. Sort of like his son looked now. Martin’s sleeves were rolled up, and he was attacking his burrito with gusto.
Again she wondered about the distance between father and son.
“Did things get better between you?” she asked. “After the strokes? I know it’s a terrible thing to ask, but I’ve seen—”
He nodded slowly. “I know what you mean. Yes and no. We spent more time together, sure. I think both of us wanted to try to make it work. Every Friday, I’d knock off work early and drive down to help out on the ranch. I took over the business operations without a problem. But outside the office, I could never do things to his specifications. I milked the cows crooked, or I put the wrong herbicide on his marionberries. After his third stroke, we had to make a change. Di arranged it all.”
“Was he comfortable at Bayshore Oaks?” She had to ask.
“He liked you, if that’s what you mean. Said you were the only one there with a good head on your shoulders. It was hard for him to be away from the ranch. But it seemed like he was doing better at Bayshore Oaks. At least, I thought he was.”
Beth was surprised to hear it. The Hal Rhoads she knew had been strong, but suffering. She’d watched him grow dimmer, eat less, cough more, every day until the end. She wondered if Martin had avoided seeing his father’s pain. Or if Hal had kept it hidden, maintaining a proud distance even when his son came home to him. Either way, Beth didn’t know Martin well enough to challenge the way he’d seen it.
“Your father struck me as so grounded,” Beth said. “Like an oak tree.” She could almost see him, standing sentinel behind his walker in the long hallway of Bayshore Oaks amid the daily churn of wheelchairs and IV carts.
A smear of diabla sauce had stained Martin’s bottom lip bright red. “It’s funny, you know? We were both entrepreneurs. We both had big ideas. He dreamed of mite-resistant lettuce. I dreamed of microscopic robots. But he never got interested in my work. I’d invite him to check out the lab, or come to a presentation. He never did. For Dad, everything had to revolve around the ranch. He gave a loan or an acre for ‘experimental purposes’ to every wild-eyed huckster in the region. He even leased a slice of marsh to that loser who owns the Kayak Shack. He took one of his boats as a down payment. Meanwhile, I’ve funded every one of my tech start-ups on my own.”
She could see it was eating at him. “I’m sorry, Martin. He may not have had an easy time showing it. But I know he loved you.”
Martin winced. “That last visit. We argued. It was stupid. I got stuck in the city late on Friday at this investor pitch event. I couldn’t get down to Bayshore Oaks to see him until Saturday. I wish . . .”
Beth touched his forearm. “Every family has its rough moments.”
“I know.” His eyes were wet, shining. “I just hate that it was our last one.”
She told Martin what she remembered, how Mr. Rhoads told her about his boy who came home after many years away. Maybe he’d been too proud to say it directly to Martin’s face.
“He called me that? His boy?”
“He did.”
As a geriatric nurse, Beth had often been in the delicate position of watching a man battle with the question of whether to cry in front of a woman he hardly knew. She looked away, took a swallow of beer, and gave him room to compose himself while she figured out how to change the subject. She considered what he’d said about Paul Hanley and his lease, and her ridiculous promise to help with the investigation.
“So you’ve had dealings with Paul Hanley?”
Martin looked at her quizzically. Then he nodded.