The two women stared at each other across the table. Teresa Ramirez raised her Corona.
“To being underestimated,” she said.
“To being seen.” Lana clinked her bottle.
Chapter Fifty-Six
It took three more weeks for Lana to finally make her move.
She woke up early that Wednesday to the sound of an animal shuffling outside her window. When she sat up and peeked through the blinds, she shook her head. It was Beth messing with her rock garden again. Lana got up, pulled on her robe, and went into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee.
Lana opened the back door and handed her daughter a steaming mug.
“What’s bothering you, Beth?”
“Nothing.” Beth accepted the cup of coffee, pocketing the piece of shale in her hand. “It’s just . . . you’re all packed up.”
It was true. Lana had spent the past ten days working like a demon, taking down the bulletin board, sorting out shoeboxes, and bagging clothes. She’d convinced Beth it wouldn’t hurt to get the bedroom painted, and Jack chose a steely blue that mirrored the slough at sunrise so perfectly you could wake up thinking you were already outside with the plovers diving for fish for their breakfast. Later today, Esteban and Max were coming to deal with the last of the junk in the garage. Lana had left a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt and a fresh legal pad on Jack’s desk, and she’d convinced Beth to take a vintage suede trench coat. Everything else was moving.
Lana joined her daughter in the swirling river of stones beyond the concrete step. She picked up a yellowed hunk of sandstone, the grainy surface rough against her cold fingers. It had rained on and off all March, and Lana could see grass and thistle peeking up between the curling stone paths. By May, the whole labyrinth might be hidden in foxtails.
“Beth, we made this decision together,” she said.
“I know,” Beth said.
“Jack needs her own room.”
“I know.” Beth kept winding through the stone maze, replacing a flat black oval with a quartz-veined cube. She didn’t alter the overall shape of it anymore, but she kept making adjustments. Tiny choices, made slowly over time, building something beautiful.
“Beth, we’re going to make this work.”
There was a shout from below, and the two women looked down the gravel hillside to the beach. Jack was down there, her back to them, paddle in hand, yelling goodbyes to a lean, muscular figure paddling farther up into the slough.
“Who’s that?” Beth asked.
Lana shook her head. “Want me to get the binoculars?”
Jack bounded up the hill, her pink paddleboard on top of her head. “Mom, so I met this guy at school who’s interning with the harbormaster? He’s older, a senior, and he went to Semester at Sea in the fall. He was telling me all about how they lived on this ship and cataloged wildlife and I was thinking, maybe instead of buying my own boat, I could—”
Jack suddenly noticed Lana behind her mother. “Oh, hi. Heard you’re coming with us to the drive-in tonight.”
Lana had agreed to join Beth and Jack for date night, on one condition. “We’re dressing up to celebrate, right? You’ll brush your hair?”
Jack grinned and pulled a slimy rope of seaweed off her life jacket. “We’re not heathens, you know.”
Lana spent the rest of the day directing traffic in the garage. By six that evening, she was at the front door in a new burgundy skirt suit and her dented metallic Jimmy Choos. Jack had on a pair of dark jeans with no rips in them and an old blazer of Lana’s that made her look like she’d already gotten her PhD. But Beth was the real surprise. She was a vision in a forest-green knee-length dress and black square-toed boots Lana had snapped up on a trip to a nearby Nordstrom that was shutting down. If only she’d ditch that bomber jacket.
Beth handed out new homemade earrings to everyone: miniature snail shells for Jack, coral for herself, sea glass for Lana. Lana marveled at the tiny treasures in her palm, using a finger to trace the silver wire her daughter had coiled around the pale teardrops of light.
“Oh! I have a present for you too,” Jack said. She disappeared behind the house, coming back with a redwood branch that had been sanded into an uneven staff.
“What’s this?” Lana asked.
“A big stick.” Jack grinned. “For your new office, when you find one.”
“Thank you.” Lana hefted the stick in her hands. “I’m looking at a potential sublet in the marina tomorrow. It could be the new headquarters for Lana Rubicon and Associates.”
“Associates, Ma?” Beth raised an eyebrow.
Lana smiled. “It has a nice ring to it.”
They piled into Beth’s car, and twenty minutes later, they rolled into the Hot Diggity, thoroughly surprising the owner, Lolo, who was accustomed to seeing the two younger Rubicon women in scrubs and sweats. He dropped a vat of relish on his right foot, causing him to shot-put the wiener in his left hand out the service window of the little red hut. Once his foot stopped throbbing, Lolo apologized for swearing, handed them three foot-longs with onions on the house, and offered to take their picture. Even Lana had to admit that the hot dogs were delicious.
When they got to the drive-in in Salinas, Lana talked the farmer into letting them park in the middle of the front row, in a space Beth was pretty sure the farmer reserved for his own wife. Lana opened a cooler and passed out sodas to all of them—Coke for Jack, Sprite for her and Beth. Beth looked at the Sprite bottle, confused. She’d never seen Lana drink any soda other than Diet Coke. But Lana was already mid-swig. Beth opened her own bottle and took a sip. It was some kind of sparkling wine. Not bad.
The movie was a whodunit. It might have been a good one, but Lana and Jack’s loud, premature conclusions about the murderer made it impossible for Beth to follow the story. By her second bottle of Sprite, it didn’t really matter to Beth either.
Beth looked at Lana. Her mother’s eyes were shining in the reflected light from the screen, her new suit hidden under the patchwork quilt she was sharing with Jack in the back seat. Beth didn’t know, couldn’t know, all the ways it would prove insufferable to have Monterey County’s newest land consultant living in what had once been her garage. She didn’t know the disasters would start the very next day, when she’d come home to find a massive hole punched in her roof to install skylights she hadn’t ordered. All Beth knew was that they were together, they were safe, and they were laughing. And that was enough.
Acknowledgments