Vacancy: A Love Story

by Tracy Ewens

  “Hey there, boss man,” Poppy said.

  Matt balked at the title but was grateful for the diversion away from memory lane. He walked into the morning energy of people on their way to work or the beach and some customers already plugged in at the tables scattered around. He joined Poppy behind the counter.

  “Are you hopped up on espresso yet?”

  “Already on the second round,” she said, blinking her eyes as if she was one quiet moment away from a nap.

  “Not sleeping?”

  “What’s sleep?”

  Matt helped take orders until there was a lull and Poppy pulled out her phone to show him pictures of the adorable and super tiny baby Hannah. As Poppy flipped through photos, his eyes locked onto a picture of Hannah asleep on Eddie’s bare tattooed chest. Matt took the phone from Poppy and tried to smile while something wiggled its way open in his chest. There was a look in Eddie’s eyes and for a split second, Matt tried to picture his life cluttered with toys and visits to the park. It felt like a memory and a brand new sensation all rolled into one. Matt found a polite smile and nodded to Poppy as he handed back her phone.

  “Wow, she’s incredible.”

  Poppy beamed and slid her phone into the back pocket of her jeans before asking a balding man in front of them if he wanted a hot or iced latte. Matt turned away from her for a moment, his back to the forever-forming line of customers while his mind tried desperately to avoid the trap of “what if.”

  Chapter Three

  The uneven wood of the floor creaked as Hollis stood barefoot before the full-length mirror that hung on the bathroom door. She had not put on a dress since well before she’d arrived at Tomales Bay. In fact, the one she was pulling over her just-showered and almost-finished-peeling body was purchased from a new shop she’d spotted on her way back from the storage unit the other day. It was cornflower blue and nothing about it said modern-day Hollis Jeffries, which might be why she liked it. Before she thought too much about it, she put on some lip balm, pushed her still-wet hair off her face, and looked around for her trusty flip-flops. They were by the front door, still sandy from her walk on the beach that morning. Wiggling her toes in the grit as she slipped them on, Hollis finished her glass of wine and grabbed a light sweater.

  When was the last time she’d had her feet in the sand before arriving at Mitchell’s Cove again? Why didn’t she ever go to the beach or “frolic in the sun,” as her mother would have put it? Hollis took in a slow breath and told herself this was no time for deep introspection. Uncle Mitch was counting on her to arrive early and help fill the ice buckets. Ice buckets. Focus on the tasks at hand, Hollis.

  Despite her best efforts, stupid introspection returned as she stepped out into the surrounding blue of predusk. Maybe she shut off the things she couldn’t control. Maybe the warm sand and steady waves were part of a time in her life when she was with him, and the moment she closed that chapter, life suddenly became too fast for flip-flops.

  That was a shame, she thought, because while it was true that most of her memories of the cove were built around him and a broken heart had kept her away, the feeling she had walking along the path that led away from the cabins felt solitary. She’d grown up on this cove, spent lazy days with her parents and her sisters. Sure, she’d fallen in love, but she’d also learned how to sail and snorkel. She had read her first Jane Austen book on the patio of her uncle’s restaurant while trying to avoid chores and made s’mores for the first time around a dwindling fire after her parents had hosted a clambake for visiting friends. Meg broke her wrist when she slammed it on the dock doing a cartwheel into the water. Hollis remembered running for help. She taught Sage to jump off the dock without holding her nose during their second summer and directed Annabelle’s first puppet show in the restaurant after closing. There were life stories of her own that had nothing to do with him. Whether she had come here to escape or to find parts of herself she’d given up to become who she was now, she would need to remember that Mitchell’s Cove was so much more to her than one person. No matter how important he had seemed at the time, it was fine that he was living here now, Hollis thought, because she was no longer a silly young girl.

  The music grew louder as she approached the pier and saw the pops of light as they broke through the hazy mist. Hollis smiled, her cheeks warm from the wine, and felt the moisture seep into her pores like one of those balms they put on her anytime she was feeling stressed and went to her favorite spa in the city. This was better: more nourishing and free. Not much in her life was free anymore.

  Party on the Pier took place the second Saturday of each month. The entire pier was flanked with colorful lights as local merchants set up tables, offering everything from barbecue to candy-covered pretzels. Dex and the Drowned Rats were warming up at the end of the pier behind a makeshift dance floor. Dex must be pushing sixty, Hollis thought as her uncle made eye contact and gestured for her to follow him into the kitchen.

  POP, as the locals called it, went as far back as Hollis could remember, and sometimes her family would make a special trip up on the off-season for the party. Hollis hadn’t been to a POP for over twelve years, but she followed the pictures on Uncle Mitch’s social media. From the safety of her city office, she’d seen two marriages during a May and June POP and a bon voyage for Laura Cray when she went to college three years ago. Last Christmas, there had been a Santa look-alike contest. Beards and bellies from all over the bay area came to compete, and Hollis had liked and commented on Uncle Mitch’s Facebook post: a photo of him center pier surrounded by all the Santas.

  Pictures were great, she thought, but as Hollis wheeled out a cart holding two large ice buckets, it hit her that she’d been away far too long. There was no substitute for standing on the pier as the sun burst rose and orange before dipping into the bay after a long summer day. A photograph could not capture the feel of an ocean breeze or the salty taste of a kiss long overdue. Hollis jerked upright as she filled the bins with cold cans of soda and bottles of water and looked around, wondering if anyone could see the regret.

  Hollis dried her hands and felt like a bit of a shame. She’d been away for so long that as the crowd began to gather along the pier and locals waved to one another, she didn’t seem to belong. Like someone who’d crashed a party and was waiting to be tapped on the shoulder and asked to leave, she bowed her head, smoothed the red-and-white checkerboard tablecloth, and turned to face the water and that sunset she’d missed for so many years. Hollis wanted to announce that she knew the back roads that led to Bodega Bay and she remembered Pete’s Fish and Chips before they had a patio. She felt a need to justify that she belonged, and despite her absence, she was still part of the history, the easy comfort of her cove.

  Is that why you’re here, is it the comfort, Hollis? There it was again, introspection. Who knows and who cares? Hollis thought, laughing at herself. None of this soul searching was going to get her where she needed to be, which was back on top, eye to eye again with her colleagues behind her imposing desk. She didn’t need answers anymore; she needed a way forward.

  First, she needed a drink.

  “What’s so funny?” Uncle Mitch asked, coming up next to her and handing her a plastic cup of lemonade.

  Hollis looked down at the cup. “Nothing. I was thinking. I’m amazed Dex and his other lovely tatted-up contingent are still a band. This looks like lemonade.” She tilted the drink toward him.

  “Those guys are legends, and it is lemonade.”

  “It’s well past appropriate drinking time.”

  Her uncle nodded and focused his attention on the band.

  Hollis sipped her lemonade. It was sweet, tangy, and severely lacking a kick of something more. Her uncle was definitely hinting. If she wasn’t careful, he’d start making her eat kale next.

  “I see you’ve brought on some seasonal help, Mitch.”

  Hollis closed her eyes. She knew the voice, felt it way down in places she often ignored. Matthew Everly—middle nam
e also his mother’s maiden name—Locke came into her life the summer between fourth and fifth grade. He had skinny legs and wore navy-blue Vans with a hole in the toe. They had been paired up the first morning of Junior Sailing. Hollis had only sailed once before, but it still counted. Matt was a newbie.

  “Have you ever done this before?” he had asked her, all big blue eyes and summer-bleached, overgrown brown hair.

  “Have you?” eleven-year-old Hollis had shot back.

  “No. I was hoping you were worse than me, though.”

  She had smiled politely and zipped up her life jacket in the way she imagined all the expert sailors did. “That will never happen.”

  His head tilted in confusion.

  “That I’ll be worse than you. Not gonna happen.” She’d thrown a life jacket at him and stepped on the small Laser sailboat.

  Matt turned out to be a more than decent sailor, and they’d been friends ever since. She would tell him later that his honesty was what first drew her to him. He had been drawn to her bite. “I love the bite,” he’d said all the years she’d known him.

  “Yeah, I brought in the top brass to help me out this season,” Uncle Mitch said and patted Matt on the shoulder. “Tiny Tots here has an MBA. She’s a big deal now.”

  Hollis cringed. She was sure she’d never heard “Tiny Tots” and “MBA” mentioned in the same sentence and hoped she never would again.

  As if some gear had turned, they all faced the band, now well into the first guitar solo of the night.

  Matt glanced at her. “So I’ve heard,” he said, with a familiar charm the little hairs on her neck registered as dangerous. For as long as she’d known him, Matt had a warmth that drew people to him.

  When she was a little girl, they’d lived in an old house in San Rafael. Her room had a big closet. One day, while playing hide-and-seek with Sage and Meg, Hollis had noticed a wire in the back of her closet. It was big and hung from the corner like a reluctant snake. No longer worried about the game, she stacked a few books and reached up to touch it, but before she made contact, she was frightened by the pull. That was how she described it to her mother moments later when she ran downstairs. It was as if the wire was pulling her in, daring her to touch it. The energy was palpable and it scared her so much she forgot all about her sisters, who were still hunting for her, and ran to find an adult.

  Turned out the contractors had overlooked the wire and left it live with a voltage that could have killed her. Her father had frantically shut off the electricity, cut the wire back, and capped it as a precaution until the workers arrived the next morning. Hollis remembered her heart was still thundering almost an hour later at dinner. Part of her had wanted to touch it, give herself over to the energy even if it stole her life, but her mind, her common sense had kicked in just in time.

  Matt was like that wire. A draw so enticing that the possibility of her heart stopping in her chest had not mattered. There was a time when what they were together meant more than anything she could ever be on her own. “You are my ‘split-apart.’ The half that makes me whole, Locke-ness,” she had whispered to him one night when they’d pitched a tent on the beach and cooked chicken on the rocks over a fire. He was the great love, the big one they write epic romance novels about. That was, until once again her common sense kicked in and she ran.

  “Good to see you without the fuzzy slippers this time, Holls. Where you been hiding?” he asked, oblivious to her memory.

  Her jaw tightened and Hollis turned, ready to ask him why he wasn’t behind his table serving coffee where he belonged, but when her gaze locked on his, she lost her words.

  Matt’s eyes should have been brown. Everything about his face said brown eyes, and yet indicative of the man himself, he was effortlessly given soulful blue eyes. In fact, all of the features on his face should have read average, ordinary. His nose was a little too wide, his eyes a little too big. He had small ears, noticeably small, but all of it together was more than she’d ever encountered in another man. She was her true self with Matt from the moment she’d met him. Unlike so many people she’d known in her life, Matt didn’t lie. He was almost incapable because most of his secrets were right there in those eyes.

  “I’m not hiding. I’m drinking,” was all she managed. It was a weak comeback, but the heat off his all-too-close shoulder was not helping her find her bite. Obviously, the man could still piss her off and trip her up in equal measure. Hoping for some balance, she turned her attention back to the band because looking at him was certainly not the answer.

  Matt laughed, the ass. “Is that so? Is that why you’re here? Mitch, are you working a detox program for the upwardly mobile these days?”

  Her uncle almost cracked up too, but instead turned and left as if he had something important to tend to.

  “It’s nice to know, along with everything else, that you haven’t changed, Matt.”

  “Yeah, well you know us townies, we like consistency.”

  “Do you have something you need to get off your chest? Because I can recommend a top-notch therapist.”

  “We don’t exactly have time for all of my issues, Holls, and besides, it’s a party. No sense bringing down the mood.” He took a sip of his drink, which looked way more exciting than lemonade and God, she could use some liquid courage right about now.

  Turning to leave at the same time Matt did, Hollis found herself face-to-face with the one man capable of seeing right through her as the Drowned Rats began their version of “Barracuda.” The corner of his mouth curled into the faintest snicker. “Now this song seems appropriate,” he said, his mouth so close to her that had he not been so smug, she might have been tempted. Instead, her jaw again clenched in anger as she left and walked toward the edge of the pier. She felt him come up behind her, keeping his distance. Typical.

  “Have you missed me?” she teased, because it certainly wasn’t like anything she could say would make her life worse at this point.

  “No.”

  Hollis laughed. “Fair enough.”

  They stood in silence surrounded by noise.

  “How’s married life?”

  “Good.”

  He was surprised she knew. Under all his casual hands-in-the-pockets ease, after so many years, she could still read the paragraphs hidden in that one-word response.

  “Did you think about me?” she asked because she found she wanted to know.

  “Every day for a while.”

  “Me too, but then it fades, right?”

  “No.”

  By the time Hollis turned, he was gone.

  Seven of the eight cabins at Mitchell’s Cove were named after dogs. Matt couldn’t remember if they were all dogs owned by Hollis’s grandfather or the family’s dogs, but each one had a dog name, and weird ones like Miss Kitty and Lil’ Earl. Matt never kept the names straight, but when the Jeffries were in town for the summer, they stayed in the Bunny Blue cabin. He would probably remember that forever. It was appropriately blue and next to the Innkeeper’s Cabin where Mitch lived year-round. Earlier when Matt was setting up, he noticed Hollis wasn’t staying in the usual family cabin. She waltzed out of the last one, farthest from the restaurant—it was green and called Mr. Boots maybe—wearing that practically see-through summer dress.

  Why the hell did he even care? Other than the cabins, nothing else was the same. Except for her bite, that was still there. He’d expected it, looked forward to it even, but did she honestly ask him if he had thought about her after she left? Had she stood on their pier, dark curls teasing the tan bare skin his hands remembered, and asked him that? What kind of sick, twisted—

  “Hey, Matt, where’s the sugar?” Thom, the guy that did the landscaping for almost everyone in Tomales Bay, asked.

  Matt was refilling the sugar while he replayed the conversation with Hollis over and over again. Screwing the top back on, he handed the sugar canister across the table.

  As POP 2016 wound down, people stopped by for something to either so
ber them up or keep them awake until the Drowned Rats played their last song. Matt took orders, made coffee, and tried not to notice how the moonlight danced along the pier. When it reached Hollis, spilled along her bare shoulders, for an instant Matt wanted to be that light. Then he would have a reason to tangle in her hair, kiss all the spots she left exposed, and surround her in a glow that would captivate her once and for all. The line at his table dwindled, and Matt had nothing else to focus on except her. How could a woman who—if town gossip was right, and it often was—had been “boozing it up and stuffing her face with junk food in the Mr. Boots cabin at Mitchell’s Cove” still be practically luminous? How was that fair?

  Matt’s father and Poppy normally worked Party on the Pier. He’d come up a few times to support his parents, but back then, the ease and comfort of the cove had turned sour and painful, so he often stayed away. That was years ago and things had healed somewhat, but he must have a death wish because he’d told Poppy to take the night off. It was better that he stay busy because he knew if there was the slightest chance, she would be drawn to the pier like the proverbial moth to the flame.

  Party on the Pier was a good time, and Matt loved the energy of the event even if it reminded him of Hollis. The first time he had danced with her was at POP. So was the last time, he realized as he stood watching her now. Stupid fool, but he couldn’t help it.

  Hollis finished up dancing with her uncle and made her way toward him. He didn’t think she’d bother coming around again, but he should have known better—she’d never been one to leave a conversation hanging. She hadn’t put him in his place yet, which meant she wasn’t done. Matt pretended he didn’t see her and started packing things up for the night.