The Complete Where Dreams

by M. L. Buchman

  Maxine Pass was technically Maxwell Pass. Or it had been until the day that Aunt Gina had declared it just wasn’t right for all of the passes to have male names merely because men were the ones who drew the maps back in the 1800s.

  For her sixteenth birthday Jessica hadn’t received her first kiss—already happened a year before—or gotten laid—two more years until that event. Instead, she’d been recruited for a “Mission!” At two in the morning on their shared birthday, Aunt Gina drove her and Natalya up to repaint the Maxwell Pass highway sign to Maxine. It had become a tradition that every time the highway department changed it back to Maxwell, the three of them would have a two a.m. gals’ outing and change the sign once again. The highway department had given up years ago. A few of the more recent road maps had even changed the name.

  “Girl Power!” they’d shout after each time they finished repainting the sign, usually about three a.m. Then they’d break out the thermos of hot chocolate and drink it from a shared cup while they admired their handiwork by moonlight.

  One time Martin, the town cop, had shown up while they were doing it. Jessica and Natalya had ducked, but Gina hadn’t slowed down a single brush stroke.

  “Thought it would be you,” Martin had observed through his open car window, obviously talking to Gina.

  “Out of your jurisdiction, Marty,” had been Aunt Gina’s awesomely calm reply. She had always been Jessica’s hero, but that totally clinched it. The town limits had been left far behind.

  He’d joined them for the hot chocolate and had a good laugh at the “Girl Power!” chant.

  Today Jessica just waved hello to the sign as they crested the pass and began their descent.

  “Didn’t you ever bust out, Mom?” Jessica tried to imagine her doing so, but couldn’t quite conjure it up in her mind.

  “Bust out? You mean cheat on your father? Never!”

  “But what about between times, when you were divorced? That wouldn’t be cheating.”

  Monica Lamont’s lips thinned as she tightened her jaw and finally shook her head in a sharp little snap. “I was only living in the other end of the house.”

  “What about with Dad? You and Dad could just…you know?” The thought of her parents having sex was uncomfortable enough that she couldn’t quite say it aloud.

  “Ralph says that if I feel so strongly about things that I have to divorce him, then I shouldn’t be expecting any special concessions while we are divorced.”

  Jessica felt she had to side with Dad on that one. He’d become used to his wife’s antics, but that meant he didn’t get any either in the interims. No wandering for him—it had always been clear that Ralph Baxter was absolutely crazy about Monica Lamont. Jessica felt kind of sorry for him.

  “Wait. You mean you haven’t had sex in two years?” This latest was their longest divorce yet.

  Again that little snap that made Jessica’s neck ache in sympathy. Mom moved to the right as the road added a climbing lane to reach the six-hundred and thirty-four foot (not quite so much bragging) Rogue Pass. That name at least made perfect sense by Oregon standards…because it wasn’t anywhere near either of the two separate Rogue Rivers in Oregon. A half dozen cars roared past. Mom always drove exactly at the speed limit instead of the nearly mandatory ten over that prevailed throughout the state.

  “So you’re waiting for the wedding night?”

  This time her mom’s nod was a little sad.

  “I’m sure tomorrow will be a great night, Mom.”

  At that she smiled brilliantly. “If the past three are anything to judge by, yes, it will be. It’s just too bad we had to delay it.”

  “Delay it? Wait! What?” Jessica bolted upright in the car seat and almost throttled herself with her seatbelt. The wedding was supposed to be tomorrow. She’d secretly planned on staying just one day past the wedding, and then catching the Airporter Express that wandered through the small coastal towns once a day. She’d already warned Natalya to expect her in Portland for the rest of the week until her flight back to the Windy City.

  “Well, we were meeting with Judge Slater about the ceremony. As he performed the first three weddings…”

  Jessica resisted pointing out that he’d done all three divorces as well. Maybe her Oregon civility was coming back. Yeah, like a toothache.

  “…and he had all of the old records in a file; even had the new marriage license pre-filled out, the dear man. However, it turns out that the first time we were married was on July fourteenth, not July seventh as I had remembered. You know how your father loves the cycle of things. So we moved the wedding to next weekend to coincide properly with the original. I knew you already had your plane tickets, so I didn’t see any point in telling you.”

  Didn’t see any point? She’d have moved heaven and earth to— Actually, her mother was right because she’d purchased the cheapest non-refundable, non-changeable tickets she could find.

  A week! She was going to be trapped in Eagle Cove from Friday morning until Sunday morning nine days later? Oh, that was so bad.

  “I can’t believe that we celebrated it wrong for all of those years,” her mother continued, completely oblivious to the panic she’d just created. “The seventh was the date that had always stuck in my head for our anniversaries.”

  Mom’s dropping voice spoke volumes. She’d always been terrible at keeping a secret.

  “So why did the seventh stick in your head?” Jessica kept it as casual as she could, rather than rubbing it in that her mom always gave up whatever she was trying to hide. It must be the journalist in her coming out: ask the question and then wait patiently for a reply. Not pushing was another change between them. Jessica didn’t feel as if she was mellowing with age, but perhaps she was. Being disillusioned at thirty-two was no more newsworthy than it had been at twelve or twenty-two; but a woman shouldn’t mellow until…well, maybe a hundred-and-two.

  On the back side of Rogue Pass, Mom concentrated on the winding descent. Jessica waved at a massive Roosevelt elk who grazed in a small clearing beside the road. Coming back to Eagle Cove might be only one step better than a nightmare, but it was a very scenic one. The road was soon joined by a stream rushing in a deep ravine on Jessica’s side of the road; the problem was that they were both racing in the wrong direction—toward, not away from, her childhood home. The stream tumbled along almost as fast as they did down toward Eagle River which would eventually define the end of town where it opened into a broad bay before it reached the sea.

  No one quite knew why the bay had been named a cove, but it showed that way on even the oldest maps. It gave the town an off-kilter personality to Jessica’s mind, as if it was always seeking to find its true identity. No bridge crossed the Eagle to the wilderness area on the other bank. To reach that required either a boat or an hour drive back up to Highway 101, across the river, and then a long crawl back to the Coast over marginal logging roads.

  “C’mon, Mom, give.” Since not pushing at her mother had failed, Jessica went with regressing and shifted to the wheedling tone she’d perfected as a child. She might hate herself in the morning for slipping back into it, but it always worked. Sure enough, her mom gave in right on cue.

  “July seventh was the one time we cheated. We didn’t actually wait for our first wedding night,” the blush on her mother’s fair skin was almost bright enough to lighten the dark corridor between the towering trees. “Your father made it amazing. But that’s also the day I became pregnant, though I didn’t know it until after the wedding. All those years I was celebrating the wrong date. That’s why we never fool around unless we’re married.”

  “Sounds like you were celebrating exactly the right date, Mom.” She tried to pin down the exact date of her own first time, but it hadn’t been all that memorable. Good, but “earth-shattering” was just another one of those 1950s’ myths that didn’t happen in the twenty-first century. Except, apparently, for her own mother. How unfair was that.

  “Maybe,” her mom adm
itted, “but we’re going to get married on the fourteenth anyway.”

  “So, I’m illegitimate?” Not that it bothered her, but she couldn’t resist needling her mother about it. Maybe she hadn’t matured all that much.

  “Yes dear, but only by one week. I swear I didn’t know.” This time Jessica heard that her mom’s confession was a sigh at Jessica’s question rather than sounding contrite. Maybe it was time Jessica grew up a bit—even when in Eagle Cove.

  “Does Aunt Gina know about all this?”

  “No one does, except your father and now you. You only arrived three days early, which was actually four days late. No one gave it any thought.”

  Excellent! Forget being mature. Aunt Gina would love the extra dirt for teasing her sister and Jessica couldn’t wait to be the one to tickle her aunt’s funny bone.

  # # #

  It had been another long morning of assisting the Judge—always with a capital J. Monday through Friday, six a.m. to ten, Greg Slater helped his father. At first it had been something that Greg did to help out, but he’d come to like the simple routines and structure to his mornings.

  “Ready?” he called back to the kitchen as he did every day. There was no real need to ask. The big old clock hung high on the wall said it was exactly six a.m. and the Judge was a very punctual man.

  But Greg looked for the solemn nod before moving out into the diner and flicking on the fluorescents, “The Puffin Diner” sign, and the porch lights. There wasn’t much need for the last, sunrise was twenty minutes ago, but the sun itself wouldn’t clear the Coast Range ridge until at least six-thirty. For now, Beach Way, the town’s main street, was mostly cool shadows and darkened buildings.

  The bell mounted on the back of the door rang almost right away as Cal Mason Jr. came in. Greg had already set a mug of coffee on the counter for him. Cal ran the Blackbird Bakery and was hours into his day. Five days a week he was as punctual as the Judge. Cal Sr. wouldn’t be in for a few hours yet.

  “Your standard, Cal?”

  “Double,” though Greg knew that was a joke. Cal was one of the few men in town big enough that he could have eaten two of the Judge’s generous portions. Six-two and as powerful as a bulldozer; his hands dwarfed the coffee mug.

  Because Cal sat at the six-stool wooden counter, the Judge was less than five feet away through the broad service window that connected the dining room with the kitchen, but he waited for Greg to fill out the order slip and clip it to the spinner.

  It was Greg’s own fault. The diner’s service had been a bone of contention, or rather “lengthy negotiation” just as most things were with the Judge.

  “They can pick up their own plates at the window. Coffee pot is right there behind the counter where anyone who wants a refill can get their own.”

  Greg had won that round by subterfuge. He’d numbered the tables and then only put the numbers on the order slips, making it impossible for the Judge to boom out with “Veronica, your order is up.” Customers had slowly adapted to not having to leave their tables for every little thing.

  At least Greg thought he’d won, until a full three weeks later his father had winked at him while sliding across a short stack with bacon and hash browns for Karen Thompson, “Like I don’t know who orders what on a Thursday.”

  Now the Judge wouldn’t cook a thing without a proper ticket. Well, he’d cook it, but he wouldn’t serve it no matter how busy or harried Greg was.

  Cal’s plate came up less than thirty seconds after Greg hung the ticket just as it did every morning: western omelet, hash browns, farm sausage, and English muffin. The last was about the only kind of bread that Cal didn’t bake.

  “Gotta have something that I can order out for and enjoy without baking it myself.”

  Greg moved the plate across to the counter and refilled Cal’s half-drained mug of coffee.

  There wasn’t much call for a judge in a town the size of Eagle Cove. Semi-retired for the last five years, he no longer spent three days a week in Newport to sit on the bench as he had throughout Greg’s childhood. Instead he’d set up a small courtroom in town. He mainly handled family matters like marriages and estates, and fines for drunk and disorderly tourists who soon learned that Judge Slater was a fierce protector of the town. There was only the occasional speeding ticket—no matter how hard Martin the cop tried to catch someone. The town was perched against the Pacific Ocean at the dead end of a winding two-lane that had left the coastal highway a dozen miles back; it had enough “Sharp Curves Ahead” signs to quell even the most lead-footed of souls.

  So, “for something to keep me busy,” the Judge held office hours only in the afternoons because his weekday mornings were all spent working as a short-order cook. And ever since Greg’s return to Eagle Cove three years ago, he’d been his father’s front-of-house man: waiter, cashier, and busboy.

  The Puffin Diner had been a near derelict before his dad had bought and reopened it. It was a classic small town place built to serve the early morning fishermen, especially those returning from a long night’s work on the offshore shoals; it was little changed over the last ninety years.

  The clapboard building stood high enough on a heavy stone foundation that even the Christmas storm flood of 1964 had crested two steps below the front entry. It was one of the only structures on the town’s main street that didn’t have a street-level entry. All of the other businesses that had existed then had high-water lines drawn halfway or more up their walls. The Grouse Hardware store, the lowest spot in town close beside the docks, had a small wooden plaque of a fish screwed in just above the main door lintel. It was bright yellow with “Dec 22, 1964” painted on it in tropical blue—it was generally considered to be a little boastful, but old man Jaspar refused to tone down the color scheme that he’d painted on that fish in his youth.

  The interior of the diner was so retro that it would have been ironic-modern if it wasn’t quite so authentic. The steel-edged tables of blue Formica were scuffed nearly colorless by the thousands of plates and silverware settings that had been slid across their surfaces over the years. The chairs’ red leather was sun-faded and the old chrome had pitted with rust from the salt air, making them uncomfortable to the touch without quite being painful. The linoleum floor had been replaced…back in the 1980s when mauve and hunter green had been trendy colors. The six round stools bolted to the floor at the counter squealed every time someone spun on or off them. The kitchen was authentic right down to the large service window, the steel spinner rack for order slips dangling in one corner, and the big grill and burners in the back. The scents of eggs, hash browns, and frying bacon filled the main street each morning enticing all passersby to come and find comfort food.

  Ralph Baxter and Manny McCall came in and took their usual spot by the corner window. They’d have tourists out fishing off their boats within the hour and were both after black coffee and tall stacks.

  At first Greg had resented serving the Judge’s fare—it was as invariable as his father. Scrambles, omelets, pancakes—no waffles because the iron had broken the same day Mom had died and he couldn’t seem to fix it and wouldn’t let Greg try. The pancakes were big and fluffy. The very crispy hash browns were not an option; they were on every single plate, even with the pancakes. Farm fresh sausage or bacon was the other staple on every plate—not that it was a choice. Everyone received whichever Carl Parker had delivered the day before along with the eggs.

  All of Greg’s efforts to vary the oatmeal recipe, served with bacon or sausage and hash browns of course, had been in vain. The Judge served only rolled oats—not steel cut—with sliced, not diced, dried apricots and diced, not sliced, fresh apple. Whether brown sugar or maple syrup was used to sweeten it was wholly up to the customer; local honey was also available.

  Omelets were the Judge’s real specialty and by six-thirty there were already a dozen slips up for them. Omelets were the only dish where variations were allowed. He offered them with cheese, mushrooms, or smoked salmon filli
ngs. Never all three of course, because there were limits to what was proper.

  The Puffin Diner mostly served coffee. Greg’s sole triumph at adjusting the menu had been when he managed to switch from Dad’s “fresh ground” granules purchased in large plastic tubs to fresh-ground French roast. Tea or hot chocolate were the only other options, but asking for marshmallows with the latter was frowned upon unless you were a kid—the whipped cream came out of a spray can.

  They’d fought royally over the Judge’s inflexibility, but of course fighting over things was a tradition in the Slater household. Not that voices were ever raised, because that would never do. The few times Greg had tried that tactic he’d been ruled “Out of Order” and banished from the dinner table: the sole forum for Slater “discussions.” With Ma gone to cancer three years before—Greg’s original reason for returning to Eagle Cove—he didn’t have the heart to “force” the Judge into driving him from the table after that first time. When he’d been remanded to the kitchen two weeks after Mom’s funeral, he’d made the mistake of glancing back as he’d moved off to finish his meal. His father had looked old, sad, and impossibly alone.

  Greg hadn’t been able to face living in the big old house out on the beach, so he’d moved into the guest house. Once he finally understood that no number of cogent debates were going to sway the Judge, Greg had let the menu go. It had been unchanged in either content or price in the last decade—other than the wavy black line of magic marker through the “Waffles (with blueberries when in season).”

  Greg had been on the verge of leaving town when the Judge sat him down at the big house’s dining room table. Ma Slater had been in the ground for a month. Greg knew he didn’t really have anywhere to go, he’d learned all he was going to from the banquet chef at the Sorrento Hotel in Seattle and there weren’t any top positions open for an untested executive chef wanting to make his mark. He didn’t have the capital to make his own splash, not in the insanely competitive restaurant markets in the big cities. But he’d find something.