by Karis Walsh
“I didn’t mean bad different. It’s beautiful and unique. You can see sunlight glistening on it. I just meant, well, I’ve never seen you get so close to a subject. So single-minded in your focus. You’ve changed.”
“Whoa,” Pam said, backing away. She wasn’t changing, wasn’t turning into whatever Mel suddenly seemed to see. Vulnerability shifted to anger in a second. The hint of her former creative spark was still too new, too fragile to share. She had needed Mel’s praise somehow. Her appreciation of the painting. But Pam wasn’t ready to have the focus shifted off the art and onto her as an artist just yet. Not until she had regained some control, some of her old ability to paint at will. Some proof that the tentative confidence she had experienced while painting had some foundation in reality. “Don’t read too much into it. I saw a jellyfish and I painted it. You know what they say, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
“Careful, the trim is still wet,” Mel said, pointing at the wall behind Pam. Her voice rose in pitch to match Pam’s.
Pam stopped backing up and stood her ground. “If you don’t like it, I can try to paint something else…”
“I like it. I want it in my inn, so don’t try to replace it. I wasn’t trying to offer a psychological analysis of you as an artist. I just meant the subject and how you treated it is different from the other mosaics.”
“Okay,” Pam said. She was reacting foolishly and she tried to calm down. Just because Mel made the observation about her focus didn’t mean she was trying to interfere with Pam’s creativity. Dissect it until it disappeared. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been…a little edgy since I moved back home. I miss, well, I miss you. Having sex with you, I mean.”
Mel rubbed her arms. “I miss it, too. The sex part. And I’m lonely here, but I’ll be better this weekend when my guests come.”
Pam carefully put the jellyfish mosaic on the floor. She wanted to take Mel in her arms, keep Mel talking about sex. Make some joke about her trim comment and lighten the mood. Strip off her clothes and initiate the new guest room. Because that’s what casual sex partners did.
But she had to let go of the illusion. She and Mel were anything but casual. Mel had been the key to unlocking her old talent, her broken love of art and creation. And Mel was the one person with the ability to make Pam lose everything once again.
“You’ll be fine. We’ll both be fine,” she said. She walked away from Mel and from her painting. From the only part of herself she dared to offer.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The soft ding-dong of an old-fashioned doorbell startled Mel.
She had installed the electronic chime on her front door, choosing the homiest sound-effect option, but no one had activated it until now. Her guests. She was tempted to stay in the kitchen until they gave up and went away, but she reluctantly put her eggs back in the fridge and walked out to greet them.
“Hi, I’m Mel. Welcome to the Sea Glass Inn,” she said, forcing a smile.
“I’m Angie, and this is my partner Sara and our friend Tracy.”
Mel shook hands with the three women. Angie had called last month to make this reservation for the group—her first official guests, since the wedding had only booked because they’d lost their original venue. She should have been excited, eager to celebrate the momentous occasion of launching her inn, but she felt curiously empty inside, lonely without Pam. She had gotten attached too quickly, and just as fast, their relationship was over. She had lost part of herself by getting too close to someone, just as she’d feared.
“What a beautiful old house,” Angie continued as Mel picked up one of the suitcases and started up the stairs. “After talking to you and hearing about all the renovations you had to do, I was expecting to be staying in a construction zone. But this place is gorgeous.”
“Thank you,” Mel said, with a smile that felt more natural than her earlier one. She felt a mix of shyness and pride at the praise.
“Is this the original molding?” Tracy asked.
Mel halted in the middle of the staircase. “It’s original, but I had to fill in some big chips and replace some whole sections. Here, and here,” she said, pointing to the repaired areas. The project had taken her hours. “The joins aren’t very smooth. I did this section first because I thought people would be less likely to stop on the stairs and notice. I improved, though. You can barely tell what I replaced in the dining room.”
Tracy laughed. “Sorry to call attention to it. I promise I’ll go up and down the stairs with my eyes closed from now on. But you did an excellent job—that’s very exacting work.”
Mel was surprised how pleased she was at the compliment. She carried the suitcase into the first room and then showed Tracy to hers.
All three of her guests immediately went to examine and praise Pam’s seascape, and then the storm painting. She had originally planned to put Tracy in the Starfish Room, the room Pam had used, but she couldn’t handle having a stranger sleeping in Pam’s bed. Eventually she would have to fill the room, but not yet. Forgetting about Pam was going to be very difficult when Mel had these massive reminders in every room. She endured the few minutes of discussion about Pam, her gallery, and the other paintings. And the inevitable tour through the inn to see the other mosaics.
Finally, Mel herded her guests back into their rooms. She would get over it eventually. She would let go of the weeks of sharing a house, and then a bed, with Pam. As Mel went through the motions of showing her guests where they could find extra blankets and pillows, she told herself she needed to take a lesson from Pam and approach their relationship with logic and reason, not feelings. She had come to the ocean to start her own business and live independently for once in her life. But she had given Pam enough power to upset her equilibrium. To make her wonder what she could have done differently to keep Pam here. She knew the answer. Nothing. Pam hadn’t wanted to stay.
Mel tried to refocus on her guests. “I can make a picnic lunch for you to take on your bike ride tomorrow. And if you’re looking for a place to eat, there’s a binder full of menus from local restaurants in the living room. Breakfast will be at eight.”
“If you have time while we’re here, I’d enjoy a tour of the house,” Tracy said. “I’ve done a ton of remodeling in my old Victorian in Seattle. We could compare notes on painting techniques.”
Mel hesitated in the doorway. She noticed Angie and Sara exchange smiles behind Tracy’s back. The realization stunned her for a moment. Tracy was obviously asking to spend more time with her.
Tracy was interested. In her. She felt flustered and was about to make an excuse to put Tracy off when she suddenly wondered what Pam would do. Pam would flirt and would casually make a date with Tracy because she was an ideal candidate. Only in town for a few days. Very pretty with her shoulder-length brown hair and long legs. Mel didn’t feel an instant attraction, an irresistible pull, as she had with Pam. But maybe a sexual connection needed time. Maybe it didn’t have to be so natural and overwhelming as it had been with Pam.
“I’d like that,” Mel said. “Catch me any time you’re free. And if you’re nice, I might let you spackle something.”
She left the room and her guests’ laughter behind and went downstairs to the kitchen. She returned to the task of preparing the ingredients for tomorrow’s breakfast, quietly shocked that she had flirted with a stranger. Awkwardly flirted, but flirted nonetheless. She hadn’t done that for years. Since her crush on Danny’s teacher. But she hadn’t been free then, and her overtures had been hesitant and short-lived. This was different. She was free. Single. Anything could happen. She whisked a bowl of eggs and cream and vanilla for a batch of muffins and covered it with plastic wrap before putting it in the fridge. The dry ingredients were already sifted and ready, so in the morning, she would only need to blend them and add some fruit right before she baked them.
Her methodical approach to breakfast was soothing. She knew she looked efficient and in control as she browned sausage and peppers tha
t she would add to eggs and bake in a casserole. The melon was already cut and macerating with lime juice and mint leaves. Steel-cut oats were sitting in the Crock-Pot, ready to cook overnight. But the steady and organized prep work she was doing was completely at odds with her jumbled thoughts. She hadn’t expected to connect like this with her guests, but now that she was running the inn she wondered why she was so surprised. She was hosting people who chose to be in a more intimate bed-and-breakfast instead of an anonymous, large hotel. And by advertising her inn as gay friendly, she had inadvertently set up a convenient dating pool.
She paused in her cooking to answer the phone. A couple traveling with their two grandchildren wanted to stay for a few nights in January. She would put them on the third floor, in the Jellyfish and Kite Rooms with their shared bath. She carefully entered the information on the spreadsheet she and Danny had created for her bookings, and she was amazed to see how many rooms she had reserved for the month. And she was already getting enough calls to hint at a full inn for the summer.
Mel returned to the kitchen and stacked her dirty dishes in the dishwasher. She could see the growth of her business so clearly.
Phone calls, booked rooms, painted walls. But when she looked at her personal life, all she saw was what was missing. She’d called Pam a mistake. Thought she’d lost part of herself during their affair. But her brief interchange with Tracy proved her wrong. What would she have done two months ago? Would she have been too embarrassed to be playful? Would she even have noticed Tracy’s interest? Before the inn—before Pam—she hadn’t seen herself as attractive, certainly not in a sexual way. Closed off, shut down, too old, too late. But not one of those phrases applied to her anymore. They never had, but she had believed in them anyway.
Scenes from her time with Pam flashed through Mel’s mind. The floor, the bed, the shower, the rickety back porch. Mel smiled and felt her skin grow warm with remembered arousal. She had lost Pam but no part of herself. Every step she had taken since buying this inn had resulted in another lesson learned, and her affair with Pam was no exception. She had grown, had gained clarity about what she wanted and deserved, had opened herself up to new possibilities.
Why couldn’t she have a full inn and a full life? A full inn meant nonstop work. And now it meant she’d have an opportunity for a date or two. She wiped down the counter before heading downstairs. Some transitory flirtations might be exactly what she needed to get over her obsession with Pam. She sure as hell wasn’t going to sit around and wallow in self-pity.
Mel shut the door to her room and sat on her bed. Where she and Pam had spent their nights together. Near the rug where they’d shared their first citrus-scented kiss. No, she’d never be unaffected by her time with Pam. She’d probably never fully get over her. And she had a feeling Pam’s unemotional and carefree approach to sex was only a veneer concealing a passionate and sensitive soul.
She had seen Pam’s paintings—had seen Pam paint—and the discrepancy between her pictures and her words was clear. Pam managed to look at a beach, at a wave, at a jellyfish and take her subjects deep inside her. Hold them there until she connected them to something bigger and wider and deeper than what she saw in front of her. She claimed to be noncommittal, happy to play with shallow relationships and surface emotions, yet her paintings, her memories, her love for the son she had lost revealed only depth. But Mel couldn’t force Pam to acknowledge any feelings she might have when she seemed so determined to keep love, art, and emotion out of her life.
The very qualities Mel wanted more than anything.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Pam parked next to Lisa’s van in the high school’s parking lot. She hurried over to help Lisa, who had crawled in the back of her van and was wrapping protective blankets around several crates she had transported. Pam took one end of a heavy crate full of sculptures and walked backward quickly as they moved out of the drizzly afternoon and into the auditorium. They repeated the trip three more times with crates of paintings.
“I have your booth right up front,” Tia said, coming over to greet them. “Did you bring any of your own paintings?”
Pam had been anticipating the question. Tia asked her the same thing at least twenty times before every annual charity art show. Pam always answered the same way. No, but she would purchase and donate a few pieces from other artists in her gallery to sell at the fundraiser for a local animal shelter.
“Yes,” Pam said, enjoying the shocked expression on Tia’s face.
“I brought three.”
“Let me see!” Tia said, pulling at the lid of one of the crates.
Pam laughed. “They’re in here,” she said, indicating the box at her feet. She pried open the lid and slid out one of the paintings. Tia pushed her away impatiently, but her hands gentled as she took off the bubble wrap and felt that protected the picture.
“Oh, it’s perfect,” she said, propping the painting against the booth’s wall and stepping back to admire it. Piper ran at the water’s edge, chasing a seagull and leaving paw prints in the damp sand.
“A dog painting for the shelter! We’ll have plenty of animal lovers here, so this will sell right away. Is this the price you’re asking? Nonsense. Give me that pen and I’ll just add a one to the front of this number. Next year we’ll plan to have you do an entire animal series. My neighbor has a cat that would be so handsome sitting on a sand dune.”
Pam unwrapped the other two paintings and set them in a row.
She listened to Tia ramble on and wondered at her complete lack of panic when Tia talked about more paintings for the next benefit, although she hoped Tia would forget about the cat idea by then. She had shocked herself by managing to get three paintings done in a week. Mel’s commission for the mosaics had forced her to create, and the habit seemed to be sticking. One minute she had been laughing as Piper struggled up the beach with a huge piece of driftwood in her mouth, and the next she had been dragging out her rarely used watercolors and splashing them onto paper. A remembered scene of the dog pawing at a crab in a tide pool quickly followed. And then Piper’s daily, and invariably failed, attempt to catch a seagull.
Pam had liked the feel of the paint, the fluidity it gave to the dog’s movements, the hazy colors of the sand and waves.
For the first time in years, she had created with a range of emotions beyond the negative ones of anger and pain. She had been enchanted by watching Piper play, and she had captured the moment.
Simple. Fun. Not detached—because why paint at all if she didn’t care?—but not wounded by the process. And her first thought when she finished was an almost overwhelming desire to rush over to Mel’s inn and thank her, to show her the paintings, to try to express what it meant for her to create even such a small thing, like these watercolors.
She didn’t need to see the pictures through Mel’s eyes, to rely on Mel to show her the joy here. Pam could see it on her own. She simply had wanted to share them with Mel. But her relationship with Mel was anything but simple, and she had stayed home.
“Thank you,” Tia said, grabbing Pam in a big hug.
“You’re welcome.” Pam gave her an awkward pat on the shoulder and stepped back when Tia released her.
“So is your girlfriend coming tonight?”
“Didn’t we have this conversation already? She let me stay while my house was being repaired,” Pam said. She could tell Tia was teasing, but she wanted to be clear about her relationship with Mel. To protect Mel’s reputation in town. She turned away and started to unpack the sculptures. “It was damaged in the storm, remember?”
“Of course. And I noticed you wisely waited a week for the paint to dry before you moved back home.”
Another gallery owner arrived, and Tia went to meet him, leaving Pam mercifully alone. She set several risers of varying heights on the booth’s table and covered the whole thing with a shimmery, pale-blue cloth. She arranged a series of brightly colored enamel fish sculptures on the lower level of the platform. Yes,
it was true. She could have moved back home weeks before she did, but she had waited. Until her feelings grew too threatening for her to stay any longer. She hadn’t answered Tia’s original question about whether Mel would be coming to the art show because she didn’t know. But she hoped so. Especially tonight, she had a ridiculous urge to share her watercolors and the hesitant renewal of faith in her art with Mel.
❖
Mel and Tracy ran across the dark parking lot and burst into the auditorium, laughing and shaking raindrops everywhere. Mel immediately scanned the brightly lit room in search of Pam and just as quickly scolded herself for caring whether or not Pam was here.
The entire population of Cannon Beach seemed to have flocked to the art show. Mel wasn’t surprised. She had learned there was little to do in the town on a Saturday night, especially in the off-season. After so much time alone and isolated in her inn, the masses of people, smell of popcorn and hamburgers, and colorful displays of art were a welcome sight.
Mel had found she liked having people at her inn, especially after spending two weeks alone, without Danny or Pam. Seeing her inn as a success, with satisfied guests and the beautiful, comfortable rooms she had imagined, had given her a personal boost in confidence.
This morning she had leaned in the living-room doorway after she’d served breakfast, sipping her coffee and chatting with her three guests.
And when Tracy had mentioned she wanted to give Sara and Angie a chance to dine alone, Mel had felt perfectly comfortable suggesting they get a pizza in town and go see the art show. She suspected Tracy’s comment had been motivated not only by her wish to give her friends some privacy but also by her desire to spend time with Mel, and Mel liked that. Mel had even mentioned her marriage, and Tracy, rather than judging her as Mel had assumed everyone would, had commented on how brave Mel was to start over in such a life-altering way.