Whole Latte Life

by Joanne DeMaio

  “It’s gone. There’s nothing left.”

  “Nothing?” Sara Beth’s shaking her head no. Certainly, the fire only destroyed the carriage house. Somehow, her precious antiques are safe. “But the Fire Department, they got out my antiques, right?”

  “Sara, dear. Your beautiful furniture,” Lillian clasps her hands to her face with a gasp. “I’m sorry.”

  “When? How?” Tom asks.

  “We’re not really sure,” Lillian begins. “There was a noise early this morning, after midnight. When I heard it, I ran to the window. It was the carriage house, the whole outside wall caving in under so much fire. The flames, oh my God, they were everywhere. We called for help right away, but it burned so fast. So fast! The Fire Department will investigate and find out more.”

  “My antiques? Everything?” Sara Beth watches Lillian closely for the slightest gentle look, the slightest smile or touch of reassurance.

  “Well we can’t get near the site because of hot spots. And some of the walls are barely standing. Some pieces may have survived, we don’t know for sure.”

  “The fire trucks couldn’t get there sooner?” Sara Beth asks.

  “They got there in no time, but when the fire woke us, it was already extensive. We called right away, but in a matter of minutes…Oh, Sara, there wasn’t much they could do with that old barn.”

  “Can anything be salvaged?” Tom asks. “Even a few pieces?”

  “Possibly,” Edward says. “But they sprayed all that water. It doesn’t look promising.”

  Sara Beth pushes back her chair and stands. “I have to see it.” She turns to Tom.

  “Dad?” Jen is standing in the kitchen doorway.

  “Jen. I told you to wait upstairs,” Tom says.

  “But Dad.” Jen looks at Lillian and Edward. “What about Slinky?”

  “Come here, dear,” Lillian says. Jen moves beside her and Lillian takes her hands. “I don’t think she could possibly have survived.” Lillian brushes a wisp of hair from Jen’s face. “But it all happened so quickly, I’m sure she didn’t suffer.”

  “Maybe she escaped?” Jen’s eyes fill with tears.

  Sara Beth watches her daughter’s heart break and it’s all too much.

  “Well, I could be wrong,” Lillian says gently, “but I don’t want you to get your hopes up. The heat, it was terrible. Even for the firefighters.”

  “Slinky died?” Jen doesn’t seem to believe it. “She was just an innocent kitten.”

  “Tom,” Sara Beth says, still standing. “I have to see for myself.”

  “You two go,” Lillian and Edward say at the same time. “We’ll stay here with the kids.”

  “Are you sure?” Tom is already standing.

  “Yes, of course. Please drive carefully.” Lillian reaches into her purse. “Take my house key. If you need to get inside, if you want to sit down, you feel free.”

  “Can I come?” Jen asks.

  “It’s too dangerous,” Tom tells her.

  “But will you look for the cat?”

  Sara Beth hugs her daughter and kisses the top of her head. “We’ll look everywhere, okay?” Until she sees the destruction with her own eyes, there has to be some sort of a mistake. Some sort of hope. So she has that now.

  A police cruiser and the Fire Marshal’s car prevent Tom from parking near the carriage house, but they’re close enough to see.

  “Oh God,” Tom utters. Charred timber stands precariously. Black soot and ash carpet the floor and any furniture spared the flames’ fury. The roof is gone, leaving jagged sections of the walls reaching skyward.

  Sara Beth’s hand reaches for his and he turns to her. “Sara.” But there is a force to the destruction still, enough to pull his gaze back. “Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. Let’s go check it out.”

  She shakes her head before turning away. “I’ve seen enough.” She stares out her side window.

  “That’s Bob Hough over there, the Fire Marshal,” Tom says. “I did the closing on his home last month. Let me see what I can find out.” He sits for a moment with Sara Beth and with this monstrosity in front of them. “I’ll be right back.”

  Bob Hough turns when he approaches. “Good to see you, Tom. Are you representing the March family?”

  “No. I wish this was a business call. My wife and I leased the carriage house.”

  “No kidding,” Bob says. “For storage?”

  “Antiques. Sara Beth was about to open a shop in town.”

  “Now that’s a damn shame. The guys fighting it last night mentioned furniture, but I had no idea.”

  “Looks like she lost almost everything.”

  Bob moves closer to what’s left of the carriage house. Then he eyes Tom’s summer suit, right down to his expensive leather shoes. “You game to go in there? Maybe we can salvage something.”

  “What are we waiting for?” Tom slips out of his suit jacket and drapes it on the fence post, rolling up his shirt sleeves. Anything he can find will only help Sara Beth, but somehow he knows it won’t be enough.

  Bob retrieves a couple pairs of heavy work gloves from his car. “That inside corner is more intact than the rest. Let’s start there,” he suggests. “Technically I’m not supposed to do this. There could still be some live spots. So be real careful.”

  The police officer joins them, and Tom glances over his shoulder willing Sara Beth to stay in the car. Because walking on her pieces of charred mahogany, cherry and oak is almost enough to do him in.

  By the time the fire trucks got through the winding curves of Old Willow Road, only a scorched skeleton stood, illuminated by tall dancing flames inside. They brought to eerie life the antiques they consumed, the woods’ twisting and turning shadows writhing like they were alive in the melting heat.

  Sara Beth sees this. She sees it happening behind her closed eyes, knowing while she reached out to her mother online, sent her words, while she slept, this evil arrived.

  The emptiness inside her is huge and she has to breathe great, slow breaths to fill it. It feels the same as the day her mother died, the way her lungs won’t fill. She thinks back to the little Morris chair she found in the carriage house on her birthday, from her mother. All of this, every bit of it, started with an antique chair she sat in nearly forty years ago.

  Art is a lie that helps us to understand the truth. So Picasso thinks art’s a lie? Everything’s a lie. Art, hope, and it all lets you see the truth. There is only unhappiness. You can run away, you can sit here in the country, and it’s there with you.

  She loses sight of the men inside until Tom backs out, bent over. He and Bob are carrying something. They set a mahogany lowboy down near the house. Using his glove, Tom brushes a film of soot from the wood. After a close inspection, he turns and gives Sara Beth the thumbs up. He and Bob hurry back inside then, nearly colliding with the officer carrying a piecrust tip table. He sets it down beside the lowboy and Sara Beth gets out of the car. Nothing more could have survived that fire. She leans against the car and watches.

  The men are three magicians pulling rabbits from a tall, black, charred top hat. The process creeps along, slowed by dangerous debris in an unstable structure, but she recognizes each blackened piece.

  And what she has left now is this: The estate sales and auctions from which she found her collection. The bidding and price dickering ring in her mind. Certain auctioneers came to know her and called her when they found something she’d like. There were Saturday tag sales she hunted with Owen, finding pretty candlesticks in the warm spring sunlight, his little hand in hers. She studied the classifieds, narrowing down her furniture choices before she made the phone calls. Weeks and months passed, adding to the collection her mother began. Years of knowledge. Even the sunny weekends tag saling on country outings with Mom decades ago, brushing the dust off tables and chairs, her mother holding a china plate up to the sunlight, lowering it for Sara to see.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Rachel pushes aside her scr
ambled eggs and sips her coffee. “It’s only Thursday. If you want to, have Summer come down early, without Emily.”

  “You think that’ll stop this rebelling she’s going through?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not my place to say so, but I think you have something to do with her acting out.”

  “Me?” He pulls over her plate and finishes her eggs, scooping them on a piece of toast.

  “You’re so overprotective with her. She has no breathing space. I mean, she said you wouldn’t even let her apply to the Marine Studies program.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Is it? You’d let her go out to sea in a vessel? Like she said, what if the water gets choppy?”

  “She said that?”

  Rachel nods. “I know you think you’re protecting her, but you’re driving her away. You have to be careful.”

  Michael stands and looks out the window, his arms crossed in front of him. He inhales deeply. “I’m trying. But I don’t know if anyone really knows where I’m coming from.”

  “I think we do, particularly your daughter. Maybe she’d rather see you deal with your memory instead of using this control stuff to keep it buried.”

  At that, he turns and eyes her. Rachel knows that if this is going to work between them, she has to be able to say what’s on her mind. “You said it’s a protection for you. You keep it between you and the memory. Well your hypervigilance is standing between you and people you love now, too. You’ve got to face that night, Michael, or you’ll lose people because of it.”

  “I’m trying,” he says, his voice rising. She hears the anger and knows it’s not really because of her. “I’m in therapy, I’m talking it out, but it takes time. And that kind of felt like a threat, that shit about losing people.”

  “It’s not a threat. It’s a wake-up call. I talked to your daughter. She needs more time with you, not time with your vigilance.”

  “Rachel. One minute changed my life. Do you understand that? Really? I killed a man. Okay? And I never thought that would be me. We don’t think things will happen, but they do. And it’s a goddamn nightmare, Rachel. So if I can do anything to stop another horrible minute, I have to do it.”

  “But,” she argues, “you’re losing good minutes in the process. Beautiful minutes. If I leave tonight, your daughter will have a few extra days of those good minutes with you.”

  “Oh no. It’s not only my daughter I’m worried about losing. It’s you, too.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. You have a very full life back in Addison. I know that.” He sits beside her and picks up his coffee. “That’s why I’m worried.”

  “Because of where I live?”

  “That’s right. I know I’m still dealing with issues, and I know damn well that you can walk away from all that crap, if you want to. Your life’s waiting for you in another state.”

  “I’m not walking away, that’s not what I meant about losing people.”

  “Listen. I’ve only got two days with you before you’re gone again.” He pauses, and the cottage suddenly changes. So does the summer. It is palpable. The sea grows deeper. The heat more intense. Thoughts more serious. Michael hasn’t shaved, so whiskers shade his face.

  “Remember that day last month,” he finally asks, “when I showed up on your doorstep?”

  “Sure. The first day of summer.”

  “And we talked about seeing if this relationship could work. We thought we’d take the summer and see what develops.”

  “I remember.” She picks up her coffee.

  “As of Saturday, you’ll leave here for more than a week while my daughter’s here. And by the time I see you again, it’ll be August.”

  “We don’t have to rush anything, we’ll still have a few weeks of summer left.”

  “That’s running out of time. And as much as I’d love to imagine you coming to New York until Labor Day, you’ve got to be in Connecticut and set up your classroom, your class plans.” He takes a deep breath. “You’ve spoiled me. I don’t like the thought of you not here.”

  “I spoiled you? Michael. I’ve had you and this amazing beach and this amazing cottage all summer.” She reaches out and takes his hand. “And you know how I feel about a beach cottage.”

  “Heaven. I know.”

  “It is. So let’s not think about leaving. I’d rather imagine this going on forever.”

  He leans forward and folds her hands in his. “I’m not imagining anything. It’s too risky. I don’t want to lose my daughter and I don’t want to lose you. Both thoughts really scare me. You call me spontaneous, but I’m really not. I want a plan, Rachel. I want us to work.” He leans closer, lowering his voice. “I’ve got two days before you leave again. And I intend to make them unmistakably real, Rachel DeMartino. To convince you to come back for good.”

  He moves his hands to her face and pulls her into a long kiss, half rising from his seat, his mouth moving over hers, very unmistakably real.

  “Michael?” she asks, touching his unshaven cheek.

  He frames her face for a long moment while conspiring something, she can see it behind his serious eyes, then stands and gets the coffee pot, distracted with his thoughts while refilling their cups. “Finish your coffee, and trust me. We’ve got plans that I just can’t change.”

  “Plans?”

  Michael finishes his black coffee. “Definite plans.”

  After breakfast, Rachel waters the petunias and geraniums in the flower boxes, then sits on the front step reading her book. A jogger runs past, the sun gets warm. Michael’s rattling bags and bumping things around in the truck bed, and it’s driving her nuts, he just knows it.

  “Are we going somewhere?” she calls over her shoulder for the second time, keeping a finger on her page.

  “No. And stop looking!” he calls back. Finally he walks down the driveway, whistling casually. He’s wearing cargo shorts with lots of pockets, a black t-shirt, his Yankees hat on backwards and aviators. Old leather boat shoes are on his sockless feet. One hand holds two cheap fishing nets, the other a large green plastic sand pail. Stuffed into the pail is a bag of bait. Stuffed into his cargo pockets are the crabbing line and extra sinkers. “Come on,” he says. “Tide’s out. Best time for crabbing.”

  “Crabbing?” Rachel hesitantly grabs the straw cowboy hat from the porch. They walk down the beach road, he weighted down with crabbing gear, she dressed in her clam diggers and cowboy hat, taking the fishing nets from him.

  At the rock jetty on the end of the beach, boulders grow from the edge of the sea like weeds and a couple of seagulls perch there, waiting for them to turn their backs on the bait bag. The deep green water laps in a lazy reach for the rocks.

  Rachel inhales deeply, breathing the scent of seaweed and salt, periwinkle snails and barnacles. When she leans up against the side of a warm boulder and clips a hunk of fried chicken onto her crabbing line, Michael pulls himself up onto the same boulder and breaks open his bait mussels. The sun rises higher and he drops his line into the water near a cluster of submerged rocks. Rachel chooses a spot further out. The beauty of crabbing is how you can close your eyes and take the sun on your face, or how sweet memories rise as you stare into the water. She’s doing this, he knows it by the way she jumps when something tugs on her line, squinting to see through a clump of seaweed. A fiddler crab dangles by one claw from the chicken bait.

  “Omigosh!” she exclaims, glancing around quickly for the bucket.

  Michael swoops in with the fishing net and scoops up the crab. “Here,” he says, handing her the big green bucket, which she dips into a wave and fills with salt water. He flips the crab out of the net into the bucket. And so the morning goes, some crabs steal the bait, some drop off the lines before they can net them, and others end up in the pail.

  What Michael loves about crabbing is that pretty much you only talk crabbing, exclaiming under your breath that you’ve spotted one, tallying up the catch, murmuring words of encouragement to
a stubborn hidden crab. And he talks to himself, to get a grip, to stop being vigilant. That self-talk therapy he’s been instructed in. He uses the net to catch a tiny eel and a few minnows to add to the pail.

  “What are we going to do with them?” Rachel asks, brushing a wisp of hair from her face. The bottoms of her clam diggers are wet from wading in the tide coming in now. They look in the pail where seven or eight crabs scurry, the eel floating low, off to the side.

  “Lunch?” Michael suggests.

  She pulls off her straw hat and squints up at him. “You’re going to cook them?”

  He takes the pail and gently tips the contents back into Long Island Sound, near the rocks. “Come on,” he reaches for her hand. “I’ll make you a ham sandwich.” He swings the nets over his shoulder, she stuffs the crabbing lines into the empty pail and they walk at the water’s edge, heading back to the cottage.

  After lunch, Rachel separates the edge pieces from a jigsaw puzzle box Michael set on the porch table. She leans over, intent on pressing together the pieces. Outside, the mid-day heat settles. “Why don’t you change into your bathing suit?” he asks. “I’ll bring the umbrella down to the beach and meet you back here in a while.”

  She does, slipping into a black tankini and filling a canvas tote with sunscreen and visors and her sketch pad. She pulls her hair into a messy bun, folds the local newspaper into thirds and slides it into a side pocket, then throws in a couple peaches. And doing all that, she sees it. The flashlight in each room, the new fire extinguisher, the shrubs trimmed back from the cottage so prowlers can’t hide, his obsession with sitting with his back to the wall in public places, his covering the windows at night. Two cell phones. His living in a way of “just in case.” And she wonders if this is what she wants, this constant monitoring for safety. This inability to ease up; this inability to get out of one night. It’s not good.

  When Michael returns, he waits on the front porch, perspiration lining his forehead. “It’s hot on the beach. You’ll need your sandals.”