Little Fox Cottage

by Barbara Cool Lee

  MEL'S FISH SHACK was a genuine old-fashioned beach dive. It wasn't one of those generic chain restaurants that tried to look funky with their stock decorations and franchise-mandated brands of mustard and hot sauce. This was an old place that hadn't been remodeled in decades, but the view from the deck was something beyond price: the building teetered on its pilings right at the spot where the wharf met the land, and it faced out across the bay to the little island with the lighthouse atop it.

  The deck was pretty full of customers, so Nico left to see if he could scout out a table for them.

  Bree stood at the railing and looked out, the dog sitting quietly at her side.

  Bree could have stood at that railing and watched the water for hours. She had been born inland, and had actually never seen the ocean up close like this before. The air was a lot colder than she expected it to be, with a wetness and saltiness to it she found intoxicating.

  The sounds were louder, the air was crisper, and she could feel the sunshine warming the spot where her hair was parted on top of her head. Everything felt just a bit more alive here, including her.

  She glanced down at Maisy and the dog gave a tentative wag of her tail as if she felt it, too.

  The bay in front of her was filled with white caps, and the wind ruffled the faded umbrellas that shaded the dozen whitewashed wood tables that clustered on the deck behind her.

  The wharf itself was busy, but not with tourists. It seemed that this was a genuine fishing wharf, with big boats tied up alongside and tough-looking guys handling nets and traps and whatever it was fishermen dealt with.

  It was the smell of a tray of fish and chips passing behind her that finally made her break her gaze from the exciting views.

  She turned back and saw Nico snag a table just as someone was leaving.

  "How's this?" he asked when she joined him.

  "Incredible," she answered, and he smiled. "I've never been to the ocean before," she explained.

  "I get it," he said. "I grew up in L.A., but the beach was a long way from Boyle Heights." He stopped wiping the table with a napkin and looked out in the direction she'd been staring. "Yeah?" he said quietly, almost to himself. "It is incredible." He seemed surprised.

  Then the quick smile was back. "So, what do you want to order? We have to go inside and stand in line for that. I warned you it wasn't fancy."

  "Do you mind if I go in and order?" she asked. "I just love checking out restaurants. Professional curiosity."

  "Go for it," he said. He slipped her a twenty.

  She must have looked doubtful because he said, "Oh, yeah. That'll cover it. This isn't the Ritz."

  "Or Lassiter's," she added. She tied Maisy's leash to a chair, then went inside to check the place out.

  Inside, the shack was full-on kitsch, from the fishing nets strung up overhead to the black and white pictures of surfers and local celebrities of the past.

  But as she walked up to the cash register she could see into the kitchen: all stainless steel and no fuss. And clean as a whistle. No vintage, kitschy germs hanging around to go with the decor. Very professional-looking setup, actually. An older woman was dipping a basket of battered onion rings into the fryer. She glanced up and gave a quick smile before turning back to her task.

  "Ya gonna gawk or order?" the skinny old guy at the register barked at her. He wore a faded Hawaiian shirt and a frown, both seeming to suit him well.

  "Sheesh. Give me a minute." She looked at the laminated menu: fresh cod, shrimp, or calamari. Or a Captain's Plate, which included all three. Deep fried or broiled. Fries, onion rings, or cole slaw. Clam chowder or slumgullion.

  "What's slumgullion?" she asked.

  "Scoop of shrimp dumped in the chowder," he answered.

  "You make it sound so appetizing."

  "Take it or leave it."

  "I'll take it. Two slumgullion, two Captain's Plates. And cole slaw."

  "No onion rings?" He acted insulted.

  "Okay, one fries, one onion rings."

  He nodded approval.

  She looked at the bottles arranged in the glass-fronted fridge behind him: sodas, beer, and fruit juices. Nico was probably not supposed to drink if he was on call, she figured.

  "Two waters," she finally said.

  He nodded and rang it up.

  "Any desserts?" she asked.

  "No desserts!" he growled. "They wanna rot their kids' teeth they can go buy cotton candy at the amusement park. This is a fish shack."

  "Got it," she said. This guy was a riot. She was pretty sure the grumpiness was at least half fake. She handed him the twenty and was surprised to get change back.

  She dropped it into the tip jar, half for good luck and half to see his reaction. His shock, and unsuccessful attempt to cover it, was satisfying.

  That's when she noticed the sign propped up next to it. Help Wanted, it read. No wimps need apply. She wondered about that last part, and asked him.

  "This ain't no picnic," he grumbled. "Ya gotta clean fish and peel potatoes and not whine about it."

  "Sounds fair," she said. "I take it you're Mel."

  "That's right. It's my shack."

  "How long you been here?"

  "Since it opened. Thirty years. Why? You taking a survey?"

  "Maybe. You have trouble keeping staff? I wonder why?"

  "The dinner shift cook's kids are getting out of school for the summer and she wants to cut back on her hours, smart aleck." He was hiding a smile, obviously enjoying the banter.

  "You share the tips with her?"

  "Of course," he said, insulted. "Ya think I need your nickels?"

  "Of course not," she agreed. "I can see you're independently wealthy. So what do you pay your cook?"

  "Minimum wage."

  "Plus tips," she said.

  "Yup. You interested in the job?" He looked her up and down. "You don't look tough enough."

  She laughed. "You'd be surprised. But no. I'm not interested. I'm just curious."

  "Then move along," he said.

  "Hand over the fish and I will."

  He laughed. "Just keep your shirt on."

  He went in the back and soon came back with a red plastic tray piled high.

  "I think I ordered too much," she said.

  "Ya think?" he said, and she could've sworn there was a twinkle in his eye.

  "Next!" he bellowed.

  THE FOOD WAS GOOD. Bree said so, and Nico laughed. "You seem surprised."

  She nodded. "I would have been before I met Mel. But his whole attitude told me that he was confident about the food he was serving."

  "That's an interesting take on it. You know a lot about the restaurant biz."

  She shook her head. "I graduated from a culinary academy, so I have the basic training, but working with Henry was my first real job after that. Before that I had a fast-food job while I went to school, but that's about it."

  She gave Maisy a french fry. The dog gobbled it up and then licked her hand, begging for more. "Finally!"

  "Finally, what?" Nico asked.

  "She's been acting depressed since Henry died. This is the first she's really shown interest in food. I don't know if dogs feel the loss the same way we do, but she's been really down every since he died."

  "You're both doing better. You're talking about it without crying."

  She turned back to him after Maisy ate the last fry. "It still seems unreal. It was out of the blue. And now I'm wondering…." She let it trail off, wondering if saying it out loud would make him think she was nuts.

  "You're wondering if Bill Madrigal's death could be related."

  "How did you figure that out so fast?"

  He shrugged his shoulders and downed another onion ring. "When someone dies suddenly, the family often looks for a reason." He stopped eating and looked out at the ocean. "Sometimes there's no reason. It just happens."

  "It's unfair."

  "Life's unfair." He went back to the onion rings. "Sometimes people die for no g
ood reason. And in Henry's case, it sounds like it was a simple heart attack."

  "But he felt fine." Then she paused, wondering if she should say the next thing on her mind.

  "What?" he asked.

  She shook her head.

  "Out with it," he said. "You need to make peace with this."

  "It's not that. I am. Slowly, but I am accepting that Henry is gone. But I just thought it was strange when the priest said…." She let it trail off.

  "I told you that had nothing to do with you. That's personal, between us. It's—"

  He hesitated, as if he wanted to say something more, but her mind was made up. She had to say it: "But Helena's husband died, too. Maybe it wasn't an accident."

  "Not an accident? I mean, I noticed it, too, when the padre mentioned it. Bill Madrigal died a few months before Henry. But if you're thinking it's some kind of conspiracy, that's taking it a bit far. Men in their fifties and sixties are very prone to heart attacks. A horrible statistic, but a fact of life. Well, of death. Or whatever it's a fact of."

  He glanced at her plate. "You gonna eat those shrimp?"

  She shoved the plate toward him. "But is it really normal for both men in Helena's life to die so suddenly, so close together?"

  "Unfortunately, it's very normal. I'm not a coroner, but I'm sure it's not unusual at all. Heart attack victims come into the ED every day, and many don't make it."

  She sat back, unconvinced. It seemed way too coincidental to her. "I just can't believe there's no sense to this. That two people died in Helena's life for no reason at all."

  "Death doesn't make sense."

  "That sounds like the voice of experience."

  "I was a battle surgeon in Afghanistan. Two tours.

  "I'm sorry."

  "Why? I'm fine," he said in a matter-of-fact tone. "It was the kids who got hurt, not me."

  "But it must have been hard on you to be part of that."

  "I've got no excuse for complaining. I didn't get a scratch on me."

  There was more to the story than that. She watched him, but he said nothing else.

  Then he said, "fine."

  "What?"

  "I'll look at Bill Madrigal's medical records. I can't tell you anything confidential about them, but I can look and see if there's anything there out of the ordinary. And if I find anything, I promise I will let Dr. Lil, my boss, know about it."

  "And you'll tell me if you find something, even if you can't say what it is?"

  "I can do that, generally speaking. But I promise you I won't find anything."

  "I hope you don't. But please check."

  "I will, if it will help you put this behind you."

  "You're just humoring me."

  "Yup." Then he smiled that quick smile again. "You're easy to humor. But I get it. I really do. I've lost people, too."

  She started to ask about that, but he shoved the empty plate away. "I'll need to run ten miles to burn off all these calories!" he said. "That captain's plate was an insane amount of food!" He brushed his mouth with a paper napkin and then sat up straight. "So, you want to know how dementia progresses?"

  She let him change the subject away from himself again. "Tell me all about it."

  CHAPTER SIX

  A HALF-HOUR LATER, Bree sat back in her chair, trying to absorb all he'd told her about the inevitable future dementia patients face.

  "So there's not much I can do," she finally said.

  "I'm sorry. But dementia is the hardest thing I think I've seen, medically."

  He paused there, as if going over things in his mind. "Yeah," he said softly. "Seeing people who don't even know who they are, or who loves them, has gotta be the worst of all."

  Worst of all. That was telling. She wondered what 'all' he'd seen that seemed to hang over him like a cloud. "I'm sorry."

  "What for?"

  "For whatever has made you feel this way."

  "What way?" he said. He was feigning ignorance, but she knew she was right. There was some shadow over him. Maybe it was about serving in the Army. She didn't know anything about that, but it must have been a difficult thing.

  "Do you want to talk about it?" she asked.

  Again he pretended not to understand. "About what?"

  He got all busy with petting Maisy and offering her some french fries, so she decided to change the subject. It wasn't her place to push.

  She looked out past the other diners on the patio to the open water of the bay. The sun reflected off the water, making the colors of the waves change, shimmering from blue to green to aqua. And the air! She couldn't get over how the air seemed fresher here, filling her lungs and giving her an energy she'd never felt before. Why hadn't she been to the sea before now?

  "This is the most beautiful place I've ever seen!" she exclaimed.

  "It's nice, isn't it?" he smiled at her. "I guess I've been taking it for granted, but yeah, it's a special place."

  "I always assumed I'd work in a city, but I really wouldn't mind ending up somewhere like this instead."

  "Ending up? Do you have somewhere else to go first?"

  She shrugged. "It's not something I've really thought about. I just figured I'd go wherever the jobs took me. As a chef, you need to be flexible, and look for opportunities to learn and work with different people."

  "Is that your dream, to be a chef?"

  "Of course," she said. "I didn't know it until I went to culinary school. I just knew I liked to cook, and didn't want to get stuck in a fast food job all my life. So I figured I'd need training. I thought I'd go to community college and learn about business so I could manage a hamburger joint or something. But then I heard about the culinary school from someone I worked with, and decided to apply. Once I got there, I met so many people who had been in the restaurant biz for years, and it showed me the possibilities."

  "For what?"

  "For owning my own restaurant."

  He stopped petting Maisy and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. "So you want to own your own restaurant?"

  "It's what Henry did. I want to do what he did, to create a legacy." She thought about that for a minute. "Yeah," she said. "I've got to focus back on my goals. I've just been reacting to everything going on since Henry died."

  "That seems normal."

  "Not for me. I've always had a goal. Now I'm coasting. I don't like the way it feels. All my life I've worked toward something, worked hard. I hate this sitting around and not knowing what to do next."

  "What do you want to do?" He was still leaning forward in his chair, as if the answer to his question was the only thing that mattered.

  She noticed the bay now looked turquoise. She sat and stared out at the boats bobbing on the ocean. "I have no idea. I had everything planned. I was going to work for Henry, and eventually I'd learn enough that, with his help, I'd be able to start my own restaurant. I want to be like Henry: to make meals that make headlines."

  "Are you ready to do that now?"

  She laughed. "I'm not nearly there. I had eleven months experience at Lassiter's. It takes years and years to learn what I'd need to be head chef."

  "But that's the goal."

  "Yeah. That's the goal." She thought of the joy on people's faces when they tasted Henry's food. The prestige of being a master chef. The power of deciding every aspect of a restaurant, from the mood to the food, as Henry always said. "Imagine if I could earn a Michelin star."

  "What's that?"

  "It's an award. It means your food is the best."

  "So what's your first step on your path to stardom?"

  She laughed again. "Probably a dishwashing job in a big restaurant."

  "Dishwashing? But with all your experience?"

  "Less than a year's experience working for a famous chef who's now dead, at a restaurant that's now closed."

  "Got ya. You're probably entitled to unemployment."

  "I hadn't thought of that. I'll have to look into it. But what I really want is a job. Any job. I c
an't stand not working. I've worked all my life. This doing nothing is making me crazy. I've gotta go back to Sacramento and get to work."

  "Does it have to be in Sacramento?"

  She paused. "I haven't even considered that."

  "You said you would go where the jobs take you."

  She nodded. "The jobs generally take you to a big city. Maybe San Francisco, which is a major food mecca. I just need to get a job somewhere I can learn as much as possible."

  "So you can buy your own restaurant. I have a cousin who owns a taqueria, but that's not really what you're talking about."

  "Not really. I mean, a place like that, or like this"—she looked around Mel's deck—"it's great and all, but I want to do something… I don't know, important. I want to make my mark on the world. Like Henry did."

  "I've never met a chef before. I'm more of a meat and potatoes guy. Or, in my case, a carnes y frijoles guy."

  She laughed. "You'd be surprised by the food you'd like, if it's made right."

  "Try me," he said, and the flirtation in that simple phrase was unmistakable.

  She looked away. "What other restaurants are in this town?"

  "There's a French-Vietnamese place up the hill that's very fancy. And the pizza place at the end of the wharf serves some really nice Italian food, not just pizzas. And stuff out at the amusement park—hot dogs and cotton candy, that kind of thing."

  "I'll need to research the restaurants here," she said, the germ of an idea forming. "The work here is probably seasonal, busy in summer and dead-quiet in the winter. So that would be a challenge for a restaurant."

  "And then what?"

  "I'll have to see if there's a market for the kind of place I have in mind." She talked on for a while, about locally sourced produce and boutique wineries and cutting-edge New American concept dining. He listened patiently, even seemingly fascinated, but when she went on for five minutes about the latest in plating techniques and he didn't blink, she decided he had to be putting her on.

  "You cannot be interested in this!"

  "I'm interested in you," he said.

  She looked away, embarrassed.

  "So what's your first step toward culinary glory?"