38
He mig
ht be trouble. With a capital
T
. And he was definitely a complication. But as Dillon shared with Matt what Claire suspected was a highly sanitized version of his days in EOD, she realized she was actually having a good time.
The restaurant was crowded, which wasn’t surprising, given the warm atmosphere on a drizzling winter night, the fire blazing away in the tall stone fireplace, and the quality of Sax Douchett’s cooking.
“I could eat this stuff all day long,” Matt said when Sax came over to see how they were enjoying their dinner.
“That’s why it’s called Come-Back sauce,” he said. “It’s my
grandmère
’s secret recipe.”
“If you bottled it, you’d probably make a fortune,” Claire said.
“Maybe so. But then, if that happened, I’d land myself in a business that took up all my time, when I’d rather just feed people and enjoy my family.”
Having heard from Dorothy or Dottie the harrowing story of how he’d ended up as the sole survivor of a SEAL mission in Afghanistan, and having seen the sign at the town line announcing Shelter Bay to be the hometown of Navy Cross recipient Sax Douchett, Claire couldn’t think of anyone who deserved a calm and happy life more.
“I think that’s a much better idea,” she agreed. “A slower pace is partly the reason I moved here.”
She felt Matt, who was seated at her left, tense.
“How are you liking Shelter Bay?” Sax asked Matt.
He shrugged. But at least the glower was gone. “It’s okay,” he mumbled around a mouthful of dirty rice. “I like playing ball.”
“Word on the street is that you’ve got some wicked skills on the court. I was a baseball guy myself, and to tell the truth, when I was your age, I thought this place had to be the dullest spot on the planet.”
“Obviously you haven’t ever visited the oil patch in West Texas,” Dillon said dryly. “At least Shelter Bay has an ocean. . . . Matt, you surf?”
Another shrug. “I did.”
“Come summer you’ll have to get back into it. I’ve been thinking of taking it up. Maybe you can give me some pointers.”
Although Dillon had promised not to kiss her over dinner, Claire could’ve leaned across the table and kissed
him
when her son visibly perked up.
“People surf here?” He made it sound like another, far distant, alien planet.
“Sure.” Dillon scooped up some crab jambalaya. “I saw a lot of surfers out last summer. There are apparently good breaks all up and down the coast. Including some for winter surfing, but those are for experts only.”
“Which I am,” Matt said.
“That may be. But you’re also important to the team, so why don’t you just save risking your neck until the season’s over?”
“I guess that makes sense,” Matt agreed reluctantly.
“All the folks counting on you to take the team to state probably wouldn’t be real thrilled if you crashed a surfboard into the cliff before playoffs,” Sax agreed.
“Not you, too!” Dillon said.
“I didn’t say I was one of them,” he assured Claire. “I’m just passing on what happens to be the main topic of conversation since you and Matt arrived in town.
“A town which,” he said, turning back to Matt, “might seem like dullsville to you now. I didn’t grow up with the bright lights of L.A. but was definitely happy to leave when I was eighteen. But a funny thing happened. After college and the military, I discovered that this place exactly fits who and where I am in my life now.”
“You never know where life’s going to take you,” Dillon agreed. “I sure never imagined living on the Oregon coast. But after my winding road led me here, it turned out to be just where I belong.”
“When I was fifteen, I was positive I’d be living in Florence, Italy,” Claire said.
“No way,” Matt said. “You never told me that.”
“It never came up.” The truth was that she’d never wanted him to believe, even for a moment, that she’d changed her life plans because of him. She had, but she’d never regretted her decision for a heartbeat.
“What were you going to do in Italy?” Dillon asked.
“I was going to study at Le Arti Orafe Jewelry School and Academy. Jewelry has been an important part of the art of Italy since the Renaissance, and Florence has always been the gem in that crown.” She smiled at the memory of the young girl with the fanciful dreams.
“Then you had me,” Matt said. “So you couldn’t.”
“Oh, no.” Wasn’t this the exact reason she’d never brought it up? If she hadn’t been feeling so relaxed and comfortable, she never would have now. “I’d already decided, for various reasons, including financial ones, to go to school in Los Angeles, which also has an excellent design college.”
“But L.A. isn’t Florence.”
“No. But Florence isn’t L.A.” She smiled and resisted, since they were in public, patting his hand. “Besides, I’m terrible at languages.”
“So,” Dillon said, leaping in to help her out when that hadn’t taken the frown from her son’s face, “we shot off the cannon this morning.”
“Since you still have both your hands, I guess it went off without a hitch?”
“Sir Francis Drake would’ve been damn proud to have our cannon on his
Golden Hind
.”
“Drake was the pirate, right?” Matt asked. “I didn’t know he got all the way up here.”
“Technically, according to my historian brother,” Sax said, “he was a privateer, which is basically a pirate for hire, in the pay of a government. In his case, the queen of England.”
After a quick glance around the room to see that everything was running smoothly and that the servers were handling the dinner crowd, he turned a chair around, straddled it, put his arms on the top of the back, and continued his story.
“My brothers and I used to play pirates all the time growing up and would pretend the cave on Moonshell Beach was where Drake hid the bounty he’d get from attacking Spanish galleons on their way back from China and Japan. And that the wreck on Castaway Cove beneath your and your mom’s cottage was the skeleton of one of those galleons. Which it’s not, but when you’re a kid, it’s fun to pretend.”
“It also makes for a better story than some wannabe pirates sinking a merchant ship because they mistakenly thought it was carrying a shipment of Klondike gold bound for San Francisco, which is what actually happened,” Dillon said.
“True. But there were a lot of wrecked galleons along this part of the coast. Since they were so heavy and more cumbersome, Drake used his lighter, faster ship to drive them into the cliffs; then he’d let the sailors who wanted to escape leave.
“Afterward his crew would loot the ships, which sometimes took days; then he’d blow them up. He got so effective that the Spanish started calling him ‘El Draque, The Dragon,’ and the king of Spain put a twenty-thousand-ducat price on his head. Which would be about ten million dollars today.”
“That’s dope,” Matt said.
“We always thought so,” Sax said. “No one’s ever quite figured out where his secret port was. Some believe it was Whale Cove down at Depoe Bay. But that’s open and easy to see, and a lot of galleon captains would’ve loved to have sunk his ship. Not just for the bounty, but to get rid of him. So most people think it was probably Tillamook Bay up north.
“Whichever, he was effective enough that Queen Elizabeth knighted him after he gave her enough to pay off her entire foreign debt.”
“That’s even cooler than Captain Jack Sparrow,” Matt said.
As he and the two men discussed pirates, both real and fictional, Claire sat back, sipped her wine while looking out at the bridge lights reflecting on the water of the bay, and felt the chains that had wrapped around her heart this past year begin to loosen.
* * *
Her ease was short-lived.
“How come you never told me about Florence?” Matt asked as soon as they were back in the cottage and Dillon was driving away.
“I told you, it just never came up.” Which wasn’t a lie. But it was a hedge.
“Because you gave up your dream because of me?”
“Oh, honey.” She wanted to put her arms around him, but feeling the now-familiar wall going up between them again, she allowed him his space. “Of course not. I was already going to school in L.A. when you were conceived.”
He folded his arms across his chest. “If it wasn’t for me, why didn’t you go?”
“As I said, it was partly because of the money. Your grandmother got divorced my senior year, and although she was given the house in the settlement, California doesn’t have alimony, so she had to find a new career. There simply wasn’t any money for me to go study in Italy.”
“Your father could’ve paid.”
“I suppose he could have. He chose not to.”
Which seemed to be the story of the men in her life. After Matt’s father had refused to acknowledge his unborn child, friends at school had told her she should get a DNA test and sue for child support. But to Claire’s mind, right or wrong, if she had forced him to pay, someday that money could come with strings. Which she hadn’t wanted to risk.
“Why did Gram have to get a new career? She already had a job designing sets for movies and TV shows. She even had an Oscar nomination and an Emmy.” Not that Claire’s mother ever talked about those days, but both the
L.A. Times
and
Variety
had included them in her obituary.
“She never really discussed it.” Which was absolutely true. Once Claire’s father had packed up and left the house, it was as if he had died. “I suppose she wanted an entirely new start.” And, given that her producer-husband had left her for his much younger assistant, Claire had always suspected the entertainment business had lost its gleam. “That way she could work at home, too. Which turned out to be a good thing for us, since she was there to take care of you while I went to school.”
And perhaps, Claire considered, her mother stepping in so completely had kept her from entirely moving on with her own life. Was it possible that she’d become so comfortable with the way things were, with the three of them making up their own family unit, that she’d never been all that interested in changing the status quo?
That thought had her remembering back to when Matt was seven years old and she’d dated a television screenwriter who’d written a few episodes of
Friends
. He’d been smart, talented, and funny and had even seemed to genuinely like her son. But her mother’s disapproval of the way he cut his hair, his clothes, the fact that he spent so much free time surfing, even his Canadian nationality, eventually did in the short-lived romance.
For the first time in a very long while, Claire was forced to wonder if, just perhaps, her mother, who’d always seemed so strong and independent, hadn’t wanted to be left alone.
“You’ve always been the most important thing in my life, Matty,” she said, slipping back into his childhood nickname. “And you’ve no idea how proud I am at how you’re turning around what was a very small slip into a new life here. Especially when I know how much you must miss your old school.”
He shrugged. “It’s not so bad. The Dolphins may be the Bad News Bears of high school basketball, but Coach Slater is the best coach I’ve ever had.”
“Really?” She could tell that he cared more about his players than others Matt had played for. But because he ran a closed practice, she hadn’t had any idea about his actual skills.
“Yeah. He sees stuff no one else does. It’s like he has superpower vision. And he always knows where everyone’s going to go. Before you even go there.”
“Maybe that’s from his military days,” she considered. “I’d guess defusing bombs requires a lot of attention to detail. And intuition.”
“I guess so. Do you like him?”
And didn’t that question come out of the blue? “Of course I do. He’s a very nice man and he’s been very good to both of us.”
“No. I mean, do you
really
like him? Like that guy you went out with when I was in second grade.”
Okay. That was a major surprise. Here she’d just been thinking about her failed relationship with the writer, who was now happily married, living in the San Fernando Valley with three kids.
“You remember Nash?” That had been his name. Which her mother had ridiculed, too. “
What was his mother thinking,” she’d asked derisively. “Why not just name your child Chevrolet? Or Chrysler?”
“Sure. He was nice. He took us to Lakers and Kings games. And taught me how to ice-skate. For a while I thought it’d be cool to be a hockey player.”
She’d forgotten the winter of his hockey love. After she and Nash had stopped seeing each other, he’d never put on those skates again. She’d finally given them away to Goodwill when they’d moved.
“So,” he pressed, “do you think you could like the coach in that way? Like a boyfriend?”
“I’m not sure people have boyfriends at thirty-three.”
“Lila Greene’s mother had a boyfriend. And she’s older than you. And married.”
“She did?” Claire waved away the question. How inappropriate was it to be gossiping about a former neighbor’s sex life with your teenage son? “Never mind. I don’t want to know. And as for Coach Slater, although he’s a very nice man, I’m way too busy right now with the upcoming show and the renovations we have to do on this house to even think about getting involved.”
“The show’s going to be over soon. Maybe you can think about it then.”
“Matt—”
“Just think about it, okay? And not just because it’d be cool to have him around more, but because he likes you.”
“Because I’m your mother.”
“Jeez.” He rolled his expressive eyes toward the ceiling, which was dotted with brown roof-leak splotches. “Believe me, Mom, me being your kid has nothing to do with it. He likes you. A lot.”
“I think you’re misconstruing things.”
“Guys know this stuff,” he insisted.
This was so not a conversation she’d ever planned to have. “Speaking hypothetically,” she said, treading carefully through this conversational minefield, “if you’re right—”
He nodded emphatically. “I am.”
“Would that bother you?”
“Hell—I mean, heck—no. You know what you said about Gram wanting to start a whole new life?”