Carolyn glanced at the waiter and then at Bryan. He was watching to see what she would do.
Reaching for her fork, Carolyn gingerly speared the opaque, pea-sized fish cheek with a single tong and put it in her mouth. She knew she could swallow it like a pill and make all the appropriate “mmmm” sounds to please the waiter. But instead she placed it on her tongue, rolled it around to get the initial flavor, and then bit into it with her back teeth before swallowing.
“Well?” Bryan asked.
“Nice.” She nodded to the waiter. “Bueno. Gracias.”
He took another humble bow and wheeled away the cart.
“Did it have any taste at all?” Bryan asked.
“It tasted sort of like chicken.”
Bryan laughed. “Cajun chicken?”
“No, chicken of the sea. Only with a squish.” Carolyn and Bryan laughed like true Americans, openly enjoying the moment.
Carolyn could tell that her mother was holding back from correcting her unrefined daughter on her European table manners. Putting her attention to food waiting on her plate, Carolyn took a bite of the tender, flaky fish and made an appropriate, subdued sound. “Mmmm.”
“When my son and I lived in Hawaii, he developed a taste for poi; you know, that gray pasty stuff they serve at luaus. That and the lomi lomi salmon. Two local delicacies that I never did come to like,” Bryan said.
“When did you live in Hawaii?” Carolyn’s mother asked.
“It was at least fifteen years ago. We were on Maui. In the Lahaina area.”
“I hear Maui is a lovely island.”
“It is. I was trying to start up a business with a friend of mine, but it never came together. Kai had some issues he was working through, and I lost someone my son and I were very close to. Todd was about ten or eleven at the time, and when Lani passed away, I knew we couldn’t stay on Maui. We returned to California, and I haven’t been back since. Todd has returned. He and his wife went there for their honeymoon.”
“And what do you do now, Bryan?” Carolyn’s mother asked.
“I work for a health care company as a systems analyst.”
“And what is that, exactly?” Carolyn’s mother hiccupped. She immediately covered her mouth and pardoned herself.
Carolyn wanted to laugh. So much for proper table manners.
“My job sounds more impressive than it is. I work out of my home and basically spend the day on the phone with medical assistants who run into any sort of problem with our software. Sometimes a whole office will have its system go down, and it’ll take me a day or two to get them back up.” He harpooned his last carrot. “I’ve been able to keep up with work some while I’m here. The time difference is the biggest challenge. But the best part of my job is that I can work pretty much anywhere.”
Carolyn’s mom shook her head. “The marvels of the computer world. I don’t understand a thing about it. How did you manage to get such a job?”
“My roommate from Berkeley ended up at Microsoft. He opened some doors for me after my wife left. I needed to get established so I could obtain custody of our son.”
“How long ago did your wife leave?”
“More than twenty years ago. She’s remarried and lives in Florida now.”
“So you raised your son by yourself?”
“It’s more like we raised each other.”
Carolyn had a funny feeling her mother was grilling Bryan rather than keeping up the conversation. She tried to redirect the topic by asking, “Aren’t these potatoes good? I love the way baking them in the salt results in such crispy skin but leaves the inside so soft.”
“They are good,” Bryan agreed. “What about you, Carolyn? Do you work full-time?”
Carolyn told him about her long-held position at the school office and how she lived down the street from the school. She added that her sister, with her two daughters, recently had moved out after living with Carolyn for almost six years.
They chatted a bit about the housing market, and Bryan said he managed to find a house only a few blocks from the beach and how that made working from home even more desirable.
“I’ve been there almost twelve years, which is hard to believe. What about you? How long have you been in your house?”
“We moved in right after we married. So that’ll be … ,” Carolyn did the math. “Twenty-five years ago this July.” She felt a tightening in her throat, and her spirit took a dive. Twenty-five years. Jeff and I would have been married twenty-five years.
“And how long ago did you and Jeff divorce—if you don’t mind my asking.”
Carolyn’s fork paused midway to her mouth. She lowered the utensil. “We didn’t divorce.”
Bryan put down his fork as well and looked stunned. “I thought at your mom’s birthday you said you weren’t together anymore.”
Her mother stepped in and answered for her, “Jeff has been gone for seven years.”
“He … he was killed,” Carolyn said plainly. She didn’t know why she came out with it so bluntly. She never talked about Jeff’s death that way. Her mother had handled the declaration with much more grace. Carolyn waited for the usual comment given at such a moment so she could thank Bryan for his condolences and they could move on with the rest of the dinner.
Bryan, however, didn’t say anything. He reached across the table, took Carolyn’s hand in his, and just held it. She looked away from his understanding gaze, but she didn’t pull away her hand. Not at first. The waiter returned to offer dessert and coffee.
Her mother answered for them, and Carolyn pulled back her hand and finished the last few bites of her dinner. Bryan’s gesture touched her deeply. Perhaps more deeply than all the wordy attempts of well-meaning family and friends over the years because, really, nothing could be said.
The table was cleared. All the crumbs were swept off the tablecloth with the use of a silver-handled brush and matching silver tray. More water was poured from a foot above their drinking glasses, and an entire new setup of silverware, coffee cups, saucers, and serving plates was set in front of them.
Next came an assortment of small slices of cake along with ramekins of flan placed in the center of the table. Steaming coffee was poured from a long-spouted silver pot. A small pitcher of milk was delivered along with a small bowl of brown cubes of raw sugar.
Carolyn’s mother leaned back, her hands folded across her stomach. She looked at Carolyn as if she was giving her an unspoken signal that one of them needed to say something more about Jeff’s death. Carolyn preferred to be the one to give the explanation.
Tapping the flat of her spoon on the flan, she said, “I haven’t talked about Jeff’s death in a long time. But I want to tell you what happened.”
Bryan’s open expression made it clear that he wanted to hear.
Carolyn reached for her water and took a sip. She didn’t know how to talk about Jeff without telling the whole story.
“Jeff volunteered for many years at a juvenile detention facility in Oakland. He spent a lot of time with the troubled teens there, doing all kinds of service for them—tutoring, yard work. He even washed dishes for a while. It made him happy to do something for them. They appreciated him—the staff, I mean. And some of the young men did too. Not all of them, of course, but he had some very meaningful conversations with some of those boys. They trusted him because he didn’t have to be there. He wasn’t an employee. They liked him, and he liked being with them.”
Carolyn paused and wished she could stop there. She didn’t want to tell this next part. Her gut tightened, and she swallowed back angry tears.
“One Saturday Jeff took several of the new boys to the back area for some softball practice. He had done that many times but not with these particular boys. They …” Carolyn didn’t want to say it. She looked to her mother.
Her mother’s expression showed her pain. She was clutching her stomach.
Carolyn looked down at her hands resting beside her plate and tried to say it as quickl
y as possible. “They turned on him for no clear reason. Two of the boys beat Jeff with a baseball bat. He never regained consciousness. He died three days after the attack.”
And I never got to say good-bye.
Bryan reached across the table again and covered Carolyn’s hand with his. Again, he didn’t offer any words. Only his touch and his presence.
The senselessness of Jeff’s death felt as real to her as it had that Saturday night when she received the call saying that her husband was in an ambulance on his way to the hospital. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Jeff was helping people. He was being a good Christian man. He had done nothing to deserve this.
The ache in her heart felt as large as the sea all over again. She wished she hadn’t told Bryan. She wished she hadn’t said the words aloud. Every time she spoke about it, the life-altering event felt real all over again. Real and horrifying.
Why did I think I was ready to move on? I’m not over this. I’m never going to be over this.
Carolyn slipped her hand out from under Bryan’s so she could reach for the napkin and dot her tears. She didn’t want to add the details about what happened to the assailants. It pained her even more to report that since the two convicted attackers were under age, they couldn’t be tried for murder. She heard later that one of them had died from a drug overdose and the other one was in prison. That outcome should have brought a small sense of vindication to her, but all she could think when she heard the news was how sad Jeff would have been to hear that two of the young men he cared so much about hadn’t made it out of the penal system with success.
Bryan continued to offer her his steady, unflinching gaze.
Her mother let out a small sighlike moan, which Carolyn took as a gesture of sympathy.
Something inside Carolyn made her want to apologize for bringing up such a terrible downer after the festive feel of the first part of their evening. Lifting her spoon to her lips, she tried to initiate some return to normality. She swallowed her flan without tasting it. “So, what should we talk about now?”
“We don’t have to talk about anything. We can just be.” Bryan leaned back and pushed away the rest of his dessert. The waiter came and poured fresh coffee. He delivered a small plate of square pieces of chocolate, compliments of the restaurant owner.
Carolyn looked around, trying to refocus. The restaurant was full of guests now. The other section that had been vacant when they arrived was atwirl with lively greetings by the owner. In the section of the dark restaurant where they were seated, all the diners around them were also at the dessert stage and were leaning over the candlelit tables, their conversations humming low and close.
Turning back to Bryan she said, “You know what this feels like, don’t you?”
“I do,” Bryan said. “It’s like a hole in your gut.”
Carolyn pressed her lips together and pushed aside her dessert as well.
“That’s how it was with me when I lost Lani. She was a deeply spiritual woman. My son would call her a God Lover. She was an amazing woman, and she loved me and loved my son, but she wouldn’t marry me because I wasn’t a Christian then. She didn’t hold my rowdy past against me. It wasn’t a self-righteous thing. Lani just loved God and lived out what she read every day in the Bible. She wanted that same abundant, eternal life for me. For us. Nothing less.”
Bryan held up his hand to the waiter indicating he had had enough coffee and to leave his cup unfilled. “I went to church with her and listened, but it was so foreign to everything I’d known in my life that I remained skeptical. You know, I thought of you quite a few times during that season of questioning everything.”
“Me?” Carolyn was caught off-guard.
Bryan looked at Carolyn’s mother and then back at her. “I thought of both of you. Aside from Lani, Kai, and his parents, the two of you were among the few Christians I’d ever known. I remembered how you prayed before meals and talked about Jesus as if he were a real person.”
Carolyn remembered how Bryan had told her that summer that he was a “hard-core agnostic.” She had told him she didn’t know what that meant, and he had laughed at her. Even though her Dutch dad had made sure they went to church every week and their Catholic-raised mom had nurtured a deep respect for God, it wasn’t until she and Jeff became involved in a small group Bible study that Carolyn saw her childhood faith grow. She and Jeff prayed about everything. After his death, Carolyn found it difficult to pray and even more difficult to trust God the way she and Jeff used to.
Bryan said, “I had enough to go on to surrender and put my faith in Christ, but the rebel in me held out. While I was demonstrating my independence, Lani was dying of ovarian cancer. By the time it was discovered, it was too late to do anything for her.”
“But it was not too late for you, was it?” Carolyn’s mother asked.
Bryan gave her a grin. “You already know the answer to that. It’s never too late with God. It just took me awhile to finally bend my knee. I had to be willing to live inside the mystery.”
“What do you mean by that?” Carolyn asked.
“Some things in life will never make sense. They won’t be made right or explained. At least in our lifetime. They float around in a swirl of mystery. I wanted God to explain all that mystery to me before I agreed to trust him. But I discovered it doesn’t work that way. He is God, and he doesn’t have to explain anything. When I understood that, then I could surrender to Christ and step inside the mystery instead of stand back and resist.”
Carolyn felt as if Bryan had just explained what she had been feeling the past seven years. She had tried to step out of the mystery and wait for God to give her answers. She remembered how Frieda had said at Marilyn’s wedding that Carolyn needed to help God work out his divine plan for her. Carolyn had answered sarcastically that God didn’t need any help from her because he seemed to do whatever he wanted. Apparently Bryan had come to the same conclusion, only his realization had brought him closer to God while Carolyn’s had taken her further away.
Carolyn noticed that her mother was being noticeably quiet on a topic she usually had something to add to. Her chin was dipped, her arms folded across her midriff, as if she were intently focused or in deep concentration.
Carolyn tried to catch her mother’s eye. “Mom?”
She responded with a catch in her breath.
“Mom, are you okay?”
Calmly but with force, she said, “I think I need you to take me to the hospital. Will you take my arm, Bryan? Please don’t do anything that would draw attention to us. ¿Entiendes?”
“Yes, I understand.” Bryan was already around the table and pulling out her chair in a gentlemanly fashion. Carolyn’s mother rose slowly and took Bryan’s arm. Carolyn grabbed their purses and followed her stalwart mother, as she shuffled to the door, bent over and with her arm gripping her middle.
“Ándale,” her mother said, giving them a breathy mandate to hurry.
“Barriga llena, corazón contento.”
“Full belly, happy heart.”
THE PROCEDURE TO admit Carolyn’s mother to the hospital for examination went quickly. The large medical facility wasn’t too busy that evening. Carolyn helped her mother dress in a hospital gown and settle in the bed appointed to her in the examination area. Once she was comfortable in the bed, Bryan came in. He took her hand in his. “Have you been in pain all evening, Abuela?”
“Off and on. It got worse as I was eating dessert. It’s not so bad now.”
“It’s your stomach, right?” Carolyn asked.
She nodded. When the doctor entered a few moments later, Carolyn’s mother repeated the symptoms in Spanish and answered the questions on the sign-in form. A series of tests was started, and Bryan and Carolyn were asked to leave. As they walked down the hall to the waiting area, Bryan reached over and took her hand in his, lacing their fingers as he had done that very first time at the beach. His presence meant the world to her at the moment.
“She kep
t pressing on her left side,” Carolyn said, as they sat close beside each other on the couch. “I’ve been trying to figure out which organ is located there, just under the rib cage. Would that be her liver?”
“Possibly. I’m glad the doctor could see her right away.”
“So am I. Hospitals make me queasy. Bad memories, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Was Lani in the hospital a long time?”
“No. Only a few days. My worst memories in a hospital were just a few years ago. My son was in a serious car accident. All the doctors said it should have been fatal.”
“But he’s okay, I take it. You said he got married last year.”
“Yes, he recovered. He has quite a few scars, but the way he came out of it was pretty miraculous. Seeing how his friends gathered around him really blew me away. A lot of people were praying for him. I wish I’d turned to the Lord when I was young, like Todd did. He’s in such a better place than I was at his age.”
“I often think my daughter has a much more developed relationship with God than I do. She doesn’t question or doubt the way I have since Jeff’s death.”
Bryan nodded his understanding. Carolyn couldn’t believe they were sitting there, in a Las Palmas hospital, holding hands and talking about God. Never in her wildest imagination did she foresee such a poignant moment as this with Bryan Spencer. Never.
“I hope my mom is going to be all right. If anything happens to her right now …”
Bryan let go of Carolyn’s hand. He stretched his arm around her and welcomed her to lean on his shoulder. The scent of cloves and basil rose from the collar of his new shirt and helped to cancel the antiseptic fragrance of the hospital that had made her stomach clench.
Feeling comforted, Carolyn tried to remember how she felt when the young version of Bryan had put his arm around her on the beach. Those memories were fading, and she found herself very much at home with this new version of Bryan. She wondered how all this was translating for him. It was strange. Yet it felt familiar and not at all unusual that they would be there like that.