of pain. Cy was everything she was not, his hair fair and curly where hers was stick straight and black. Softhearted where she was driven to succeed. Athletic. Resilient. Forgiving.
Rosa was a different design altogether. She thought about her father and the last time he’d called. She’d refused to speak to him. Cy had gabbed on just as if the man had not betrayed them on the cusp of their sixteenth birthday. She had no time for their father’s excuses. All that mattered was making her business thrive, to show herself and the world that, this time, failure was not an option.
“I can’t understand this,” she said to Baggy, who had insinuated his ten-pound body under her elbow. “I made a business plan.”
Cy stuck his head out the front door. “What should I make for dinner? Or do you want takeout?”
“We can’t afford takeout,” she grumbled. “I’ve got the marinara reheating on the stove. I started it before Mr. Mercedes canceled us.”
“Oh, huh. Marinara.”
“What’s wrong with my marinara?” The answer was quite simple; their mother wasn’t alive to help her make it. The memory of those glorious pots of sauce bubbling on the stove were almost tangible, the smell of the crushed rosemary that had grown in a cracked terra-cotta pot seemed to permeate the air even now. Frank Sinatra music had usually played in counterpoint to the gurgling of the sauce, and more often than not, her father’s deep baritone warbled a harmony.
Rosa put Baggy down, supporting the awkward creature until he got all his legs working in unison. “Do you remember how Mom used to plop the tomatoes into boiling water and they’d sort of pop out of their skins?”
Cy nodded.
“I tried that, but it didn’t work.” She swallowed against a sudden thickness in her throat. “I squished them with my fingers.”
“That’s okay,” Cy said, joining her. “Mom wouldn’t mind.”
“And I didn’t have any fresh garlic so I used a lot from the jar.”
“Uh-huh.”
Her voice dropped to a near whisper. “And I left out the wine.”
She could still hear their mother adding a splash of red to the marinara and a much bigger splash into her own glass. One glass, followed by another.
She hadn’t realized she was crying until Cy embraced her, the only other person in the world who could understand. “Cheer up, kiddo. Not everyone is gifted in a culinary way.”
Wiping her eyes on her sleeve, she gently elbowed him away. “Our business is failing, we have rent due at the end of the month and zero, count them, zero clients, and you’re going to tell me my marinara sauce is bad?”
He flashed his effervescent smile. “Not bad, just...aggressive.”
She would have smiled if she had the energy. Instead, she put into words the worry that had plagued her the most in the past four years. “I should have tried another law school.” It was ridiculous. No other school would take her after she was kicked out. She swallowed the shame of it. Cheater—that’s what they’d thought of her. Heat rose to her cheeks. But she wasn’t a cheater, just a naive girl who’d been stupid enough to put her future in the hands of the wrong man.
Cy laughed, a boisterous, rolling chuckle. “Right. You hated law school, remember? Even if the thing with Foster hadn’t happened, you spent every moment of the case-analysis lectures imagining what the room would look like with pine paneling and silk drapes.” He hopped down the steps, reaching for a leaf that graced the spotless front path. Not surprising. Cy could stay still for no more than three minutes, barring sedation.
But law school was where the successful people went, the ones who were going to make something of themselves. The image popped into her head before she could stop it. Pike, the golden boy from high school. Privileged and perfect, or so she’d thought until the accusation from her father turned him into her enemy. Pike’s derisive laughter still rang in her ears from one particularly horrific day when her mother had shown up at the high school three months into Rosa’s freshman year, wearing only a bra and panties, clutching a bottle of whiskey and waving to everyone as if she was queen of the British Isles.
Then, like petals borne away by a fickle wind, her high school friends weren’t her friends anymore.
And Pike finally had his revenge.
Rosa combed her hands through her hair and groaned. It wasn’t the time for a stagger down that blighted memory lane.
The mailman pulled up and Cy trotted off to greet him, engaging him in conversation about their shared passion, the San Francisco Giants. There would be nothing but bills and a myriad of credit card applications, as if they needed any more opportunities to climb deeper into an abyss of debt. Cy thumbed through the stack as he came back up the walk, tearing open an envelope in that messy way that bugged her to no end. She looked at Baggy who now lay on his back, one eye fixed dreamily on her.
“Baggy, I admire your ability to stay calm while all around you is turning to poop.”
“Rosa,” Cy said, his eyes riveted on the letter in front of him.
“Unless it’s a paying client, I don’t want to hear about it.”
“Uh, I think you do.”
She shot to her feet. “No, really, Cy. If it’s bad news, I just can’t take any more right now.” She began to pace. “I’ve got to think of a way out of this, or we’re flat-out ruined. Do you understand me?” An acrid smell drifted into her nostrils a moment before her brain filled in the pertinent details. Kitchen. Marinara. Stove. Burning!
With a shriek she ran into the kitchen just in time to see the lid blow off the pot, showering the stove and Rosa with hot, red sauce. She did not have time to indulge the pain as the sauce ignited on the burner, followed by the potholder Cy had left too close to the heat.
Smoke billowed. Sauce bubbled. Rosa scurried around, swatting at the flames with a heavy kitchen towel. When the fire was out, she turned wearily to her brother, sauce spatters on the front of her shirt, the smoking potholder in her hand. She stuck a finger in the sauce and tasted it. “You’re right. On top of everything else, my marinara is horrible.”
Cy stood there, still clutching the letter, a look of complete shock on his face. “Put down the potholder, sis. You’re not going to believe this.”
* * *
ROSA WAS STILL in a cloud of disbelief the next morning as she guided her Nissan along Highway 92, Cy sitting next to her with Baggy curled across his lap. She relished the sight of the Pacific Ocean crashing against the rocky shore as they made their way to the tiny coastal town of Tumbledown, just south of Half Moon Bay. The population on the official sign read 314, but that had been erected before the birth of twin boys to the town’s dentist, she’d been told by her almost-aunt, Bitsy, the last time she’d visited. A miniscule country store served the basic needs of the seaside community, along with Tad’s Bait and Tackle, which also sold ice cream in the summer. Small houses in a variety of styles and conditions dotted the landscape. A series of ramshackle farms offered opportunities for city slickers to do everything from picking pumpkins to cutting their own Christmas trees, depending on the season.
The faded, striped
