Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [22]
“Right.”
He glanced up at me. “That sounds familiar.”
“I used to be from around here.”
“Ah.”
“Do you know someplace I can get lunch?” I said. “It’s been a while since I’ve been in Woodland Dunes.”
“Sure. I can make a few recommendations.” He looked at the check-in slip a moment longer before he put it back in the box, then turned back to me, his lazy hair falling farther over one eye. “Mind if I join you?”
“Oh.” I hadn’t expected him to ask that, although it wasn’t a totally unappealing thought. “Don’t you have to stay here?”
“Nah, everyone’s checked in, and Elaine, my housekeeper, she’s like my right hand. She can deal with anything.” He paused a second. “But if you’d rather be alone, I can tell you where to go.” He pulled a map out from under the desk and placed in on the counter.
Alone. I thought about it a minute. It might be the best thing since I needed to keep looking, to keep pushing in corners until I found out what happened to my mother. Yet I wasn’t sure what my next step was, and it would be helpful to have someone who knew the area.
Truth was, I was feeling a little rattled. I didn’t want to be alone right now.
I smiled at Ty. “Let’s go.”
Ty took me to a diner called Bingham’s, where we could sit in the sun. The restaurant was in the downtown section of town. It still boasted quaint shingled buildings and bricked sidewalks, just as it used to when my family had lived there, but the stores that used to sell hardware, flowers and crafts had been replaced with a designer boutique, a coffee shop and an upscale delicatessen.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at the change. Decades had passed since we’d left. During that time, Woodland Dunes and the surrounding towns had morphed into sort of a Midwest version of the Hamptons—a summer enclave for those looking to escape the city. When my parents had originally bought here, they too used the place as a summer retreat, but my mom had fallen in love with it. They had two children then, Dan and Caroline, both of whom adored the space and the freedom they couldn’t get in the city, so my parents made the house near the lake their permanent home. My dad bought an apartment in Chicago for the nights he couldn’t get home during the week.
My dad had told me this much. He’d always been willing to talk about the early days, about the afternoon he met my mom at University of Chicago, their wedding at the Palmer House, and how they’d moved to Woodland Dunes. But I learned not to ask questions about anything after that. Seeing the pain in my father’s eyes was too difficult. He was the only family I had, and I wasn’t willing to risk losing him, as well. So I learned to push away the wonderings. The letter had brought all those questions back, though, and I didn’t have the power to bury them again.
We placed our orders, Ty joking with the owner, who gave him two complimentary lemonades.
Sitting under the red-and-white-striped awning, I bit into my turkey sandwich, suddenly starving. “Good?” I asked Ty, watching him dig into his food.
“Excellent,” he said between mouthfuls of a broccoli and cheddar omelet. “I love breakfast foods after breakfast. I eat weird stuff first thing in the morning, too, like sushi and pasta.”
“Cold pizza. That’s a good breakfast.”
Ty’s fork stopped in midair, and he smiled wide. “Exactly.”
We talked, and I told him about my job and my life in Manhattan. Ty explained the work he’d done on Long Beach Inn before it opened.
“How did you know how to do all that stuff?” I asked. I finished the last bit of my sandwich and sank back into my chair.
“After I got out of college, I came home and worked construction. I was pretty lost during that time. No idea what I wanted to do, but the construction paid off. I learned a hell of a lot. Because of that, I was able to either do the work at the inn myself or find someone fast who knew how.”
“How do you like living in Woodland Dunes?” I said. “I vaguely remember living here as a kid, but now