“I guess so,” she said. “But I’m not going to make any fast moves.”
Landry smiled at her. He poured a glass of wine for her and she sat up at the breakfast bar.
“Otis is very smart,” Landry said. “Too smart for his own good sometimes. He knows how to open his door, for example. And even though that door opens into the backyard, which is fenced, he can jump the fence. I’ve pulled up to the house to see him waiting on the front porch. If you see him outside, don’t freak out. He might walk over to you but you can tell him to lie down or go home.”
“You’re sure about that?” she asked, sipping her wine.
“I’m very sure,” Landry said. “He’s an excellent dog. I take him on visits to hospitals and nursing homes. Everyone loves Otis. Okay, I’m going to boil some spaghetti. I even made a salad and I have some garlic bread.”
And she was suddenly famished. The spaghetti was absolutely delicious, the salad was great, the bread was crunchy and wonderful. And the dog stayed on his mat.
Landry’s phone rang and he ignored it. “Do you want to get that?” she asked.
“Whoever it is can leave a message. I even have dessert.”
They took their coffee and dessert to the sofa and talked. He asked her how the book was coming and she told him it was a little better than it had been in Newport Beach in her mother’s house. She was hopeful of finishing it this fall. She’d always loved the fall and would love it even more in the mountains.
Then she stopped talking as Otis’s head appeared on her lap. He looked up at her with his big sad brown eyes. She looked back at him. The she put her hand on his head and his tail wagged.
“I might’ve forgotten to mention, Otis falls in love easily. But you’re not his first and you probably won’t be his last. I don’t want you to have a broken heart.”
The call Landry missed while he was having dinner with Kaylee was from Laura. He hadn’t heard from her in a while. They had married eleven years ago. They met in San Francisco in the diner where she worked. It happened to be in the same neighborhood as the warehouse where he rented space to create his art because his small flat was just too small.
Landry had gone to college in San Francisco and loved the city. Three years after college he was still there, working away on his pots, vases, wind chimes, sculptures, whatever struck his artistic nerve. He also worked to keep body and soul together, sometimes working construction, sometimes waiting tables or bartending. Laura was working in the diner to pay for her acting habit—she wanted to be a star. She auditioned for plays, TV commercials, small movie roles, anything that came along. They had art in common and when they met and fell in love it was like a bushfire—burning hot and fast. After a year of seeing each other, they got married in a small, quiet Spanish church in Oakland. They were happy every day. They frequented old movies, galleries, diners that were open late and absolutely any parade or celebration in the city. They were young, carefree, hopeful.
Then Laura was offered a chance to audition for a part in a movie if she’d go to LA. It was a decent part with some potential. She told Landry she’d be gone for a few days for the audition and if she got the part she might be gone for as long as three months. That was the end of his marriage as he remembered it. She got the part and traveled to Portugal for the shoot. She was home in a few months but only for a few days before there was another opportunity. By the time their second anniversary rolled around, she informed him she would have to move. LA would be her base, not San Francisco. But of course she would come to him whenever she wasn’t working.
He tried to be supportive; he knew how much she wanted it, wanted to be a star. He thought about how frustrated and unhappy he’d be without his art, but he missed her. This wasn’t his idea of marriage. He offered to move to LA, though he preferred San Francisco. “That wouldn’t solve our problems, Landry,” she said. “At least half the time I might get the part there but we’d go somewhere else for the shoot. The next movie—a made-for-TV movie—we’re shooting in Vancouver. I’ll be there for at least four months. You can come and visit if you like, but I’ll be working long days. Twelve-hour days. I’m going to rent something with some other actors. Something cheap that I won’t use much. A flop house, if you will. You wouldn’t want to relocate your whole business in the hopes of seeing me less than two days every other month.”
For two years she “visited” him, usually for less than a week a few times a year. They still talked on the phone all the time, but not every day. It was after they’d been married three years and he hardly ever saw her that he decided to move back to Virgin River. He could live with his dad in the house he grew up in. “But it’s so much harder for me to get to,” Laura complained. “I’ll have to fly into San Francisco and rent a car and drive to Humboldt County!”
So he saw even less of her. Even though she constantly said she missed him, somehow he didn’t think she missed him all that much. She had a rental house in LA that she shared with roommates, two men and two women, some of them on location sometimes. It was nicer than a flop house but less conducive to Landry’s possible visits. He did visit once
