House of Our Dreams

Excerpt

The two-story adobe rose from the earth, as regal as the sycamores rooted in the soil. Roof tiles lay scattered on the ground like fallen fruit. The brittle balcony sagged, destined to collapse with the next sundowner winds.

Serena wrapped her fingers around the iron gate that separated her from the house. Grandma’s house. Places have a hypnotizing power to transport the mind, revive days that are finished. She remembered being young here, dangling her brown legs over the balcony while her brother threw avocados at the soles of her sandals.

Ryan shut his door, popped the lid on a tube of sunscreen. “Holy shit,” he said as he glimpsed the house. “It’s a teardown.”

Serena launched her keys at him. Missed. A knot of anxiety and helplessness tightened in her stomach. “Are you going to take County’s side?”

Ryan scooped up the keys. “I had no idea how neglected it was.”

Serena snatched the keys back and slid the iron key into the rusted gate. Resistance like the lid on a bottle that won’t budge.

“Let me help.” He turned the key and swung the iron gate across the driveway. Rusted hinges hissed like a cornered cat.

“We’re in!” A pulse of energy ignited Serena’s heart. She tucked her black hair under her baseball cap, reached for Ryan’s hand. “Welcome to Caramar.”

The last time she passed through that gate, Mama was beside her. Serena had held her mother’s purse, as Mama took photo after photo documenting the decay. If she could transplant Mama’s indomitable will into her own body, Serena wouldn’t be so cowed by Caramar’s crumbling façade. She noticed the walls had long cracks, like scars. Thick boards sealed the front door and sent an alienating message. Keep out.

The house was built by Spanish ancestors Mama had romanticized—the same ones her Mexican father derided as pinche conquistadores. Serena held space for both sides, both stories. She was shaped as much by her mother’s privilege as her father’s cynical, hard-scrabble perseverance.

Ryan was silent as they approached the house. Was he tallying its faults? The handiwork of a flood that roared through the house in 1969, followed by sixteen years of neglect. No one had lived here since the flood. But every problem had a solution, Mama had insisted. She had rattled on about earthquake retrofitting and basal erosion in the walls, and the ratio of clay, sand, and straw for making adobe bricks. Serena paid little attention when it was Mama’s project, but now, the responsibility was hers.

She caressed an exposed brick, coarse to the touch. “I’m going to restore this place as Mama wanted.”

Ryan’s green eyes swerved to query hers.

“No way I’ll let it be demolished,” she declared.

He scratched his jaw, blew air through twisted lips. “This will get complicated.”

“And when we get married, we’ll move in.”

“Wait a minute, that’s not practical.”

Ryan’s skepticism tainted the outing. Maybe she should have come alone first. But she needed his buy-in, his checkbook.

“I’ll get the food from the car,” he said and turned away.

Serena followed a path around the house. As she passed the kitchen window, she remembered Grandma in a green-striped apron chopping garlic and onions for fresh salsa. When Serena would pull an apron string, she’d get a swift slap from abuela’s creased hand. Broken glass crackled under her feet now as she peered inside. Other glimpses from the past were trapped here, like the flowers that come after wildfires.

“Serena?” Ryan called.

“I’m here.”

He walked toward her, the blanket in one hand, picnic basket in the other. “Careful. Don’t lean on that rotted wood,” he said.

Don’t, don’t, don’t. A thousand warnings from Mama and Grandma had started with that contraction. Don’t play in the creek, there’s poison oak; don’t climb the oaks, you’ll fall; don’t swim past the buoys, you’ll drown. Yet there was no place where she'd felt more free or more cherished.

The wind whipped around the house, carrying the swishing sound of waves careening against the cobbles of Fernald Point. Serena approached the chain-link fence that separated the property from the beach. Across a patch of ice plant, the Pacific sprawled blue and bold. She breathed in moist, salt-laden air that sent her back to childhood afternoons spent with knees deep in wet sand as her fingers pried clams and horn shells from among the boulders.

“Oceanfront property,” Ryan said. “You’ve got maybe four hundred yards of beachfront.” Finally, a note of appreciation in his voice.

“So many memories on this beach.” She reached up, kissed the corner of his mouth. He put the blanket and basket down on the sand.

“This land is worth millions,” he said.

“We can’t sell.”

“I’m afraid that exactly what your father plans to do. I don’t think he’ll stand aside and let you play This Old House.”

“I’m not playing, Ryan, and I’m not backing down. Wang can’t wipe my family’s history off this land. It would be a betrayal of Mama. I owe it to her to finish what she started.”

“Sweetheart.” He slipped his hands under her chin, tilted her face to his. “That’s a huge burden to put on your shoulders.”

Too late, she thought. Any course of action that yielded to Wang was unacceptable. Plus, there was the magnetic pull of those rooms, the land. Serena needed to hang on to this tangible link to her mother and grandmother. Finishing what Mama had started would pull her through the hollow of her sadness. She was sure of it. Could she say this to Ryan? Would he get it?

“Ryan, you have to be on my side.”“I am always on your side, but—”

“No buts.” She put a finger to his lips.

He kissed her finger and took in a deep breath. “I don’t want you to get hurt with unrealistic expectations.”

She glanced down the beach, where a procession of full-grown palm trees marked Wang’s compound. He had planted trees and hedges around the perimeter, even as he awaited building permits. His dominance spread like a cancer.

“What’s unrealistic to you, isn’t to me,” she countered.

He nodded at her. “Like when I said there was no way we could get tickets to the Symphony’s New Year’s Eve concert? And you marched down to the box office and finagled two tickets.”

 “Perfect example.”

 “Let’s eat,” he said and spread the blanket on the soft sand with its view of the sea and far-off islands.