The Last Beach Bungalow Read Online Free

to volleyball practice and sent flowers, cards and soft slippers for me to wear in the hospital.
    “Ma’am?” the girl behind the counter asked. There were now three people in line behind me, looking at their watches, glaring at me.
    “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll take three turkey and cheese on sourdough.”
    “Mustard and mayo?” she asked.
    “Yes, thanks,” I said.
    “Would you like drinks and chips with those?”
    “Yes, please,” I said, and as she told me the total, my eyes started to tear up again. I closed my eyes and pressed my hand to my lips to keep from weeping out loud. I would get a turkey on sourdough, a Diet Coke and some Lays potato chips to eat on the gleaming granite counter in the middle of my new kitchen. That’s how I would celebrate this milestone—with a fast-food meal in a house that my husband had designed and built after my diagnosis because he thought it was what I wanted.
    “Ma’am?” the girl asked. I was now crying. I was standing in line at Subway at lunchtime, and I was crying.
    “Are you OK?” the woman in line behind me asked. She was wearing black pumps. That’s all I could see of her as she grabbed a napkin off the counter and handed it to me. The shoes had pointy toes and a white strap that curved over the top of the foot and ended at a button on the other side. The stitching was black on white and white on black. They were like saddle shoes all grown up and gone to town.
    “Why don’t you go ahead,” I said, and stepped aside. I turned to sit down on a red plastic chair by the door. I was like a child who couldn’t get control of her own body. A minute went by, maybe two. The woman in pumps came over and squatted in front of me. She was wearing a black suit with a pencil skirt that had a rim of knife pleats at the hem and a jacket that nipped in at her waist—not the easiest outfit to squat in. She put her hand on my knee, which I thought was incredibly presumptuous and incredibly kind at the same time.
    “Is there something I can help you with?” she asked.
    “Those are great shoes,” I said.
    She looked completely unfazed. “They’re Kate Spade,” she said.
    I nodded. I’d written a piece for Inc. about Kate Spade many years ago, before I had a child and before Kate got into shoes and dinnerware. I’d sat down to lunch with her at Shutters in Santa Monica and we’d had a great conversation about women’s entrepreneurial spirit. We joked about the hippie purse of the woman at the table next to us. I was young, and I was certain that we had bonded in some profound way—that Kate Spade was going to be my friend. I sent her a thank-you note that referenced the joke we’d shared, included my phone number and never heard from her again.
    I lifted my eyes to look at the woman in the black suit. She looked smart; Armenian, possibly. She was probably a lawyer who came home at the end of the day and threw together fabulous dinners with lamb and mint. “Have you ever left a pair of shoes behind in a store,” I asked, “because you didn’t think you needed them or you thought they were too expensive and then one day, years later, they pop into your head—the exact color and shape and even their price—and you think, why didn’t I buy those shoes? Why didn’t I bring them home?”
    The black-suited woman nodded. “It happened to me with a pair of Frye boots in college. Remember Frye boots?”
    “Absolutely,” I said. “That’s what happened to me today, only it wasn’t shoes I left behind.” She didn’t say anything, just squatted there waiting for me to explain. “What I forgot was how to celebrate that I’m alive.”
    I drove with my sandwiches along the beach, dipped down into the grove of eucalyptus that lined the creek near Malaga Cove, and then climbed up into the hills. The whole of the Los Angeles basin opened up in my rearview mirror. From here, on a clear day, you could see each building of downtown and Century City, the Getty