Desperation Reef

Adding to those costs is the fact that the furniture, art, lighting, plumbing, electrical, sound system, ovens, stoves, warmers, and appliances were all high-grade commercial and expensive. Much of it has been damaged thoroughly by flame and smoke, some of it irreplaceable. The surfboard collection is almost totaled. The paintings are ruined. The high-end projection screens on which the surf videos played are now melted around the edges.

Laguna Beach fire trucks had gotten there less than twelve minutes after Casey’s first 911 call. But four crude fire bombs — casually staged as deliveries just outside the lobby, the back door, the side kitchen entrance, and the upstairs apartment deck — had already exploded, accelerant and high winds spreading the flames rapidly. Remote fuses, the arson investigator said.

His team found a fifth bomb under the north floor of the dining room — placed through a crawl space under the raised foundation. The access screen had been snipped off. No north-wall security cameras because of the inaccessible sandstone drop-off and chain-link fence heavy with mandevilla. The flames ate up through the framing timbers and into the room, swiftly.

According to Jen’s contractor, she’s looking at spring of next year. Which means a five-month wait, if the City of Laguna Planning and Building Department and the California Coastal Commission sign off promptly, and the supply chains hold. He says the price of his materials have doubled in two years and the union wages he pays are out of sight.

Mae follows her into the dining room where Jen kneels and touches one of the classic Hawaiian redwood surfboards that caught flame and finally came crashing down from its ceiling mounts. It’s a hundred years old and badly burned. Most of the other boards were made of foam and fiberglass, which of course ignites viciously and melts when swarmed by flames. Some are John’s. Some belonged to the greats: Kahanamoku, Noll, Weber, Dora, Young, Nuuhiwa, Lopez, Andersen, Tomson, Irons, Slater, Clark, Bethany, Parsons, Laird, McNamara. There are twenty-six of them, Jen knows — one for each year of John’s life. Some of which, blackened and disfigured, are still hanging on the walls.

She stands, pats Mae’s soft round head, feels like crying or kicking Jimmy Wu hard as she can in the nuts, but she’s not much of a crier and Jimmy’s a bit out of range.

Since the Barrel burned up and cooled down Jen has thrown herself into the cleanup — and into her training for the Monsters of Mavericks — with her usual ferocious energy.

And now, with a $175,000 shortfall for rebuilding her love and livelihood, she’s even more inspired to win the Monsters.

Which is a long shot, she knows, at forty-six, and not having ridden big waves in twenty-five years, according to the Surfline.com rankings and the surf contest handicappers on BetUS Sportsbook.

Not that she isn’t training and working her ass off: in between her sunrise stand-up paddleboarding, surfing whichever SoCal break is going off best, weight lifting, and striding underwater along the bottom of LBHS pool with dumbbells in her hands and weights on her ankles — Jen still reports to work exactly as she has for eighteen years.

But now she’s demolishing the ruins rather than running the most popular restaurant in Laguna Beach. She’s got help from Mom and Dad and Pastor Mike, from Casey and Brock when they’re not surfing — god bless them — but they’re still not done yanking out the now-toxic drywall. Or scrubbing the smoke stains off the flame-scorched ovens and stainless walls and backboard in the kitchen. All this and more, instead of making sure that Casey’s catch of the day is being properly prepared, greeting and seating her friends and loyal local customers, tweaking the menu, touching up the paint, polishing the now destroyed floors, making sure the surfboards and framed photos and paintings are one hundred percent dust free and glittering like jewels in the sunlight shooting through windows.

The smell is awful but face masks make her dizzy. People out on the sidewalk stop and stare at her through the opaque plastic sheeting hung to keep the curious out and the ash and stink in. Every ten minutes she takes Mae around back to the deck facing the Pacific, lets the dependable onshore wind fill their lungs.