“You are adorable for your concern, but Alex does not have post-traumatic stress disorder. Besides, he’s been home for years now.” I feel the familiar worry tugging at the back of my mind, partly because Alex seems too perfect, and also because I don’t know the full extent of his story. His grief. Kellie. All of it. But I extinguish my uneasiness.
“Well,” she says, “just be careful, you. Take it slow. This is your first relationship after James.”
Her words sting a little, and I suddenly fear I’m betraying James’s memory, betraying our love.
“I know,” I say. “But Joanie, I haven’t felt this way about a man since I met James. That has to be a good sign, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” she says. “It is. And I’m happy for you. I just want everything to go perfectly. I don’t want you to experience any more hurt.”
What I want to tell her is that my heart has already been pushed to the most painful place possible, the brink of no return, and I’ve survived. There’s strength in that. But I can’t find the words to explain how I feel, so I simply agree with her. “I know,” I say. “And I love you.”
“I love you too.”
I hang up and reach for my laptop. I type “Penny Wentworth” into Google and wait expectantly.
Chapter 13
PENNY
Hello?” I say into the phone, trying my best to mask my sadness.
“Penny?” It’s Mama, and she sounds concerned.
“Hi, Mama,” I say as cheerfully as I can.
“You’ve been crying, haven’t you?”
I dab a handkerchief to my eyes and shake my head. “Of course not; I’m just a little stuffed up today,” I lie. “I must be coming down with a cold.”
“Well,” she continues, “I do hope you’re taking care of yourself. You know, Caroline’s daughter Mary took sick in her first trimester and lost the baby.”
“Mama, I’m not pregnant,” I say.
“But you may be, soon.”
Her words reverberate in my ear. They taunt me like the schoolchildren who used to make fun of my pigtails on the playground. “Mama, I’ve been married for three years—don’t you think it would happen by now, if it was going to happen?”
“Honey, we can plan and wish and hope all we like, but sometimes these things just take paths all their own,” she says. “Remember how I got you?”
Mama had me when she was seventeen. I never knew my father, just that he was a navy sailor who was deployed shortly after they met, and he died at sea not long after. She’s never said if they were married, and I’ve never asked. And yet, it doesn’t matter. Mama loved him so much that no other man can replace him. I imagine I would have loved him too. I’ve concocted quite a picture of the father I never knew—his warm smile, broad shoulders, and strong hands. And I can never look out at open water without wondering about him.
You’d think I would hate the sea because its waters took my father from me, but I don’t. It intrigues me, even calls to me, somehow. Every day after school, I’d take the long way home just so I could look out from the top of the hillside to the Puget Sound. I’d watch the seagulls fly overhead, swooping down and calling to me, as if daring me to follow them. Sometimes I’d find a spot on the hill a mile from my house and gaze at the frothy waves crashing onto the shore and imagine what it might feel like to sail away, beyond the horizon. Mama said I was her water baby, though she never uttered those words in the presence of others. She didn’t trust the water, for either of us. She refused to teach me to swim, and yet she accepted my love of the shore, as long as I kept it at an arm’s length.
“You’re right,” I say as a passing boat sounds its horn outside.
“You’re not still going out in the canoe alone, are you?” Mama asks.
Although she loves Dex down to the very last fiber of his being, she doesn’t like that he lives on a houseboat. She would never admit that her fear of water is the sole reason that I can’t swim. When we were married, she pleaded with Dex to move back to his house on Queen Anne Hill. But he’d rented it out, and besides, when Dex makes up his mind, there’s no changing it.
“I wear a life vest whenever I go out in the boat, Mama,” I say. “You don’t need to worry about me, you know.”
“It’s a mother’s job to worry about her child.”
I pull back the curtain beside the living room window and see Jimmy outside, sitting on the back deck reading a comic book, his chin propped in his hand. I wonder if Naomi worries about him. I wonder if her love for her child is just as strong as Mama’s. I close the curtain quickly, before Jimmy can see me.