In the late afternoon the day before the day before the first day of school, Sherri got home from work early and called up the stairs to Katie, “We’re going to dinner!” Katie didn’t come down immediately and of course Sherri’s heart started up the old ticking of alarm, so she called again, trying to keep her voice steady.
And here came Katie, holding a book, her finger tucked between two pages, acting as a bookmark. “Sorry,” she said. “I fell asleep reading.” She held up the cover of the book, which featured a pair of legs in blue jeans and the title The Second Summer of the Sisterhood.
“That looks like a nice book,” said Sherri. “Where’d you get that?”
“Morgan,” said Katie. “It’s a series. This is the second one. But we’re not allowed to read past book three yet because then there starts to be sex and stuff.” She yawned as though the whole idea of that was terrifically boring. “That’s what Morgan’s mom said.”
“Grab your shoes,” said Sherri. “I’m taking you out to dinner to celebrate.”
“To celebrate what?”
Sherri wasn’t exactly sure. To celebrate the fact that they were still alive? That Katie would have someone to eat lunch with? That over the course of the summer Katie’s nightmares had abated, so Miss Josephine stopped complaining about the noise?
“To celebrate the first successful summer of our new lives,” Sherri said finally.
“Okay.” Katie shrugged, maybe unimpressed, and got her flip-flops.
Brown’s Lobster Pound in Seabrook was one of the many places Sherri had driven by this summer and said to herself, We have to try that! That happened to her all the time—the hazard and joy of a coastal town in the summer. Try me! called the taco truck that parked at the Plum Island Airport. And me! pleaded the gelato shop downtown. Don’t forget about me! The food stands at Yankee Homecoming. The oysters at Brine. The sandwiches from Port City Sandwich Company. The whoopie pies at Chococoa Baking Company.
They took Route 1 toward the Salisbury Bridge, stopping at the hideous intersection where Merrimac Street and the bridge traffic came together and invited all the cars into a giant game of chicken.
Rebecca’s Acura had been totaled in the accident, and, obviously, that poor boy’s family had been totaled as well. Sherri hadn’t gone to the funeral because that felt presumptuous—she hadn’t known the boy. But she felt somehow responsible that anybody had died in this beautiful town this summer. Had she unwittingly brought darkness to a place that knew mostly light?
Brown’s was a low tan building, unassuming except for the fact that the building extended into the water, so you sort of felt like you were on a moving boat. You ordered at the counter and brought your food to a table. Sherri stood for some time looking at the menu. Katie took her hand and looked very seriously into her eyes and said, “Mom. It’s time.”
“Time for what?” Sherri felt her heart jump with a familiar terror. Katie was going to say something that would shake Sherri to her core—something about Bobby or the other men, something she’d seen or heard that Sherri thought she had kept her safe from. Something unspeakable.
But Katie was grinning. “It’s time to eat a whole lobster,” she said.
The relief that flooded through Sherri felt almost like a warm liquid poured over her head. “It is? No lobster rolls?”
Katie nodded firmly. “It is. We’ve lived here almost a whole summer, and we haven’t done it yet. No lobster rolls.”
“Okay,” Sherri said. She was weak with relief, and the relief made her feel silly, almost drunk. “Okay, Katie-kins! Anything you say!” They ordered two lobster dinners with the works, and they found a seat at one of the picnic tables on the outdoor deck.
The lobsters overran the edges of their paper containers. Around Katie and Sherri the other tables held a low, celebratory hum. Sherri would have ordered a stiff drink but she saw now that people were carrying in wine bottles and cans of beer in paper bags: it was BYOB, which somehow made it seem that much more festive. Truthfully, Sherri didn’t need anything to drink.
“Did you know they used to feed these to prisoners?” Katie said. She was holding up her whole lobster and considering it.
“Who did?”
“I don’t know.” Katie shrugged. “People in the olden days.”
“What olden days?”
“Not sure.”
“Who told you?”
“Google. Or maybe Morgan. I can’t remember which.”
“I’m not sure what to do from here,” said Sherri. She held up her lobster and looked at its creepy, incomprehensible eyes.
Katie said, “I got you,” and took out her phone and loaded up a YouTube video on how to crack a lobster. Normally Sherri would not have allowed the phone at dinner, but she needed the help. Katie moved the phone to the center of the table and they both watched, trying to be surreptitious about it so that the other restaurantgoers wouldn’t know what novices they were. Apparently you were supposed to twist the tail off before you did anything else, then the claws. You could use a small fork to reach up into the shell and pull the meat out of the claws; the meat in the tail normally came out in one big piece, and was firmer than the meat in the claws. They dunked the lobster meat in butter and stuffed it into their mouths like it was the first meal they’d had in weeks. They ate corn on the cob and coleslaw and onion rings. They ate all of it.
Katie hadn’t even finished the last of her lobster when she said, “After dinner can we get ice cream? There’s a place right across the street, Dunlap’s? It’s supposed to be good. Morgan told me it’s good.”
Sherri hesitated. Now that fall was here, she’d have to cut back on her spending, cook healthy food for her and Katie, maybe find some way to exercise regularly. (Definitely not barre class.) “I don’t know—”
“Please? It’s the second to last day of summer! It’s the last night of summer, because tomorrow is technically a school night.”
“Okay,” said Sherri. “Of course we can, sure.”
The day after tomorrow Katie would walk up Olive Street to High Street, where she would meet up with Morgan and a few other girls from the group to walk to the middle school, and Sherri would clean up from breakfast and take a shower and get in her car and drive to her job, where she would do all of her usual job things, which were boring but not mind-numbingly so, and she would try not to think about the fact that Katie was out of her sight and out of her control, and that, sure, the school had some sort of intercom system or whatever, but was it really safe, was it really secure?
Would anything ever be secure enough to satisfy Sherri?
Sherri hoped Katie never knew how close she’d come to real danger in those early days before they’d become safely ensconced in the program. She hoped that in time she’d forget all about the time in the motel and the bad food and the bad television and Louise the counselor with the velvety brown eyes, and also about the life they’d had before that. But not all of it, maybe, because that life was part of Katie’s history, the only one she had.
The sky was becoming paler as the sun began to drop. It wasn’t sunset yet, it was more like sunset’s appetizer. Sunset’s calamari. Sherri’s favorite part of the day. She breathed in the briny smell of the water.
She would never not be scared for herself or for Katie. But maybe the fear would become a low thrum in the background of their lives instead of the crashing cymbals in the center of the stage, in the same way that Rebecca had explained to Sherri that her grief for Peter never left, would never leave, even as she fell in love with Daniel.
They cleared their plates and placed them in the appropriate bins; they walked across the street to Dunlap’s. They were an ordinary mother and daughter on the penultimate night of summer. The line for ice cream was long, so they had a good amount of time to peruse the menu.
“What are you going to choose?” Katie asked.
I choose life, thought Sherri. I choose happiness. I choose the light.
She looked down at Katie, her forthright, strong, vulnerable, invincible, vincible child. She thought about a girl named Madison Miller who had probably gone out for ice cream with her parents dozens of times, never knowing that one day she wouldn’t.
After Brooke’s party one of the dads to whom Sherri had been talking had asked around for her number. (At the time she hadn’t known he was divorced.) His divorce was new and shiny, just out of its packaging, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. He’d registered on Tinder, but it scared him, so he never used it. He had been impressed, he told Sherri, by her “bravado” at Brooke’s party. Sherri thought what he really meant was that he’d been impressed by her breasts. Or maybe both. She was still deciding whether she was ready to date—whether she’d ever be ready to date. Right now her priority was getting Katie settled in school and doing a bang-up job at Derma-You so she could get more hours. Apparently, with the rapid expansion they’d be seeking a manager for some of their new locations. Jan said she’d told management that Sherri had a solid work ethic and a natural discreetness about her, which was a necessity in their business.
“Mom?” said Katie. The line was moving up; there was a family of four in front of them, and after that it would be their turn. “What are you getting?”
“I think I’ll have my usual,” Sherri told Katie. “Chocolate with chocolate sprinkles.”
Katie rolled her eyes. “They have like four hundred flavors here and you’re getting the same thing you always get? You’re so predictable, Mom.”
“I know,” Sherri said. “I’m completely predictable.” Sherri tried to look rueful but she couldn’t do it genuinely, because predictable implied safe and safe implied boring and to Sherri Griffin on that evening, on the far edge of summer, on the outer reaches of Katie’s childhood, boring seemed like the most beautiful word in the world.
She just had one final item on her to-do list.