they needed to work on the bus so early in the morning, she did believe that it had taken some effort on his part to carve out that hour or so he had to do it.
“The entire staff needs to be certified,” Fred was saying. “My secretary already looked into it and discovered that the Red Cross is sponsoring an all-day course at the firehouse next month.”
“What’s the date?”
“Saturday the 20th,” Grace answered. “I saw the sign at the pharmacy and thought at the time it would be a good idea to refresh my memory, so I signed up.”
“Wonderful!” Fred was clearly delighted. “Such a clever girl. You are your mother’s daughter.” He turned back to Luke.
“So all we need to do is sign you up.”
“I’ll be there,” Luke said, sounding as if it were the last thing on earth he wanted to do.
“Excellent,” Fred said, patting his handkerchief along the back of his neck. “Glad you’re both willing to pitch in this way.”
Luke nodded, as if he’d had a choice, which everyone knew he hadn’t. Then he looked at his watch. “I’m sorry,” he said to Grace, “but I have to get inside for a conference call in fifteen minutes, and I’m not going to be around in the morning. How about if we finish this tomorrow evening? Say, around seven?”
“It’s a date,” she said, automatically.
He didn’t correct her, but he might as well have for the dark look he gave her. “Seven,” he repeated. “We’ll do one last drill. After that, you’re on your own.”
* * *
“When are we going home?”
“We are home,” Grace said to Jimmy for what seemed like the tenth time the next day. “For now.” She stabbed the ground with a trowel, thinking of Michael, and tossed the dirt aside. It was late to be planting tomatoes and basil, but she’d bought mature plants, and with a little luck she’d have a midsummer harvest. “You’re going to have to think of it that way.”
Jimmy rubbed his eyes with dirty hands, streaking mud across his lightly freckled face. His blond hair was sprinkled with dirt, like powdered sugar on toast. “But it’s not like home.”
“No.” Grace tried to temper her frustration at having to make him feel better about the move when she was having so much trouble feeling good about it herself. “For one thing, you’ve got this nice big yard to play in.”
“Yeah, and no one to play with.” She didn’t like the sulky edge to his voice. It sounded too familiar. She herself had said almost the same thing to her mother last night when they were talking about the unlikely possibility of Grace ever having a date again.
It’s not like there’s anyone to go out with in this town even if I wanted to, which I don’t.
“So you’ll have to get out and meet new people,” Grace said, like a tape recording of her mother.
“There are no new people here.”
She turned to him, startled. It was exactly what she’d said, but she had reason to say it. Blue Moon Bay held on to its inhabitants the way a spiderweb held flies…once you were trapped here it was difficult to leave. It was hard to say whether that was because people loved it so much or whether it was just too much trouble to move away. Unless, of course, one was an attractive eligible male.
But whatever problems Grace had with moving back, it should have been a dream town for a kid, with the ocean and the bay and the freedom and safety of living in a town where everyone looked out for everyone else.
“Everyone here is new to you,” Grace said.
“Everyone here is old!”
Grace laughed. “Come on, you’ve met Jenna’s kids.”
“They’re babies. They’re only, like, eight.”
“Well, don’t worry about it, because when you start summer school you’ll meet a bunch of new kids.”
“That’s another thing,” Jimmy said, like a little lawyer with his Evidence Against Blue Moon Bay all lined up. “Why do I have to go to summer school? If we were back home, with Dad, I’d get the summer off like normal kids. Like my friends.”
Grace winced inwardly. He was absolutely 100 percent right. But if he were back home, he’d be going to a school that was less academically challenging than Connor. “Well, in this case it’s a good thing you have summer school, because you will meet kids your age there. See? So it’s all working out perfectly.”
“Dad’s not here,” Jimmy muttered, kicking a bag of topsoil.
She was tempted to point out that Dad had seldom been around in New Jersey either, that whole days had passed when he got home after Jimmy had gone to bed and was asleep in the morning when Jimmy got up for school…but pointing out Michael’s parental inadequacies wouldn’t really make her feel better, and it for sure wouldn’t make Jimmy feel better.
Grace set her trowel down and pulled off her gardening gloves. “He’s not at our old home either, honey,” she said gently, putting an arm around her son’s narrow shoulders. “You know that. It’s not as if we could just drive back to New Jersey and walk into our old life. We’re making a new life, you and me. And if we can just be a little open-minded about it, we might be able to make a really great life here. Maybe we won’t even want to leave.” But she couldn’t imagine things turning out that way.
“I’ll always want to leave,” Jimmy vowed.
“Why?”
“Because this place is stupid.”
Grace experienced an unusual twinge of protective loyalty toward her hometown. “No, it’s not, Jimmy. This is where your parents grew up. It should be interesting to you for that, if for no other reason.”
“Do people here hate Dad?”
The question was so unexpected that for a moment Grace couldn’t formulate a response. “Why on earth would you think that?” she asked at last.
He smushed the topsoil bag with his toe, staring intently as he did so. “You do.”
“I don’t,” she said, trying to convince herself that it wasn’t a lie. “Dad and I just can’t be married to each other anymore. There are lots of people I can’t be married to whom I don’t hate.” Luke Stewart came to mind, a little joke from her subconscious.
“Does everyone know he left us?”
It broke her heart that Jimmy felt the abandonment so keenly. If Michael had a bit of heart to go with his good looks, he would have made more of an effort to maintain contact with his son. Since the divorce, though, he’d been in California seven months out of twelve and had only seen Jimmy about once a month when he was around.
“No one knows the details of what happened with Dad.” Of course, everyone knew at least some version of it. She’d heard
