realized, meant time. Time with Maddy and Davis, time with her. I wanted it. I wanted every extra minute with a longing so fierce it shook me. It made me understand exactly how deep I had embedded here.
While all this was swirling in my head, Char turned serious. Just for a moment.
“Don’t take this wrong, okay? You’re barely twelve years older than me, and you’re super pretty, so really, really, do not take this wrong,” she said. “But Lisa Fenton, last night, she called you my mom-friend. Isn’t that funny?”
I knew the term because I taught so many kids and teenagers. In Maddy’s class the title had gone to a boy named Simon. He was the one who had to check everybody’s trim, who tried to track the whole group’s no-stop dive times, who kept saying at Summer Social, Y’all, don’t gulp those milk shakes, you’ll get brain freeze!
“I’m not insulted,” I said.
I wasn’t. I was overwhelmed. She was joking, but there had been vulnerability in her inflection when she’d asked if I thought it was funny. And this word: mom. Even tethered to a piece of teen slang, it was a weighted word when it came at me out of Lolly Shipley’s mouth.
She must have heard that I was choked up, because she turned serious.
“Well, I liked it. Maybe because I don’t really remember my own mom. Or maybe because you started as my teacher. But I’m . . . I liked it, is all. When she said that.”
I took a long, shaky breath, because in that moment I could see it. A way to stay. I’d returned to Florida to make things right with Tig, and I’d been rewarded with Char’s friendship, even though I’d chickened out and only helped him secretly. What if I could help Char secretly, too? And if her brother, Paul, had troubles, she’d tell me, and I could step in. If bad times stayed away, I’d work with my lawyers to set up anonymous scholarships for any kids they had. I would care for all three of them, Tig, Char, and Paul, behind the scenes, if only I could stay.
“Me, too,” I said, and I more than meant it. “I like being your mom-friend.” I said those words like a promise, like a vow. If I took this silent path, it might lead me toward redemption. If the universe let me have Maddy and Davis, I would know that I was close enough for it to count. I’d know I had done enough right by Tig Simms to count, too.
Char made a pleased sound and lightened the conversation, complaining that Phillip had not helped her with cleanup. Getting her house back in order was taking up the morning, but she’d promised an elderly neighbor she would drive her to the doctor.
I wasn’t working until four, and I thought, Here. Here is a small, good thing that I can do, right now. For Lolly Shipley.
I had to talk her into letting me, but I won out, seeing it as a start on all the ways I could be present for her.
It wasn’t simple. At first I couldn’t look at her face without seeing Lolly. I’d come home from every outing, every visit with her, headachy and exhausted. I started misbehaving with food, not eating for ten hours, or twenty, or forty. When I finally broke, I would gorge myself, then purge.
I thought about confessing to her, but what truth could I have said? Char, when gently pressed, told me simply that her mother had been killed by a drunk driver. A teenage boy, she said. Not “a couple of teenagers” or even “a carful of teenagers.” Just a boy. Even if I said, My maiden name was Smith. I’m Amy Smith, it would mean nothing without hours of awful explanations. And to what end? Any confession would be for me, not her, to wring her out for drops of absolution.
I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t leave her. I couldn’t look at her.
I had to separate them out, Lolly and Charlotte. For the sake of my own sanity.
I had the idea while I was diving, hovering over the deck of a wrecked schooner, playing my light over a pair of angelfish to make their sunshine-yellow sides flash. Lolly had gone into the water once, and she’d been trapped in that inhospitable blue. It had left her with a lingering terror. But I had given water back to Char, hadn’t I? Now it was a good