The Sky Beneath Her(85)

Tuesday, June 16, 2026, 7:30 p.m.


I drove to Kaitlin’s surf shop and was relieved to see the light on in the second-story apartment. I climbed the back staircase and knocked on the door before I fished my keys from my purse and unlocked the dead bolt. “Kaitlin! It’s Tula.”

She emerged from her kitchen. The shoulders of her purple T-shirt were damp from her loose wet hair. Cutoff jean shorts hugged her tanned, muscular thighs. She was carrying a beer. “Hey, I’m sorry you had to pay that bill for me yesterday. I thought they’d give me more time.”

I kicked off my flip-flops and dropped my purse on a small table. I crossed straight to the refrigerator and plucked out a juice, then plopped on the couch as I twisted off the top. I’d forgotten about the money. “I know you’re good for it.”

She moved toward me, her expression a blend of worry and curiosity. “It might take a while.”

I drank. “How did the sales pitch go?”

She cradled her beer. “Okay. They’ve committed to two Saturdays in July. If it goes well, they’ll evaluate.”

“That’s good, right?”

“It’s a start.”

“Great.”

“Why do you look like you lost your best friend?” she asked. “It’s the money, isn’t it?”

I pressed the juice to my temple. “It’s not a lot of money.”

“At the rate I’m going, I’ll be ninety before I pay off my bills.”

Having money, not having money. It seemed simple right now. “Can you take on more cleaning gigs?”

“I can.” She shook her head. “But I don’t want to. I have a dream to chase.”

“Okay.”

“I thought if I pursued what I loved, my life would fall into place. I thought I could be as free as you and your mother were.”

How many of Mom’s clients had envied our free life? How many people thought our lives were all fun and adventure?

“Our life had problems. Plenty of times it was hard. Never enough money, slipping out before the rent was due, bumming rides when the car broke down.” Not enough money for medical care to catch a cancer earlier. Since Mom had died, I’d pushed the bitterness deep, stamping on it until it was so small, I could almost forget about it. But it was always there, waiting.

“Did your mother ever want a more conventional life?”

“No. Never. I asked her plenty of times—could we find a house and just stay put for a while?”

“What did she say?”

“She brushed me off. She’d been on her own since she was young and didn’t know how to stay in one place.”

“Sounds sad.”

“I guess it was. She didn’t have a conventional home and didn’t know how to make one.”

“What about her parents?”

“Her dad was gone a lot, and then her mother died of cancer.” A restless spirit, many had said. A few times I’d called Mom “selfish” in private. But in public I’d always defend her. For better or worse, we were a team. We looked out for each other. Now, I could see others—I—had paid the price for her choices.

“You could have had my life. Stuck in the same place. Scrubbing toilets and pushing brooms. And now here I am, about to take on more cleaning gigs because my dream is too expensive.”

I didn’t have the mental space to hear her complain about a life I’d craved. Not glamorous. Few really were. But it was stable. And now she was endangering it with selfish choices that mirrored my mother’s. “You have friends. A community.”

“This place feels so small sometimes.”

“You sound like Mom.”

“What’s that mean?”

I gulped more juice. “Every time we put down roots, Mom started to get restless. She complained about it feeling small. Didn’t matter what I wanted. Always her.”

“I’m not selfish, okay. I just want to live a bigger life.”

“Bigger is not better.” My patience was shredded. “We need to walk away from this conversation, Kaitlin.”

Kaitlin shook her head. “Nope. We aren’t doing that. I want to know why you showed up here tonight and decided you could dump your anger on me.”

Waves of frustration were poised to knock me over. I’d come here to talk to her about my mother, but the more she complained about her life, the more I heard my mother. Mom was never satisfied. “You remind me of Mom. She was always on the verge of bankruptcy because she couldn’t stop chasing the next adventure.”

Kaitlin shook her head. “Is that why you quit? Did you decide, ‘Better to live small than risk the price’?”

The honesty hurt. Mentally, I raised fists, ready to fight. “I didn’t quit! I changed directions. I’ve lived a good, stable life.”

She set the beer on the counter so hard, liquid splashed her hand. “You’re divorced. You hate your job. And you don’t have a home. Doesn’t sound like it’s working out for you.”

The fight drained from me. She was right. I’d lived the last seven years trying not to be my mother. I’d married, taken an office job, embraced routines, and lived Dave’s dreams.

When I didn’t respond, Kaitlin added, “I remember she didn’t listen to you.” She hesitated, not voicing what I’d feared. That Mom knew she wasn’t coming back.