The Starfish Sisters: A Novel(27)

He stroked his thick mustache, eyeing me over the curling blue smoke of his L&M cigarette.

“You need to make friends here,” my mom said, bustling into the kitchen. She wore her silky robe, belted tight around her middle, and a pair of mules with feathers on the top. Her toenails and fingernails were red. She poured a cup of coffee. “What about the girls you had over to swim?”

I rolled my eyes to cover the intense embarrassment that still burned in me over that night. If she thought I was contemptuous, it was better than if she felt sorry for me. “Not everyone needs a million friends,” I said.

“Not a million,” my mother said in her direct way. “A couple would be fine.”

“Mom!”

“I’m saying that maybe if you reached out and tried to be friendlier, you’d have more friends, more of a social life.”

“Like you?” I shot back, because really all she did was work and have cocktails with her lawyer friends.

It was impossible to get her mad, though, and she raised an eyebrow. “I’m allowing the Thanksgiving week trip, but you are not going to spend the entire Christmas break in the back of beyond, hiding from your life.”

“Lilly,” my dad said mildly, lifting a hand. “Leave her alone.”

“Maybe Suze can come here,” I said.

“But—” My mother shook her head. “Phoebe, I hate to say it, but that girl is strange. All that hair, her weird clothes.”

“Oh, I’m sure! Don’t be so judgmental, Mom!” Heat pulsed in the hollow of my throat. “That’s not her, it’s her dad. He won’t let her cut her hair and makes her wear those clothes so that boys don’t look at her.”

“I’m sure it works,” my mother muttered.

I shoved my chair back with a loud scrape and said to my dad, “I’ll be in the car.”



With every mile between us and Portland, tension slid away from my neck and shoulders. It wasn’t just Suze. It was going toward my grandmother and the studio where we would spend our time painting, and the beach and tide pools and the taste of the air. My parents fought all the time lately, and not hearing their furious, low voices would be a relief all by itself.

Watching fog-draped pine trees swish by the car windows, I asked my dad, “Why did you leave Blue Cove? It’s so much better than Portland.”

He took a breath. “Well, kiddo, it doesn’t have a lot of opportunities for a guy like me. I was never going to be a fisherman or a hotel manager. I wanted to read books for a living.” He winked at me. “Now I do.”

“Couldn’t you have taught high school English?”

“I could have,” he said, “but to tell you the truth, I didn’t want to. From the first time I found out you could live at college as a professor, there wasn’t another damned thing I wanted.” He reached for my hand on the seat. “They call that a vocation. And knowing what you’re supposed to do for work is one of the best things that can happen to a person.”

It was the first time I’d ever heard this idea. “When did you figure it out?”

“Pretty much the day I walked onto the campus, freshman year.”

I nodded. Looked back to the trees, trying to imagine what my vocation would be. “I used to think I wanted to be a marine biologist,” I said. “I like tide pools and the ocean, but that’s a lot of science.”

“Mmm.”

“And then I thought it might be that I wanted to be an architect, because houses are so cool.”

“They are,” he agreed.

“I’m drawing a comic book in art class,” I told him. “Maybe I could be an artist?”

“That’s not surprising. You are so good at drawing and painting.”

I tried to imagine what it would be like to spend my days in a studio, painting all the time. “Maybe a comic book writer,” I added.

“Cool.”

This was what I loved about my dad. My mother would start arguing for architecture, for being sensible, even though it was years and years until I had to decide. My dad let me be . . . me.

As we descended from the mountains, following switchbacks through the forest, my heart felt as light as it ever did. I could breathe. “I hate my school,” I said.

“I’ve been kind of getting that.” He paused, looking in the rearview mirror, then at me. “Do you think it’s the school or the stage of your life you’re in? Junior high is always pretty cutthroat.”

“No one likes me.”

“I don’t believe that’s true at all. Why do you think that, sweetheart?”

“Because I don’t have any friends?” I retorted. “They think I’m weird. The only class I like is art.” I glowered. “I wish I could come here and go to school.”

“Mmm. Well, maybe that’s not the best idea, either. What if we found some art classes after school or something? Maybe that would be a good carrot. Cuz you have to go to school, and you have to do well. Otherwise—”

“I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face,” I finished.

“Right.”

We arrived as the skies opened up and poured down rain. We had to dash into Amma’s house, dripping all over the floor. Just the smell of the house made me feel better. My dad and his mom chatted about Thanksgiving Day and the plan for him and my mom to come back, and I tolerated it, wanting to get out of there and over to Suze, the one friend in my world who really got me. “Can I go now?” I said finally.