“Well. They do say you meet your special someone when you stop looking,” said Ruby, who was laughing a little bit, too. “So who’s the lucky… person?” she asked.
Gabe’s eyebrows twitched. He cleared his throat. “Um. Well. It’s kind of a funny story…” He licked his lips, then shook his head. “Maybe for another time.” He looked at the guesthouse, then at Ruby. “If it’s not too weird having me here, I can just crash with Miles and Dexter again tonight.”
“Or you could stay in the guesthouse.” Ruby sounded a little shy. “There’s more room. And I think, tonight, I’m going to go back to P-town, and stay with my mom.”
“Really?” asked Gabe, who knew how complicated things had been between Ruby and Annette.
Ruby nodded, smiling a little. “Really.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“You know she isn’t perfect. And I don’t know, maybe this is a onetime deal. An anomaly. But last night, for the first time in my entire life, she was actually right there when I needed her.”
Gabe smiled shyly. “I’m happy for you.” He held out his arms. “Friends?”
“Always,” said Ruby, and hugged him tight.
EPILOGUE
If We Shadows
One Year Later
They stood on the edge of the water below the house, their faces turned toward the sun and the sea.
Sam and Gabe and Eli all wore dark suits. Sarah’s dress was black; Ruby’s was navy-blue. Connor and Miles and Dexter were dressed in neatly pressed khakis and button-down shirts. Each boy carried a bouquet of wildflowers, cosmos and zinnias in shades of red and pink and cream. Sarah held a box made of black plastic with a sticker that read VERONICA LEVY on its top. Her mother, it turned out, had arranged for the disposal of her physical remains, at a place called （Sarah still cringed when she thought about it） Budget Cremations of New England. This, it emerged, was the same place that had handled their father’s cremation, one of a great many facts that, for better or worse, her mother hadn’t chosen to share.
Sarah surveyed the assembled mourners. “Is everyone ready?” she asked.
“Could someone check the wind?” Ruby asked. “Not to be morbid, but we don’t want a Big Lebowski situation.”
Gabe licked his thumb and held it in the air. “I think we’re good.”
Carefully, Sarah removed the top from the box and looked down at her mother’s ashes: grainy and gray, with glittering flecks here and there. Heavier than she thought that ashes would be; lighter than the weight of a person’s life should have been. “You don’t think I should have gotten an urn?” she whispered to Sam, just as her mother’s sister, their aunt Suzanne, asked, loudly, from her spot three landings above the beach, “They couldn’t get an urn?”
“We didn’t need one,” Sam said. He turned to give Aunt Suzanne a big wave, and a bigger smile, and said to his sister, “Mom didn’t want to sit on someone’s mantel. She wanted to be with Dad. And this was their favorite place in the world.”
Sarah remembered the conversation she’d had with Ronnie the night before the wedding-that-wasn’t, how her mom had told Sarah that the Cape had been her favorite place, not her father’s. And yet, they’d scattered his ashes in the water, at his request. Marriage is compromise, Sarah thought, and smiled a little, hoping her dad hadn’t doomed himself to an eternity of seasickness or endured a lifetime of subordinating his wishes to his wife’s. That wasn’t the way Sarah remembered it… but if the last months of her mother’s life had taught her anything, it was that memory was subjective. Veronica remembered summers with her children, with occasional breaks to write or grade papers; Sarah remembered a mother constantly working, with occasional breaks to be with her children. “I’m probably wrong,” she finally admitted, during one of her last talks with her mother, but her mother had said, “No matter what really happened, it’s how you felt that mattered. I’m sorry if I ever made you feel anything else but loved. Because I wanted to be a mother. I loved you and your brother very much.”
Sarah held the box out to her brother and his partner, then her husband, then her stepdaughter, then the boys. One by one, they used the silver scoop to remove a portion of the ashes and sprinkle them into the water. When Sam started to cry, Gabe put his hand on Sam’s back. When Eli saw Ruby sniffling, he reached into his pocket and handed her what turned out to be an honest-to-God handkerchief. When everyone had taken a scoop, Sarah waded into the surf and turned the box upside down, letting the wind take the last of her mother and blow her out to sea.