Chapter Two
To Do:
Give notice to landlord
Put furniture on craigslist
Contact school re: taking Sabrina out early
Start packing up office and call clients
Tell skunkball ex we’re moving (like he’ll even care)
What an unexpected and amazing gift. Jenna and her daughter would have a home. On the beach! No more rent. No, better than that, they would own something that could produce income for them, a good income, certainly more than she made now. She handed over the letter for her mother to read.
“I knew she was going to do this. It’s just what you need,” Mom said when she’d finished. “And the best news is you won’t get it right away. By the time you inherit, hopefully your three-year spousal support sentence will be up and a certain someone won’t have any claim to it.”
“Unless Aunt Edie dies,” Jenna said, reality splashing cold water on her euphoria. Then Damien would be right there with his hand out, demanding half of everything she’d inherit. “I mean, obviously I wouldn’t want her to, anyway,” she added, realizing how she’d sounded. She loved Aunt Edie and hoped the sweet, old woman lived to be a hundred. There weren’t enough Aunt Edies in the world.
Mom handed back the letter. “I wouldn’t worry about that. All the women in our line are long-lived. She’s eighty-two but she’s in good health. No, this is a blessing, no doubt about it.”
“I still can’t believe it,” Jenna said. It all seemed too good to be true.
“Can’t believe what?”
Jenna looked up to see her daughter had entered the room. Sabrina was wearing a pink T-shirt and denim shorts, which showed off long, coltish legs. She’d gotten Jenna’s blue eyes and round face and her nose, which, if Jenna did say so herself, wasn’t a bad nose at all, and she had a pretty, full mouth under it—a mouth which was turned down a lot lately. Her reddish blond shoulder-length hair was freshly washed and blown-out, and she’d covered the few scattered zits on her face with concealer. She was a cute fourteen-year-old. Down the road, she’d be a beautiful woman.
If she lived that long. There were times when Jenna wanted to throttle her. Teenage girls could be stinkers (Jenna knew—she’d been one), but teenage girls whose parents were splitting could be minimonsters.
Who could blame them, though? When the grown-ups in their lives screwed up and the toxic spill splashed on them, they were bound to react. Jenna tried to be patient with the pouting, the tantrums and the accusations, but sometimes it was hard, especially when her daughter pointed out that if she’d been nicer to Daddy he’d have never left.
In those moments, Jenna bit her tongue until it bled. She’d have liked nothing better than to inform her daughter that she had been nice to Daddy until he started being nice to another woman. If Sabrina wanted to make someone the villain she should cast her father in the role.
But Jenna also knew that father-daughter relationships were important. In spite of all the love her mother had lavished on her, she’d yearned for her own daddy so many times growing up. What Sabrina had with her father wasn’t stellar—she was hardly a top priority for him, coming in somewhere after his art, his new woman and basically all things Damien—but it was better than nothing, and Jenna wanted to try and keep it intact. Sabrina had often volunteered to be his helper when he went in search of his unrecyclable detritus (junk), and they shared a fondness for horror movies, something Jenna had never really approved of him letting her watch. But at least it was something they did together. Okay, he did it and let Sabrina join him. Still, it put them side by side on the couch on a Friday night.
There’d been no horror movie marathons allowed since he moved out—another thing her daughter held against her. But Jenna had remained firm. Their life had been enough of a horror movie the past year as it was, and she preferred to fill her daughter’s mind with more beautiful and positive images than terrified teens and spurting blood.
When Jenna wasn’t worrying about money she was worrying about Sabrina. She’d gone from being a straight-A student to getting Cs and Ds. She was barely speaking to Jenna these days and she had discovered the definition of surly. So far, the changes had been limited to an overall bad attitude and nothing more dramatic or dangerous. But Jenna knew that teenage angst could easily spiral into something much darker and more serious, so she walked around holding her breath, her shoulders tight, fearful that things could take a turn for the worse at any moment. She and Sabrina had tried going to a counselor but Sabrina had refused to open up. Sometimes Jenna wished she could clone herself because she sure needed a massage therapist.
Other moms who’d been through this assured her that her listing ship would right itself eventually. Meanwhile, though, she was captaining it alone. There’d been no custody battle and very few visits with Daddy. The blame for this was also laid on Jenna’s doorstep, and again Jenna had kept her mouth shut.
“You’ve got the house,” Damien had pointed out. “I’m in no position to take her.”
Of course not. There was only room for two in the basement love nest. Damien couldn’t be bothered obviously, and Aurora the muse probably didn’t want the competition.
So both mother and daughter had been rejected, by a man who didn’t deserve either of them. But now all that misery was about to get shoved into the past. Now they had a bright future looming, a new start.
“I have some amazing news,” Jenna said to her daughter. “We get to live at a beach motel in Moonlight Harbor.” Her voice was quivering with excitement. Heck, her whole body was quivering.
Eagerness transformed Sabrina from sulky to adorable. “For the whole summer? Wow! Can Marigold come visit?”
“Of course she can. But...we’re not going just for the summer.”
The eagerness paused. “What do you mean?”
“We get to move there. My great-aunt, your great-great-aunt—”
“Live there?” Sabrina interrupted.
“Yes. Your great-great-aunt—”
“Live there?” Sabrina stared at Jenna as if she’d announced they were going to prison.
“Now you sound like Aunt Edie’s parrot,” Jenna teased, trying to cushion what was shaping up to be a bumpy ride. “She has this parrot named Jolly Roger...”
Sabrina’s brows dipped right along with the edges of her mouth. “I don’t want to move.”
“Oh, darling, it’s so much fun down at the beach,” put in Mel, trying to help. “You’ll love it.”
“No, I won’t,” Sabrina corrected her, her voice tinged with panic. “All my friends are here.”
“You’ll make new friends,” Jenna said. Like that was assuring to a fourteen-year-old?
Blink. Blink, blink. Oh, no, there it was, the nervous tic that had plagued her during her messy marriage, returning with a vengeance. She thought she’d gotten rid of it when Damien left.
Sabrina’s hands fisted. “I don’t want to make new friends! I don’t want to leave Marigold.”
Asking Sabrina to leave behind the girl who had been her bff since they were in the fourth grade was the equivalent of asking her to cut off her arm, especially in light of the fact that her father had stepped out of the picture. How could Jenna have forgotten so quickly the passion of those young years, the desperate need to keep your friends and your footing on an ever-shifting social ladder? Best friends were a young girl’s emotional anchor. Crap. Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap.
“I won’t go!” Sabrina cried. “I’ll stay with Daddy.”
Jenna’s right eye twitched. “Baby, you can’t stay with Daddy. He can’t take you right now. We’ve already talked about that.”
“But you said we’d always be close by, that I could see him whenever I want.”
Big-mouth her. “You’ll still be able to see him.”
“No, I won’t. Not if we move away.”
“It’s not that far.” Well, not compared to someplace like Texas.
“I won’t go. You can’t make me!”
Sabrina turned and fled and Jenna’s excitement crumbled faster than a sand castle under assault from an incoming tide. She heaved a sigh. “I guess I’ll call Aunt Edie.”
“Don’t you dare,” her mother said. “This is an opportunity for you to make a better life for yourself and your daughter.”
“Some new life if she ends up hating me even more than she already does.”
“She doesn’t hate you.”
“No, she adores me. Anyone can see that.”
“She’s angry that her father’s gone. You make a good scapegoat.”
Jenna frowned. “He’s the one who screwed up and I’m the one being punished.”
“That’s about the size of it,” Mom said.
“I should stay here. Maybe once Jenna’s done with school...”
“The opportunity might not be there. Aunt Edie needs help now. And, frankly, so do you. Not having to pay rent would make all the difference.”
“I’m not doing that bad,” Jenna protested.
“You’re not exactly making a fortune. And once Damien starts taking a bite out of your paycheck you’ll have even less.”
“We could move in with you,” Jenna suggested hopefully. Her mom didn’t live that far away. Sabrina wouldn’t even have to change schools.
“Of course you could,” Mel agreed. “And you know I’d be glad to have you. But how long do you think your daughter would put up with sharing that second bedroom with you?” She shook her head. “I’m afraid none of us can be any help in this. You have one set of grandparents in an over-fifty community in Olympia and a grandmother in a one-bedroom condo in Bremerton. Sabrina wouldn’t be allowed in one place and she wouldn’t be happy in the other any more than she would be here. And the truth is, she’s not going to be happy anywhere for a while. You know that.”
“But at least she’d be with her best friend if I stayed. At least I wouldn’t have to change schools on her.”
Mel cocked an eyebrow. “And she’s doing so well where she is.”
Jenna’s head suddenly hurt.
“Honey, you have to think beyond these next few months,” her mother said as Jenna tried to rub away the ache at her temples.
“I don’t know. It’s a big step.”
“Most first steps are. And yes, you can stay where you are and play it safe. You can keep limping along with the clients you have. I can slip you money once in a while, and so can your grandparents. But it will never be enough to keep you very high above the poverty level. Once we die—”
“Don’t even say that,” Jenna interrupted. Her mother and the grandparents had been her safety net over the last year, as well as her rooting section, coaches and therapists (and therapy with Mom had been free). She couldn’t imagine life without any of them. She especially couldn’t imagine life without her mother, who was both her role model and her best friend.
“We’re not planning on it anytime soon,” Mel said. “Once I’m gone you’ll have my life insurance money. And you girls are in the grandparents’ wills. Although the recession dipped into Gram and Gramps’s retirement pretty heavily—but still.”
“Can we not talk about this?” Sheesh.
“My point is that, while down the road you’ll inherit a small nest egg, it doesn’t help you now. You have to live. Go to the beach and you can live comfortably. You can build a future.”
Jenna tried to imagine herself getting her daughter on board with this plan now that she’d seen Sabrina’s reaction. She couldn’t. The motel had looked like such a godsend, but really...
“I know what you’re thinking,” Mom said, making Jenna’s brow furrow and her lips turn as far down at the corners as her daughter’s had only a moment ago. “Stop it right now. You can’t keep doing what you’ve been doing and expect to do well, not with how your life’s changed.”
Deep down she knew her mother was right. And deep down she did want to make a new start and do something special with the rest of her life. But...
“You’re like a snail that’s outgrown its shell. You have to move on, expand your life. Adapt or die, darling.”
“And is that what I’m supposed to tell Sabrina?” Jenna retorted irritably.
“No. You simply tell her this is how it has to be. Children are resilient. She’ll adjust.”
“I don’t know.” Only a moment ago this had looked like a great opportunity. What if it turned out to be a great mistake?
“You’re not moving to the edge of the earth,” Mel said. “Her friend can come visit. She can come here and stay with me and see her father. Tell her it will be fine.”
“Like you told me when I kept asking where Daddy was?”
“Exactly. And it did turn out all right, didn’t it? You had a happy childhood.”
She had. After her father died the relatives had circled around their bereft little family, making sure both Jenna and Celeste got plenty of love and attention. The grandpas stepped up to the plate, taking the girls to father-daughter dances and coming to their music recitals and volleyball games along with the grandmas. Uncle Ralph had made visits to the beach an adventure, teaching the girls how to bait a crab trap and how to work a clam gun. When they’d gotten older he’d also scared away boys he deemed unworthy of his great-nieces, which had turned out to be most of the boys they ever met. That had perturbed them both, but they’d loved him, anyway. And Aunt Edie, she’d always been there, smiling and ready to help the girls make wind chimes out of bits of driftwood and seashells or to bake cookies together. On rainy June evenings they’d all played hearts and crazy eights or, Jenna’s favorite, Monopoly.
She’d always won at Monopoly. Now she had a chance to win in real life. But she didn’t want to win at the expense of her relationship with her daughter. Resilient or not, kids still paid the price for their parents’ mistakes.
But surely living at the beach wouldn’t be a bad price to pay. Maybe Sabrina would love to dig for clams and make wind chimes. Maybe she’d be as in awe of the spectacle of waves racing to throw themselves on the sandy beach as Jenna had once been.
If Jenna could just get her down there.
“This could be good for Sabrina, too, you know,” her mom said, as if reading her mind. “Her father really isn’t a very positive influence.”
“He’s still her father.”
“Let him be her father from a distance. It’s what he wants, anyway.”
“Yes, it is.”
Sad, but true. Damien and his slimy lawyer had done a great job of pulling the wool over the judge’s eyes. He’d come away with a very loose arrangement, visitation rights but no responsibility. He’d be the same father he’d been when they were together, barely involved.
“Someday, she’ll figure out who the real bad guy is,” said Mel.
Jenna sighed. “Part of me wants that, wants to be exonerated. But part of me... Jeez, Mom, he’s her dad. I hate the idea of her ever realizing what a pathetic one he is.”
“She will, and it will be hard. But she’ll survive. She’s strong, like her mama,” Mel added with a smile. Then she sobered. “Meanwhile, remember who’s the child here and who’s the adult. It’s up to you to move you girls to a better future even though your daughter isn’t able to see it. You have to do what’s right even if it’s not what’s popular.”
How many times had her mother told her that when she was young? She smiled. “How did you get to be so wise?”
“Lots of stupid mistakes,” Mel replied, although Jenna couldn’t remember her mother ever doing anything stupid. “Trust me when I tell you that you need to take advantage of this. Don’t let the fear of the unknown keep you tethered in a place where you can’t prosper. And you know I’m not simply talking about money.”
Jenna nodded. Mom was right. She’d fallen into quicksand and now someone was offering to pull her out. She’d be crazy not to take that helping hand. And she wanted this. She wanted to feel alive again instead of like one of the walking dead. And the move would be good for Sabrina, too. Fresh air, healthy outdoor activities, a summer of fun to distract her from the dark clouds her parents had blown over her life.
How was she going to convince Sabrina of that?
She took a deep breath and followed her daughter to the guest bedroom, praying all the way that somehow the right words would drop into her mind.
She found Sabrina on the bed, listening to her iPod, tears streaking down her face. Clothes lay scattered around the floor. The book she’d been reading leaned against a corner, its pages fanned out, obviously hurled there in a fit of anger. Sabrina pretended not to see her mother, but the vicious kick at a pair of jeans gave her away.
Oh, boy. Both eyes went into action. Blink, blink, twitch, twitch.
Jenna forced her eyelids to stay in place and sat down next to her daughter on the bed. Sabrina shifted so her face was turned to the wall.
Jenna laid a hand on her arm. Sabrina yanked it away.
“Sabrina.”
Sabrina took out her earbuds and glared at Jenna. “It’s not fair,” she spat.
That much was definitely true. None of what had happened was fair. She sighed. “I know.”
“You’re ruining my life,” Sabrina wailed.
No. Damien was ruining her life. He’d ruined both their lives. But that wasn’t something she’d say out loud. “I’m trying to get us out of the ruins, Sabrina. I’m sorry Daddy and I couldn’t stay together.” I’m sorry your dad’s a shit. “But this is how things have turned out, and I don’t want us to keep sitting around being miserable. I want to do something that’s good for our future.” This was way too philosophical. Jenna tried a new tack. “I want to be able to afford nice clothes for you. I want to be able to pay for all those school activities you’re going to want to do when you start high school. I want to be able to save for your college education. I want to try and make things better for us.” Sabrina was sitting with her lips pressed together, a river of tears flowing down her cheeks. “Can you understand that at all?” Jenna asked.
Sabrina bit her lip and nodded. “But I don’t want to move,” she said in a small voice.
“I don’t want to move you,” Jenna said. “But I think, in the long run, this will be good for us. Can you try and keep an open mind?”
Sabrina burst into sobs.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Jenna said, and hugged her.
At last Sabrina’s sobs began to subside. She wiped at her nose. “What if I hate it there?”
“What if you give it a chance?” Jenna countered. “It really is a great town,” she hurried on. “They have this cute ice cream parlor where you can get about a million flavors of ice cream. And there’s miniature golf and go-carts. Lots of friendly people. Your aunt Celeste and I used to meet so many cute boys at the beach,” she added, sure that would clinch the deal. Her daughter was frowning, but at least she’d stopped crying.
“Can Marigold come?”
“She can visit as soon as we get settled. How’s that?”
The frown shrank slightly and Sabrina said a reluctant okay. Then added, “But what if I hate it?”
Back to that again. “You won’t,” Jenna assured her. Dear God, pleeease let me be right about that.