Beach Girls by Luanne Rice Read Free Book Online

girls hadn't known about. She remembered how they had healed her first broken heart—a trip to Paradise Ice Cream for sundaes, a ritual burying of the maraschino cherries in the sand.
    She could have used that ceremony many times since. Laying down her brush, she put the wren sketches aside for the night. Then, because she had promised Tilly she'd take her mousing, she opened the kitchen door and let the cat run into the night. Barefoot, she walked through the yard, to stand on the rock that faced the beach. She heard the waves and saw their sharp white edges rippling through the inky blackness.
    One after another, the small waves of Long Island Sound touched the beach in steady rhythm. Stevie tried to catch her breath, get her heartbeat in synch with the waves. Tilly rustled through the underbrush. A nearly toothless cat, in search of prey. It made Stevie smile—it really did—to think of such hope in the face of dental reality.
    “Go, Tilly,” Stevie said, still gazing down at the beach, at the place where she and her friends had spent so many happy days so long ago. She looked up at the stars and found one for Madeleine and one for Emma. “And one for Nell,” Stevie said, staring at one bright star, twinkling white-blue in night's endless black.
     
    A WARM BREEZE
blew through the screens, and the sound of crickets and night birds was a lullaby. Nell lay in her bed, her stomach aching from eating too much lobster, and tried to be soothed by the sounds of nature. It didn't work.
    “Ohhh!” she said.
    “Go to sleep, Nell,” came her father's voice.
    “I'm trying!” she said.
    “Try harder.”
    She stuck out her tongue. What kind of answer was that?
Try harder!
God, fathers didn't get it. Didn't they know that the harder you tried to sleep, the faster it slipped away? Nell's mother would have said. . . . Nell squinched her eyes extra tight, trying to remember what her mother would have said.
    The memory wouldn't come. Nell used to be able to fill in the blanks with her mother's words, but suddenly there were none. None! She tried to conjure up her mother's voice, and that wouldn't come, either!
    “Ohhh!” she cried out louder. Suddenly her stomachache was much worse. “Daddy!”
    He came into the small room. She saw his tall silhouette in the doorway. Then he sat down on the edge of her bed. The house was small, and it smelled musty. The curtains were ugly. Nell hated it here. Her stomach ached. She missed her mother. Seeing Stevie was both too little and too much. All of these feelings swirled through her mind, cutting her with tiny knives, making her cry and cry.
    “It's okay, Nell,” her father said, putting his arms around her.
    It's not, it's never going to be okay again,
she wanted to say, but she was sobbing too hard to get the words out.
    “Maybe you shouldn't have finished your lobster,” he said. “It was pretty big.”
    Nell remembered the scene at the restaurant: her father and Francesca talking about some bridge they were building, the table so festive and covered with lobsters and clams and corn on the cob, and Nell just rolling up her sleeves and dipping the pink lobster meat into melted butter, feeling fuller and fuller, and Francesca smiling and stifling a laugh as she said, “Someone's eyes are bigger than her stomach.”
    “She's gone,” her father said now.
    “I know,” Nell cried. She closed her eyes, drawing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. She had heard Francesca saying goodbye a short while ago. She had to drive all the way back to Boston, and Nell could just tell she wanted to be invited to stay over.
    “Don't worry about her, Nell,” he said.
    “Mary Donovan's father married his girlfriend,” Nell wept.
    “I'm not Mary Donovan's father.”
    “Mommy loved lobster.”
    “I know.”
    “She told me the beach girls used to go lobstering together.”
    “Maybe they did. I don't know.”
    “Can we ask Aunt Maddie?”
    Silence. Her father's hand