This was both a good and bad thing. Good, because we got away with stuff. If we played out on the beach past bedtime, if we had double dessert, no one really cared. Bad, because I had the vague sense that Steven and I weren’t as important here, that there were other things that occupied my mother’s mind—memories we had no part of, a life before we existed. And also, the secret life inside herself, where Steven and I didn’t exist. It was like when she went on her trips without us—I knew that she did not miss us or think about us very much.
I hated that thought, but it was the truth. The mothers had a whole life separate from us. I guess us kids did too.
chapter twenty-five
When Jeremiah and Conrad walked up the beach with their boards under their arms, I had this crazy thought that I sho
