Sea Change Read Free

surgeon, was always in wrinkled green scrubs with her hair tied back and shadows under her wide gray eyes. This Mom wore an orange tunic over along, flowing skirt. Her soft, light-brown waves tumbled down her shoulders, and her face—oval-shaped and pretty, a face that led some people to think I was adopted—had a healthy glow.
    “What happened to you?” I blurted. I had a secret fear that when I went away to college and began coming home for holidays, I’d find my mother white-haired and stooped—abruptly old. But seeing her now felt like the opposite experience; since leaving New York, Mom had gotten younger.
    Mom chuckled. “You’ve just never seen me with a real tan. The sun finds me. Trust me, it’s not like I’ve had time to go to the beach.” She cupped my chin in her hand, regarding me fondly. “I bought you buckets of Banana Boat yesterday, Ms. Alabaster—SPF forty.”
    I could tell from the lilt in her usually businesslike voice how glad Mom was to have me with her. Two days ago, she’d called me from Savannah, where she’d flown to attend the funeral of my grandmother, her mother, Isadora Hawkins. It was there that Mom had learned of her inheritance: the summer home on Selkie.
    Mom’s siblings, Aunt Coral and Uncle Jim, who both lived near Isadora in Savannah, had been up in arms. Mom and Isadora hadn’t spoken in almost thirty years; they’dhad a falling-out in Mom’s youth, the details of which were murky to me—something about Mom marrying my dad, a poor Yankee from Brooklyn—so nobody could believe that Isadora had left Mom such a legacy. Mom was equally mystified, but mainly aggravated that she had to take a leave of absence from work, sail out to Selkie, and try to sell the old house.
    “I could really use your help,” Mom had told me over the phone. “I want to sort through Isadora’s personal effects as fast as possible, and you, my love, are extremely talented when it comes to organizing.”
    I’d felt a warm flicker of flattery as I stood outside my high school, having just taken my disastrous English final. I was curious about the unknown strands of DNA that linked me to the South. And although I had my internship lined up, part of me had longed to escape what was shaping up to be a lackluster, lonely summer. My nineteen-year-old brother, Wade, was with our father in Los Angeles, and I sort of enjoyed the idea of the genders being divided across the country, like the Union and the Confederacy.
    So after several e-mails to the museum, my internship was deferred until July fifteenth, and I was buying tickets on Travelocity.
    “How’s everything going so far?” I asked Mom now aswe stood facing each other under the azure sky. The water’s rhythmic lapping against the dock was soothing.
    She groaned, putting a hand to her forehead. “Don’t ask. Aunt Coral keeps calling me, hollering her head off about how the house should be her birthright, and…”
    Mom paused midrant, and her jaw dropped as her gaze fell on something behind me. Her face blanched beneath her tan, and for one crazy second I wondered if she’d seen the kraken unfurling from the ocean.
    I looked over my shoulder to see Sailor Hat loading luggage onto a rolling cart. The man with salt-and-pepper hair from the ferry stood at his side, nodding and handing him a few folded dollar bills. The man’s dark-haired son was walking off the boat, his head still bent over his iPhone. A few other ferry workers tramped around them, preparing Princess of the Deep for its return voyage.
    “Who are you looking at?” I asked as I turned back to my mother, intrigued.
    “Nobody,” Mom replied, and she took hold of my arm. “Come on, you must be starving, and we have a ways to walk. They don’t allow cars on the island.”
    I threw one last glance back at the ferry, then hurried after my mother. We headed off the dock, cutting through swaths of scratchy yellow grass, and then started up a pebbly path that snaked away from