It was, she thought, the most beautiful place in the world. Sarah Farrington pulled her car off to the side of the road at the top of the last hill before descending into town. This was her favorite moment of returning home, the moment when the hills fell away and the horizon filled with the blue expanse of the Pacific. From the top of the hill, Sarah could see the white foam of breaking waves along the sand bar that marked the mouth of Tomales Bay. The waves formed a trembling line where the water flowing out of the bay met the stronger incoming ocean tide. An osprey hovered, then swooped, talons first, into the calm glistening bay water. The Pacific was never so calm. Placid for a moment, perhaps, but Sarah knew that within minutes the sea could rise and waves would pound against the sandy shore. From where she stood, she could just see the tops of the high sand dunes and the tips of the eucalyptus trees. She could not see the roofs of Thomas Beach. Behind her stretched miles and miles of rolling green hills, pastures filled with sheep and dairy cows, and sleepy northern California towns. Before her lay the edge of the world.

Every time she reached the top of this hill, Sarah was reminded of the beauty she had forgotten. What she carried with her, what she remembered, was the town. Thomas Beach overwhelmed all other images. Memories of Thomas Beach were like a naked light bulb hanging in front of a wall of beautiful paintings. When Sarah closed her eyes all she could see was the glowing outline of the bulb; the paintings were gone. The metallic ticking of the car that had carried her for the past five days from the north coast of Maine to the north coast of California, reminded her that this was not, yet, the end of her journey.

She got back into the car and drove north along the ridge until she came to an unmarked turn off. No highway sign. No arrow. No indication that a town existed at the end of the narrow road leading down to the sea. Sarah slowed, considered continuing straight ahead, on toward Bodega, to Jenner, Eureka, Oregon, continuing all the way to Canada, Alaska, the North Pole. She shifted down into second and turned left.

As she passed the stand of cypress trees that once encircled a one room schoolhouse, Sarah slid the gear shift into neutral. She turned off the engine. It was all downhill from here. The moment her fingers turned the key she felt the familiar tingle of adrenaline beneath her skin. Like a circus daredevil dropping into a cannon, she abandoned herself to the momentum, to the force of gravity, the force of family obligations, of phone calls in the night. The force that she could guide but not control.

The blue '65 Valiant plunged for a mile and a half through hairpin curves so round and serpentine that Sarah felt her stomach swaying. On one side of her was a steep ravine filled with rocks and poison oak, on the other, was the raw hillside. Sarah had played this coasting game ever since she was twelve years old and her father first taught her to drive. Sometimes the ride was smooth, the movement of her hands on the wheel gently coaxing the car through the dangerous curves in perfect synchrony with the freefall motion. Those times she felt as confident as a skier maneuvering through moguls. Other times she held so tightly to the wheel that the blood was forced from her knuckles and she was swept up in the frenzy of almost skidding out of control, narrowly missing the ditch or hanging one tire off the edge of the pavement.

Once she had played the game in her mother's Chrysler. That time when she approached the first curve and turned the steering wheel, she heard a resounding click. That was how she learned about automatic steering lock. The trajectory of the Chrysler had drawn a tangent on the arc of the curve, a straight line to the ravine. Like a horse digging in its hooves before a fence, she had pushed with both her feet on the brake pedal and the Chrysler stopped. Smoke poured from the black stripes of rubber left on the pavement and the shiny grill hung over the edge, but that had not ended the game.

The Valiant didn't have a steering lock. Sarah coasted through the last curve and entered Thomas Beach as she always had, a little too fast. She sped past the large hand-painted sign that was propped up against the trunk of a eucalyptus tree. This was home, the end of the road. Now that you had nowhere else to go, Sarah thought, there was a sign to tell you where you were. "Welcome to Thomas Beach - The Farrington Family Resort." The black hand-painted letters had faded and the white background peeled in tiny curls exposing the plywood underneath. In small letters underneath was written: Population 40. That figure was a few years out of date as Sarah and her brother, David, had moved away, her cousin Rachel lived in San Francisco, her uncle Gerrick's wife, Olive, had run off with the Laura Scudder's Potato Chip man and had taken their two kids with her. Grandma Beatrice was dead.

There were a few additions to the town's social register; two pensioners, a drug dealer and a poet. All of whom had wandered into town and hadn't found their way out again. Here, at the end of the county maintained road, there was no train station, no bus service, no taxi stand, not even a working gas station. One had to make arrangements to leave Thomas Beach before arriving.

The sun was low as Sarah eased into the parking lot of the old Thomas Beach Resort Hotel. It was a long two story building built in the shape of a T. At the intersection of the south wing and the main structure rose a tall square tower with a peaked roof. The upper story of the hotel was dark. Tattered lace curtains still hung in the dirty windows on the second floor. The same curtains, stiff with fly specks, dust and old cobwebs that had hung there when Sarah and David had played hide and seek in the empty guest rooms. The dining room that she remembered as a child was now the Farrington Family General Store filled with the knick-knacks and necessities of beach resort tourists. Long shadows hid what had once been the grand entrance and weeds covered the circle drive where Model T's had let out their parasoled passengers.

From the early 1900's to the 1940's Thomas Beach had been a bustling seaside resort. Playground-by-the-Sea they had called it then. Sarah had seen the fancy phrase emblazoned on faded posters and matchbook covers she found stuffed in a cupboard in the back of the store. Ernest Farrington, Sarah's great grandfather, bought the Thomas Beach Resort Hotel in 1902 from the original owner, Herbert Thomas. At that time the hotel slept thirty-two guests and served fifty people at one sitting in the grand dining room.

When Mr. Thomas built the hotel, in 1856, he wasn't interested in establishing a family playground on the white sand beach or launching fishing boats into the Pacific to catch salmon. He built the hotel to entertain visiting timber merchants who he expected to purchase lumber from his new enterprise: the Thomas Beach Eucalyptus Farm. It was Mr. Thomas's dream to harvest eucalyptus trees for use as building materials and railroad ties for the fast expanding North Pacific Railway. Unfortunately, the imported Australian eucalyptus trees were not suited for building or for the railways. The trees spiraled slightly as they grew and as they dried the cut lumber slowly began to un-spiral. The twisted timber pulled the spikes out of the railroad ties and buckled the walls of houses. Although the oily wood burned very hot, the fire was difficult to control and the logs were soon ruled out as a fuel source for the steam locomotives.

Though unsuccessful as a salable commodity the tall pale trees flourished in the sandy soil along the Northern California coast. They sent their roots out long and shallow beneath the ground and sucked the earth dry around them. Heavy, pungent oils dropped from their narrow leaves and few native could thrive in their vicinity. The native scrub oaks and the cypress trees soon disappeared. Now these strange trees with their ever peeling bark hanging in strips from their trunks, like snakes shedding skin, were the only trees left standing in Thomas Beach.

To his credit Herbert Thomas did not use eucalyptus to build the the Thomas Beach. That building sat on indestructible 12 x 12 virgin redwood pilings and every wall was framed with straight grained Douglas Fir. A hundred years after the first nail was driven into its thick studs, the large building still stood. However, it was no longer a hotel.

Sarah coasted silently to a stop beside two round and rusted gas pumps; regular and ethyl. Both were empty. The underground tank had corroded and been left unrepaired years ago and was now unusable. Above the pumps hung a faded plywood cutout of Pegasus, his wings spread high above his flowing mane and his hooves dancing on the brand name of a gasoline that no longer existed. Sarah walked across the pot-holed parking lot and up the cement steps to the store. Hanging in the front window, beneath a tin Coca-Cola "Yes, We're Open" sign, was a handwritten notice which read: Due to a death in the family the Farrington General Store will be closed tomorrow, June 23, 1985.

This was the reason Sarah had come home; to attend the funeral of her grandmother, Beatrice Farrington. Sarah did not mourn her grandmother's death, nor did she suffer any guilt from her lack of sorrow. There was a nothingness about the way she felt about her grandmother's death, an emptiness that wasn't an absence of love, or an aching void left to be filled. It was simply nothing. Like the absence of pain when a piece of dead skin falls off or fingernails are trimmed. Whatever emotion Sarah had once felt toward her grandmother had dried up long before her death. Even the hate was gone. Sarah Farrington and her grandmother had agreed, silently but unequivocally, on the day they met, nearly twenty years earlier, that they hated each other.

Sarah was six years old. She and her family were moving back to Thomas Beach. Moving back was the way her mother phrased it, but for Sarah and David it was moving away from the life they knew on Naval bases and moving to a strange town, filled with strange people. To celebrate the return of the Sam Farrington's, her father's brother and sister, Gerrick and Hattie, had prepared a huge Christmas feast in the middle of July. The long mahogany table in the hotel dining room was set with linen and silver. A fire crackled in the fireplace beneath the dusty elk's head. There was a 28 pound turkey stuffed with Tomales Bay oysters, mashed potatoes, two inch high soda biscuits, giblet gravy, homemade cranberry sauce and creamed sweet potato casserole with marshmallows melted on top.

"Don't forget your yams," Grandma Beatrice had said as she scooped up a spoonful of orangey-yellow mush streaked with runny white marshmallow.

"I didn't forget Grandmother," Sarah said. "I don't like sweet potatoes."

"Yes, you do. Everyone likes sweet potatoes," Beatrice answered and without hesitating let the dollop of hot mashed tubers fall onto Sarah's plate.

"No. I really don't like them," Sarah replied, certain that her grandmother had merely misunderstood her the first time.

"Nonsense," Beatrice said as she passed the casserole on to her other granddaughter, Aunt Hattie's daughter, Rachel. Rachel took an extra large helping, smiled docilely at her grandmother and rolled her eyes in Sarah's direction.

Sarah, uncomfortable in her tight braids and over-starched dress, tried hard to be polite. Everyone else seemed so happy, smiling at each other, swapping stories, catching up on all the news that Sarah hated to cause a scene. She took a small bite of sweet potato. It was horrid. The fibrous yellow mass swelled on her tongue absorbing all the moisture from her mouth. She had no spit to swallow. The muscles in her throat constricted and with a quick involuntary spasm the offensive food flew out of the child's mouth and landed on her grandmother's bone china bread plate. It sat there, an orangey-yellow lump, just to the right of the half-eaten biscuit spread with brown apple butter.

"You ill-mannered little heathen," the old woman spat under her breath as she turned her large watery eyes on Sarah. The little girl saw the angry liver spotted hands tremble, like quivering membranous gloves, and she sank deeper into her chair. In a frail, matronly voice Beatrice added, "In this house we eat the food God has so graciously provided us. It may be acceptable, in the places you have lived, to dismiss God's bounty, but here we are thankful for Our Lord's generosity and we do not squander His gifts. You are back in Thomas Beach now, young lady, and you will behave yourself. What is left on your plate, Sarah, you will eat cold for breakfast." With that pronouncement a nervous laughter erupted around the table.

Sarah's father was deep in conversation with his younger brother Gerrick and hadn't noticed her dilemma. Carol Farrington, Sarah's mother, however, sat at the far end of the table, acutely aware of the situation. Her eyes begged Sarah to be good, to be quiet, to not make a scene. Sarah knew her mother wanted desperately for them to fit into this family. At the end of the meal the yellow sweet potatoes with the glutinous mass of marshmallows still sat on her plate.

When Sarah slipped down from her chair she felt a tingling at the back of her neck. She turned to find Beatrice glaring at her with unblinking, watery, pale blue eyes. Beatrice said nothing and Sarah said nothing. They simply stared at each other. Stalemate. The six year old was too young to know exactly what game was being played, but it was clear even then, that she and her grandmother Beatrice were on different sides.

Sarah opened the heavy wooden doors and walked into the store foyer. It was a small square room that held strange mementos and a near empty bulletin board. The overwhelming familiarity of every object assailed Sarah's senses, the sweet sticky smell of the oiled wood floor, the hollow swoosh of the swinging doors that lead from the foyer into the store, the musty cedar of the rough walls, smoothed in places by years of children's fingers and passing dresses. Fragments of memories rushed passed her. Bits of old conversations. Childhood faces. Strange featureless sensations. Ghosts.

She shook her head like a pitcher shaking off a bad call. Three tall glass jars, each holding the pickled remains of bleached out flounders and huge horseneck clams, still stood in the entryway. Their glass tops yellowed with dust. She had been told once where they came from but had long since forgotten the story. Perhaps they were purchased by Ernest Farrington on one of his shopping trips into San Francisco. Or, perhaps, they were a gift to her grandfather, Henry Farrington from the wife of a busy sport fisherman. Wherever they came from they had been sitting where they were now, in the corner just inside the front door of the store, for as long as Sarah could remember. In the other corner stood a bright red penny gumball dispenser that still took pennies and next to it stood a nickel toy machine. The toy machine contained peculiarly fascinating objects like fluorescent green rings and black wiggly spiders, each encased in clear plastic eggs. Anachronisms, throw backs from the past, and yet they were more at home here than she was.

"Hello stranger," her Aunt Hattie called out from behind the cash register when Sarah finally left the strange antechamber and pushed through the swinging doors into the store.

Like her Uncle Gerrick and unlike Sarah's father, Hattie Farrington looked liked Grandpa Henry. Hattie was tall, nearly six feet, and as wide as a double house trailer. It was said that Henry Farrington could hold four grandchildren across his chest and that he wore bib overalls made from six pairs of old denim jeans. But Hattie, whose chest was equally spacious, was more fashion conscious. She wore a light colored voluminous cotton shirt over dark stretch pants and a freshly pressed blue smock with hundreds of tiny pleats along the front. Her girth seemed almost regal, like a Polynesian potentate. She dyed her naturally light brown hair jet black which contrasted sharply with her pale complexion and pale blue eyes. From her ears hung large silver hoops and a silver necklace inlaid with glossy abalone shells hung around her neck. On her head she wore a blue captain's hat with a round patch stitched on the front which read: Thomas Beach - The Family Playground. The large script across her ample breast announced Farrington's Family Resort in matching blue letters. Hattie returned to her maiden name after her husbands left her. She was, if Sarah hadn't lost count, between husbands four and five.

"Well, you took your time getting here," Aunt Hattie said in an overly friendly, laughing, voice which didn't match the coldness in her eyes. Sarah noticed that her aunt's eyelids were puffy and rimmed in red.

"It was cheaper to drive than to fly," Sarah answered. "I had the time and I didn't have the money."

"A long drive. But then you like to stay on the move, don't you," Hattie said, remarking on Sarah's inability to stay in one place for more than a few years at a time. "Are you going to stay for the summer, then?"

"No, I have to get back to work," Sarah answered. "Besides, if I stay here that long I may never leave." She could already feel the glass display jar descending. She had a strange fear that years from now she would be found hanging upside down in formaldehyde, in a jar in the corner, just inside the front door.

"We can't have that, now can we?" Aunt Hattie said, the laughter still lacing her husky voice. "If you're looking for your mother, she's in the back bagging ice."

"Thanks," Sarah said, her tone just as friendly and just as false as her aunt's. Hattie dipped her hand into the glass jar filled with candy that stood on the counter. She peeled the plastic wrapper off a piece of Jolly Rancher Watermelon and popped it into her mouth. She tilted the jar toward Sarah. Sarah knew better than to accept the sweet bribe. She had learned years ago how the fat girl ruse worked. Cruelty and cattiness followed by cakes and cookies. "No, thanks."

Sarah found her mother half in and half out of the walk-in freezer. Her father had made the walk-in by backing a two-ton refrigerator truck up to the side of the building. He cut a hole in the wall and Presto, they had a walk-in freezer. It was another two years before he got around to disconnecting the cab, taking off the tires and building a platform and roof for the steel box. Carol Farrington propped the heavy steel door open with her left foot and lunged with her right like an eighteenth century swordsman into the freezer compartment. From this precarious position she was trying to wrestle out a large brown paper bag of crushed ice.

Carol wore the same beach resort uniform Hattie had on, though in a much smaller size. Sarah could see now that there was a large horseneck clam silk-screened on the back of the smock. The clam, even the smallest, most pristine version is not a beautiful creature. The horseneck, a variety of geoduck found only in the Pacific Northwest, is perhaps the ugliest and certainly the most vulgar of all mollusks. Its neck, which measures an average of eight inches long and two inches wide, is covered with thick wrinkled gray skin and resembles a horse's penis far more than a horse's neck. When the body burrows into the sand the neck stretches as much as six feet in order to place its small slit-like mouth above the ground to feed on passing oceanic protozoa. Digging for these clams is more work than sport. As you walk across the slippery, muddy island the necks feel the vibration and retract squirting fountains of water into the air and often up your pants leg. As quickly as possible you dig through the dank smelly mud which oozes back into the hole as fast as you dig it out. The wise clam digger will have spent four dollars at the Farrington General Store to buy a four foot length of stovepipe to shore up the hole. If not, the hole gets wider and wider as you get wetter and wetter and no closer to your prey. When you finally locate the body of the clam you then lay with your face pressed into the mud and reach into the hole to pry the clam loose from the powerful suction that holds it firmly in the black briny ooze. One advantage to this prone position is that now your body is so numb from the cold that you don't feel the sharp clamshell cutting deep gashes into your tender palm as you raise your prize triumphantly from the depths. "Do you need some help with that?" Sarah asked, as her mother pulled the twenty pound bag of ice over on its side.

"No. I've got it." Carol said and then fell backward into a stack of frozen meat. The stack wavered for a moment then toppled over. Bundles of packages wrapped in white butcher paper fell on her head and hamburger patties skidded across the floor like red hockey pucks. Sarah's mother sat on the floor of the freezer surrounded by frozen meat.

"Don't move, Mom. Let me pick these things up or you'll trip over them."

"These damn bags. I've been telling your Dad for years we need our own ice machine." Her breath steamed around her as she spoke but she stayed still while her daughter restacked the frozen packages.

"Do these patties go anywhere particular," Sarah asked. "Or can I pile them up on these cases of Swanson frozen dinners?"

"The packages are all marked so put the patties back where they came from."

Sarah looked down at the broken package in her hand. 6/4/85-GROUND CHUCK - GERRICK was written with a black magic marker across the front of one. Another was marked 6/11/85-SAUSAGE PATTIES - HATTIE. These were not for resale. Like most of the other business equipment, the tractor, the trucks, the vacuum cleaner, the walk-in freezer was used as a Farrington family appliance. Items too large to freeze in their home refrigerators were kept at the store. It was not uncommon to find leftover meatloaf in amongst the root beer Twin Pops.

She retrieved the last of the hamburger patties from behind the frozen orange juice, slipped it back through the tear in the butcher paper wrapping and stacked the other packages on top. Aunt Hattie and Uncle Gerrick would never notice.

"So, how was your trip?" Carol asked as she picked herself up off the floor and gave Sarah a warm but brusque hug. Her mother's hugs were always a bit awkward. They were tentative, encompassing, begging and self-conscious at the same time. Carol seemed uncomfortable with her body as if it didn't quite fit her. Sarah sensing her mother's discomfort hugged her quickly and reached for the box of plastic bags.

"It didn't take as long as I thought it would," Sarah said holding open a plastic bag so her mother could scoop the ice cubes into it. "It's practically all freeway from Maine to California."

"Well, five days seems awfully fast." Carol burrowed a wide mouthed steel scoop deep into the bag of rattling cubes. "You'd better be careful or you'll get another ticket."

"The last ticket I got was ten years ago." With a deftness born of years of practice, Sarah spun the heavy bag and held it out for her mother to close with a bright red twist-tie. "Where's Dad?"

"He and Gerrick are tearing down #22. They're getting ready for the 4th of July bonfire."

"Another cabin? What's that leave us with, four?"

"Three. The roof on #28 was leaking so bad this winter we had to tear it down."

"Fixing the roof wasn't an option, I suppose."

"Now, Sarah, don't you start criticizing me. You only just got here and already you're picking on me." Her mother's voice began to tremble aided in part by the coldness of the steel scoop she still held in her hand. "You'll just have to discuss this with your father."

"O.K. I'm sorry," Sarah said and held her arms out straight for her mother to stack with ice bags. "You're right. It's none of my business."

"I'm glad you came. Beatrice's death has been hard for all of us. Hattie should really have stayed home today. She's so upset."

"I noticed her eyes were puffy."

"She's been crying all day but she won't go home."

"She probably likes the attention."

"Now, Sarah, that's no way to talk about your aunt. After all she's done for us."

"I'm sorry," Sarah said, but she wasn't. She didn't share her mother's views of the Farrington family. As far as Sarah was concerned her aunt Hattie, her grandmother Beatrice and her cousin Rachel had never done anything for them. She also knew that her mother cherished the hand me down clothes ("Hattie has such a sense of style!"), the family picnics ("She sure knows how to have fun!") and the large family Christmas dinners.

"This must be hard for you," Sarah said.

Carol pulled a tissue from the pocket of her smock and blew her nose. She mumbled something that Sarah took to be an acknowledgment of her apology. Then added: "Dinner will be at six o'clock. After the store closes."

"I'll be there."

Sarah emptied her armload of ice into the display freezer at the back of the store and walked through the Pharmacy Section to the front door. For a small store there was an enormous selection of goods: toothbrushes, hair sprays, bobby pins, toe nail clippers, aspirin, Maalox, Pepto Bismal and every brand of seasickness pill on the market. Above the drugs and toiletries hung long bamboo poles for poke pole fishing and green string crab nets in many different sizes. A hand written sign nailed to the center of the largest net read: SPECIAL CRAB BAIT AT COUNTER. Sarah shuddered at the thought of those tasty red crabs gorging themselves, like underwater vultures, on bits of dead flesh fastened to the bottom of the net. The special crab bait provided by the Farrington family, for a special price, was actually plastic wrapped, deep frozen, road kill. Rabbits, possums, raccoons, even small deer that fled into the headlights of the family cars were cut up, skinned, wrapped in plastic, stacked in the walk-in next to Uncle Gerrick's ground chuck and sold to the weekend sportsman.

Another hand written sign hung above the shell counter. This one read: YOU BREAK IT - YOU BOUGHT IT. Strange shell dolls with cockleshell skirts and painted lopsided smiles, handmade by Sarah's great-aunt Ursula, sat amongst the exotic conches and corals imported from the Bahamas and other warm water resorts. Aunt Ursula had died ten years ago but boxes of dolls still waited to be sold. The local sand dollars and olive shells rarely made it to the beach in one piece after the fierce pounding of the Pacific waves. So the tourists at Farrington's General Store bought purple sea urchins from Fiji and tiny perfectly preserved seahorses from the coral reefs of Tahiti.

Sarah laid a few items on the counter in front of her Aunt Hattie: a new toothbrush, a bottle of Anacin and a Big Hunk candy bar.

"Do you want these on your parents' charge account?" she asked. "Or are you paying?"

"I'm paying." Sarah answered as her aunt rang up her purchases, scrutinizing each one as if a secret hid beneath the plastic wrappings.

"Excuse me," a young man said, poking his head between the swinging doors. "Is there a vet in this town?"

"No," Hattie replied. She turned abruptly back to the cash register.

"What's the problem?" Sarah asked the man, embarrassed at her aunt's rudeness.

"It's my dog," the man said. "He's throwing up and his nose is warm. He looks like he's going to die."

"Hmmff," Hattie exhaled as the cash drawer opened. "It was probably eating out of the garbage cans on the beach." With another disdainful snort she made change for the twenty dollar bill that Sarah handed her.

"Look, there's a doctor in Tomales," Sarah said. "Dr. Reynolds. He's not a vet but he might be able to help. Maybe you should call him."

"Thanks. Can I use your phone?"

"There's a payphone outside," Aunt Hattie said.

The man patted his pocketless shorts and Sarah handed him a quarter.

"Thanks again," he said and disappeared through the swinging doors.

"It was probably his dog that knocked over all the cans on the parking lot last night," Hattie said. "There were so many seagulls down there this morning it looked like the county dump. I should charge him for the cleanup service. I have no sympathy for stupid people who can't control their pets. If the dog's sick, well, it serves him right."

Sarah picked up her bag and left.

CHAPTER TWO

Sarah left the car sitting in front of the empty gas pumps and walked down the road toward the beach. She jumped up onto the narrow strip of cracked sidewalk that bordered the pavement. A few feet along she tripped over a mound, like a cement volcano, where roots had pushed up the concrete. The cypress tree had fallen years ago but the cement still buckled and a wide fissure opened up far enough to catch a passing heel. Sarah caught herself before she fell and swore out loud for having forgotten this little danger. She had never seen the tree but she had seen pictures of a tall scraggly cypress in a scrapbook at Grandma Maggie's. In the photos, a shiny new 1934 Oldsmobile with a conical steel nose was parked beneath it. Behind the car a line of little cabins stretched all along both sides of the street. Each cabin had a tiny yard surrounded by a white picket fence.

When Sarah was growing up there was still a complete row of cabins on the west side of the road. Now she walked past a row of rusty aluminum trailers, each one carefully decorated with seashells, driftwood, Japanese glass floats, and old lengths of yellowing rope. In front of a silver Airstream, an old two pronged anchor protruded from a menagerie of ceramic seals. Beside a fading Yellowstone Deluxe hung a long string of abalone shells. The pearly insides shone purple and pink in the low afternoon sun. In the garden of the GulfAir Special stood a grey whale's jaw bone which had been converted into a geranium stand. All the windows displayed neat rows of dried starfish, crab shells and sand dollars along their sills.

At the end of the line of trailers stood the remaining four, now only three and a half, cabins. She could see the empty space left by #28 already grown over with sea fig and sour weed. Weeds had sprouted up along the two parallel wooden forms which lay waiting for her father to fill with concrete. It would become another trailer parking space. The shell of Cabin #22 stood next to the empty space. Nothing was left of it but the roof and four exposed stud walls. Sam Farrington stood in the middle of the floor surveying the ropes he had fastened to the supporting walls. The ropes were attached to a towing bar on the back of the tractor idling patiently in the road. His dark hair was neatly parted on the left side. The ridges of the comb's teeth had left deep furrows revealing his pink scalp. He wore a plaid shirt tucked evenly into pressed blue jeans. Sarah watched her father mentally calculate the descent of the roof and the angle of collapse of the walls. He was a carefull man.

It was her father's telephone call, not her grandmother's death, that had brought Sarah home to Thomas Beach. He had called her on Sunday morning. It was the first time in her twenty-six years that her father had ever called her. In fact no one ever called her at 7:30 on a Sunday morning. It was a beautiful crisp Maine morning. She had driven out to Quoddy Head to watch the sunrise and was just crossing her front yard when she heard the phone. The sound was so harsh, so discordant that she almost didn't answer it.

"Ah, there you are," Sam said when she finally submitted and picked up the phone. His tone of voice indicated that he had let it ring far longer than was customary. He ignored the fact that his daughter was out of breath.

"Dad, what are you doing calling this early?" she said. "It must be, what, 4:30 in the morning out there?"

"I just wanted to let you know you that your Grandmother is very, very sick."

"I'm sorry, Dad," Sarah said. "Is she in the hospital? Do you want me to send her flowers?"

"Well, no. It's not that. You see, she died last night."

"Oh, well, gee, Dad, that's pretty sick."

She didn't say, though the thought voiced itself clearly in her mind, that even Grandma Beatrice couldn't get much sicker than dead.

"I thought you'd want to come home for the funeral. You don't have to come, of course. But, Sarah, ... hmm," he paused, "it would be nice."

That "hmm" was as close as Sarah's father would ever come to saying he needed her. As close as he would come to asking her for anything. It wasn't his custom to ask for help. He grunted sometimes in an inarticulate demand for assistance when he had his hands full and couldn't open a door, or when he couldn't quite reach the salt shaker at the dinner table. But he never said or even hinted that he needed anything from anyone.

But damn, she did not want to go back to Thomas Beach.

"If I left first thing in the morning," she said hesitantly, hoping he would interrupt and tell here that she did not have to go. "I couldn't really get there until Friday."

"The funeral isn't until Saturday morning. So that will work out fine," he said.

"Oh, well, all right then, I guess I'll see you Friday."

There was no choice. She had to go back to Thomas Beach. Her father needed her. Just for a few days. Just for his mother's funeral.

Sarah hung up the phone and surveyed the room. Cardboard boxes marked KITCHEN STUFF stood in the corner, still packed. Her boxes of Classical and Country cassettes stood in awkward stacks against the wall waiting for her to find the perfect place. New curtains hung on the windows, but dragged along the floor, unhemmed. She'd only just finished lining her books up on the shelves of the knotty pine cases, alphabetizing the fiction by author, grouping the non-fiction by subject. The ink was probably still wet on the one-year lease she had signed the day before. One year with an option to buy. She put in her offer the same day she signed the lease. Sunrise Cottage, Lubec, Maine was going to be her home.

After the conversation with her father, Sarah curled up in the worn overstuffed chair that she had placed in front of the window looking out on Moosehead Cove. The tide was so low that all the water had drained from the small bay. If she listened carefully, she could hear the ocean waves out beyond the cove's entrance. She pulled a maroon afghan from one of the boxes and nestled deep into the chair. It was in this chair that Grandma Maggie, her mother's mother, had sat for hours on Saturday afternoons, snapping string beans into a large bowl on her lap and telling stories. Sarah would sit with her coloring book and crayons on the floor and listen.

In 1922, when Sarah's Aunt Lizzy was a baby and her mother wasn't yet born, Margaret Miles Sullivan, known as Grandma Maggie to everyone who knew her, and Grandpa Jack, moved out to California. Their trip out in the Model A had taken nearly two weeks. It was the heat and the bouncing Grandma Maggie had remembered most. She told Sarah how it was so hot on the drive out West that she had dipped one of Grandpa Jack's handkerchiefs in a bucket of water and wrapped it around her head. She held her head out the window of the car until the warm breeze sent tears streaming down her cheeks. Crossing Utah she gave up trying to stay dry and simply let herself sweat. She told how she braved a barroom full of drunken cowboys outside of Reno just to get a glass of water. And she told about the bouncing. When they drove across the country nearly all the roads were dirt. Some of them weren't even graded, just gravel poured down off the back of a dump trunk. Grandpa Jack's Model A didn't have any shock absorbers. "Like riding on a wooden saddle," Grandma Maggie would say as snapped her beans.

"I see you got here in one piece," her father said when he saw Sarah standing next to the tractor. He looked older than she had remembered. His smile lines, the mirror image of the ones on her own face, were deep crevices that remained long after his smile had faded. "How did the car run?"

"Fine," she said. "I think the hard driving was good for it. Except one little problem. The hood flew up in Nebraska. It bent right over the windshield. For a minute there I thought I'd died."

"Latch probably needs adjusting," her father said.

"Probably."

Sarah had long ago realized that her father's mode of communication was to talk about cars or other mechanical devices. Personal problems or emotions were not in his conversational repertoire. He was the kind of person who during a mugging would comment on the relative merits of the Smith & Wesson. It would be his way of screaming.

"I'll have a look at it tomorrow," he continued. "I think I have some extra lock assemblies in the garage."

"Thanks, Dad. That would be great."

Sam Farrington swung himself up onto the tractor, engaged the lowest gear and drove off slowly. The ropes around the tow bar tightened. The timber frame of the cabin creaked and groaned. The tractor pulled steadily and with a loud crash Cabin #22 fell gracefully into a pile of broken lumber and dust.

"Sarah," a round friendly voice yelled to her. She saw her uncle Gerrick approaching in a pink Jeep. When her father left the Navy and returned to Thomas Beach in 1964 he brought home barrels of Government Surplus primer and three retired Willys Jeeps. Now, more than twenty years later, the Farrington Resort had a fleet of primer-pink jeeps.

"I see you haven't fixed the brakes yet," Sarah said to her uncle, pointing to the tire strapped to the front grill of the jeep.

"Down shifting, Sarah. That's what gears are for."

"One day you'll leave your transmission in the middle of the road, Uncle Gerrick."

"And your dad'll put another one in for me," Gerrick laughed. He looked just like the pictures Sarah had seen of her grandfather Henry, huge and smiling. He wore a western cut shirt with the broad back panel outlined in blue piping. Silver clasps inset with large pieces of turquoise connected the red cords of his silver tipped bolo tie. His belly hung over the oval silver belt with the carved image of a horse's head peering out from under a horseshoe. Gerrick overwhelmed the front seat of the jeep. The canvas doors were missing or he would have left a bulge in the stiff fabric panels. As it was, his unrestrained girth overflowed the black cushions. Sarah saw the five-pointed tin star pinned to his chest. Gerrick was the unofficial sheriff of Thomas Beach. Visitors never questioned the authenticity of the badge or asked if he had a permit for the pistol strapped to his thigh. It wasn't until she was a teenager that Sarah found out that her uncle wasn't a real sheriff, that he'd bought the badge at Woolworth's Five and Dime in Petaluma. But by then she had already begun to learn that no one in her family was quite what they seemed.

"Back for good now, Sarah?" Gerrick asked.

"No. Just for a week."

"Still on the move, huh?"

"Not really, Uncle Gerrick. I've just put an offer in on a house in Maine, near the library where I work. I should hear in a couple of weeks if the owners will accept it."

"Property's a good investment. You can always rent it when you leave."

"I think I'll stay there."

"Good. Settle down. Stop moving around all the time. It's about time." Gerrick chuckled sending a ripple through the loose jowls hanging beneath his chin. Like TweedleDumb, Sarah thought or Deputy Dawg. Rather stupid but harmless. Though his comments were nearly the same as her aunt Hattie's, he said them with no underlying malice, no digging rancor.

Sarah walked back up the street to her car leaving her father to gather up the fallen house and her uncle to patrol the empty streets. Other than the echoes of the house falling and the constant roar of the ocean, Thomas Beach was quiet. The town was built on the side of a hill overlooking the long white beach. There were three parallel streets, each holding a row of wooden houses with large square front windows facing the sea. There were no street signs. Most people referred to the streets as Front Street, Middle Street and Top Street. The street which bisected these streets was called North Street because it pointed to the north. The actual names of the streets could be found on the county surveyor's map in Uncle Gerrick's desk drawer. But nobody ever bothered to look.

Sarah's parents lived in one of the two-story bungalows on Front Street. Like most of the houses in Thomas Beach it had been built in the early 1900's by her great grandfather, Ernest Farrington. Most of the houses were still clad in the green tar and gravel overlapping siding strips that Ernest had bought in bulk from Friedman Brothers Building Supply. That was back when the original brothers, William and Oscar, still ran the store. Other houses had been updated with the trendier redwood shingles or ceder shakes that came in various patterns; tear drop, diamond, wavy, scalloped. The houses that weren't owned by members of the Farrington family or by the few other year-round residents were owned by people in San Francisco or Sacramento who rented them out during the summer and on holiday weekends. Each house had a seaside resort style name: Larry's Lookout, C-side Inn, Shangri-La, Oar House. Some translated the names into Spanish for a more exotic flavor: Vista del Punto, Vista del Mare, Passa Tiempo, Casa di Nona.

Sarah parked in front of the house with "El Nido" written in twisted rope above the garage doors. The nest. This was home. She carried her suitcase up to her old bedroom on the second floor and without taking her clothes off she fell across the bed and into a deep sleep.

* * *

"Up to the table," Carol Farrington yelled from the bottom of the stairs. Sarah woke with a start as if pricked by an electric current. For a moment she forgot where she was. Her old bedroom was intimately familiar and strangely foreign at the same time. Like a nightmare where different time periods overlap. Her suitcase lay where she had dropped it, just inside the door. A University of Maine, Colby sticker was stuck to the side of the worn vinyl along side other, more exotic, decals: a silver Eiffel Tower, a white oval with the capital letters NL, a black square with Toledo in gold lettering, a glow-in-the-dark patch of Buckingham Palace. A frayed Alitalia luggage tag hung from the handle.

Looking around her old room Sarah saw the Laura Ashley wallpaper - tiny roses climbing up a lattice work of green leaves on cream colored background - still clung to the bedroom walls. She had begged her mother to send away for it. She had promised to hang it herself. And she had. Each seam matched perfectly. The lattice design met precisely at each edge, giving the illusion of continuance, of an unbroken pattern.

But other things had changed. The dark green dresser was gone. In its place stood Grandma Maggie's oak chest of drawers. The books on the shelf beneath the window were odd sized and disorganized. Sarah's Detective Book Club monthly hardbacks were interspersed with her grandmother's Reader's Digests and strange works of romantic fiction she didn't even recognize. Her room was almost the same and yet very, very different.

"Dinner's ready." Her mother's voice climbed the stairs. The Pavlovian clarion call still worked, reminding her that she was hungry.

Sam and Sarah took their traditional places at the long dining room table. He, across from his wife, and his daughter, on his right side. David's chair was empty.

"I didn't know what time you'd get here, so I didn't fix anything complicated," Carol said as she scooped a spoonful of mayonnaise onto a square of cherry Jello jiggling the suspended bits of mandarin orange and banana inside.

"Still your favorite, isn't it?" Carol said, more as a statement than a question.

"Mmm, thank you."

Sarah knew if she reminded her mother that she had never liked jello, not even as a child, Carol would cry and there would be a scene. So Sarah ate the bright red, trembling mass. Without thinking, she squished the Jello back and forth through her teeth until it liquified into a sweet syrup. The rude, gargling sound she made startled her and sent her off into a fit of laughter. Absurd laughter. Bizarre laughter. The kind of laughter that erupts when one feels out of place, like a screen actor trapped in the wrong movie. Groucho Marx meets Ophelia with a script by Stephen King. Romeo proclaims his love for Miss Piggy on the deck of the Starship Enterprise.

"I'm sorry," Sarah said, trying hard to overcome the wave of giggles washing over her. "I must be over tired."

"Do we have to send you to your room?" Carol asked. "Just like we did when you were a little girl."

"That's all right. It's over now."

"Not that sending you to your room ever did any good. We could still hear you laughing all the way down here."

Sarah had a vague memory of her mother, frantic and despairing, yelling at her through the bedroom door. "Sarah, if you don't stop that right this minute, you will die laughing," her mother had screamed. And Sarah had found that so funny, she laughed until her sides ached and her throat was raw.

"Well, life just strikes me funny sometimes, Mom. And jello strikes me funny all the time." Sarah giggled.

"Honestly, Sarah, sometimes I don't think you've grown up one bit."

Carol Farrington didn't understand her daughter's humor or her taste in food. Carol adored Jello. For her, Jello was more than an instant dessert. It was an art form. She created wiggling Jello sculptures for all occasions. There were tall Jello castles decorated with little flags for birthdays and crimson Jello hearts layered with peppermint-studded cottage cheese for Valentine's Day. For Thanksgiving there was the turkey mold filled with orange Jello, cranberry sauce and pecans. For Christmas she made a lime flavored Jello tree with bits of jellied fruit and tiny marshmallows as ornaments. Her mother was the only person Sarah ever knew who brewed hot Jello and drank it out of a cup like tea. As a teenager, Sarah had nightmares about that hot gelatin settling inside her mother's body, forming wiggly sculptures of subcutaneous Jello.

Against the harshness of the red Jello, the rest of the dinner was a symphony of white. Bleached noodles with a cream sauce, white enriched dinner rolls, fried halibut steak and very pale canned string beans cooked so long the seeds had fallen out and the color had washed down the drain. Small bowls filled with mayonnaise sat at either end of the table in case anyone felt the need for more flavor. Mayonnaise was Jello's closest rival for her mother's love.

Her father ate slowly, meticulously cutting his food into tiny pieces. He even cut his noodles into squares. Carol talked incessantly as she ate. She kept up a non-stop inventory of the local gossip, giving special attention to the more sordid and gruesome events. Sam seemed oblivious to her ramblings and totally absorbed in the rhythmic scraping of his knife and fork.

"... shot his wife right through the front window of their house. The police found her laying on the floor with her three-year-old son sitting next to her, crying."

Sarah interrupted the tail-end of her mother's story. "Could we change the subject, Mom? Murder and cherry Jello don't go together well."

"Well, I'm sorry," she said, though she clearly wasn't. "I was just trying to fill you in on what's been going on around here."

"I know. It's just that it's all so morbid."

"That's not my fault."

"What time's the funeral tomorrow?" Sarah asked, hoping to move the conversation in a different direction.

"11:00. We should leave here by 10:30 so we get there in time to greet everybody."

"I suppose there'll be a lot of people."

"Your grandmother was very highly respected in this community. I imagine the church will be full. Poor Hattie, though," her mother added, "this is very hard for her. We're all upset. Beatrice was such a wonderful woman."

Sarah did not share this view of her grandmother, but this was not the time to bring up her grievances, which, compared to death seemed petty. Besides, maybe she was wrong. Maybe she had only imagined that her grandmother hated her, that Beatrice was cold and cruel. Maybe they were all one big happy family like her mother always said. Maybe.

"Aunt Hattie did look pretty bad in the store. Her eyes were all puffy."

"Yes, well, she loved her mother. She's so upset, she can't trust herself to drive. Rachel has to come out tomorrow to take her to the church. Oh, by the way, did I tell you David won't be here tonight?"

"No, you didn't tell me."

"He had to work on an important account, so he'll meet us at the church tomorrow."

Sarah was disappointed. She had looked forward to spending an evening with her little brother before the funeral. Even though they were polar opposites, she and David were good friends. Sometimes, Sarah thought they'd grown up in different families or, if not, certainly in different towns. David loved Thomas Beach. Where Sarah saw rot and decay, he saw beauty and possibility. It was his dream to rebuild the resort, and return it to its former glory. To polish up the family jewel. He was getting his master's degree in business and worked at a bank specializing in real estate acquisitions during the summer break. When David looked out the front window of El Nido, he saw the land as the Tomello Indians must have seen it -- no rotting houses, no pot-holed parking lot, no dark and empty hotel, no Farringtons. David saw a white sandy beach, rolling green hills, a bay filled with salmon, perch, herring, crabs and clams. And hanging above all this beauty, he saw a sign: David's Place.

Sarah picked up her plate. "Thanks for dinner, Mom. I guess I wasn't very hungry."

"You're just not used to home cooking anymore."

"I probably ate too much fast food on the road." Sarah took her plate to the kitchen and scraped the jello, noodles and overcooked vegetables into the garbage disposal. She made a mental note to buy some carrots and crackers to snack on between meals.

Sarah stepped out the front door into the night. From the porch she could just make out the white foam on top of the waves. The last hint of twilight was passing into the blackness of night. The magic time, when all the colors drain from the world and life is caught in monochrome. This is the moment of balance, of stillness, of perfect peace before the day tumbles into the darkness of the night. Soon she lost sight of the waves and lost herself instead in their sound. The roaring of the Pacific. Listening carefully she could hear that the amorphous roar was made up of several discrete sounds. As if attuning herself to a single instrument in an orchestra, she picked out the high-pitched notes of the small rippling waves brushing along the sand. Then she focused for awhile on the round bass notes of the large swells breaking over the rocks. The distant bell buoy rang out, like a tympany, as it rocked back and forth in the deep troughs of the tide. She heard, or perhaps she imagined she heard, the rhythmic slaps of waves, like smacking lips, hitting against the hulls of fishing boats moored along the bay.

As Sarah listened to the symphony of the night, she realized how little had changed in the eight years since she had left Thomas Beach. The town was wrapped in a peaceful postprandial drowsiness, its shabbiness hidden by the night. A full moon rose in the east, illuminating the ridge where she had stood that afternoon looking down.

Inside El Nido, her father sat alone at the diningroom table. The serving dishes had all been cleared away, but Sarah knew he would remain until every morsel was gone from his plate. He would wipe the plate with a piece of bread, cross his knife and fork, and then lay them gently down like a stainless steel X in the center of his polished plate. Only then would he push himself from the table. Her mother, she knew, would be in the kitchen, trying to pour a quart of cream sauce into a pint tupperware container. As the sauce spilled over the edge, she would shake her head in frustration and accuse the plastic container of conspiring against her. Nothing had changed.

CHAPTER THREE

Sarah stood on the porch, staring out into the darkness. She could hear her parents moving around inside the house. They were the family elders now, the oldest generation. They were the living voices of the family's past, the purveyors of the family legends. Beatrice Farrington, the last of Sarah's grandparents, was dead. Beatrice had shared little with her granddaughter. It was her other grandmother, her mother's mother, who had told her stories. Margaret Miles Sullivan, was known as Grandma Maggie to most everyone. Maggie grew up on a hog farm in Martinsville, Indiana, the heart of the heartland, as she called it, but moved West in 1922.

Thomas Beach wasn't always like this. No sir, it wasn't. Of course, you wouldn't remember when the trains were still running and the hotel was filled with guests, and the floor of the dance hall shook with all the stomping and carrying on. That was way before your time. Your mother doesn't remember the trains either. I suppose she was too young or, then again, maybe she just forgot. But I can tell you that Thomas Beach was a bustling resort in those day. People came all the way up from San Francisco to spend the day at the Farrington Family Playground-by-the-Sea. They got off the train right down the street from us at the station in Tomales. Some people stayed on board for the Triangle Trip. The narrow gauge made an excursion trip from Tomales to Monte Rio, along the Russian River all the way to downtown Santa Rosa.

Henry Farrington, your dad's father, he died before you were born, a great big bull of a man. Anyway, he would meet the train at the station in Tomales and drive the guests out to Thomas Beach. That was a wild ride in those days. We didn't have the asphalt down like we do now. No, it was four miles of dirt and turns so sharp you had to hold on to the doors with both hands for fear of falling over. Henry told stories, long racy stories that made the women blush but kept their minds off the road. He had a way with women, that way that fat men have, you know. I suppose they didn't find him much of a threat. He weighed nearly 300 pounds. Your Grandma Beatrice had to make him special overalls, nothing from the stores seemed to fit. I doubt that pleased her much. Then, nothing pleased Beatrice, least of all Henry.

We moved out to Tomales in the spring of '22. It wasn't long after that we met your father for the first time. I'll never forget that day. I was as broad as Farmer John's barn, pregnant with your mother and we had gone on down to Tremayne's General Store to buy fresh milk for Lizzy. The Leone boys brought the milk and cheese down from the creamery every morning and Lizzy loved to drink the thick cream off the top of the bottle. It must of been a Saturday because Jack was home and he wasn't hardly ever home in the morning on a working day. Anyways, we were standing there next to the counter waiting for Theo Tremayne - that's young Willie's great-grandfather - to fetch us the milk when a woman comes in, just as broad in the belly as myself. Her face was all screwed up in a scowl and she was fit to be tied.

"Sam," she yelled. "I know you're in here. You're going to get the whipping of your life if you don't get back up to the church this minute."

A little face came peering around the corner of the dry goods shelf. That was your father, dressed in his Sunday best, his hands and face covered with dirt. He looked up at Jack and me with eyes so big and begging that they pulled at my heart.

"If you're not out in front of the church when we leave, well, we'll just go on home without you. Do you hear me, young man?" Beatrice's screech was answered by silence. Jack and I said nothing. Even Lizzy looked away.

After Beatrice left, your father came out from behind the shelves. He couldn't have been but five or six years old. He had a little wooden ship he'd been playing with in the darkness behind the pickle barrels. He walked right up to Lizzy and put that boat in her hands. She held that block of wood to her chest for weeks. Wouldn't let me take it from her even at the dinner table. Your father was always good to your Aunt Lizzy. Now, I wouldn't go saying that about all the folks in this area. No sir, I wouldn't.

Your father put me in mind of your Grandpa Jack when he was a boy. Not that they looked at all similar. Sam was always small for his age, not short mind you, just small and compact. Your Grandpa Jack on the other hand was a beanpole, tall and lanky, with legs that I swear started up around his neck and seemed to bend every which way. You hardly noticed his height when he was sitting down, but when he stood up, well, he just kept on standing up. It was like one of those store bought dress patterns that keeps on unfolding forever out of a tiny square packet. A long drink of water they called him back home. And that he was, a very long drink of water. But it wasn't in outside looks that Jack and Sam were similar, it was the look in the eye, that little twinkle that made you wonder if they were laughing at you or laughing at the world.

It was that damn little twinkle that won my heart all these years ago. My Jack, Jackson Frederick Sullivan, grew up on a farm just the other side of Martinsville, Indiana from where I lived. It wasn't much of a place, a few hogs, some chickens and a couple of milk cows. But they didn't need much. It was just Jack and his father by the time I met them. His mother had died when he was a youngster and the two men got along fine by themselves. I grew up on the other side of town, the other side of the tracks is more like it. We lived on a large farm with lots of field hands and Mama even had a housemaid, Ida, who had a room over the kitchen and helped Mama with the cooking and cleaning.

One day, it was springtime, me and my sisters - there were four of us girls - were out in the garden trying to catch robins. The birds were fat, their bellies swollen from eating all the plump worms that lived just under the topsoil of Mamma's vegetable patch. But they were still too fast for us to catch. We would sneak up on them quiet as churchmice but they would leap away from us before we could get a grip on them. It was Madge, she was the eldest who saw the skinny redheaded boy sitting under the magnolia tree. He was just sitting there leaning against the tree whittling on a stick and watching us. Madge, she was also the daringest one, went right up to him and says "What are you doing sitting here under our tree?"

"Watching y'all," he said, calm as you please.

"Well, you ought not to be here." Madge said, sounding very much like Mama.

"You're doing it wrong." He says and keeps on whittling.

"Doing what wrong," Madge asked. She was curious now because Madge never did think she did anything wrong.

"That's no way to catch yourself a robin," he answered.

"Well, mister know-it-all, just how would you go about it then?"

"You need to get yourself a shaker of salt and sprinkle a bit on the bird's tail and it'll fly right up into the palm of your hand."

"No, never. You're having us on." But Madge wasn't quite sure if this strange boy was telling the truth or not.

"Suit yourself." He said and went back to his whittling.

After a few minutes of heated discussion among us girls we decided to try this boy's method. Amy, being the youngest, was sent to the house for a shaker. For the next hour we took turns stealing up behind the robins with Mamma's little glass salt shaker, flinging salt this way and that but never getting close enough to hit the bird's tail. It suddenly occurred to me that if we got close enough to put salt on its tail we were probably close enough to grab the bird itself. I was about to yell out to Madge to stop carrying on like a ninny when I turned and looked toward the magnolia tree. It was as if that boy read my mind for when I looked over at that tree he was looking full into my eyes. I saw that laughing twinkle and I knew he was pulling our legs. But I didn't let on to my sisters. I stood and watched them as if I were looking through his head, seeing what he saw: a bunch of silly girls making fools of themselves on a warm spring day in Indiana. And I laughed. And I knew I loved that boy right then and there.

Jack and I were married in May of 1919. He'd graduated from the university over in Bloomington and put in his time in the army flying planes. Even Madge was impressed by the little wings he had sewn on his khaki uniform. Mama and Papa allowed as how he'd probably never amount to a hill of beans, but they had to grant that he was smart.

"Too clever by half," Papa would say.

But that was because Jack could fix just about anything, whereas even the most basic machinery baffled Papa. And Mama was vexed and charmed in about the same measure by Jack's strange humor. He liked to tease her and I don't think anyone had ever teased my mother in her whole life. She just wasn't the teasing sort.

But she blushed when Jack said "Now, Mrs. Miles, we all know what you're thinking, and you should be ashamed of yourself. A decent young woman like you. Tsk. Tsk."

When Mama would protest Jack'd just put up his hand and say "Shush now, we'll hear no more about it."

Of course Mama was thinking nothing of the sort of thing he was implying. We'd all laugh and soon she'd laugh too. Jack just had this way about him.

Madge never did approve of him. She had the notion that a marriage based on love had little chance of surviving whereas a marriage based on money was truly secure. She married a Texas oil man and never wanted for nothing. She had the furs, the diamonds and the European excursions. She didn't have much happiness but she said the money kept her busy enough to take her mind off her troubles. Now, I'm not saying that she's right, but there have been times when I saw the wisdom in her thinking. Our life's not been a bowl of cherries and Lord knows Jack and I could have used the money over the years. But we both made our choices and there's no use crying about it now.

I got pregnant right off which thrilled Jack but I must admit I was a bit scared. He had a good job with the Illinois Central as a mechanic working in the shop at Columbus. Sometimes he'd go out as a brakeman when they were short-handed. But mostly he worked in the yard fixing broken couplings and repairing boilers.

It must of been Jack who brought that virus home from the station. Probably picked it up from passenger coming out from the East. I don't recall anyone else in town coming down with it like I did. I was two and a half months pregnant, just past the morning sickness stage when I got the fever. I was so sick I thought I'd die. My body was as hot as a steam engine furnace and nothing seemed to cool me down. My skin broke out in a rash and then angry red blotches appeared all over my face and belly. The doctor said I had German Measles which seemed funny at the time. Here I was 20 years old, in the middle of America carrying a baby of my own, and I come down with some foreign little kids' disease. The doctor didn't tell me that inside my belly my little girl was suffering too. But the fever passed and I didn't think any more about it.

Your aunt, Elizabeth Miles Sullivan was born on April 10, 1920. She was such a pretty little thing when her face wasn't all screwed up and red from crying. Madge, who had two babies already from her rich Texan, said Lizzy was just colicky and that she'd calm down real soon. But her wailing tore at my heart. I walked the floor boards smooth all that spring, rocking Lizzy in my arms and singing every song I knew to soothe her. Mama came down in the summer and helped me for awhile, but she had Papa and Amy still at home so she couldn't stay long. Jack stayed later and later at the yard. Can't say as I blame him, there wasn't much peace to come home to.

On her first birthday, Lizzy still wasn't walking but she crawled real good. She was a strong little thing, always scrambling around behind me, pulling at my dress to stand up. But so sick all the time. I've never seen a baby sicker than your Aunt Lizzy. We went to see Doctor Anderson so many times Lizzy thought he was family. But he just shook his head and gave her medicine to calm her down. The little bottles of syrup made her drowsy. Sometimes that was a blessing. I got so tired carrying her around, trying to keep her from howling. The howling was the worst, she'd scream so loud I thought my head would split open, and my heart would ache to hear her. Nothing seemed to calm her. Sometimes Jack could soothe her with a story. He had that deep comfortable voice. But most often I'd give her a spoon full of syrup and hold her until she went to sleep.

That year we went to every specialist in Indiana. Over to the Medical Center in Indianapolis they told us our best chance was the Mayo Brother's Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. It was an awful long trip but Jack got us the tickets from his company and we set out with Lizzy. She liked the train ride and didn't fuss near as much I'd feared. I think the rocking of the train going along the tracks lulled her to sleep. I worked on my knitting, a warm fall pullover for Jack, the kind with the cable stitch he liked so much. Jack spent most the trip talking with the conductor and wandering up and down inspecting the train. By the end of the day he knew everybody. He even spent some time up front with the engineer.

He didn't show it but I knew Jack was as nervous as I was about the doctors. Maybe we were expecting too much. But everything we read talked about how the clinic had helped so many people that it just wouldn't seem fair if they couldn't do something for Lizzy. Lying there with her feet tucked up under her new calico dress and her head on my lap, she looked so sweet. I prayed, and Lord knows I don't pray for much, but I prayed we'd find some cure in Rochester. I promised Lizzy, right then, that whatever we had to do to make her well, we would do.

It was dark when we finally pulled into Rochester. But everyone was real helpful, I guess we weren't the only family to make the pilgrimage to the Mayo Brothers. The clinic had found us a room nearby with a family who took in boarders. It was small and too warm but that didn't bother us much. We were up and out first thing the next morning. We arrived a half-hour early for our nine o'clock appointment. We sat a long time in the crowded waiting room with the other patients. Some looked near as sick as Lizzy. You could feel the hope in that room. Desperate hope. We were all holding our breath and crossing our fingers and saying every prayer we could think of. Anything to make our babies better.

It was almost noon when a tall doctor in a long white coat came to get us. He led us down a long corridor to a little examining room. He looked at Lizzy real close, asked me a thousand questions and wrote down everything I said on a wooden clip board he held on his lap. Then he left us in that little room for such a long time I thought he'd forgotten about us. But he came back.

"Mrs. Sullivan, " he said.

I'll never forget his face, so kind, so sad. I knew before he spoke that what he had to say pained him. But I knew it would pain me even more.

"There is nothing we can do for your little girl. I'm going to be honest with you because I don't want to see you folks getting your hopes up or spending your money on cures that aren't going to work. Lizzy is severely retarded. She will always be retarded."

"What does that mean? That she's slow to learn?" I asked. "Well, we can work on that."

"It's more serious than that. Lizzy suffered severe brain damage when you had Rubella Measles. She will never be able to learn, not in the sense that you are thinking of. She will never read or write.

"You're saying my daughter is simple," Jack said in that matter of fact way of his.

"I'm saying that your daughter has brain damage, irreparable brain damage," the doctor said, very clearly, enunciating every syllable as if he thought maybe we were simple too. "There is nothing we can do for her."

"No." The scream seemed to come from someone else, someone strong and determined, someone who could fight all the doctors in the world. Not me. Not little Maggie Miles. "No. My baby is sick. You will help her."

I demanded to see another doctor. But when he finally came he only agreed with the first one. I refused to leave until I had seen nearly every doctor there. As each doctor walked away, their footsteps echoing down the long corridors, I prayed that they would stop, that they would turn and run back to me with some hope, some cure, some miracle for Lizzy. But they kept on walking.

Finally, the last doctor came. He didn't wear a long white coat. Instead he had on a dark suit like a banker or a lawyer. He shook Jack's hand. He smiled at me. But he didn't look at Lizzy.

"You must understand that there is nothing more we can do," he said. "We have examined your little girl as carefully and as thoroughly as we know. There is no cure for retardation."

"Thank you, doctor." That was Jack's voice. There was nothing more for me to say.

"She will need a lot of care. She may never learn to dress herself, or use the toilet. She will need almost constant attention. This little girl is a full-time job."

I held Lizzy tight. Babies were always a full-time job. What did these doctors know about that anyways? They come home, kiss their children on the forehead and say goodnight. They don't see the diapers, the messes on the floor every time you turn around, the broken toys, the torn dresses. Constant attention. Of course she needs constant attention. Lizzy is sick. She needs care and medicine. I rocked her in my arms, and she clung to me so hard she near squeezed my breath away.

"You'll be all right, my baby, everything's going to be all right. Mama's here and she won't ever let you go." I whispered in Lizzy's ear and I just let Jack do the talking. There wasn't much left that I wanted to hear anyways. I knew the moment the man in the suit walked into the room that it was going to be up to me to take care of Lizzy. I was all she had and I wouldn't let her down.

"I want to give you some brochures about full-care homes that take care of people like Lizzy," the man said as he handed Jack a fistful of pamphlets. "Go and look at them. The private ones are a might expensive but the State has institutions too. I should tell you that children with severe brain damage rarely live long. The regular childhood illnesses often prove too much for them."

Jack looked over at me. He knew my thoughts without asking. "What if we keep Lizzy at home with us? Is there anything special we need to do?"

"Just keep her as comfortable as you can. If possible I would recommend moving to a milder climate, some place where she won't be so exposed to winter colds and influenza. Mr. Sullivan, one thing you must realize, there is no cure for your daughter. The best you, or anyone else, can do, is make her life comfortable."

There wasn't much left to say after that, so we gathered ourselves up and went on home. We talked all that summer about what to do. We even visited one of those homes the doctor recommended. I had nightmares for weeks after that. The horror I can't even describe. It was a filthy, cruel place. I told Jack that it would be over my dead body if Lizzy ever stepped foot in a place like that. We never discussed institutions again. But your grandfather in his own quiet way was taking care of things. One night he came home and announced he had found us a new home. A place where the sun always shined and yet close enough to the ocean for the cool sea breeze to put pink in Lizzy's cheeks. Without saying a word to me, he had written to some railway companies in the West and one, The North Pacific Coast Railroad had offered him a job.

Mama had been dead set against it. Looking back, maybe she was right. It's hard to say. I told her that Lizzy couldn't survive in the harsh Indiana winters and the hot, humid summers. The doctor had been very clear that the cold and the damp would kill her.

"Not all God's children are blessed with long life, Maggie," Mama said. "Stay here where she can be with family."

"The doctor said the drier climate would help her," I said. "Maybe the ocean air can cure her. I have to try."

"But she'll be a stranger," Mama said. "Here she is kin. Out there, she'll just be someone's sickly child."

But when I held Lizzy to my breast, and she looked up at me with those big brown eyes, begging me to make her well, I knew I couldn't stay. I was all the family Lizzy needed. I had promised Lizzy that I would take care of her, that I would protect her.

It was a long trip from Indiana to Tomales, California.

There was no air conditioning in those days, just the breeze you got from holding your head out the car window. We had to stop every hour or so to get water for Lizzy -- the desert air nearly dried her up. She fussed and carried on the whole trip. Jack did all the driving of course. Sometimes I thought he'd gone deaf, he shut out her squalling so completely. It wasn't so easy for me. I guess there are some sounds a mother can't help but hear.

But we made it and we were awful happy to drive up to the little house the railroad company had found for us. After nearly two weeks on the road it looked mighty nice. And it was nice. It had three bedrooms upstairs with an upstairs bathroom too. There was a large fenced-in back yard. Well, you know the place, where the Gamboni's live now. When we were there, the house was white and there wasn't that big garage built on the side like they have now. But the yard's the same, though I always planted peonies along the fence where Jenny Gamboni has those trellises of wild roses. Lizzy never could learn to stay away from prickly roses.

Our few belongings that we'd sent ahead were waiting in their packing crates in the sitting room. Percy Williams, the station master, had seen to it the house was aired and ready for us when we arrived. He and his wife Emily had us over for dinner that first night. I dressed Lizzy up in her finest frock, but she was awful tired from the trip and was irritable at the dinner table.

Emily Williams had no patience with children, not even her own, and hers was the first rejection of Lizzy I ever saw. "Excuse me," Emily said. "Your daughter seems to be drooling." And she looked at Lizzy as if she were a monster. I could see in her eyes the disgust, the revulsion and the anger. How dare you, she seemed to be saying, how dare you bring this creature into my home, into my town.

"We have places for children like Lizzy here in California," Percy Williams said. "We'd be happy to help you find one."

Your grandfather stood up from the table. "Mother," he said, "Fetch your coat." Then just as sweetly as you please he held out his hand to Percy. "Thank you for your hospitality but we'll be getting on back to our house now." The men shook hands as I got our coats.

We never mentioned the incident again. Your grandfather worked for Percy Williams for nearly twenty years, first at the train depot then later at the downtown garage. Emily and I played bridge together every Tuesday afternoon and drove to Petaluma together every Friday morning to have our hair done. She never said another word about Lizzy and though we socialized with each other I never considered Emily a friend.

Over the years I got so I could tell about a person by the way they treated Lizzy. Those who had no warmth in their hearts ignored her or were impatient with her illness. Kind folk, true Christian folk, not what Jack called the "Only-on-Sunday" folk, took the time to say hello to her, to smile at her and to talk to her like any other child.

That first night in Tomales, after Jack had gone to bed, I sat on the floor - 2,500 miles from my home, from my family, from my sisters, surrounded by packing crates, trunks and suitcases - and I cried.

CHAPTER FOUR

Sarah woke up early Saturday morning, still on Eastern Standard Time. For the first time in her life she made it downstairs to the coffee pot before her parents. She filled Mr. Coffee to the top line with water, measured six scoops of Folgers into the paper basket and pressed the switch. Before the first drip even hit the grounds she was out the door and on her way to the beach.

A line of summer fog lay along the horizon like a white ribbon. It held the ocean winds away from the shore. The sun sat low and soft in the eastern sky. It sent cool shadows down from the sand dunes. Long-billed curlews darted along the tide line, stopping every few feet to sink their skinny beaks into the wet sand looking for ghost shrimp and mole crabs. Calidris minutilla, squat little sandpipers with short beaks, scurried behind the long-legged marbled godwits, snatching whatever scraps the larger birds left behind. Herring gulls stood majestically on the low rocks and preened their long white feathers. Yellow lupin flowers unfurled like tiny cats' claws and the purple buds on the sea fig, like boutonnieres on crusty fingers, slowly opened into the day.

Sarah inhaled deeply and the salty air tickled her lungs as she walked south along the shore toward the bay. Her feet sank into the white sand, pitching her slightly forward with every step. The beach was nearly a mile long. Behind her, on the north end, the white sand ended in rocks and high red clay cliffs. The houses of Thomas Beach sat back from the cliffs at the base of a small breast-shaped mountain. Beyond the houses, open meadows stretched to the edge of the cliffs, like thick green marzipan spread on a tall layer cake. The nearest town, Bodega Bay, was thirty miles north. Between Thomas Beach and Bodega were two small rivers which cut through the cliffs to the sea. They carried rain water down from the coastal mountains, through the dairy barns, and across the pastures to the Pacific. Small beaches formed where the rivers met the ocean. There were no roads to these beaches, just the narrow winding cow trails and the tracks left by the farmers' four-wheel drive trucks.

In front of her the southern tip of Thomas Beach formed the northern lip of the mouth of Tomales Bay. There were no rocks or cliffs here. The beach was flat, ending in a long tongue of sand which jutted out into the waters between the bay and the ocean. During the spring, when the tides were high and the waves crashed down on the shore, this sand point disappeared. But the sand never went away. It dispersed and reformed into long bars which lay hidden just beneath the surface of the water. On maps the words "Treacherous Waters" were printed along this stretch of coast. Every year, at least one boat, loaded with weekend fishermen, overturned on these sand bars. Sometimes the sportsmen managed to hold onto their boats until rescued, but usually, they were unable to find their way to the boats and they drowned quickly in the chilly waters. The Farrington family and other town regulars formed search parties to walk along the beach. They examined every mound of sand, every sea lion carcass, every pile of rotting seaweed, looking for the human corpses. But the bodies never turned up on the beach. Instead they were dragged by the currents down the bay and usually came to rest in Mr. Henline's oyster beds. Sarah remembered a story she had overheard her mother tell to someone on the telephone. Her mother said that Maynard Henline had pulled up Sheriff McCall's brother that morning when he was harvesting the oysters. For years the image of the dead young man wrapped in the oyster ropes had crept into Sarah's dreams.

Her mother's stories were often morbid. Once she had phoned Sarah in Rome to tell her about a strange boating accident that had taken place just outside the breakers. A father and son were out fishing. The son fell overboard. He couldn't swim. The father through the anchor over. The anchor chain wrapped around the father's foot and dragged him to the bottom of the sea. The son lived. The father drowned. Sarah had searched that story endlessly for a hidden meaning, for some obscure moral lesson. She had finally concluded that there are times when a story is simply a story.

Today, the ocean was calm. The waves broke gently, then glided up the sand. Far beyond the breakers, she could see white caps forming, an early warning sign of storms to come. The quiet hum of waves underscored the sounds of morning: the complaining caw of a gull, the distant drone of a fishing boat motoring across the bay, the swoosh of water washing around a log. The morning air was different from the air of the night before, when disembodied noises emerged from the darkness and creaks and groans reverberated into infinity. The early morning air was contained. Sounds ricocheted off the grayness of the sky, off the ceiling of the world. Walking along the beach Sarah felt as if she were enclosed, like her Grandpa Jack's pocketwatch, in a glass dome on the mantle. This morning the enclosure was calm; a beautiful, serene entrapment.

Above the music of the morning, she heard the jangling of metal dog tags and the soft thud of paws running along the wet sand. And panting, distinct, breathy, moist, panting. A large German shepherd, jet black with golden brown markings, bounded up from behind her. The dog sniffed at Sarah's outstretched hand. As she bent down to pat his head, he jumped up to lick her face. Sarah and the dog bumped foreheads with a resounding thunk. The dog was undeterred. He covered Sarah's face with wet slobbery kisses.

"Bailey, get down," a man's voice yelled.

Bailey gave her one last slurpy swipe with his tongue, withdrew his wet paws from Sarah's thighs, and ran off down the beach sending a flurry of gray willets into the air.

"Sarah?" the man called out.

When she turned, she saw a grown up version of a boy she knew as Ray Ambrosi. He was taller, with broader shoulders and a wider chest than she remembered. But his face, small and smiling, was the same as when he was a boy when he had been her very best friend.

"Sarah. It's you, isn't it?" Ray was nearly out of breath from chasing his dog.

"Yes. Of course it's me," Sarah said. And she smiled, a warm hearty smile that started at her toes and rose to the top of her head.

"I haven't seen you in ...how long? Eight years?" Ray didn't embrace her. That wasn't his style. That wasn't the nature of their relationship either. Instead he reached out and touched the sleeve of her jacket, like a little kid touching his mother to reassure himself of her presence.

"More like ten, I think."

"Well, whatever, you look great."

"Thanks," Sarah said. "So, what brings you down here so early on a Saturday morning?"

"Bailey. He likes to run on the beach in the morning."

"Didn't you read the signs? All dogs must be leashed."

"He won't hurt anyone. Besides, I figured everyone who cared about that leash law would be getting ready for your grandmother's funeral."

"What? I thought my mom told me you were a Sheriff's Deputy?"

"I am," Ray said, and laughed, as he shortened his stride to match hers. "But I haven't changed that much."

"No," she said and smiled. "You haven't changed a bit."

His brown eyes still twinkled with mischief and for a moment she felt like they were kids again. Ray had always been quick to bend the rules and willing to join her in her pranks.

"Remember the time we turned the seventh grade teacher's VW bug upside down?" Sarah asked.

"Mr. Schmidt. I'll never forget that. He was so mad I thought he'd break a blood vessel in his neck. But not as mad as the time you told him, right in front of the whole class, to drop every other letter from his name."

"He sent me to Burnsides' office for that one. The next day Burnsides' secretary accused me of stealing all the red jelly beans out of the glass jar on her desk and putting them in Schmidt's coat pocket. But it was you who did that. I never told her though."

"What a mess. He hung his coat by the radiator and the jelly beans melted and stained the lining of his jacket."

"You were bad, Ray."

"Yeah, well, it was you who snuck into the secretary's office during the staff meeting and scratched dirty words onto her carbon paper."

"You have to admit, that was one of my better pranks."

"I'll never forget Mrs. Mendoza's face when she came flying out of the office holding that carefully typed letter. It had probably taken her all day to write that thing. And there, at the top of her copy in big letters was 'FUCK YOU'."

"I bet she checked all her triplicated forms after that."

"Sarah, I may have been bad, but you were always one step worse."

"Yeah, the dead rabbit in Schmidt's desk drawer was a bit more gruesome then the dead frog you put in his glove compartment. You never got caught for anything either. I was the one who got sent home all the time."

"You always looked guilty."

Without thinking, Sarah punched him as hard as she could on the arm. He laughed. His arm was thicker, more muscular than she remembered. And on closer inspection, she saw that Ray's face had changed. His mustache was thicker. When he first grew that mustache it was just a thin line of transparent peach fuzz. "Put milk on that thing and the cat will lick it off," Grandma Maggie had said.

Also, the crescent shaped scar at the end of his left eyebrow had faded with time. When Ray was eight his cousin Warren hit him with a metal Charlie Brown lunch pail while they were waiting on the side of the road for the school bus. He bled so much they thought he had lost his eye. Warren flagged down a milk truck and he and Ray got a ride back down the lane. Clarisse Ambrosi, Ray's mother, put a butterfly bandage on his head and drove the boys back to school. Injuries were never a big deal out on the farms. Though, Sarah recalled, all the third grade girls had OOed and AHed sympathetically over him.

Ray and Warren grew up on the Ambrosi Bros. Dairy a few miles outside of Tomales. Their fathers were brothers, and their mothers - Clarisse and Anna Baroni - were sisters. The Ambrosi brothers owned one of the largest dairy ranches in Redwood County, 550 acres of prime pasture land. They milked 200 black and white holsteins in their barn twice a day. They were the first ones in the area to get a fully automatic milking system. They had computers to calculate the grain and feed and automatic turnstiles to move the cows along.

"I always thought you'd stay on the ranch," Sarah said moving further up the beach to keep from getting her feet wet. "Why did you decide to be a lawman?"

"We couldn't all stay at home. Warren married Annette Bianchi and they moved into the big house where my grandparents used to live. Max and Linda built their own place, up near the reservoir. I could have worked the old Mitchell ranch. Dad wanted to buy it for me because it's right next to ours. But I wanted to do something different."

"Well, there's a big difference between cows and criminals."

"Not as much as you'd think," he said and laughed.

Ahead of them Bailey barked at a seagull half buried in the sand. When the bird didn't move, the dog rolled over on the bird's stinking carcass, covering himself with the putrid scent. Bailey shook himself off, picked up a stick and charged back towards Ray and Sarah.

"Down, Bailey" Ray commanded as the German shepard launched himself towards his master's chest. "You stink. Drop the stick. C'mon, drop it."

Bailey dropped the stick at Ray's feet.

"Good boy."

"Do you think that other animals are really fooled by that scent stealing trick?" Sarah asked.

"I doubt if a cat will ever mistake Bailey for a bird."

"Remember when we used to wear pitouli oil?"

"Don't remind me."

Ray picked up the stick and threw it as far out into the water as he could. The stick sailed past the first set of small waves and landed in the calm trench before the next larger set of breakers. Bailey went after it, wading in deeper and deeper, until all they could see from the beach was his sleek black head bobbing above the water.

"He'll swim around until he gets it," Ray said. "Or finds something else."

"He's a beautiful dog."

"He's a monster. Chews everything in sight. I chained him up in the back yard when I went to work the other day, and when I came home, he'd chewed the legs off the picnic table. So I locked him in the garage. He chewed the mudflaps off the sheriff's car."

"You're kidding. I bet Sheriff McCall loved that."

"You know McCall. He sat back in that big bottomed chair he has and said, "Son, if'n you can't control yer mutt, how'n the hell ya gonna control the hoodlums 'round here?"

Sarah laughed. Ray's impersonation of Josh McCall was perfect. She could just see the man with his thumbs hooked through the belt loops of his khaki polyester pants and his shiny cowboy boots resting on the oak desk. Her uncle Gerrick had modeled himself after Sheriff McCall. However, whereas Gerrick Farrington was a buffoon, Sheriff MacCall was an authority figure. He was an institution around Redwood County. A man always to be trusted and never to be crossed.

"I thought you said Bailey wouldn't hurt anyone?"

"So far he's only a threat to rubber and wood."

Sarah watched as Bailey dog-paddled back toward shore, his black paws reaching high out of the water and the stick hanging out of his mouth. When he got to the beach, he carefully laid down the stick and shook himself. He started at his head and worked down his body until only his tail quivered. Beads of water flew in all directions.

"So, how's Maine?" Ray asked, dodging Bailey's spray.

"Great. Much like here, really. Small town, on the coast. A bit cut off from the world. Strange and private people. Very inbred. Come to think of it, a whole lot like here."

"We aren't marrying our cousins, yet," Ray said. "Your mom told me you came back a few years ago?"

Sarah heard the hurt and accusation in his voice. She knew he wanted to say that she was a cold bitch for not calling him when she was here. She also knew he wouldn't say it.

"I stayed up at Grandma Maggie's old house for a month after I finished grad school. I didn't talk to anybody or see anybody. I came back for a rest, not for a visit."

"Look, Sarah, I know that it was a long time ago and we've both gone on with our lives and everything, but I have to ask you this." Ray stopped walking and turned toward her. "Why did you drop out of school and move away without saying goodbye?"

"I didn't exactly drop out of school. I graduated a semester early." Sarah felt her defenses rising. She did not want to discuss this. She did not want to reopen old wounds, wounds that she had convinced herself had healed.

"Okay," Ray said and then continued, pulling the scab back a little further. "But you never said goodbye. You just left."

"As I remember it, you were pretty busy at the time with my cousin Rachel and her friends," Sarah said, the sharpness in her voice betraying her rising anger. "I'm surprised you even noticed I was gone."

"I noticed," he said. "One day we were best friends, the next day it was like I was dead. You didn't talk to me. You didn't look at me. When I called your house, you hung up the phone. No explanation. No discussion. Just boom - over."

"I'm sorry. That's the way I do things. Or did things."

Sarah's mother had taught her when she was very young how to deal with people who angered her. You erase them from the world. Carol Farrington claimed that the lesson of Alice and the Cheshire Cat was not that the cat disappeared but that Alice chose to see only the smile and when Alice was through with the smile she chose to see nothing at all. When Sarah came home complaining about some kid who had insulted her in the schoolyard her mother told her to imagine that she held a large eraser in her hand. "Simply wipe that child off the face of the earth," Carol Farrington said. "Like yesterday's math problems on a chalkboard."

Now, standing on the beach, the sun just beginning to brighten the foam on the breaking waves, Ray wouldn't wipe off. He was still walking beside her, still smiling.

"I guess, I do owe you an explanation," Sarah said.

"Yeah, you do."

"Look, I know this sounds childish, and it was childish. I admit that. In fact, I feel real stupid, right now, even talking about it - I thought you had something going with Rachel."

"What made you think Rachel and I had anything to do with each other?"

Sarah was beginning to feel very foolish. The anger that had been so important, so justified, so honorable, when she was sixteen, now seemed petty and inappropriate. She dug her fists deep into her pockets and took a deep breath.

"I saw your truck parked outside Rachel's house the night of the Homecoming Game," she said, all in one exhale.

"Of course I was at her house," Ray said, sensibly and logically. "She was the head cheerleader. I was on the football team. She gave a party. I went. And for that you haven't talked to me for ten years?"

"Well, yeah," she said. "But..." She paused, suddenly aware that her voice had risen an octave higher than the whine of Ray's police siren.

"Yes?"

"As I remember it, you parked your truck in full view of my bedroom window to go to a party that I wasn't invited to. Not that I would have gone anyway. But, if I'm not mistaken, you didn't leave until four o'clock in the morning. How do you think I felt?" "I'm sorry," Ray said. "I never knew it was such a big deal for you. It meant nothing to me. Rachel meant nothing to me. We didn't sleep together, or anything, Sarah."

"I'm not sure I ever thought you were lovers. I just felt betrayed. I thought you had crossed over to their side."

"What do you mean, their side?"

"The Farrington side. Beatrice, Hattie, Rachel, even Uncle Gerrick. There was my side and their side. There was no in between."

"Sounds like war."

"It was."

Ray and Sarah walked along in silence for a few minutes. They were each lost in their own recollections of the past. The sky was getting brighter and the morning crispness was gone from the air. Bailey trotted along beside them with the stick in his mouth hoping that one of them would pay some attention to him. Sarah wrestled the wet stick from his drooling grip and threw it as far as she could toward the sand dunes. He ran off, sniffed around every bit of seaweed and pretended not to see the stick which lay in full view. Then, as if to catch the dead wood by surprise, he leapt into the air and pounced on it.

"Do you want to hear what I thought happened?" Ray asked.

"At Rachel's party?"

"No, not that. I mean, do you want to know why I thought you left?"

"Oh, sorry. Why did you think I left?"

"Well," he said slowly. "I thought you were pregnant."

"What?"

"I thought you had gotten pregnant."

"Pregnant? What made you think that?"

"Look, Sarah, you left without saying a word to anyone. And then, there were rumors going around that you had to leave school - that Mr. Burnsides had asked you to leave - because you were pregnant."

"Do you mean that all these years you thought I had a baby hidden somewhere?"

"I didn't know, " Ray said. He poked the toe of his tennis shoe under a crab which was struggling on its back. He flipped the crab over and it scurried sideways into the waves. "Every time I called to ask you for your side of things you hung up on me."

"I thought you were calling with lame excuses about Rachel."

"I wasn't thinking about Rachel. She wasn't my friend. You were."

Sarah looked over at Ray, but he was looking out at the horizon. She followed his gaze, letting her mind skim the top of the waves, and encompass the blueness of the sea. She felt him beside her, his body so near she could hear him breathing, but his mind so far away she could only guess what he was thinking. Sarah didn't understand friendship, not the type of friendship that Ray offered. A woman at a Zen retreat, after listening to Sarah boast of her travels, had said that she moved all the time because she was afraid to grow up. Instead of developing real intimacy and mature relationships Sarah just threw her friends away after a few years like discarded Kleenex. She liked to think that she changed and grew so quickly that people just couldn't keep up with her. She grew so fast that friends soon became strangers. Every move to a new city brought her a new circle of friends. Every move left old friends behind.

"So, who was the father of my child?" Sarah asked, breaking the silence.

"Depends on which story you heard. I heard several. My favorite was Calvin Falk."

"Oh, yuck. You've got to be kidding. People actually thought that I had sex with Calvin Falk? The kid who had so much snot in his nose that Mrs. Marshall bought him his own Kleenex box. That's gross."

"Well, there were other candidates: Ben Jermain, Bob Williams, and Johnny Baroni."

"Now, Ben Jermain I might have considered," she said. "But Bob's gay and Johnny couldn't get it up with the help of an electric cattle prod."

"Bob's gay?"

"Honestly, Ray. You're so naive. The fact that he dated Shirley Bailey should have been a clue."

"She was kind of sturdy, now that I think about it."

"Brick shithouse," Sarah said. "But, where did all these stories about me come from?"

"My mother was the first one to tell me you were pregnant. She heard it from your Aunt Hattie at a church meeting."

"I knew it. That bitch. This is the kind of bullshit that made me leave Thomas Beeach. Rumors and lies. Even you believed them."

"I'm sorry but when you left like that, without a word to anyone, what was I supposed to think?"

"I bet my parents, who knew damn well I wasn't pregnant, believed the rumors too. God, I hate it here."

Sarah wasn't aware that her voice was growing louder and louder until she heard her words echoing back to her from down the beach. She wanted to scream and keep on screaming. The blissfull nothingness that she had felt was shattered by anger. She wanted to pound on something, anything, until her fists bled. She wanted to kick at hard surfaces until her toes broke. She wanted to inflict pain on the only person who ever seemed to notice. Herself.

"Sarah," Ray said softly. "I'm sorry." They had come to the end of the beach. She could hear the waves breaking over the sand bar that reached out beneath the water toward Tomales Point. She could hear the bell buoy that marked the entrance to the bay, warning fishermen to stay within the deep narrow channels and to beware of the shallow waters. "It's good to see again."

"This visit home is really difficult for me. I have to go to the funeral today. The whole family will be there. It's going to be a heavy dose of Farrington after such a long absence."

"They are a strange bunch of people."

"Ah, I thought I was the only person who thought they were wierd. It's nice to know at least someone agrees with me." Sarah laughed.

They turned around and walked back up the beach. Bailey, still gripping his stick between his teeth, trotted along beside them. The sun was above the hills and the day was warming up. They could hear a motorcycle shifting gears as it climbed the long winding road out of town. Thomas Beach looked serene and innocent nestled against the hill and ringed by the tall eucalyptus trees.

"I heard that you and Cherie were having some trouble," Sarah said.

"She moved into town three months ago."

"Petaluma?"

"Yeah. She's renting an apartment in one of those big houses on D Street."

"How are you doing with all this?"

"Getting by," Ray said as he kicked a dirty plastic bottle of sunscreen into the air. "I have my daughter on the weekends. Not seeing her every day is the hardest part."

"Did you really name her Sarah?"

"Yes. But don't get too excited. We named her Sara, without an H, after my grandmother."

"How old is she now?"

"Six. She'll start first grade in the fall. That was part of the problem. Cherie didn't want her to got to Tomales Elementary. She didn't want her to ride the bus for an hour every morning either."

"That's understandable. It seems like I spent most of my childhood on that schoolbus. It wasn't so bad in the afternoon because then we were the third or fourth stop. But in the morning we were one of the first to be picked up. We drove at least thirty-five miles to get to a school that was only four miles away."

"The school was only one of the problems. Cherie didn't like the hours I worked. She didn't want to live so far out in the country. She wanted to travel, go to parties, go to the movies, go just about anywhere."

"Sounds like she wasn't ready to settle down on the farm with the husband and kids."

"No. She wasn't. Neither was I. We got married when we were nineteen years old. Cherie was already pregnant with Sara. I was going to the JC and working nights at the Stop and Rob. We were just kids."

"So what's going to happen now?"

"I don't know. She says she needs some time to think about what she wants to do with her life. She's working at Otto's Travel Agency on Kentucky Street, right now. But she doesn't like sitting behind a desk all day. I'm always afraid that one Friday, I'll go to pick up Sara, and they'll both be gone. Flown off to Bali or Paris or some place."

"She wouldn't just pack up and leave, would she?"

"No. I don't think so. But I'm comfortable here and that always pissed her off. She sometimes told me that comfortable is dead."

"Sounds like she needs a bit of adventure."

"She always envied you. The way you traveled all around the world. Rome. London. New York. Amsterdam."

"Traveling all the time isn't as glamorous or as fun as it sounds. Moving around became a habit for me. Every year or so I'd suddenly pack my bags and head for a new city or a new country. Just when I got to know the language and the people I would leave. I was always an outsider, a newcomer, a foreigner."

"After a lifetime in this tight-knit community, that sounds pretty good."

"You wouldn't like it. The ex-patriot life is usually rather sleazy. Most of the Americans who live in Europe are there because they can't make it at home. Of course, there are the rich ones who live in villas and summer on the Cote D'Azur and winter in Chamonix. But I didn't travel in those circles."

"What exactly did you do over there?"

"That's a good question. At the time I thought I was doing a lot of great avant-garde theater work. Looking back, I see that I worked my ass off on a lot of half-baked artistic schemes. I set up a theater company in Holland with a crazy Frenchman who wanted to perform in Ancient Greek and Latin. We actually did a few shows. Not very many people came to see them, of course. But that only proved to us that we were on the cutting edge of the performing arts. Ahead of our time. After that, I traveled with an Italian mime troup through Scandinavia in a purple camper van with a huge clock on the roof. We did shows that even I couldn't figure out."

"Why did you decide to stop?"

"It seemed like the groups I joined got stranger and stranger, the people more and more bizarre, until I finally realized that they were crazy. Not artists, not geniuses, not great post-modern thinkers - just nuts."

"So you came home?"

"Well, I came back to the States, wandered around for awhile and then found this nice, quiet little job at a library on the north coast of Maine."

"You sound like you're ready to settle down."

"I'm going to try."

Bailey barked. He was standing over what appeared to be a mound of dirty sand at the base of the dunes. He lowered his head to his front paws, stuck his rear end in the air and barked. The mound didn't move. Bailey lept sideways. Again, he lowered his head and barked.

"What's he got over there?" Sarah asked.

"Probably just somebody's picnic basket. Let's go look."

When he heard Sarah and Ray approaching Bailey began to growl menacingly at the mound of sand. He snarled and shook his head.

"I don't think that's a picnic," Sarah said and stopped walking. "I think it's a dead animal."

Ray continued forward. He knelt down beside the mound. "It's a dog. A big husky. Still warm."

Sarah looked closer. The dog's white fur blended into the white sand. She could see the black nose and the exposed pink and black gums. The sand was dark and wet near the dog's open mouth.

"Looks like it threw up before it died," Ray said.

"Probably ate bad garbage. Aunt Hattie has been complaining about the dogs knocking over the cans. She's posted new signs everywhere."

"I know. I saw them when I came in."

"I'll tell Dad about this one. He'll bring the tractor down and pick it up."

They left the dog in the sand and walked up the beach toward the parking lot. A few cars were parked along the rail which divided the gravel lot from the sand. A man with sun bleached hair carried a surf board across the beach toward the water. A seagull sat on the rim of a trash can pecking at a paper bag. Bailey bounded past the bird without looking at it and ran toward the woman who was walking toward them. The woman screamed and Bailey began to bark. As Ray and Sarah drew nearer they saw Carol Farrington, standing stiff as a board, her arms wrapped around her chest, glaring down at the dog.

"Go home," she yelled at Bailey. "Go home."

"Mom, it's all right," Sarah called out to her. "It's only Bailey. Ray's dog."

"I don't care whose it is. It's supposed to be on a leash. It could have killed me."

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Farrington," Ray said as he pulled a long chain from his pocket. "He must have slipped out of his collar."

Ray called Bailey to him and clipped the chain to the red leather collar which was still firmly clasped around the dog's neck.

"You shouldn't let it run around like that, scaring people half to death." Carol said, trembling with fright and anger.

"It's O.K., Mom. Bailey's just a puppy."

"You don't know the trouble we've had lately. Dogs knocking over trash cans. You're lucky Hattie didn't see you." Carol said and pointed to Bailey. "She's going to start charging a fine for every over-turned trash can."

Bailey, unaware of the attention, was bent over like a pretzel with his left hind leg sticking straight up in the air. He was happily, and noisily, licking his balls.

"Disgusting animal," Carol said.

"Bailey, stop that," Ray said and yanked the chain.

"Did you come down here for a walk?" Sarah asked her mother, hoping to change the subject.

"I came down looking for you," she said. "If you don't hurry up, we'll be late for the funeral."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be gone so long."

"Well, we'd better get going," Carol said.

"I should go to work," Ray said. "I have weekend duty. It was nice to see you again, Sarah. Are you staying around for awhile?"

"No, I'm leaving on Monday. I have to get back to my new job. I just moved into a new house. I haven't even unpacked yet."

"Well, send us a postcard once in awhile," Ray said. Sarah knew there was much more he wanted to say, but her mother was standing next to her. "I hope things work out in Maine."

"Me too. Good luck with Cherie."

"Thanks."

He walked away with Bailey trotting beside him. Sarah looked past them to the green and brown sheriff's car with the redwood tree stenciled on the side. It was parked in front of a large hand-painted sign that said: No Dogs Allowed on Beach. The car was clean and waxed to a fine shine. But the black rubber mudflaps hung in shreds behind the rear tires.

CHAPTER FIVE

Sam Farrington was dressed and ready to go. He stood at the front window staring out at the ocean and watched his wife and daughter walk up the road from the beach. He wore his dark blue suit. His only suit. The one with the wide lapels and dark top- stitching. The suit had gone in and out of style more times than he had ever worn it. He had polished his brown leather shoes to such a high lustre Sarah half-expected rainbows to form over the toes. That fashion magazines deemed it gauche to wear brown shoes with blue suits was not now, nor had it ever been, a big issue in Redwood County.

"You look great, Dad," Sarah said as she came through the door.

"Thank you. This suit has held up well," he said proudly. "Sometimes it pays to spend a little extra."

Her father was not an extravagant man. He rarely bought things on credit and when he had to use a credit card he paid it off in full at the end of the month. But on certain items, appliances, shoes and a good suit, he did not economize. "The poor pay twice." he had always told Sarah. She remembered the times she had bought a cheap refrigerator or a bargain-priced pair of loafers and had to replace them before the ice cube tray was emptied or the soles scuffed.

"I'll take a quick shower and change," Sarah said as she rushed up the stairs past her mother. "It won't take me a minute."

"I've heard that one before," Sam said jokingly.

"Well, maybe two minutes."

Sarah's funeral outfit, a black cotton skirt and matching jacket with a royal blue silk blouse, lay on the bed where she had left it before going to the beach so it didn't take long for her to dress. As she zipped the skirt along her hip she felt a slight tug as the material stretched to conform to her rounded shape. Voluptuous, she thought.

"Baby fat." Grandma Beatrice's voice filled her head. "You'll lose that when you grow taller."

Every time Beatrice had walked passed Sarah she pinched - hard- the soft flesh on the little girl's waist or the delicate underside of her soft pink arms.

"Then again," the old woman would add, "Farrington women aren't known for their height." And she would laugh.

Sarah shook the bitter sound from her head, like Bailey shaking water from his fur. She threw on her jacket and joined her parents downstairs.

Carol Farrington stood in front of the hall mirror with a sheet of folded Kleenex clasped tightly between her lips, blotting her glossy over-red lipstick. She wore a black calf-length knit dress with one of Grandma Maggie's silk scarves draped over her left shoulder. The black dress accentuated her pale complexion and her silvery gray hair. The azure geometric patterns in the silk scarf brought out the blue of her eyes. Sarah rarely saw her mother out of sweat pants or the oversized Farrington Resort uniform and had forgotten how handsome she could be.

"Hurry up, Sarah," Carol said, letting the tissue, with its right red lip print, fall into the waste basket. "We don't want to be late for the service."

"I'm ready, already," Sarah said.

"Don't be flippant. Not today, Sarah," Carol sniffed and walked awkwardly on her high heels to the door. "Your father's waiting for us outside in the car."

The family car, a 1979 bright yellow Toyota hatchback with one blue door and one blue fender, was idling roughly in the drive. Her father's philosophy on consumer goods did not extend to automobiles. Sam bought cars used and kept them running with spit and baling wire. The hood was up and Sarah could see her father's brown shoes hanging out the driver's side door.

"Sam, what are you doing now?" Carol asked, exasperated.

"Just adjusting the hood release. Don't want it to fly up like Sarah's did."

"Honestly," she said, bursting into tears, "We're going to your mother's funeral. Am I the only one around here who cares about Grandma Bea?"

Neither Sarah, nor her father, answered. Sam slid out from under the dashboard, pulled the hood down, checked carefully to see that it fastened securely, and climbed back into the front seat. Sarah took her place in the back seat. She felt like she was ten years old, sitting behind her parents, all dressed up. The sweetness of her mother's Wind Song perfume and her father's

Old Spice After Shave folded into the familiar rubbery smells of the car. Sarah felt slightly nauseous and wished she'd eaten heavier, starchier food for breakfast. The thought of food, added to the smells and the infantalizing situation suddenly reminded her of an incident that happened when she was in grade school: when Aunt Hattie had picked her up early from school.

On the way home, somewhere through the second series of hairpin curves, Sarah had become ill. Hattie stopped the car. She gathered Sarah up in her fleshy arms and carried her to the side of the road. Hattie patted Sarah's back as she vomited over the edge of the ravine. When the heaving ended, Sarah looked up at her aunt, "I don't feel good." she said.

It was her aunt's reply that Sarah remembered: "You're lucky. At least you can throw up." That was the kindest thing her aunt had ever said to her and yet for years Sarah had wondered what she'd meant. Was Hattie unable to vomit? Did she store up that bile somewhere inside her massive frame? Did Aunt Hattie dislike her because she could vomit and her aunt couldn't? Could you die from not vomiting?

Sarah smiled to herself as they drove in silence down Front Street, past the store with the CLOSED sign on the door, through the eucalyptus grove and out of town. Carol clung nervously to the door handle as Sam navigated the sharp turns of the hill. Her mother had nothing to fear. He drove slowly, holding the Toyota in the lowest possible gear, and even then, he lugged down the engine. "Lower the gear, better the traction."

It was four miles through the hills to the Presbyterian Church of Tomales. Freshly shorn sheep grazed in the pastures. Lambs, their tails newly bobbed, chased each other through their mothers' legs. A red-winged black bird, perched on the back of a ruminating holstein, dug parasites out from between the stiff hair of the cow's hide. The rolling hills, like the round bellies of sleeping giants, still held lush patches of spring green amidst the dry summer grasses. Another month of sunshine and these hills would be a golden brown fire hazard.

Just before the town of Tomales, Sarah saw two rusted trestles standing above the marshy lowlands of Tony Gilardi's field. Once they had held the tracks of the North Pacific Coast Railway. This morning Sarah watched Tony's mare, Babe, rub her aching left haunch along the rough steel. The roadbed for the old track was still visible in short lengths in the fields. It pushed out of the earth like the embossed outline of a zipper on a too tight skirt. From the car Sarah couldn't see the old tunnels hidden behind the hills. But she knew they were still there.

They weren't late for the service, though a crowd had already gathered in front of the church by the time Sam pulled the Toyota into the gravel parking lot. Groups of distant cousins who Sarah only vaguely recognized stood in clusters on the concrete steps in front of the church. Most of the mourners were local people, members of the congregation who lived in Tomales or on the dairies outside of town. Some were tradesmen who had driven their goods out to Thomas Beach resort over the years. The Laura Scudder's man who delivered potato chips every Wednesday talked solemnly to the Hostess bread and donut lady. Behind them stood the Clover milk man and Old Mr. Halversom, the Utah Woolen Mills salesman. When he was younger, Mr. Halversom traveled all over the country in his 1948 Chevrolet with the metal bar across the back seat for hanging coats. Twice a year he had come to Thomas Beach, once in the late spring to take orders for winter coats and again in the fall to deliver them. When he retired, in 1979, he bought one of the old railroad houses on First Street in Tomales. He set the Chevy up on blocks in the garage out back, and Mr. Halversom set himself in a rocker on the front porch with his pipe. His travelling days were over.

Three of the six or seven non-Farrington residents of Thomas Beach were at the funeral. These were the existing members of what Sarah called the Survivors' Club. Grandma Maggie had joined this group when she moved out from Tomales after Grandpa Jack died in 1963. The club was an association of old people, all of whom lived alone except Agnes and Harold Burney, and Grandma Maggie and Lizzy. They looked out for one another. They had an elaborate signalling system to notify each other of thier continued existence. "Every morning Lizzy and I get up and draw back the shades. We check to see that Gertie has her kitchen blinds pulled up. That way we know she's up and about. Then I call over to Bernard's. Gertie looks out for Harold and Agnes, they being just on the other side of the street, and Bernard watches for Beatrice to open her back bedroom window. Beatrice is supposed to call me before eight o'clock, but she forgets more often then not."

Sarah had scoffed at the old people's strange dotless Morse code. But their morning ritual saved Gertie's life once and woke Bernard from a drunken stupor more than a few times. Gertie, Miss Gertrude Mueller, had lived in Thomas Beach for as long as Sarah could remember. She spoke broken English with a heavy German accent that got stronger as she got older. There were many rumors about Gertie's history, but the most common was that she had come to Thomas Beach as the mistress of a wealthy San Francisco railroad magnate. He bought her the cottage on Middle Street and visited her on weekends. Uncle Gerrick, who ran the post office in his spare time, said she got a letter from San Francisco every two weeks, around the first and the fifteenth of the month. She did most of her shopping at the Farrington store and had an account that she always paid off around the time the letters arrived.

"One morning," Grandma Maggie had told Sarah, "I looked out and saw that Gertie's kitchen blinds were still closed down. I called over to her on the phone, but she didn't answer. I put on my housecoat and called Bernard to meet me at Gertie's back door. We knocked hard enough to wake the dead, but no one answered. Bernard took the key out of the geranium pot by the door, and we let ourselves in. There she was, lying on the kitchen floor. I thought for sure she was dead, but Bernard - you know how he can be - fussed over her, taking her pulse and what not. And sure as day, she was breathing."

"That night Dr. Reynolds told us Gertie had knocked over her morning tea kettle and scalded her arm. Well now, that was bad enough. But then she spread a healthy layer of Balm Ben Gay over the burn and wrapped it up with plastic wrap. It's no wonder she passed out."

Luckily for Gertie, the Survivors' Club found her before the ointment had penetrated too deeply.

Bernard Roget was one of Grandma Maggie's favorite characters. A native of Marseilles, he drifted into French at least once during a conversation.

"I have no idea what he's on about," Grandma Maggie would say. "But it sounds awful pretty."

Like Gertie, no one knew for sure how or why Bernard came to be living in Thomas Beach. One story says Bernard was raised by the local Miwok Indians and left behind when they migrated north. Another story says he washed up on shore from a French trawler. Bernard maintained that he was a political refugee. He said he fled Marseilles as a young man in order to escape persecution by the Vichy government. According to his account, an American businessman found him wandering around the docks and hired him as a travelling companion. They came to Tomales hoping to set up an import business along the Pacific Railways excursion line. But shortly after their arrival, Bernard's benefactor died, leaving him just enough money to buy the tiny house at the bottom of Top Street in Thomas Beach.

Bernard soon became a fixture of Thomas Beach. He collected Indian arrowheads from the Miwok hunting site in the hills behind the resort and sold them to tourists. Grandma Maggie said he started the rumor himself- about being raised by Indians - so that he could get more money for his trinkets. When the store was open, he sat on the bench outside the front door with his felt beret cocked to one side and told stories about the days when Ernest Farrington and the local fishermen went out in the dead of night to rendezvous with cruisers carrying rum along the coast. Sarah loved these stories of her great grandfather and his midnight exploits. She had never known Ernest or her grandfather Henry but she knew that Beatrice's idea of adventure was flipping the pages of National Geographic while she sat under the hair dryer at the Marge's Beauty Salon. Bernard embellished the stories with lurid accounts of pirates, roving submarines and ferocious sharks. During the off-season, when there were no tourists to buy his trinkets, Bernard made a living doing odd jobs around town, fixing swollen doors and crooked cupboards.

What Sarah remembered most about Bernard was how he whittled. As kids, David and Sarah watched for hours while Bernard carved sailboats, intricate figurines and ornate whistles out of ordinary sticks. He carved balls inside of cages and interlocking wooden chains. He made Sarah a sailboat with sails so thin sunlight shone through them. It sat on her bookshelf, on the second shelf from the top, in front of her father's hardback editions of the Hornblower series.

Bernard died in his sleep one night when Sarah was away at college.

"I knew he was gone when I woke up that morning," Grandma Maggie told Sarah. "I could feel him hovering above me. Like as if he'd come to say good-bye."

Of the Survivors' Club only Gertie and Agnes and Harold Burney were alive to attend Beatrice's funeral. The Burneys, both retired elementary school teachers, lived quietly in a little cottage they named Snug Harbor. Every morning and every evening the Burneys walked through the streets of Thomas Beach and along the shore holding hands. They collected olive shells and bits of smoothed colored glass for their front garden. They rarely spoke to anyone, but they talked to each other, quietly pointing out interesting plants or drift wood. Today they stood together, Agnes with her arm through Harold's, watching as the other mourners gathered.

Sam parked the car on the far side of the church near the cemetery. He straightened his tie in the rear view mirror and hummed nervously to himself.

"Come on," Carol said impatiently. "If we don't hurry the pews will all be filled."

Sam coughed, shifted slowly in his seat and opened the car door.

"Are you all right, Dad?" Sarah asked gently.

"Huh, oh, yes. I'm fine," he said clearing his throat again. He ran his hands over his pants legs to ease out the creases. Then he pulled himself up straight and, as if on military parade, held a bent elbow out for his wife. Together they marched slowly toward the church.

"Why don't you guys go in the side door?" Sarah said. "I'll go around front and look for David."

"Don't be long. The sermon will start any minute," Carol said.

"I'll just be a second."

Sarah wiggled her way through the crowd on the front steps until she found David talking with a group of third cousins-once-removed.

"When did you get up here?" she asked as she slipped in beside him. As always, Sarah was struck by how tall her little brother had become. In his dark tailored suit and his lustrous black leather shoes, he stood inches above the other somberly dressed people. He had light brown hair and little ears. No one else would notice that David's ears were small but it was a detail that a sister wouldn't overlook. Sarah's ears were perfect - not too big, not too small. They were, however, hidden beneath her long jet black hair.

"I came straight to the church this morning," David said. "I worked late last night. Where are Mom and Dad?"

"They've already gone in."

"How are they taking it?"

"Dad has shut down. But he's playing the good soldier. Mom

is nervous, self-conscious and upset. Fairly normal, really."

"Sarah, be nice," David said sotto voce, so that the cousins couldn't hear. "Let's go inside."

He shook hands with everyone, accepting their condolences, concurring with their laudative tributes to the late Grandmother Beatrice. David responded with gracious and proper leave taking remarks then took Sarah's arm and escorted her into the church.

"Sarah, how are you?" Harold Burney asked. He was seated in the last pew. He reached for her as she and David walked down the crowded aisle. "Did you fly in from Rome?"

"No. I live in Maine now."

"What?" He said, adjusting the hearing aid in his right ear.

"I live in Maine," Sarah repeated, louder. She was aware that her voice echoed slightly in the quiet church and people turned their faces toward her.

"Oh, I thought you were in Italy."

"I was, but I moved."

"Oh, well, it's nice to see you made it back." Harold smiled solemnly and patted Sarah on the arm. Agnes sat beside him, nodding in silent agreement.

The Farrington family - immediate, extended and distantly related - filled the first three rows of wooden pews. David and Sarah squeezed past Uncle Gerrick, Aunt Olive - who had appeared that morning from Tennessee - their grown children and grandchildren. They sat in the empty space next to their parents. Sam picked an invisible fleck of food from his tie and hummed B-flat to himself. He often hummed B-flat when he was in unfamiliar situations, like department stores or theater lobbies. No tune, just the one note. Carol, jerking her head from side to side, took an inventory of everyone present.

"What's that moaning sound?" Sarah asked as she sat down next to her mother.

"That's Hattie," Carol mum