We were staying with one of my mom’s church friends, Franny, but it wasn’t good. She had a slew of grandkids running in and out of the house and a bunch of cats I thought Bella might be allergic to, and you could tell she was letting us stay there because it was the Christian thing to do but that we were in the way. Bella and I shared the sagging mattress of a pull-out sofa and I thought we were getting flea bites in the middle of the night, but it wasn’t like I could say anything about it. We didn’t have a lot of other offers and about three times a day, Franny asked me if I’d found a place we could move into yet. I had—a shithole of a trailer that sat in a row of other trailers along the main road. It was nothing but a one-room tin can, and a good nor’easter would probably send it flying down the street, but it was going to have to do. There was a double bed I’d let Bella sleep in and a futon that would work for me. I thought it was okay for little kids to sleep with their parents, but the books I’d read said it wasn’t cool once they were three or so. Bella was really good at sleeping in her own room at home. At Franny’s, though, we didn’t have much choice and anyway, Bella needed me close. I needed her close to me just as much.
If she asked me one more time when Nana was coming back, I didn’t know what I’d do. I told her Nana was in heaven and had to stay there and then she worried someone was keeping her in a locked room or something. So I explained about God and how heaven was a good place, but I got scared maybe I was giving her the message that dying was a good thing and I didn’t want her to start thinking she should die. Then she started asking me if I’d go to heaven and leave her. Franny told me I was overthinking the whole situation and making it too complicated. She said to Bella, “Your nana’s gone to sleep in heaven with Jesus and when you’re a very old lady, you’ll get to see her there again,” which seemed to satisfy Bella, or so I thought, until about an hour later when she asked me, “Can we go see Nana in heaven today?”
Man, I wished we could.
Mom hadn’t been perfect. She’d smoked and had diabetes and was overweight and didn’t take care of herself at all, but she’d loved Bella and she’d been happy to watch her while I worked. It turned out the fire was caused by some malfunction in the wiring behind the stove, so it wasn’t anything I could blame on my mother and I was relieved by that. I didn’t want to be angry with her now. I didn’t want that to be the last feeling I had toward her. Instead, I felt grateful. She gave her life for Bella. I couldn’t wrap my head around that—my fat, wheezy mom running into the burning house to save her. “God was working through her,” the minister said at her funeral, and even though God and I had never been on the best terms, I liked that thought. I was holding on to it.
I never realized just how much I’d come to depend on my mother. Now I was it for Bella and it scared the shit out of me. I had no job now. Couldn’t work with a kid to take care of, and no job meant no money. My boss found somebody else to finish up the work on those cabinets in the oceanfront house. There’d been about a hundred guys waiting to step into my shoes.
The thing that really sucked was that I’d been getting paid under the table for my work. That meant cash, and my most recent pay envelope had been in the house. Four hundred bucks, up in smoke. I’d had about a hundred dollars in my wallet when the house burned down. That was what stood between Bella and me and starvation now.
Ahead of me on the beach, Bella squatted down and picked up something I couldn’t see from where I stood. She ran back to me, holding it and her lamb against her chest with both hands. The lamb fell to the sand and when she bent over to pick it up, the object she was carrying fell, too, and I had to laugh.
“Need some help?” I asked as I walked toward her.
“I can do it!” she said as she picked up her lamb. By that time, I’d reached her and saw that the object was a huge pale gray whelk, the biggest I’d seen on our beach, and I’d seen some big ones over the years.
“Wow, Bella, you hit the jackpot.”
“It’s a whelk,” she said. She gave up trying to hold both the shell and the lamb and sat down on the beach instead.
I sat down, too, and examined the shell. Busycon Carica. It was nearly one and a half times the length of my hand and totally flawless, the interior the pale peachy color of a sunrise. I was so glad she’d found it. We’d been collecting shells on the beach since she was a toddler, but most of them had been ruined in the fire and now we were starting over.
“Do you remember what lived inside?” I asked.
“A snail!” she said. She sat cross-legged, gently touching the knobby shoulders of the shell with her fingertips.
“Right. An animal like a snail,” I said.
“That’s right.” Like me, she loved hearing anything about marine life. I felt my own father’s spirit inside me when I was on the beach with Bella, teaching her something. I’d hear his voice coming out of my mouth. I wish they’d had a chance to know each other, my dad and Bella. They would have gotten along so well.
“It liked to eat clams!” Bella said.
“Very good. What else did it like to eat?”
She scrunched up her face, thinking. Her nose was a little pink. I’d forgotten sunscreen. “Scabbits?” she tried, and I managed not to laugh.
“Scallops.” She could never get that word right. Someday, she’d be able to and I’d miss the way she said it now.
She petted the shell like it was a puppy. “Is this the one, Daddy, where the boys turn into girls?” she asked.
I let out a little sigh. Franny was right; I gave this kid way too much information. She really didn’t need to know about hermaphroditic gastropods at age three. Almost four. I’d probably been seven or eight when my father gave me that bit of mind-boggling information.
“That’s right,” I said simply. “Should I put it in the bag and we can look for more?” Over my shoulder, I carried the canvas tote bag we always used for the shells we found.
“Okay!” She hopped to her feet and took off ahead of me down the beach. I followed a few steps behind, moving closer to the water to let it swish over my feet. There was one big difference between my dad and me, I thought. He’d been a plumber with his own successful business and he kept me fed and clothed. I might not have grown up rich, but I never went without. He didn’t fail me the way I felt I was now failing Bella. I wanted more than anything to be the kind of man who would make my father proud. I wasn’t doing such a great job of it right now.
Honestly, if Robin’s father had still been alive, I might have asked him for help. He had plenty of money. The contract he’d made me sign said I would never contact Robin herself—and I was still so pissed at her that she was the last person I’d turn to for help anyway—but I didn’t think her father would be cruel enough to turn his back on his own granddaughter if she was starving. Didn’t matter. He was dead. Mom had been an obituary reader, always checking to make sure her friends were still above ground. I’d felt kind of numb, hearing that he was dead. That man and I had never liked each other. The first time I held Bella in my arms, though, I sort of got where he was coming from. I felt this awesome need to protect her. I’d do anything to keep her safe. That’s all Robin’s father had been trying to do. Protect his daughter. I got it then, even if I still hated the dude.
Bella and I watched the dolphins and pelicans for a while, then started walking home. I’d been feeling so content on the beach, so far away from my problems, that I started heading in the direction of our burned-down house before I remembered and turned toward Franny’s. The tote bag on my shoulder was a little heavier than when we’d started out. Walking away from the beach and back toward my real life, everything felt a little heavier.