“No, I know. You have a hard time sitting still in general.”
Oakley snorted a laugh. “Thanks.”
The kids devoured a bag of chips, polished off a jug of hibiscus tea, and were back in the water by the time Laurie finally came back from her swim. She squeezed onto the towel in between Oakley and Anne, her arms still cool and beaded with seawater. Rivulets ran down from her thick hair.
“You look like a selkie,” Anne said, finger-spelling the word.
“Nope.” Laurie looked wistfully out at the bright cerulean water. “Just a human.”
Oakley took her sister’s hand and waited for Laurie to look at her before saying, “I’m sorry if I crossed a line before.”
Laurie gave her a crooked smile. “I’m sorry for overreacting.”
They watched as a pair of teenaged girls ran into the surf, each carrying a shortboard. Oakley glanced at her daughters, now building a massive village of sandcastles with their cousins, and then looked back at the girls who were paddling out past the break.
“Can you even remember being that young?” she murmured.
“As young as your daughters or those surfer girls?” Anne asked.
“Either one.”
“Not really.” Anne sighed. “I can remember remembering, if that makes sense.”
Oakley tapped Laurie’s knee and asked, “When’s the last time you went surfing?”
Her laugh was low and warm. “About a million years ago?”
“Same,” she said and signed. “Anne?”
“A million and a half.”
“We should go.”
“Sure,” Laurie said, but her eyes were sad.
“Really. Let’s make it happen.”
Slowly, hope replaced Laurie’s look of resignation.
OK, she signed.
“Anne?” Oakley asked. “You in?”
“Surf trip?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.” Anne grinned, suddenly looking more like a surfer girl than a middle-aged mother of three. “Let’s make it happen.”
17
Anne
Anne headed into town on another glorious Hawaiian morning.
It had rained overnight, as it so often did in Pualena, and the clouds gave way to blue skies as she drove up from the cliffs. A resplendent double rainbow arched across the sky, shining bright against the early-morning blue.
Just one week after getting everything set up online, the rooms she’d readied were all fully booked for summer. The current guests were all in one group, and they had requested a five o’clock breakfast before driving north to zipline over waterfalls.
