“Want to race back?” He gestured toward the sliver of shore.
“What about our poles?”
Connor dropped to a crouch. “I could teach you to do a backward dive.”
For a second Cassie’s eyes gleamed—Connor could do anything when it came to diving. He’d tried to show her once or twice, but she hadn’t been a very good student. Still, abackdive.
“Okay,” she said. “What do I do?”
Connor positioned her beside him on the floating dock so that they stood with their backs to the water, their toes balanced right on the edge. Then he bent at the knees and executed a perfect dive, slicing the water with his hands before his body followed like the silver slip of a knife. He surfaced beside the dock and wiped mucus from his nose.
“You do it.”
Cassie sucked in her breath. She bent a little, hopped, and slipped on the wet dock. The only thing she remembered for a long while after that was the horrible sound her skull made as it cracked against something hard and unforgiving.
Connor was already in the water when she blacked out, and he slung an arm across her chest and scissor-kicked his way back to the shore.
He dragged her across the sand, Cassie’s heels cutting dark wet furrows in their wake.
When her eyes blinked open, something was blocking her view of the sun, something black and looming.Cassie. She rubbed her hand against the back of her head.
Connor was staring at her as if she’d come back from the dead, instead of just passed out for a minute or two. “You okay?” he said. “You know who I am?”
Cassie snorted; she couldn’t help it. As if she could ever forget Connor. “Yeah,” she said. “You’re my other half.”
Connor stared down at her, his face so white she knew she had given him a good scare. For a moment neither of them said a word. Connor found his voice first. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get some ice for you.”
They swung open the screen door of Cassie’s house, leaving damp footprints and a shadow of sand on their way into the kitchen. “It would have been a perfect dive,” Cassie tossed over her shoulder. “Next time, I think—” She stopped at the doorway so abruptly Connor slammed against her back, and unconsciously, she leaned toward him. Her mother was slumped across the kitchen floor, soaked in a pile of her own vomit.
Setting her lips in a tight line, Cassie knelt beside her mother with a wet dishrag, wiping her cheek and her mouth and the collar of her shirt. From the corner of her eye, she saw Connor silently retrieve the bottle of gin that had rolled underneath the radiator. Her mother was supposed to be at the bakery, since it was only three o’clock. There must have been another fight. Which meant she didn’t know when, or whether, to expect her father home.
“Ma?” Cassie whispered. “Ma, come on. Get up.” She looped her mother’s arm around her neck and hefted the dead weight in a dragging fireman’s carry. With Connor watching from the doorway, she draped her mother across the living room couch and covered her with a light quilt.
“Cass?” Her mother’s voice was soft and breathy, a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe’s. She reached blindly to find her daughter’s hand. “My good girl.”
Cassie tucked her mother’s hand under the quilt and wandered back into the kitchen, wondering what she could scrounge up for dinner. If she had a meal set when—if—her father got home, then he wouldn’t get angry, and if he didn’t get angry her mother would be less likely to drink herself out cold again. She could make everything okay.
Connor stood in the kitchen packing ice into a plastic baggie. “Get over here,” he said. “The last thingyouneed is for your head to swell some more.”
She sat down on a chair and let Connor hold the pack to the curve of her neck. It wasn’t like Connor hadn’t seen this before—he kneweverythingabout her—but even the first time, he had just offered his help and kept quiet. He hadn’t looked at her with those moon eyes that she knew meant pity.
Ice water ran down the hollow between Cassie’s shoulder blades, and in spite of Connor’s first aid, a headache was beginning to kick throughPicture Perfect 43her. She stared out the window at the floating dock, which looked so far away she could hardly believe she had been there minutes before.
Cassie sighed. The problem with absolutely perfect summer days was that they were bright bull’s-eye targets for something to go outright wrong.
SHE WOKE UP TO THE COOL STING OF ALOE BEING RUBBED ALONG her calves. “You’re going to pay for this later,” Alex said. “You’re so red it hurts me to look at you.”
Cassie jerked her leg away and tried to roll over, feeling uncomfortable with the intimate slip of Alex’s palms over her own skin. She winced at the pain when she tried to bend her knee. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
Alex glanced at his watch. “I didn’t mean to let you sleep for six hours, either,” he said. “After Herb left, I sort of got tied up on the phone.”
Cassie sat up and shifted degrees away from Alex. She watched the sun cut a ribbon across the ocean. An older woman came strolling down the beach with two weimaraners. “Alex!” she called, waving. “Cassie!
Are you feeling all right?”
Alex smiled at her. “She’s fine,” he yelled. “Have a nice walk, Ella.”
“Ella?” Cassie murmured. “Ella Whittaker?” Her eyes widened, trying to catch a glimpse of the statuesque woman who, fifty years back, had been a pinup girl and a screen legend. “The Ella Whittaker who starred in—”
