“Thank you,” Mick whispered in her ear as he pulled Nina to him. “For the person you’ve been your entire life. And all that you’ve done.”
And then, before Nina could even realize she was crying, he was gone.
Nina sat down on the steps facing the door and her brothers and sister sat down next to her.
“You OK?” Hud asked.
Nina looked up at him, so many feelings dancing around inside her, out of the grasp of words. “I mean …” she said and then gave up.
“Right,” he said.
“Me, too,” Kit added.
“Yeah,” Jay said.
Casey stood by the door.
Hud looked at her there, alone and unsure, on the threshold. “Come on, sit down. I don’t care who your dad is. You’re one of us.”
Kit scooted over to make room. And when Casey sat down next to Nina, Jay squeezed her shoulder. Nina patted her knee.
She needed someone to love her. And they could do that. That would be very easy for them to do.
June was gone. Yet here she was, living on through her children.
6:00 A.M.
It took exactly fifty-two minutes for them to convince Nina to leave. The five of them were all standing around the island in the kitchen, eating from the cracker tray.
Kit pitched the initial idea. “What if you just left and went to Portugal right now?”
Hud was silent. Casey wasn’t sure what to say. And Nina dismissed it over and over again.
Until Jay started echoing Kit.
“It’s not actually that crazy, Nina,” he said. “You don’t want to live here. Especially now. You don’t want to be with Brandon. You don’t want all the attention. You don’t want any of this and you also don’t want to have to explain yourself to everyone. So leave. Don’t tell anybody. Just go.”
“You’re saying I leave my things, my bank account, my house. And no one will have any idea where I am?” Nina said.
“I mean, that’s not exactly what we are saying,” Hud said.
“Brandon will know where I am, won’t he? So he’ll still be a problem. People still know who Dad is. Everyone is going to know I got cheated on. Everyone’s gonna know my husband left me for Carrie fucking Soto.”
“Can I just say …” Casey stepped in. “That she seems like, as my mother used to say when she was really mad, a real asshole?”
“Yes, you can,” Nina said. “Yes, you can say that.”
Kit saw then that there was a version of Nina—the nice girl who always said the nice thing—who was gone. And there was a slightly new Nina—who agreed when someone said the woman that fucked her husband was an asshole. And Kit thought, for both the old Nina and this new Nina, she wanted Portugal.
“Will you just listen to me?” Kit said. “It’s actually pretty simple.”
“OK,” Nina said, exasperated. “Go ahead.”
“We don’t want people tracking you down. We want them to leave you alone. So we make it really ambiguous. You leave now. The party got out of control. I’m sure it will be in the papers. And people will think you ran off with someone or something.”
“Or that I died.”
“I mean, maybe,” Hud said, conceding the unlikely possibility.
“So, fine,” Kit said. “People say you died. Who cares? That just means they will leave you alone. We know you’re not dead. We’ll tell Mick you’re not dead. I can tell Tarine or whoever you want. We’ll tell anyone that will keep the secret. But then you take some cash, you drive to the airport, and you get a one-way ticket to Portugal. Get yourself a small house. Or whatever. See if you like it. If you don’t, then you’ll come home. And if you do, then stay as long as you want. And we will come visit you. All the time. And no one would even question it because the surfing is great there. Hud and Jay would probably go all the time anyway for surf shoots and shit. I’ll tag along. We will see you all the time. We will come stay with you for weeks sometimes. We’ll always be in your hair.”
“I can’t leave,” Nina said. “I can’t leave you all. You …” Need me.
“No,” Kit said. “Not anymore. We love you and we want you around. But, Nina, you don’t need to take care of us anymore.”
“She’s right,” Hud said. “Kit’s right.”
And that is when Nina started to wonder if this wasn’t such a crazy idea. She started to wonder if she could just go. It felt daring to even imagine.
“Kit’s right. You should go, Nina,” Jay said. “It’s totally not like you to do it. And that’s exactly why you have to.”
Nina was listening to him. He could tell.
“You’ve spent your whole life making up for Mom and Dad. We don’t talk about it very much but … Mom didn’t make it easy either. But I have always known that it didn’t matter how drunk Mom got or whether Dad came home because you would always be there.”
“I’ve known that, too,” Hud said.
“I’ve known it my entire life,” Kit said. “I know it now. And I’ll know it even if you live on a beach in Madeira.”
Casey stepped in. “I barely know you and you’ve made me feel that way. It seems like it’s just the way you are.”
Kit looked at Casey and could see that Casey cared about her family, cared about Nina already. Kit wondered what it would be like to be someone’s older sister, to pass along the stuff you’ve figured out. She could do that. She wanted to do that.
“What if they find my car at the airport at some point and track me down?” Nina asked.
Kit started smiling. They’d moved on to logistics.
“My truck,” Casey said. “It’s parked down the road, way past the bluffs. I was … I was intimidated by the valets. And … all the fancy cars.” Casey walked over to her purse and pulled out her
