Chapter 1
My sister, Ashley, was eighteen the summer that our mother took us to the beach in Pensacola, Florida. The trip was Ashley’s high school graduation present and birthday present rolled into one. I can still close my eyes and smell the salty air, and if I wiggle my toes, I can imagine that I’m playing in the warm sand.
And we got to stay for a whole week. We swam, collected shells, fed the gulls, and every night we watched the sun set over the water. I was eight that year, and to me the whole time was dusted with miraculous fairy dust.
We had a picnic on the beach on Ashley’s birthday. Just the three of us—Mama, Ashley, and me—but there was pizza and a chocolate cake with candles. That was the second day of our weeklong trip. By then, I had fallen in love with the beach and made myself a promise that I would come back as often as I could.
Ashley and I found the old bottle washed up on the beach the night of her birthday. It was most likely a tequila bottle, but I was convinced that it was magic and that if we rubbed it hard, a genie would come out the top in a puff of smoke and grant us each three wishes. I shut my eyes and rubbed the bottle.
“Oh. My. Goodness!” Mama squealed.
My eyes popped wide open, but all I saw was a sunset reflected in the water. “What is it, Mama?”
“I saw the genie. He smiled at me and waved as he headed for the snow-cone shop down the strip.”
I glanced over at Ashley. She was my idol, and more than once I wished that I was like her and Mama—petite, gorgeous brunette, graceful—but I was tall, blond, brown-eyed and clumsy.
“I saw him, too.” She nodded. “And we each get three wishes.”
Ashley wished for college to be easy, for no rain the rest of our vacation, and for a handsome prince to come into her life and sweep her away to live happily ever after. It took a few years but her wishes all came true.
Mama asked that her daughters, Ashley and Jessica—that would be me—would find happiness; that she would live long enough to see her grandchildren, and for the three of us to always respect and love each other. Her wishes also came true. Ashley and I were both happy. Mama got to see two grandchildren and watch them grow up to be fine young men, and we really did all three love each other.
I rubbed the bottle a few extra times because I wanted to really see the genie pop back in the bottle so I could take him home with me, but he wouldn’t show himself a second time. So, I made my choices: the first was that I would find a big, huge conch shell the next day. And the second wish was that I could see my father. The third was that someday I’d fall in love and live happily ever after like the princess in the Cinderella movie. I did find a conch shell the next day. It wasn’t big but it still sits on a shelf, along with the bottle, in my living room to remind me of the good times we had that summer.
That was twenty years ago, and my second and third wishes still hadn’t come true. Then on a Thursday afternoon, a deputy sheriff came to our real estate agency with the news that our mother had been killed in a car wreck south of Jefferson, Texas, where we live. A semi driver had lost control and slammed into her little smart car that she whipped around town in. She and the driver were both gone before the ambulance arrived on the scene.
The consensus in Jefferson, Texas, has always been that everyone knows everyone, knows what they are doing, and who they are doing it with, and they read the weekly paper to see who got caught. We knew Thomas, the deputy, and the way that tears ran down his eyes, I wondered if maybe he was my father. But even in my immediate and overwhelming grief, I knew that couldn’t be true. The whole town would have known, and that bit of gossip was too juicy not to spread like a Texas wildfire.
Of all the things other kids had when I was a little girl, the thing I envied the most was that they had a father. Some of them even had two—a real daddy and a stepfather. It didn’t seem fair to me that they got two, and I didn’t have even one. Eventually, I realized that having a mother like I did made up for no father. Maybe that’s why I was in denial so long after she was killed. I had lost both mother and father that evening when Thomas brought the news to us. Six weeks later, I was still in denial and refusing to take the next step—as Ashley called it—in the grieving process.
“Tomorrow morning, we are going through Mama’s things and putting the house on the market,” Ashley said.
“No!” I wailed and tears began to roll down my cheeks. “We can’t touch a thing in our childhood home. That holds all our memories.”
“Our memories are in our hearts.” Ashley hugged me until I got the weeping under control. “And Mama wouldn’t want a shrine. She would want us to move on and live our lives. All this sadness robs us of happiness.”
“I can’t do it,” I declared. “You’ll have to take care of it, Sister. I can’t get rid of her things, and I can’t move on.”
“Yes! You! Can!” Ashley took me by the shoulders and looked right into my eyes. “And. You. Will.”
“Can we just wait another month?” I begged.
“No, we are doing it tomorrow.” She didn’t leave any room for argument, so the next morning at eight o’clock, we met at Mama’s house. My shoes felt like they were filled with concrete, making my feet so heavy as I walked from the car to the porch. We had lived in this house my whole life, and most of Ashley’s. How could we just treat it like any other place on the listing at our real estate office?
“Here’s what I’ve got in mind,” Ashley said. “We are going to go through her personal things and take what we want. If there’s anything, furniture-wise, that either of us wants to keep, we will mark it, and when the women’s shelter people come to take it all away, they will leave those pieces.”
“Women’s shelter?” I frowned.
“I made the decision to give what we don’t want to the shelter in Tyler. Mama was all for empowering women, so I think she would like that idea.” Ashley handed me a roll of masking tape. “Put a strip on anything you want and sign your name. Be sure it’s visible.”
“I want to keep it all,” I told her. “Can’t we just rent a storage unit and…”
She didn’t give me time to finish but butted in. “And let it all get gnawed by rats and ruined by heat and cold? Mama would want it to go to a good cause. We’ll start in her bedroom. I’ll go through the dresser drawers, and you can clean out the closet. Do you want to keep her bed?”
She took me by the hand as if I were still eight years old and led me down the short hallway to the bedroom. I couldn’t remember how many nights I’d gotten in bed with Mama when I was a little girl. I was terrified of storms, and never—not once—had Mama scolded me.
Let me go in peace, Mama’s voice was so clear in my head that I turned around to see if she was in the room with me. I love you, Jess, but you’ve got to let me go.