Free Beach Plum Island by Holly Robinson Page B

wanted to ask Gigi if she had any friends, but she didn’t dare do that yet, either. “Would you like to try making a pot? Maybe like one of those jars you were drawing on the beach?”
    “For real?”
    “Of course. And let me tell you this right now: I don’t let just anyone work in my studio and touch my tools. Only people I trust.”
    “Wow. That would be so sick!”
    Whenever Gigi smiled, as she was doing now, Ava could see how much she resembled their father. She felt a pang, seeing her dad’s same dark brown eyes and the dimple in Gigi’s left cheek.
    Gigi mastered hand building quickly. Her deft fingers quickly formed the coils for her first jar. She painstakingly followed Ava’s instructions about smoothing the walls with a flat wooden tool as she rounded its belly and did a decent job on the lid, too, making a square lid for a round pot. An interesting choice, Ava thought, though who knew what would happen in the kiln.
    Ava showed Gigi where to put the pot on the metal shelves with the other greenware, then explained how it would need to dry for two days before she could fire it. “Once I fire it in the kiln, you can come back to glaze it. Then it’ll go in the kiln one more time, at a higher temperature, so the glaze turns into glass. After that, you can take your pot home.”
    “This is so awesome,” Gigi said. “Thank you.”
    “You’re very welcome.” As Ava watched the girl diligently rinse the tools in the sink, she asked, “So where are you supposed to be right now?”
    Gigi didn’t turn around, but by the defiant toss of her head, Ava knew she was about to lie. “Nowhere. It’s summer, remember?”
    “Don’t even try to lie to me. I’m a high school teacher and I have two sons older than you are,” Ava reminded her. “I won’t be mad. Just tell me the truth.”
    The girl spun around, her cheeks almost as pink as the tips of her hair. “All parents say they won’t be mad when you tell them the truth. Then they are anyway.”
    “First of all, I’m not your parent. I’m your sister. Second, I really care about you. I’m sure your mom does, too. She just wants you to be happy.”
    “That’s what all mothers say.”
    “No. Some mothers actually drown their children, or shoot them or shake them or give them away.”
    Gigi looked startled, then giggled. “
God.
You’re even more morbid than I am.”
    Ava doubted that. “I’m telling you the truth. I care about you, and about your mom, too.”
    “Uh-huh. That’s why you were at the house every day Dad was dying.”
    “I
wanted
to come. Your mom made it clear she didn’t want me around.”
    “I believe you,” Gigi said with a sigh, her narrow shoulders slumping. “Mom didn’t want anybody around, especially not you or Elaine. I didn’t blame Elaine for doing what she did at the funeral, you know. If I were you guys, I’d be pissed off at my mom, too, for stealing your dad.”
    “Oh, honey. Your mom didn’t steal him. Our dad hadn’t been happy for a long, long time.” Ava bit her lip, wondering what she could say that would be true without being too honest. “Everything that happened with our parents was long ago. It had nothing to do with you, me, or Elaine. Nobody outside a marriage can really know what’s happening on the inside of it.”
    She stopped talking, reminding herself that the girl was only fifteen. If Gigi had been older, Ava might have said that falling in love was like visiting a foreign country: Occasionally, you felt so at home in a new place, you wanted to stay there forever, adopting new customs as your own. More often, things went stale. If you were lucky enough to get out, you could search for a new country to visit. Or maybe you’d quit traveling to new places altogether, as Ava had done.
    “There are more mysteries about love than you and I could solve in a lifetime,” she told Gigi. “What I want to know is what you’ve told your mom about where you are.”
    “She still thinks I’m