Page 120 of Summer Longing

“Well, Mom, it seemed very important to you. But we don’t have a lot of time.”

“Neither do I,” Ruth said, handing her a set of keys.

“What’s this for?”

Ruth spread her arms wide. “It’s the keys to your new house.”

Olivia looked at Marco. Marco looked at Ruth.

“I’m not sure I follow,” he said.

“I bought this house but now I don’t need it. But you two do. I mean, youthree. So please—accept it as an early wedding gift.”

“Mom, it’s a lovely thought, but you need a place to live,” Olivia said, bending over to retrieve the pacifier Mira had dropped on the ground. Honestly, sometimes her mother was just absurd. It was as if she needed melodrama to breathe.

“No, I don’t,” Ruth said. “I’m leaving with your father tonight.”

Olivia straightened up. Her mother was beaming.

“What? So you’re giving up this house?”

“That’s right,” Ruth said. “I’m moving back to Cherry Hill.”

The light still had the ability to take Ruth’s breath away even three months into the Provincetown summer.

Ruth and Ben sat on a bench at the water’s edge waiting for the ferry. As daytime turned to twilight, the sky became a pale rainbow, blue to yellow to orange to pink and lavender at the horizon. She’d never seen a lavender sky before her summers in Provincetown, and it was one of the many things she would miss.

The hardest thing to leave was her new group of friends, the people gathered beside her at the edge of MacMillan Wharf to see her off: Amelia and Rachel, Elise and Fern, Clifford and Santiago, Lidia and Manny. And, of course, she was saying goodbye to her daughter. She focused on Olivia, taking in the sight of her holding Mira in her arms, Marco by her side. Ruth was leaving Olivia, but she was leaving her smiling. She was leaving her happy.

Amelia appeared beside her, touched her arm. “A little going-away present. It was supposed to be for your new house,” she said. She handed Ruth a bubble-wrapped package in a brown paper bag. It was heavy.

“Oh, Amelia. You shouldn’t have!” Ruth gingerly pulled at the masking tape at the edge of the bubble wrap. The gift inside was square and flat and she was able to slide it out of the wrapping.

She gasped. It was her starfish drawing, transformed into a tile-and-seashell mosaic. In the center of the starfish, the piece of blue sea glass.

Amelia leaned close and said quietly, “I told you, you can take something broken and turn it into something whole.”

Ruth felt her eyes fill with tears.

She had been right to follow her instinct back to this magical place. She’d come searching for a house, looking for a place to belong. She’d believed she had nothing from the past to build on, that she was starting over. Instead, Provincetown brought her back to the beginning and showed her that the building blocks of your life didn’t fall away and disappear; it was all there, still solid, waiting to be leaned on.

The ferry pulled up to the dock. Ben grabbed their bags, and they hugged everyone goodbye. Ruth tried not to cry as she boarded the boat and followed Ben to the upper deck.

“I’m going to miss it,” Ruth said.

Ben put his arm around her. “Me too.”

The whistle sounded. The ferry pulled away from MacMillan Wharf. Ben looked straight ahead, but Ruth turned to watch the Pilgrim Monument fade from view, holding her starfish mosaic to her chest.

Regeneration. Renewal.

I’ll be back.