“I’m told they found chowder over three pews away.” He didn’t stick around for the cleanup efforts, so he couldn’t confirm that. But it was impressive if true.

Bea folded her arms on the table. “They were just trying to help, you know. They all loved Mom, too.”

Her words scratched at a raw place in Mitch’s heart. A place he’d thought had scarred over by now. The words to “Sweet Caroline” came to mind unbidden, and he yanked the lid of his toolbox open to drown out the melody in his head. Caroline was gone. He couldn’t change that, and he couldn’t take back what had happened with his church family afterward. But maybe there was one thing he could still change.

“Have you thought about your plans for the future, B.B.?”

She wrinkled her nose. “What do you mean?”

The wariness in her voice should’ve been a warning. Nevertheless, he forged ahead. “I mean going back to college. Getting a degree. Choosing a career. You can’t work at the Food Farm forever.”

Some rosiness began to appear in her pale cheeks. “I don’t know if I’m ever going back to school, Dad. I’m not sure what the point would be. And you know the Food Farm is only temporary.”

“‘What the point would be’?” He pulled a screwdriver from the toolbox and waved it around. “The point is, you can’t just give up on your dreams. Jeremy’s ambitions are not more important than yours.”

Her nostrils flared. “It has nothing to do with that. He would support me going back to school if that’s what I wanted.”

“And why isn’t it? You always liked school.”

She pressed her lips together and didn’t respond. She looked so much like Caroline when her eyes sparked like that. Caroline had always wanted to give Bea the world. Before she died, she’d made him promise he wouldn’t let her death hold Bea back. He hadn’t done a great job of that. Hadn’t wanted to accept she was leaving him. That everything was going to change. But it wasn’t too late.

“I know it might not seem like it right now”—he dropped the screwdriver back in the box and leaned his hands on the table, facing her—“but there’s so much life ahead of you. So many opportunities. We didn’t name you after Beatrice Shilling and Beatrice Hicks so you could organize produce while your husband wanders around doing who-knows-what.”

She pushed back from the table and stood. “You know very well what he’s doing. He’s working on starting his own company. It’s going to take time—”

“I don’t know what it’s like in California, but around here, a man does whatever he has to do to support his family.”