“Of course you’ve seen the ocean,” her mother said. “I used to take you there all the time when you were a baby.”

“I don’t remember it.”

“Alice Moss, of course you do. You used to be afraid of the gulls.”

The mention of the gulls triggered a memory. Alice pictured her mother feeding them corn chips, laughing, as hordes of the dirty birds swarmed around them. She also remembered the prickly feel of her sunburned skin and the way the sand clumped to the side of her juice box. Still, to her mother she said: “I don’t remember any of that. That must have been some other baby you had.”

Her mother laughed, showing her crooked teeth, stained where they overlapped. “Well, now you can go to the beach all by yourself whenever you want. Show off that body of yours.” Edith darted out a hand toward her daughter’s breasts, probably thinking about twisting one of them, but Alice jumped back out of her reach.

“Gross, Mom,” she said, and left the kitchen. Her mom’s happiness since the settlement money had come in had been kind of nauseating. The boiler explosion had nearly killed her, but when the check arrived, she’d danced around their apartment like she was a teenager, then gone out and bought a carton of her favorite cigarettes, plus a big bottle of Absolut vodka. Alice had panicked that her mom would spend all the money right away, doing something stupid like taking her girlfriends on a cruise, or getting a brand-new sports car, but after the fancy vodka and the cigarettes, she only bought a bunch of new clothes, then told Alice how they were moving out of Biddeford to a real nice town called Kennewick. Alice pretended to be dismayed, but she was okay with it, especially when she found out that the house they were renting had her own bedroom and bathroom in it. That made up for leaving her friends behind and having to start over at a new high school. And the house was pretty nice, with big windows and wooden floors instead of stained wall-to-wall carpeting that smelled like cigarettes.