WHAT YOU SEE

There’s a chill in the air, and a few fallen leaves dot the lawn at Seaside. Ronan has spent the morning helping his dad cover up all of the grills and move the lawn chairs into storage. I helped Grammy check each cottage refrigerator to make sure it was empty, unplugged, and left open so it doesn’t stink in the spring.

I’m sitting on a picnic table when Ronan comes and sits next to me. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” I say, and we sit there quietly for a while. My head fills with thoughts like a tide pool just before high tide.

A question bubbles to the surface, and I turn to Ronan. “You mind if I ask you something?”

He half laughs. “Well, you can ask anything.”

“The day you hit those kids. The horseshoe crab day. Why did you do it?”

“Being dumb. That’s how.”

“No, I mean, why?”

He looks at me. His eyebrows are all smooshed up. “You know why. They were going to hurt that horseshoe crab.”

“But you didn’t have to hit them.”

“I was mad.”

“At them?”

He stares straight ahead. “Why are we talking about this?”

“Because I’ve been thinking about storms. And wind . . . and people.” I turn to him, and he’s watching me. I blurt out, “Ronan?”

He drops his head. I think he knows I have a tough question coming.

“What is your mom’s name?”

He takes a slow breath. “Andrea Gale. Why?”

“I was wondering, that’s all. You were mad that day at the beach. She wrote you that letter.”

He turns to me. “Like I said, why do we have to talk about this?”

I stay quiet and wait, like Esme does for me.

Finally he speaks. “It’s for the best, she said. I couldn’t believe she actually wrote that down, sealed an envelope, and mailed it to me.”

“Do you miss her?”

“She’s my mom.”

I swallow hard. Because I understand.

“I had a picture of my mom in this frame next to my bed,” I tell him. “And one day I got really mad and smashed it. I didn’t mean to. It just . . . happened. I mean, I felt mad, but it feels like when we’re mad, it’s really just throwing a bunch of stuff in a blender, you know? Like sadness and confusion and feeling like nothing’s fair. I wonder if you can just be angry without all the other stuff. It’s like a recipe.”

He leans back a bit. “Yeah. I know a lot about anger, but I guess we each have our own recipe for it.”

“Maybe anger is like the wind.”

“Anger . . . wind? What are you talking about?”

“Like, all these things have to happen inside us at the same time and mix together just right, and you get angry. So angry you can’t sort through it all. And the same goes for wind. Lots of things that have to happen just right, with the earth moving underneath making it harder for the wind to stay in its patterns. And you really can’t see wind. You can only see how it moves everything around it. And anger is like that, too.”