I hear her using the present tense, and for some reason this hurts more, because Emma doesn’t actually know my mom. At least, not the mom I know. The person in Emma’s photos and the person I love are completely different people. She pauses, giving me the opportunity to respond, but I have too many feelings welling up inside me to even look at her. Part of me is grateful—relieved, even—to hear her say that. But another, louder part is saying the thing I can’t say aloud. Then where were you?

“Okay,” I manage.

“And if you want to talk about her, or yesterday, we can. Anytime. It doesn’t have to be today.”

She’s looking at me with her intense Emma eyes, and there is so much pressure building up inside of me, I might actually combust.

I manage a small noise in my throat, and luckily that seems to fulfill the response requirement. She stands up. “The girls want to take you to Singing Beach in Manchester-by-the-Sea today. Have you been there?”

She’s looking slightly away from me now, which is great. My emotions are probably all over my face. I take a quick breath. “No.”

“The grains of sand are shaped in a way that they make a squeaking sound when you move your feet across them.”

Despite my best intentions, I feel my interest pique. “Really?”

“It’s rare. Only a few beaches in the world sing. I thought you might like it,” Emma says, a tiny smile on her face.

I quickly look away again. I am very into the idea of seeing something that only exists in a few places, and I kind of hate that she knows that.

Getting to Manchester-by-the-Sea takes twenty minutes. Packing up for it takes two hundred. I know because I am forced to rehearse for most of it.

While Emma and Simon are making peanut butter and honey sandwiches and filling plastic baggies with potato chips and apple slices, the girls insist I begin to learn my choreography for the Pirate Mason show, which is what they’ve decided to call it. Emma has apparently told them they will not be buying me tap shoes, so they’ve decided to change things up from tap dance to ballet, and it is so much more horrible than I could even have imagined. Not only have they planned out the entire one-man show; they expect me to get it right. And there is a lot to learn. Pliés, leaps, and a vast number of twirls. There’s even a scene where I’m supposed to dance with a toy shark balanced on my head.