The look on her father’s face was almost tragic in its hurt. The thing was, he was a great dad. He came to her plays, even the one where she played cowgirl number four, with exactly one line. He came to her swim meets with a video camera, even though she gave him a look every time he panned in as she mounted the starting block.

But then she quit acting. She quit the swim team. She needed to get serious, to fill her schedule with advanced art courses. He still came to all her shows, proclaiming everything she made “Beautiful! Beautiful!” Although he’d once added jokingly, “All those squiggly lines look the same to me.”

Lately he’d been urging Joey to take the LSATs, saying things like, “You know, Joey, in our family, Mom is not the breadwinner. She makes beautiful things, but that’s not what allows us to eat.”

Now her father said a quiet, “Okay.” He started off the terrace.

It was the sunflowers. The stupid sunflowers made her say it.

“Dad,” she whispered. “I’m sorry for saying that thing before, about your dancing.”

Her dad turned. He put a hand to his brow to deflect the sun’s first sting. “It’s fine, Joey. It’s fine.”

Chapter Ten

Sarah

Corfu
1942

In the month after Sarah saw the dreamy fisherman, she took often to the port under thin rationales. She was eager to retrieve lamb for her mother from the butcher by the sea, eager to collect pails of water from the well in the synagogue courtyard. And suddenly she was weaving an indirect route past the port toward the place of her employ—the apartment of a widowed gentleman on Solomou Street, for whom Sarah laundered clothes and then ironed them, even his handkerchiefs and socks.

Sarah hadn’t shared her fisherman sighting with anyone, not even Rachel, although she’d wholeheartedly apologized to her best friend, reassuring her that of course it was wonderful she and Solomon had a burgeoning romance.

The High Holidays passed, and a new year begun, as all the while Sarah ruminated upon her own burgeoning something. But so far, her eyes hadn’t latched upon him again.

She told herself it was a good thing, as she walked along the sea with Benjamin in early October, on their typical Sabbath stroll. That boy wasn’t Jewish, and she didn’t know him besides. Maybe he had a voice like a girl and a stench of fishy fish, besides. But Sarah wasn’t much convincing herself because, after family lunch, she’d donned her finest blue shirtdress and brushed her hair with the hundred strokes that was Rachel’s professed beauty secret.