One night, I’d heard my parents arguing by phone, the words indistinguishable except for my mother screaming “Don’t talk to me like I’m one of your fucking Marines, Cole!” and “I married you, not the damned Marines.” The last she punctuated with a loud, repeated slamming noise.

The next morning at breakfast, I alternated between worried glances at our broken phone, which lay like shrapnel on our kitchen table, and her. Distracted, she exhaled through pursed red lips and stared into the curlicue of smoke drifting above her head.

I shoved my Cookie Crisp cereal in circles around my bowl, dunking them in the milk and watching them bob back to the surface. Unsinkable cookies. Funny how the chocolate chips always looked bigger on the box than in real life.

“Stop playing with your food, Soph,” my mother said.

I looked up quickly to find her smashing a cigarette into the fancy white candy dish she used as an ashtray.

Her blue eyes met mine, suddenly fierce. “Let’s go somewhere.”

“Like to the movies?”

She shook her head. “Not the movies. Listen, we can do anything. Where would you want to go right now if you could go anywhere?”

The expectant look on her face weighed on me. She wanted me to pick somewhere exciting. If I said what I wanted—to spend time with her—it wouldn’t be the right answer. I shrugged and drank the last of the milk in my bowl.

“You’re too much like your father.” She sighed and rose to her feet, clearing away my cereal and her ashtray. “You don’t always have to be so perfect, Sophie. Be spontaneous.”

I grasped enough of that to know I’d disappointed her. “The beach,” I blurted out.

“The beach?” she asked as if the idea intrigued her. “I like it,” she added decisively, dropping our dishes in the sink with a clatter. “Go pack an overnight bag.”

She didn’t have to tell me twice. We both rushed through the house, laughing and calling to each other from our rooms. She made it into a race, giving me ten minutes to gather my things and get into our car. I made it in nine and a half.

We didn’t stray far from home.

The four hours to Nag’s Head on the Outer Banks reassured me like my call to my father hadn’t. We played games—“Find an object that starts with each letter of the alphabet” and “I Spy”—and sang along to the radio. When we arrived, my mom splurged on one of those motels that sat right on the beach and had a pool.

A few moments of those two days pop out like Polaroids taped to my heart: Savoring saltwater taffy in waxy rainbow shades as we sat in the sand watching the sun color the water. Doing a flip into the pool in my red polka-dot one-piece with the bow on the front while mom clapped from under the shade of a lemon-yellow umbrella. Dancing in our hotel room with the radio turned up loud enough to feel my heart knocking in my chest, and the flash of my mother’s skirt as she whipped me around. And at the end of the day, curling up at her feet as her fingers tickled my scalp and she unknotted a day’s worth of tangles from my waist-length hair.

For two days she focused every bit of her attention on me. She listened to me chatter on about Carey and Blake. I told her everything I liked and everything I disliked and everything that popped into my head. Unfiltered. Uncensored. Unaware.

And then we returned home to find Uncle Eddy on our doorstep. I snubbed him as only an eleven-year-old can, running past him and stomping into the house. My mother sent me to my room, and their voices rumbled from the kitchen. They did not sound angry, like my parents usually did. They did not argue or shout. No—they spoke in hushed tones, excited whispers. Sharing secrets.

I sat on the floor with my ear to the door, tearing at the skin around my fingernails, but I couldn’t make out their words. It didn’t matter, though. The next day the two of them picked me up from Carey’s house in Uncle Eddy’s old Buick. I sat in the backseat with my arms crossed, glaring out the window. I didn’t want my mother near him. He’d ruined everything.

Instead of driving to our house, we pulled up at my grandmother’s. My father’s mother, her steel-gray hair coiled into uniform rows of perfect barrel curls, shook her head at my mother. Uncle Eddy used to say that Grandma had sharpened her tongue on my grandfather for so many years, it could flay the skin off a man from one hundred yards away. While my mother and I climbed out of the car, my grandmother approached Uncle Eddy who busied himself pulling a suitcase—my pink suitcase—out of the trunk.

“You’ve betrayed your brother and this family,” she told him, taking the suitcase. “You’re not welcome here.”

Uncle Eddy’s face tightened, like each word had slapped him. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Mom.”

She turned to my mother. “And you. You should be ashamed of yourself. I told Cole you would never be a Marine’s wife.”

My grandmother tried to restrain me, but I shook off her hand. I cinched my arms around my mother’s waist.

My mother had never liked my grandmother. She’d spent as little time as possible with her, complaining to my father that Grandma criticized everything from her smoking and her housekeeping to the way she raised me. Despite her feelings, she’d always been polite on our visits, but that mask fell away as we stood there.

“You’re right, Ellen,” she said. “I’m not cut out for this life.”

They exchanged a look that went over my head.

My mother bent to kiss me on the forehead. “Be a good girl, Sophie.”