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“But you don’t have a big belly,” I interrupted, surprised.

“No,” she said. “The baby is just a sprout. It hasn’t gotten very big yet.”

Something about the thought of a baby made me feel needy.

“Mama, uppie,” I begged like Heidi did, hugging the back of her legs.

“No, Lissie, get off, please, I’m cooking.” She pulled away from me. “You’re a big girl, I can’t lift you up anymore.” I slunk back to the table and hung there for a minute, trying to act like I didn’t care, then snuck out the back door and kicked over a bucket set under the edge of the roof to catch rainwater.

Back in the garden Heidi had dumped over the can of potato beetles. She stood watching as they crawled all over each other, sliding on shiny backs in the straw around the potatoes.

“No-no, Heidi,” I said. “Bad!”

“No-no,” she repeated. “Bad!”

I picked up the beetles in handfuls mixed with the straw mulch and put them in the bucket. They tried to crawl on my hands and cling to my fingers and made me feel like they were crawling all over my body. My thoughts felt like that, too, thinking about Mama.

“Heidi!” Mama called.

“Lissie!”

L’s and i’s and e’s echoed across the curve of the beach as my bare feet sank in the sand beneath the water, pants clenched up in fists against my legs. The surface of the bay was covered in an excitement of diamonds that sparkled and bounced in the swell. I was wading toward that place of light, but as I neared, it always moved farther away.

“Where’s Heidi-di?” Mama’s voice tripped across the beach.

I turned, dropping the grip on my pants, to look back at Mama. She stood in her green galoshes in the ragged band of seaweed that had washed up at high tide, a wood-handled three-tine pitchfork in her hands to harvest seaweed for mulching the gardens for winter. Mama worried because Heidi liked to go right into the ocean, as if she had a magnet on her for water. I pointed behind the rock island, where I could see Heidi bending over, looking for sand dollars, and Mama nodded her head and returned to work, her pregnant belly protruding as she slid the pitchfork into the seaweed and lifted a mop of it onto the old wheelbarrow.

Heidi came to me bearing a perfect round sand dollar. When I shook it to rattle the small bird-shaped bones inside, her eyes grew nearly as round as the sand dollar. “Let’s go find snails,” I said, the wet hem of my pants pasted to my legs. Nearings’ Cove—so called because it was directly below their property—fanned out in a clamshell shape around us, wide and gradual at the top where the seaweed lay, and deep and narrower down by the water. The sizable rock island slumbered in the middle of the beach at low tide, its surface full of crystal pools left behind in the crevices where you could find snails and starfish. A whole universe lived inside those tide pools, everything fresher and more beautiful when wet and magnified by water. We pulled up the snails and marveled at the way the coil of the shell was similar to the coil of fiddleheads in spring, or the coil of the lines that made up the fingerprints on our fingers. What kind of magic was this?

“Lissie,” Mama called again. “Bus-sss!”

“Oh.” I sighed. Time for school. It was not fair, nature was so much more fascinating than school. I scrambled down the rock, found my wet shoes, and ran up the beach to the bus waiting above on the road by the Nearings’ driveway. I was always missing the bus, it seemed, and we’d gotten a note from the town, asking that since the bus had to come thirty minutes out of its way to get me, and since gas prices were so high, could I try to be there. Especially since they would be plowing in winter for the bus, unlike in previous years when the local plowman might “forget” our road simply because he didn’t like hippies.

“You’re soaking wet,” Mama squawked when I passed, but there was nothing she could do as I left her world for the world of school.

Skates showed up that fall of 1975 with Lyn and Lucky and the kids in a fancy rented motor home. It