The small boat nosed in, and a woman in a gray cardigan stepped off it with a single duffel bag over her shoulder and no gold stripes at all.
Her silver hair was loose in the wind.
She saw the signs.
She stopped walking.
Then she dropped the bag on the planks and ran.
My mother ran to us, thirty-four years of tides behind her, and she put her arms around all three of us at once.
Scarlett grabbed a fistful of silver hair and would not let go.
“Words are cheap at sea,” my mother whispered into my shoulder.
It was what she had told me the night before the twins were born, and it was what she had told me every year of my life, in her way.
“Watch what he does when he’s on land.”
I laughed, and I cried, and I held on to my mother.
