Chapter Forty-Five
They rinsed the sand from their feet at the public outdoor shower station, the cold water making Nora yelp and laugh. Then came the ritual—slipping their shoes back on, brushing off calves and hems, the beach already starting to feel like a memory even as it shimmered behind them.
Nora glanced at the two women she came from—her mother walking just ahead, her grandmother humming softly and adjusting Roxy’s bag over her shoulder.
And suddenly, she was struck by time. How it passed, how it shifted people.
She imagined her mother, once her age, walking away from this same shoreline.
Her grandmother too, would she have been barefoot and wild decades before, the hem of her skirt clinging damply to her legs, or would she have hung back?
There seemed to be two sides of Eleanor Bell Strickland. Which was real?
The thought made her heart ache with wistful tenderness she hadn’t experienced before.
Nora was different now. This summer had changed her.
In so many ways, she felt older than she had just two months ago.
Older than the girl who’d crossed the high school stage with a nervous smile and a diploma in her hand.
But in other ways, she felt achingly young.
College loomed like a whole new universe, one she wasn’t entirely sure she was prepared to enter.
A dorm. A roommate. Classes. Choices. Self-reliance.
All of it exhilarating, all of it terrifying.
At the car, Nora glanced over her shoulder toward the shore. “I’m going to miss this. Promise me when I’m home for Thanksgiving, we can take a day and come back to the beach.”
“It’ll be freezing,” Leanne said, smiling. “But I wouldn’t dream of saying no.”
Nora smiled back. Not so long ago, there’d been a time when her mother might’ve said no without thinking.
When there was a list of rules and unspoken expectations.
No cold beaches. No off-schedule adventures.
That list seemed to have vanished somewhere along the way, maybe back in Atlanta, Denver, or the middle of a muddy music festival.
“I’ll knit us some scarves,” Eleanor added. “Peace and music scarves.”
Nora laughed, turning to lift her grandmother’s hand, still adorned with the faded swirl of henna. She brushed her thumb gently over the design, mesmerized that her grandmother had the spunk to tattoo her skin, even if temporarily.
“You’re a real rebel, you know that?” Nora asked.
Eleanor winked. “I suppose you can try to take the rebel out of someone, but it doesn’t mean they’ll forfeit who they are.”
“Tell me something rebellious you did,” Nora said, nudging her gently.
“Besides running away at the age of sixty-nine?”
Nora laughed. “Besides that.”
Eleanor’s eyes twinkled. “When I was about your age, I set out to be a musician. But most people in the industry didn’t like my style.”
“What was your style?”
“Picture Jimi Hendrix,” she said, “but make him a young blond in a demure ankle-length day dress with saddle shoes, when the music of choice was jazz or the blues.”
Nora’s eyes widened. “That is a sight I would’ve liked to see.”
“Well, it wasn’t a sight the world was ready for. They tried to shape me. Mold me. And I let them for a while. Until I got tired of playing music their way…and I gave up.”
“You were a woman ahead of your time.”
“Perhaps I was.” Eleanor’s gaze drifted to Leanne, her eyes alight with mischief. “Are you going to change before heading home?”
Nora glanced at her mother, struck by how beautiful and youthful her mother looked, years younger than forty-five.
Not in the polished, presentable way of church luncheons or PTA meetings—but in the real, undone kind of way.
Her face was bare, untouched by makeup, her hair wind-tousled and full of life.
The ocean air had painted her cheeks with the sun.
She still wore Nora’s cutoff jean shorts and a brand-new T-shirt that read “I Heard the Moon”—a tribute to Shep’s band and a play on the Apollo 11 landing on the moon with Neil Armstrong and his crew.
The shirt was still stiff, not yet broken in, but somehow it suited her.
Like slipping into something softer, more honest.
Nora watched her mother, seeing a woman teetering between past and future. A woman who had walked back into herself.
“No,” Leanne said, her jaw set. “I rather like this shirt.”
Nora didn’t know what to make of that. Her father was going to combust when he saw her mom.
For the first time in Nora’s memory, her mother’s face held a kind of lightness—her eyes sparked with something entirely new.
The years of quiet exhaustion, of tamped-down wants and unspoken disappointments, had been peeled away mile by mile on the road, revealing the woman who had always been buried just beneath the surface.
And for a split second, a question lodged like a thorn in Nora’s chest. Had she helped put that version of her mother in hiding?
The resentment between them—the distance that had grown over the years like ivy on a house—had felt unmovable. But now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe the divide hadn’t been written in stone but chosen. Repeated. Reinforced. Like all the unspoken things they’d allowed to grow too heavy to carry.
Still, deep down, Nora knew it hadn’t just been her.
There was something her mother had never shared, something older and heavier than anything Nora had caused. And she didn’t want to press. She wasn’t sure she was ready to hear it.
She loved her dad. He was a good man—when he was around. And maybe that was the problem. Over the years, he’d faded into the background of their lives, all in the name of building something bigger than himself. Bigger than them.
Most of her friends’ dads had done the same. And for the longest time, Nora had accepted that that was just the way things were. She’d never stopped to wonder what it cost or the weight her mother must have carried, alone, every day.
A month ago, Nora would’ve rolled her eyes. Told her mom to stop making everything so heavy. As if endurance was owed. As if being tired wasn’t allowed.
But now? Now she saw it. All of it.
The guilt twisted inside her like a bottle cap. How blind she’d been. Well, no more. Her mother deserved more. She deserved joy. Ease. To be the woman she’d become on this road trip. They all did. And Nora was going to make sure she, her mother, and her grandmother stayed that way.
Eleanor gently patted her daughter’s hand. The gesture was small but substantial. So simple it might’ve gone unnoticed if not for how it made Nora’s chest ache.
Her mother, usually so composed, so careful, allowed herself a heartbeat of vulnerability, resting her head, just briefly, on her own mother’s shoulder.
Nora felt like an observer in a sacred space, watching something private unfold. The pat. The lean. The movements were almost imperceptible—but they carried the weight of so much more.
Affection had never come easily between her mother and grandmother, not in the way Nora had always longed for. But something about this summer had softened the edges, had cracked something open.
And for the first time, Nora let herself believe that maybe it wasn’t too late for them to find their way to each other.