Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (general ebook reader .TXT) 📗

was all they had ever known, mingled with a mystery that kept them busy exchanging clues from things their mothers said about a man neither of the girls had ever met.

Did they possibly have the same father?

“He wore a dirty white hat,” Jane reported, after her mama had let that slip one night while she stirred the cheese packet into the macaroni. Martha’s mother used real, grated cheddar when she made macaroni and cheese, and she let the girls call her by her first name, Zoe.

They both called Jane’s mom Mama.

It was a rare slip, this bit of info, and Jane had immediately run to Martha’s to tell her.

“Got it,” Martha had said. “I’ll check Zoe’s diaries for anything about a white hat.”

“Dirty white hat,” Jane corrected her. Details were important.

Martha had been reading Zoe’s diaries for years and reporting back to Jane, not once thinking that this might be considered snooping.

They had tried asking direct questions, but neither Mama nor Zoe was forthcoming. The dirty white hat was like a golden ticket in a chocolate bar.

“He wasn’t from here, Jane” was all Mama would ever say, as if that were a real answer.

Not from here? thought Jane. Nobody is from here.

The fact that their mothers were both tight-lipped only reinforced what the girls wanted to believe. And it helped that their imaginations had been sharpened to fine points in an isolated place with very few other people and hours and hours to kill.

They were both homeschooled (if you asked Jane’s mama) or unschooled (if you asked Zoe), meaning they were free to roam the ocean’s edge, be curious, study whatever they fancied. For Jane, it was bivalve mollusks, clams, mussels, anything with a shell that spit and squirted. She spent hours digging them up, cutting them open, dissecting their kidneys and hearts, fascinated by their siphons and eager to know how they functioned. By the time she was twelve, she knew almost everything there was to know about them. So did Martha, but that was only because Jane needed someone to impart all this knowledge to, since she wasn’t required to write papers or take tests.

Their mothers might have been very different people who had a strange dislike for each other, but they seemed to agree that little girls should not be made to conform to anything that did not ebb and flow like the tide: their minds, at the very least, should run rampant along the beach.

It helped that the mobile-library van drove from Seattle once a month, bringing books to all the stray houses along the coast. The librarian often brought biology textbooks for Jane and once even surprised her with some journals from the University of Washington because she knew how much Jane loved reading about scientific studies.

For Martha she brought fantasy or, once in a while, romance novels. Jane had tried to read one of the romances but rolled her eyes pretty quickly and went back to a battered copy of the Farmers’ Almanac. Martha had rolled her eyes at that, especially since it dated to the early 1900s. “Who cares about the weather in the past?” she’d asked.

“The past is important,” Jane had said. “If it weren’t, why would we care so much about who our father is?”

“Well, I’m sure he had nothing to do with a year of bad crops in 1922.”

Except for a jaunt into Vancouver to give birth to Jane herself, Jane’s mama had never spoken of a life anywhere else, as if she had been born miraculously at the age of eighteen, holding a satchel and harboring a gift for painting marine birds midflight.

The scattered sea-shaken houses on the cliffs overlooking the ocean had been built long ago, but they mirrored the people who came and went: reclusive and solitary, wind-beaten and up for grabs. Jane’s mother had inherited hers from a widow whose husband had disappeared while fishing for halibut. When Mama (before she was called Mama, obviously) showed up with her satchel of art supplies, needing a home, the widow took it as a sign that she should hand over the house and move on. People here listened—mostly to the wind, but also to fate. The sea told them what they needed to know, and also when to stay and when to go.

Zoe as well seemed to have materialized out of the sand dunes on the beach, giving birth to Martha as if she’d sculpted her in the rye grass out of flotsam and jetsam, topped off with a head of flowing seaweed. (Martha and Zoe were so hairy they kept a screwdriver by the bathtub because the drain constantly needed to be cleaned.) Before she’d had Martha, Zoe had lived in almost every house on this beach, with one man or another, until one by one the men left—usually on a boat—and took nothing and everything with them.

The last one to leave had basically given Zoe his house, with its dark blue shutters that would not clasp, but according to Zoe’s journal, he was not Martha’s father.

Also according to Zoe’s journal, there wasn’t much to say about Martha’s father.

Zoe and Mama were simply Zoe and Mama. Two women living according to the laws of nature, the sea, the sun, the moon, and their daughters.

For a while people came from all over to spend time on this particular stretch of beach, so even if not many people lived here, the girls didn’t feel isolated or alone—at least, not when they were younger. The outside world came to them. Families with kids, couples without. They were from all different coasts and walks of life, of all different shapes and sizes. No one ever stayed long, but that was also the beauty of it: how transient people were.

One summer a guy from Slovenia came and sold ice cream sandwiches out of an old abandoned bait and tackle shop. Nobody told him he couldn’t, so he stayed longer than most. Jane and Martha went often to visit him, and he would