After a few minutes, he came clumping down the porch steps. His Go Navy T-shirt looked clean enough. His blond hair had a shampoo-ad shine now that it was dry. That hair was way too pretty, she thought. For a boy.

“The bike probably needs air in the tires,” he said, leading the way to the barn.

She fell in step with him. “You like the navy?”

“My dad’s in the navy, so I’d better like it. We’ve been stationed in Guam the past two years. Know where Guam is?”

“I’d be lying if I said I did. Sorry.” She glanced away, feeling ignorant.

“That’s okay. I probably wouldn’t know either, except I live there. It’s an island in Micronesia—in the South Pacific.”

“Guam,” she said, enjoying the shape of the word in her mouth. “What’s it like?”

“Tropical. Like Hawaii, only with snakes.”

“Sounds amazing. I’d put up with the snakes if it was like Hawaii, which I’ve never been to, but I bet it’s beautiful. I’ve only ever lived here.”

“I think right here is pretty awesome.”

“In the summer,” she agreed. “Ever visited in the winter?”

He shook his head. “Let me guess. Cold, dark, and wet.”

“The worst.” Every year her parents talked about closing the restaurant for a whole month in winter and taking the family someplace warm. All they did was talk, though. Then they’d start worrying about what to do about the dog. And the house. And the restaurant. And they’d worry about being able to afford a big trip with five kids, and the older girls missing school, and eventually they’d talk themselves out of leaving.

Will lifted the rusty latch of the barn door. The hinges creaked as he opened it. Sunshine poured through the cracks in the walls, creating long bars of light and shadow and illuminating ancient swags of spider webs. Dust motes swirled with movement. The tall, arched ceiling made the space feel huge, bigger than a church sanctuary.

“My granddad keeps saying we’re going to clean this place out,” Will said, “but we never get around to it. I bet some of this stuff goes back to his grandfather, who built the place.” He pointed out a carved wooden plaque that read justine. “That’s from a ship that took the oysters down to San Francisco.”

Caroline studied a wooden ship’s figurehead of a woman’s bare-breasted torso. “And is that Justine?”

He blushed so hard, his freckles disappeared. “Whatever. Give me a hand with this bike. I don’t think anyone’s used it since I was here last summer.”

They extricated the bike from the clutter and wheeled it outside. She helped him pump up the tires, glad her dad had taught her how to do it so she didn’t look like a klutz. He found a can of WD-40 and sprayed the chain, and everything seemed to work well enough.

“Better make sure there aren’t any spiders in that helmet,” she cautioned him.

He held it up to the sky to inspect it. She was grossed out, but not surprised, to see a shaggy-legged wolf spider clinging to the underside. She was surprised when he calmly picked it up and sent it on its way, then brushed off the cobwebs. Maybe after the snakes of Guam, he wasn’t afraid of a mere spider. He clipped on the helmet. “Ready?”

She jumped on her bike and led the way down the main road. She went fast, showing off a little, raising both arms and calling out, “I love summer!” She was no match for the boy, though. He easily glided past her and took the lead. It was a long fast ride down the road to the south end of the peninsula. They passed the poky little golf course, where big-bellied men were drinking beer and hacking away with their clubs. The main town of Long Beach was crammed with traffic and people browsing through the shops. She and Will didn’t talk much, although she pointed out some of the places visitors loved to explore—Marsh’s Museum of Oddities, the go-kart track, the saltwater taffy factory, the shooting arcade.

“Let’s ride the boardwalk,” she said, turning toward the archway that framed a magnificent view of the beach, endlessly flat and dotted with people. They followed a scenic path through the dunes at the edge of the beach.

“That’s our restaurant—Star of the Sea,” she said, pointing out the big weathered building with its shaded decks and umbrella tables.

“Hey, we went there for razor clams the other night. I like that place.”

“Almost everybody likes it,” she said. “It’s real busy in the summer, especially since there were some articles about it in the New York Times and Condé Nast Traveler. Oh, and a crew from the Travel Channel came out one time and filmed for a whole day just to make a half-hour show.”

“Really? That sounds cool.”

“I wanted to be on TV so bad. I even made a new outfit to wear and talked about it on camera, but that part all got cut out. They showed my parents because they’re the owners, and then my sister Virginia on account of she’s drop-dead gorgeous and she pretended to be a customer on the deck.”

He was looking at her funny. She flushed. “I talk a lot, I know. Mom says it’s because I’m the middle child, and when you’re in the middle, you learn to speak up, or people forget about you.”

“I doubt anybody’d forget about you,” he said.

“Huh. You haven’t seen my sisters and brothers. I got two of each. Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“Nope. Just me.”

“Lucky you.”

Dodging sun seekers and people with fishing gear and kites, they rode all the way to the fishing village of Ilwaco, its marina filled with charter boats and commercial vessels. “Ever been up to the lighthouses?” she asked. “There are two of them.”

“Let’s go,” he said.

The twisty, hilly climb nearly did her in, but she didn’t let on that her legs were about to give out. The ride took them up to a rocky headland with damp pathways leading through the dense forest to the lighthouses, North Head and Cape Disappointment.

At a viewpoint overlooking the place where the Columbia River surged into the Pacific Ocean, they stopped to rest near the first lighthouse—North Head. They peeled off their helmets and each took a long drink of water at the park fountain. Then they climbed out past the safety fence to the promontory, a rock-strewn perch with a view of the coastline as far as the eye could see.

“Awesome,” said Will, staring down at the dizzying sight of waves crashing against the cliffs and rocks. Some of the breakers exploded hundreds of feet in the air.

“In the spring and fall, you can see the gray whales migrating,” she said. “You should see it in a storm. The surf gets huge and there are giant thunderheads. Wind and fog like you wouldn’t believe. It’s super dangerous for boats around here. Does your dad work on a ship?”

“Sure. Next January we’re moving from Guam to Coronado. That’s in Southern California.”

“Oh, California sounds nice.”

They stood on a rocky outcropping, feeling the salt spray on their faces. “This is my spot,” Caroline told him, gazing out at the seam where the ocean met the sky. “I mean, it doesn’t personally belong to me, but I come here to think sometimes.”

“It’s a good one.” He stared out at the blue horizon. Then he picked up a loose stone and hurled it far. She tracked it until it disappeared. He started walking along a trail that wound around the towering cliffs. She followed, trying to picture the place called Coronado. Whenever she thought of California, she envisioned the world of Beverly Hills, 90210, a boring show her sisters were obsessed with.

“California will be okay, I guess,” he said. “I’ll go to a regular school, not a DoD school.”

“What’s a DoD school?”

“Stands for Department of Defense. They have ’em on all the bases. Once we’re stateside, I’ll go to public school.”

“Will your dad work on a different ship then?”

He shook his head. “Shore duty. He’ll be working on base because it’s just him and me now, so he can’t go on deployment.”

“Oh. Did your folks split up?” That’s what happened to some of her friends. One or the other parent left, an idea that gave Caroline chills all through her body. The kids usually stayed with the mother, though.

“My mom’s dead.”

Caroline stumbled and nearly lurched into him. “That’s terrible. That’s . . .” Her mind was so crowded with questions, she didn’t know where to begin. “What happened?”

“It was something called pulmonary edema. She had an undiagnosed heart defect.” His voice was quiet and flat, which somehow made it sound worse than if he’d fallen apart crying.

“That’s the worst thing I ever heard. When?”

“Just after New Year’s last year. Dad was on shift, and I thought she overslept. She died in the night.”

Caroline tried to picture what that must have been like, finding your mom dead one morning. “I don’t . . . Gosh. That’s horrible. I can’t think of anything else to say.”