Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea (9781101559833) by Morgan Callan Rogers

would go with him. No, it was best if I stayed with Grand. When I threw a fit about being left behind, Daddy held firm. “Why don’t you help me look through the pictures,” he said.
    They were jumbled together in an old yellow suitcase with mouse-chewed leather straps under my parents’ bed. Carlie had vowed that one day she and I would put them all into photo albums, but we hadn’t gotten around to it. I dragged the suitcase into the kitchen and Daddy lifted it onto the kitchen table and undid the buckles. He and Grand and I began to sort through the pile.
    Here was me as a fat baby. Here was me at three with Grand’s black-and-white cat named Poker, who had folded his game long ago. Daddy as a boy, standing beside Grand, both of them looking spiffy in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. Daddy and Carlie hugging each other and looking into the camera.
    Carlie alone.
    I shuffled it out from the pile. Even in the black-and-white picture, I could tell it was summer. Carlie stood back to the harbor, her hair flying around her face. She looked into the camera, not smiling wide, as she was apt to do, but giving the photographer just a hint instead, and her eyes were smoky. “I asked her to marry me after I took that picture,” Daddy said. “I couldn’t believe she said yes.”
    â€œâ€™Course she said yes,” Grand said. “You are the best thing happened to her.”
    Daddy said, “Well, she’s the best thing . . .” He put his hand on my head. We looked at Carlie looking back at us from the photograph, and then Daddy said, “She hasn’t changed much except for the stupid dye job. I guess we can use this one.”
    Daddy and Parker left to make the trip to Crow’s Nest Harbor at about 3:00 P.M . on Thursday. Grand stayed with me Thursday night. We slept in my parents’ bed, and I tossed and turned and breathed in the perfume from my mother’s pillowcase. Come Friday morning, Carlie still hadn’t made an appearance.
    Word spread like measles through The Point, and by noon on Friday, Evie, Dottie, and Madeline came to keep Grand and me company. Then Ida, Bud’s mother, showed up with Maureen, and Stella Drowns wandered down from Ray’s store. I wasn’t happy about Grand letting her into our kitchen, but Grand would have said all were welcome, so Dottie, Evie, Maureen, and I went into the living room. Evie and Maureen cut out paper doll dresses from a book Ida had brought along to keep them busy. Dottie and I picked up a jumbo-sized Archie comic and read the parts to each other. But I kept one ear on to what was being said around the kitchen table, where the women sat drinking pots of tea that Grand kept boiling up.
    They didn’t know Carlie well. She’d made a nest of her life with Daddy and me, but she was too restless for quilting, like Ida did, or painting, like Madeline did, or knitting and baking, like Grand did. Carlie liked to move. That was Carlie.
    Stella, sitting across from Grand at the kitchen table, said, “Seems strange, all the same. It’s almost like she and Patty planned it.” The kitchen went quiet, then Grand said, pressing down on her words, “How do you mean?”
    â€œI’m just saying, the whole thing is weird,” Stella said.
    Madeline said, “A wife and mother went shopping and disappeared. That’s weird.”
    A cold band settled around my heart as I realized that they thought something was wrong. I left Dottie and stood in the kitchen doorway. Grand saw me and said, “Florine, do you and Dottie want lunch?”
    I ignored her. I glared at Stella Drowns. “Nothing’s wrong,” I said.
    â€œOh, Florine, I didn’t mean it,” Stella Drowns said. “Thinking out loud is all.”
    â€œMight think better with your mouth sewn shut,” I said.
    Grand said, sharp, “Florine, apologize. I won’t have you talk like that to