And every time Hud or Jay offered to drop out of school, too, in order to pick up shifts at the restaurant and help pay the bills, Nina forbade them. “Absolutely not,” she said, with a seriousness that consistently disarmed them. “You quit school, I’ll kick you out of the house.”

They all knew she never would. But if she was serious enough to bluff that hard, then they felt they had no choice but to listen to her.

In the spring of 1978, Nina and Kit sat side by side on the bleachers as Hud and then Jay walked across the stage and accepted their diplomas.

Kit hooted and hollered. Nina clapped so hard she stung her hands.

When Jay and Hud pulled their tassels from one side of their caps to the other, Nina knew that the war wasn’t over. But she let herself rejoice for a brief moment. A battle had been won.

• • •

After graduation, Jay worked at Riva’s Seafood and a local surf shop. Hud got a financial aid package that made it feasible for him to go to college nearby at Loyola Marymount, by taking some side jobs and accepting some help from Nina.

On the weekends when they could, Jay and Hud would ride up the coast, chasing swells. Hud had already bought a used camera by then. The two of them had decided that Hud taking photos of Jay would help both of their portfolios.

And so, it was often just Nina and Kit at the house. Kit, nearing sixteen, did not want to be under her sister’s thumb. She did not want to be told what to do or when to hold back. She no longer wanted to be reminded to be careful.

So, instead of hanging out at home, Kit went over to Vanessa’s. Kit went to parties. Kit joined a club of girls who liked to surf in the early morning hours before school. She took a job assisting a housepainter up in Ventura and begged rides off her co-workers to get to job sites and back.

All of which meant that by the end of 1978 there were moments—finally—when Nina came home from working twelve hours and had no one to take care of.

It unsettled her, having these quiet evenings in the house, when all she could hear were the waves crashing beneath her and the wind blowing past the windows. She would sit down and balance the checkbook, nervously subtracting each sum, continually finding they were still overdrawn. She would go through Kit’s report cards, trying to figure out a way, despite everything, to afford a tutor.

In the rare moments that she truly did not have anything she had to do, Nina would sometimes read Jay and Hud’s old comics, trying not to think of her mother.

And then, one day, in February 1979, three and a half years after June died, Nina sat by herself on the rocks down the shore from her home and caught her breath.

It was just before the break of dawn. The air was chilly, the wind was running onshore. The waves were coming in fast and cold, foam claiming more and more of the dry sand.

Nina was in a wet suit, her long hair fluttering in the breeze. The sun started to rise over the horizon, peeking ever so slightly. She had gone down to the shore to surf before the start of the day.

But as she stood looking at the water, she saw a family of dolphins. At first, it looked like just one dolphin jumping. And then one more. And then two more. And then another. And soon the five of them were in a pack, together.

Nina sat down and began to weep. She was not crying out of stress or frustration or fear, although she had so much of those still in her bones. She was crying because she missed her mother. She missed her perfume, her meatloaf, missed the way she made impossible things happen. Nina missed lying in her mother’s arms on the sofa, watching television late at night, missed the way her mother would always tell her everything would be OK, the way her mother could make everything OK.

She mourned the things that would never happen. The weddings her mother would never attend, the meals her mother would never make, the sunsets her mother would never see.

And she thought, for a moment, that maybe she could let herself be angry at her mother, too. Angry at her mother for the burnt dinners and lit cigarettes, for the Sea Breezes and Cape Codders. Angry at her mother for getting in that bathtub in the first place.

But she couldn’t quite get there.

On the beach that early morning, Nina watched the tiny crabs digging deeper into the sand, she watched the purple sea urchins and pearl starfish holding steady in their tide pools, and she let herself cry. She allowed herself to grieve every tiny thing—every hair roller, every housedress, every smile, every promise. She wanted to empty herself of heartbreak, a task both possible and impossible. And when Nina dove deep into her own sorrow, shoveling it out like digging to the bottom of a hole, she found that this pain, which had seemed bottomless, did, in fact, have a bottom for now.

Nina sometimes felt as if her soul had aged at a rate ten times that of her body. Kit still needed to graduate. There would still be bills that Nina knew she might never be able to get out from under. She still didn’t have a high school diploma. But she felt somewhat renewed in that moment. And so she wiped her eyes, and did what she had come out on the beach to do in the first place.

She grabbed her board, paddled out past the breakers, and took her position.

• • •

That April, Nina was spotted by a magazine editor on vacation while she was surfing First Point. It was hotter than she’d expected, so she had unzipped her wet suit, letting her yellow halter bikini top show through. The waves were larger than normal, and Nina was having one of those days when you are fully connected, when ease comes easy. She was taking wave after wave, compensating for their speed with the low crouch of her body, riding in long stretches almost to the pier.

The magazine editor—on the thicker side, with graying hair and a chambray short-sleeved shirt somewhat chicly unbuttoned to his chest, had made his way down to the beach from the pier from which he’d seen her. He approached her as she was coming out of the water and introduced himself just as her feet hit the sand.

“Miss,” he said, moving toward her eagerly. He looked to Nina to be about fifty and she was afraid he was going to ask her out.

“You are a wonder to look at,” he said to her, but Nina noted there was not an ounce of lasciviousness in his voice. He was merely presenting what, to him, appeared plain fact. “I want to introduce you to a friend of mine. He’s a photographer looking to do a surf spread.”

Nina was drying her hair with her towel and squinted slightly.

“It’s for Vivant magazine,” the man said, handing her a business card. The moment it was in Nina’s hand it was already wet. “Tell him I sent you.”

“I don’t even know you,” Nina said.

The man considered her. “You’re a beautiful woman with great command of a surfboard,” he said. “You should make money off of that.”

He left shortly after and as Nina watched him walk away from her, she was surprised by how easy it had been for him to grab her attention.

When she got home, she sat at the phone, flicking the card with her thumb and forefinger. Money, she kept thinking. How much money?

Nina didn’t love the idea of posing for photos, but what other options did she have? The restaurant was in the red from a slow winter. She knew for a fact it was going to fail a health inspection. Hud’s tuition for next year was going up. Kit needed her cavities filled. The roof had started leaking again.

She called the number on the card.

• • •