Prologue
New Jersey
2004
“Dad,” Jecca said to her father, Joe Layton, “I want to go to Virginia to see Kim. It’s only for two weeks, and you can run the store without me.” She knew she sounded like a whiny little girl and not the mature nineteen-year-old woman she was, but her dad did that to her.
“Jecca, you spent all year at that college with your friend. You lived with her and that other girl. What’s her name?”
“Sophie.”
“Right. I don’t see why you can’t spare your old dad a few weeks.”
Parental guilt! Jecca thought and clenched her hands into fists. Her father was brilliant at it. He had perfected it to an art form.
That she was spending the entire summer working for him in the family hardware store never seemed to enter his mind. She’d already been home from college for two whole months now and her father hadn’t taken a single day off—and he expected his daughter to be at the store alongside him. She was the one who closed the gap when one by one all the other employees took their vacations. But Jecca didn’t consider taking care of the hundreds of do-it-yourselfers as what her father called “being together,” since the only “conversation” they had was when he asked if the new router bits had come in.
Jecca appreciated all her father did for her and she wanted to see him, but she also wanted some time off. She wanted fourteen whole days to do only what she wanted to. Put on a bikini and lie by a pool. Flirt with boys. Talk to Kim about . . . well, about everything in life. Time to dream about her future. She was studying art at school as she wanted to be a painter. Kim said there was some magnificent scenery around her home in Virginia, and Jecca wanted to put it all on paper. The plan was perfect—except that her father wouldn’t agree. She didn’t want to cause any anger by openly defying him, so all she could do was plead for his permission.
As she watched him stack boxes of wood screws, she thought of her last e-mail from Kim.
“You should spend some time at Florida Point,” Kim had written. “If you climb to the top you can see across two counties. Some of the boys, including my idiot brother, strip off and jump into the pool at the bottom. It’s a far drop and very dangerous, but they still do it. Naked boys aside, it’s a beautiful place, and I think you could find lots to paint up there.”
Jecca had explained to her father as patiently as she could, in as adult a manner as possible, that she needed to produce some artworks before the next year.
Her father had listened politely to every word she’d said, then asked if she’d ordered the tenpenny nails.
Jecca lost all her newly found maturity. “It’s not fair!” she’d yelled. “You let Joey off for the whole summer. Why can’t I have even two weeks?”
Joe Layton looked affrontby oked afed. “Your brother now has a wife, and they’re trying to give me grandchildren.”
Jecca gasped. “You let Joey have the entire summer off just so he can screw Sheila?”
“Watch your mouth, young lady,” he said as he moved to the small power tools section.
Jecca knew she had to calm down. She wouldn’t get anywhere by making him angry. “Dad, please,” she said in her best little-girl voice.
“You want to meet a boy, don’t you?”
Jecca refrained from rolling her eyes. Did he ever worry about anything else? “No, Dad, there is no boy. Kim has an older brother, but he’s had the same girlfriend since forever.” She took a breath and reminded herself to keep on track. Her father was good at knowing when his only daughter was lying. Joey could get away with telling whoppers. “I was out with the boys,” he used to say, and their father would nod. Later, Jecca would say to her brother, “The next used condom you leave in the car, you’ll find on your pillow.” She knew he hadn’t been out with “the boys.”
“Dad,” Jecca said, “I just want two weeks to gossip with my friend and to paint. When I go back to school I want to nonchalantly, as though I didn’t work my tail off to show Sophie and maybe a teacher or two some watercolors that I did over the summer. That’s all. I swear it on—”
The look her father gave her made her close her mouth. She couldn’t swear on her mother’s grave.