Blue Moon Read Online Free Page A

graceful strokes, keeping them steady. Cassglanced at Josie, then pointed. A lobster was caught in the trap.
    Josie watched her mother take a deep breath, then dive down. She shimmered through the water, quick as a fish, to unlatch the trap door. Josie watched her hand reach inside, her fingers closing around the lobster’s back.
    Cass swam up to Josie. Josie reached out, taking the lobster from her mother. The lobster reached back, its claws clicking, trying to pinch Josie’s hand. Josie smiled. She had held hundreds of lobsters. She looked at its big, round eyes, and she touched its long, skinny, green, ribbed antennae. Then she let it go.
    It drifted through the water for an instant, then flapped its tail to swim backward. Josie watched it hide under a rock ledge covered with blue-black mussels. Her mother tapped her hand.
    Josie knew it was time to leave, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to watch the crevice, to see if the lobster would appear again. But she followed her mother anyway, into the shallow water. She touched the sand with her toes, craned her neck to breathe without the snorkel.
    Her mother tossed her head from side to side, letting the water drain out of her ears. Josie copied her. Then she raced out of the water, to crouch in the damp sand below the high-tide line. Shivering in the salty breeze, she began packing sand into a sturdy castle. She knew her mother would soon join in. They always built a sand castle before leaving the beach.
    When Cass and Billy first married, years after falling in love, friends of her parents would come to the restaurant and ask, “When are you two going to start a family?” Some would even add the words “of your own.” The question had boggled Cass’s mind. How could two grown people with parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters “start” a family? Just leave the past in a photo album, take a deep breath, and begin again? To Cass it would be like chopping down the family tree to plant a new one.
    Then T.J. was born. There in the delivery room, the moment the doctor placed their son on her stomach, Cass felt the world change. Soaking wet, numb from the waist down, she held her baby. Billytried to find a way to hold them both. Their newborn had Billy’s black curls. Cass remembered looking Billy straight in the face.
    “I love our family,” she said, and for the first time in her life she wasn’t counting the extended Keating clan. She was talking about three people—Cass, Billy, and T.J.
    So why should it have surprised Cass when her son, learning to talk, had given short shrift to his ABC’s and animal noises, and had seemed more interested in nailing down the intricacies of their family?
    “Are you Gram’s daughter?”
    “Yes.”
    “And I’m your son,” T.J. would say with satisfaction. The mother-son part he had picked up right away.
    “Right,” Cass would say.
    “Are Aunt Bonnie and Aunt Nora your aunts?”
    “No, they’re my sisters.”
    “And they’re my sisters, too.”
    “No, they’re your aunts.”
    “Then who are my sisters?”
    Cass would explain, again, that T.J. didn’t have any sisters, that for the time being he was an only child, but that he had his great-grandmother Sheila, his grandparents, aunts and an uncle, and two parents who loved him very much.
    Belinda had learned to talk the same way. When Billy would call, Belinda would say, “Daddy, would you like to speak to your wife?” When Nora would call, Belinda would say, “Your brother-in-law is on a fishing trip, but your sister is here,” then hand the phone to Cass. It had cracked Cass and Billy up.
    Cass knew that people with hearing loss often compensated in other ways: they had sharper vision, or they sensed a person’s approach before anyone else in the room could actually hear it. Josie, lacking clear words, had developed superior family intuition. She loved to hug and cuddle, and she knew when T.J. needed to be left alone. Although she didn’t always