Lin Su checked Charlie’s computer regularly to be sure he wasn’t getting into any trouble—she’d look through his browsing history, his apps and programs; she probably even read some of his emails. They never talked about it but she told him he used the computer by her consent and she would be checking. A couple of times he saw her with his laptop and knew she’d been snooping—once when he came out of the shower, once when he woke up after being asleep awhile. And she asked to use it a few times to pay bills, something she could do as easily on her smartphone.

He didn’t mind. He was smarter on the computer than she was and covered his tracks. He joined a couple of professional networking links that were free; he joined Facebook but didn’t have an accessible page. He had a lot of Google searches but his surfing tracks weren’t visible in his cache.

Once he found Gordon Simmons he started poking around for Lin Su’s adoptive sisters—Leigh and Karyn. Karyn was tough—she’d been married a couple of times, changing her last name each time, and he’d had to search public records. But Leigh Simmons was easier. She was either single or had kept her last name. She was a professor of anthropology at Rutgers. She’d done a stint in the Peace Corps and was a big supporter to this day. He liked her face and he thought she might respond to him if he got up the nerve to get in touch.

All this would hopefully lead to two things. One, he didn’t think his biological father was really dead. Charlie wasn’t sure of his name. Just asking would get Lin Su a little riled up. She said his name was Jake, that there was no family, that it was unimportant to discuss and it had been such a hard time for her. Charlie bought the hard time, but not the rest. You don’t love a good man and not even keep a picture!

The second thing, Lin Su said his grandmother had been in such ill health, she gave Lin Su into adoption, but that didn’t mean she had died. Lin Su never knew for sure what became of her. She had that one picture—his grandmother as a little girl, sitting on an American serviceman’s lap. It was taken in the sixties. Lin Su had no other pictures of her mother, just her name—Nhuong Ng. She would only be around fifty if she were alive.

Charlie wanted to find his roots.

Seven

It took Lin Su only a couple of days to get herself organized and comfortable in her new small space, working on laundry and sorting in the evenings and early mornings. She felt the need to make a run back to her trailer to look around in case there was something she forgot. She asked Mikhail if he’d be around the house while Winnie napped so she could do that and Winnie said, “Take Mikhail. Or Blake. But please don’t go alone.”

“I’ll be perfectly all right in the light of day, Winnie. After all, I lived there for nine months without any issues.”

“And now there have been issues. Don’t fight me on this. I don’t need a keeper at naptime—I’m going to rest for two hours. I won’t even be answering the phone.”

“I’ll go,” Mikhail said, standing up. “Is good to be safe.”

When they were in the car Lin Su tried pleading one more time. “Mikhail, I mean no offense, but I don’t think you could protect me if we had a problem. And I don’t want you to even see the awful mess left behind—you’ll think I lived like a dirty peasant.”

“I am dirty peasant,” he shot back. “I had no bed till I was eleven and then I shared with two brothers. Her Majesty calls me ‘scrappy little Russian.’” He pointed forward. “Drive. I hope little bastards give me trouble. I’ll bite their noses off.”

Just what I need, she thought. But she drove.

As if to hammer home the point that her time in the little trailer was at an end, she pulled up to see the padlock had been broken. The premises had been invaded again, except now that there was nothing of value left it seemed to have been taken up by squatters. There were only a couple of things that had come to mind to fetch— Charlie’s nebulizer machine for his breathing treatments, a couple of pans, her old Crock-Pot, the teakettle, miscellaneous junk, stuff she really didn’t need to get by or that she could replace cheaply. She stood just inside the door and looked around. There were beer cans here and there. A beanbag she didn’t recognize had appeared in the little living room. Beside it on the floor, a syringe.

“Touch nothing,” Mikhail said. “We are finished here. We start over. When you think on that it will fill you with a glorious renewal.”

She sighed. “It filled me with a feeling of renewal the first ten times I had to start over...”

He looked at her with tired eyes. She didn’t know Mikhail’s history except that he emigrated from Russia when that was not easily done. And now his best friend, Winnie, was dying, though very slowly and without much suffering. With deep sincerity he said to her, “I know this to be true.”

Mr. Chester was standing by her car when they left the trailer just a minute later. He was holding his rake, his weapon. She suddenly realized she had rarely seen him without it. “This place wasn’t always like this,” he said sadly. “The wife and I put our new mobile home here twenty years ago right before my retirement. It was a pretty decent place. Clean. Safe. Everyone had flowers bordering their patios and the laundry was scrubbed clean. There were good people, friendly like us, but all the good people left. I don’t know what happened to it.”

“Was the same property manager here then?” she asked.

He shook his head. “We been through a few of them, each one worse than the one before. Do you have a place to go?”

“I do, a nice place.”

“Go there, then. Tell that boy of yours I’ll miss him.”

She gave the old man a hug. “I’ll miss you, too, Mr. Chester. Take care of yourself.”

She drove away, Mikhail silent beside her. She left the graffiti-filled park, passed the motel, stores, run-down homes and apartments, the fenced-in industrial parks. She was very glad to leave all that behind. Is it true that you can be poor anywhere? she wondered. And she decided not to think about that place again.

That was the day her life began to really change. Rather than driving to Winnie’s house, working and then driving home, she was now part of the town because she was seen there several times a day. She’d met lovely people before moving above the flower shop but now she was in the mainstream and not a nurse escorting Winnie here and there. People stopped her on the street if they saw her, asking about Winnie, asking about herself and Charlie. Now she had coffee and a pastry at the diner before walking across the beach to her job, and more often than not someone from town would sit beside her—maybe Seth, sometimes Carrie or Peyton or even Grace with her two cell phones, one for work and one personal. She started many days chatting with Gina, who had been working in that diner for almost twenty years. It was Gina who could give her the oral history of the people she knew, starting with how Cooper came to Thunder Point to find out how his longtime friend, Ben, had died so unexpectedly. Cooper stayed on, turning Ben’s old bait shop into a nice establishment on the beach, thus the name Ben & Cooper’s.