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“Shing-a-ling,” she startedhamming it up, dancing this corny sixties dance, prancing and moving her hands up and down.
    “The monkey,” I called and she did that, too, monkeying like a maniac, then switching into the mashed potato when Tommy told her to, and Mom went extra-wild, goofy, smearing everything right into a version of the hustle and the shopping cart, and the water sprinkler. She did a gogo move with her legs pumping up and down for a few seconds, and she swung her arms around and up and down as if she wanted to pound her fists on a big drum, then she brought her hands across her eyes to do the Batman. She made an awful noise clunking around. Sometimes her knees creaked and cracked and that made us call out more dances, trying to get her to cave. Afterward we made her rap, throwing out topics that she had to rhyme and look “street” about. It was all absurd and pretty hilarious.
    I looked at Tommy, who was laughing as hard as I had seen him laugh in a long time. And maybe wishes weren’t something you hoped for, but instead something that found you. Tommy, Mom, and I were three specks in a big world, I thought, with sharks in the seas around us.

T he smell of the ocean is always new. You could be away from it for a hundred years, or live by it every day, and when the wind finally brings the ocean’s scent to you, you recognize it deep down somewhere. My first smell of the Pacific came on the wharf when we watched the seals, but at 5:23 the next morning from the backseat of Mr. Cotter’s Cadillac I smelled it again and it was new. Mr. Cotter had showed up at five precisely, his legs covered by a pair of wind pants, his nose marked by a dot of zinc oxide, a blue fleece buttoned up around his chin. He brought a coffee thermos and a half gallon of orange juice and a box ofDunkin’ Donuts muffins and bagels. He didn’t mention that Tommy forgot to wear the shark hat or even that Mom made us all wait fifteen minutes while she showered. He fixed us a little place to eat on the top of a cooler he had in his car trunk while we waited for Mom, and Tommy and I ate there while we watched the sun come up and felt the morning wind die away.
    I had to hand it to Mr. Cotter: he figured out how Tommy wanted to take the shark trip. He didn’t keep making jokes, or plying Tommy with questions about sharks devouring things, and while we ate he talked quietly about his own experience with the sea, and how he sailed sometimes in a small boat, and how he grew up in Northern California but had gone to school back East, to Dartmouth, actually, which was why he took a special interest in Tommy’s application. That brought New Hampshire into the conversation, and he asked us where we lived, how far into the White Mountains, if we hiked up in Mount Moosilauke—he had fished the Baker River there while he attended Dartmouth—and if we ate maple syrup on snow in the spring. Turns out he had retired as a radiologist, his wife had died, and his children, all grown, lived near him. He enjoyed competitive croquet, and played most afternoons with a bunch of old fogeys (his word) on a court on an acre of land they bought together for that purpose.
    “Bee wants to go to Dartmouth,” Tommy said at onepoint. “She goes over to the campus and walks around and pretends she’s a student there.”
    I bumped Tommy’s shoulder and turned red.
    “Is that so, Bee?” Mr. Cotter asked. “It’s a great school.”
    “It’s my top choice,” I said.
    “She wants to go to the Ivy League,” Tommy said, crumbs from his blueberry muffin flecking his chest. “And she will. Whatever Bee sets her mind to, she does.”
    “That’s an admirable trait,” Mr. Cotter said, looking at me as if for the first time. “Be sure you get in touch with me when you get ready to apply. I pull a little bit of weight out there.”
    “I will,” I said. “Thanks.”
    Mr. Cotter and I exchanged a look, then we went back to eating bagels. I sipped coffee.