I nodded. “My mom’s Mexican.” He raised his eyebrows even higher and tilted his head slightly. I get that a lot: my hair, red, my eyes, blue, my skin, freckled and rose-pale. Not a trace of a Hispanic trill in my voice. I don’t even like tacos. But that’s what happens when you grow up as an army brat with an Irish Catholic father from the Midwest with the last name of McGinty and a firm belief that English is the only language that should be spoken in the entire world, much less in central Illinois. You’re Dosinda Maria McGinty for the first twenty-three years of your life, and then you’re dropping out of community college to marry Jackson Hall, a music teacher from Missouri who you convince yourself that you love. And then you’re moving to Florida with him and flirting with a marine biologist until you realize with a start that here you are and you’re already late for tonight’s shift at Jolly Blackbeard’s Crab Shack Bar.

The second time I saw Chase was a week later on a day so hot it felt like I was trying to breathe through a sodden rag. I was walking along the shore, absentmindedly picking through sea shells, when I came across the most bizarre-looking, dried-up little thing I had ever seen. It was the same color and feel as a sand dollar and could almost be labeled as starfish except that, emerging from its tiny circular center, were five spindly limbs twisted into the curl of a pinwheel. I gently picked up the thing by its center between my thumb and forefinger and placed it flat in my palm. It almost looked as though five crusted-dried earthworms were smashed together by their ends, like an alien washed up on shore.

“Brittle star.” Chase bounced it lightly in his hand. Today he was wearing a sherbet orange polo and the same crisp white visor. “You’re right to think it’s some kind of starfish, though. Brittle stars are very rare. It’s the second class of starfish, called Ophiuridea. The first is Asteroidea, which includes your basic sea stars, you know, the Beaded, the Netted, the Spiny Beaded, the Sugar...” He grinned sheepishly and handed it back to me. “Sorry, that’s probably a little more than you needed to know.”

I laughed a little as I took back the brittle star. “That’s all right; I actually think it’s all fascinating.” I shifted in my flip-flops. “It was just so strange that I had to ask you.”

He grinned in that knowing way again. “I tend to come across a lot of strange things.” I felt myself coloring slightly, and although I couldn’t be entirely sure, I thought I saw him wink. “I like strange.”

My father, when he was home, yelled a lot. Not so much at me, or at least when I was still small, but mostly at my mother. When he was gone she was a real sass, a spitfire, out all night and lounging about the house by day, chain-smoking in only her long silk nightgown with cigarette burns and her flashy turquoise jewelry, necklaces, earrings, bracelets, rings. She said what she wanted. She did as she pleased. She told me stories of Mexico and of the wailing ghost-lady La llorona, an Indian peasant girl who slept with a rich man and drowned her two children when he left her for a noblewoman. She was doomed to roam the river banks and ocean shores of Mexico forever, shrouded in black, weeping and wailing for what she had done. My mother would tell me this story, take a long drag on her cigarette, and then grab me suddenly by the shoulders so that I would scream. “La llorona!” she would shriek with wild laughter. “She’s got you!”

But when my father was home my mother would shrink into her own black shroud, cowering behind the kitchen counter or beside the living room sofa or even at his feet, on the floor. He would call her names I didn’t understand but knew were barbed with meanness and hate. Barricaded behind my bedroom door by my mother in Springfield, Atlanta, Denver, Lexington, St. Louis, the wet-gray coast of Maine, I curled myself tight so that I was small and pressed my palms to my earlobes, screwing shut my eyes. I couldn’t figure out why my father was so angry and why he would call my mother a horse. Was he trying to say that she was horse-faced, as ugly as an animal? She wasn’t - she was beautiful: dark-skinned with eyes like liquid bright and a diamond collarbone and long black hair thick as a pony’s mane. It wasn’t until many years later that I understood why my father was yelling.