Page 153 of What You Wish For

What I mean is, things got a lot better for Tina Buckley once she was free of Kent and all his demands. Tina and Clay wound up moving in with Babette for a while, which suited Babette just fine, while Tina went back to school to finish her degree.

Turned out one of Tina Buckley’s wifely duties had been to cook gourmet meals for Kent most nights, so Babette ate very well after Tina came home and started teaching her some skills in the kitchen.

And so did I. Because Tina—of all people—invited me to join them.

It turns out to be a funny thing about moms: once you help their children rescue whales in the middle of the night, they stop hating you so much. Or, maybe, once they get rid of the husbands they should have been hating all along, they can give you a break.

Either way, we made up.

She turned out to be a much nicer person than I’d given her credit for.

Tina did stop Kent from selling off our school. She must have had some really great dirt on him. He didn’t even put up a fight. His behavior at the beach—specifically, assaulting the school principal—also prompted his removal from the board.

Guess who took his place?

The beautiful Babette.

Kent Buckley moved to New Jersey, after that, and he turned out to be the kind of divorced dad who did not make a large effort—or, frankly, any effort—to see his kid.

And while we can all agree that it’s good for boys—in theory—to have a father around, we also agree that it really depends quite a bit on the father.

Which was fine. Clay wound up with a better family, anyway. Between Tina, Babette, and me, he had more than enough loving adults looking after him. I even gave him his own CLAY RECOMMENDS shelf in the library. Not to mention the Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network, which gave him a medal and honored him at their annual fundraising dinner (he wore a little tux), as well as got him volunteering with them almost every weekend.

After Babette took her rightful place on the board, Kent Buckley was quickly forgotten. We moved forward with the Adventure Garden, at last, and built the most astonishing pirate-ship tree house. Babette continued to boss Duncan around—in part because now she really could get him fired—but mostly just because it was fun.

He liked it more than he admitted, I think.

We did wind up making security changes at the school. The goal became to do enough without doing too much. Duncan brought us into the sad, modern age where schools have to think about these things, but he wound up trusting the instincts of the collective wisdom of the faculty when it came to figuring out where to draw the line. He changed the school a little bit, but he also worked to change the world a little bit,too, volunteering for a gun-sense group and trying to make the world safer.

And in the meantime, despite all the worries and tragedies and injustices in the world, we remembered to have fun when we could.

We remembered to have dance parties, and sand-castle building contests, and cookie-decorating competitions. We remembered to do karaoke, and have school-wide movie nights in the courtyard, and take long walks on the beach. We let the kids write stories about the school ghost at Halloween, we played hooky from school on pretty spring days, and we brought back Hat Day.

We made a choice to do joy on purpose. Not in spite of life’s sorrows. But because of them.

And it really did help.

Not that our lives were all magically fixed. Babette still missed Max, and grieved for him, and would for the rest of her life. Tina still—inexplicably—missed Kent Buckley, or, at least, the idea of him. Alice still had to live much of her life with Marco deployed half a world away. Clay still had kids at school calling him Brainerd.

And even after Duncan and Chuck Norris moved into my little carriage house with me, Duncan still had nightmares, and I still had seizures.

We didn’t fix everything for each other—but we didn’t have to.

We just made a choice to be there.

Which counted for a lot.

Max had always joked that if anyone ever made a statue of him, he’d want it to be a fountain—of him peeing. But the board, even with Babette at the helm, just couldn’t run with that idea.

We held on to his memory in other ways. We decided to hold an annual, disco-themed dance party in his honor. We hung a painting Babette had done of him in the office. And Babette painted a colorful mural on the playground fence with everybody’s favorite Max-ism: “Never miss a chance to celebrate.”

Did we miss chances to celebrate after that? Did we get caught up in our worries and our petty arguments and ourselves?

Of course. We were only human.

But we tried our best—again and again and again—to choose joy on purpose. Just like Max would have wanted.

And, of course, I didn’t quit my job, or leave my island, or give up on courage. I stayed, and I chose the people I loved over and over. For better and for worse.

But mostly for better.

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