The narrator of this story is Theresa, a 15-year-old only child. The child of her heart is her cousin, eight-year-old Daisy. It’s a summer story, the time when school is on vacation and the long days belong to the children.
As simple as the surface level story is, there are so many complicated and beautiful currents running below the surface. Theresa’s love for her little cousin, and the realization that something is wrong puts a tension and sorrow through the story. Theresa is only 15, but in charge of so many young lives. She is a child, but taking on the responsibilities of an adult. The true adults around her have the freedom to abdicate their responsibilities, the care of their children, to this 15 year old. She is expected to do so much.
Her relationship with the aging artist, the father of her only paid babysitting ward, brings in tensions of art and even sexuality. Well, her own budding beauty and sexuality seems to turn any adult male into a drooling imbecile. She has to respond and deflect advances before she quite knows what they mean.
And then the neglected kids next door, so needy and unintentionally destructive, keep her realizing how lonely it is possible for people to be.
It’s a beautifully written story, a perfect slow bobbing rhythm, like an inner tube on the surface of the water.