Ava is chastened. She has been so busy fretting about her relationship with Nathaniel that she hasn’t had two seconds left over to think about Bart.
She and Bart used to be… so close. When he was born, Ava was ten years old; she would push him in his stroller, pretending he was her baby. He had soft, chubby cheeks and blue eyes and blond chick fuzz on top of his head. He was a living doll.
When Ava was a teenager, the thrill of taking care of Bart wore off a little. She was always called on to babysit him, and when she turned sixteen and got her license, she was enlisted to drive him and his pesky friends all over the island. Did she complain?
Yes, she complained. She called him a spoiled brat. Mitzi never punished him, he was never held accountable for his actions, and as he grew older, his actions became more and more atrocious. He started smoking at fourteen. Ava caught him and his friend Michael, each with a cigarette, in the back parking lot of the high school. She turned him in to Mitzi, who cried and blamed herself. Bart hosted enormous parties at Dionis Beach with beer he stole out the back door of the Bar. He crashed three cars in eighteen months, he got caught repeatedly with marijuana—by Kelley and Mitzi, by the high school principal, by the police—and he broke and entered a summer house in Pocomo one weekend night in February when he and his derelict friends were bored.
But Ava doesn’t want to spend her moment of silence running down Bart’s rap sheet. What a person does isn’t the same as who a person is. Bart is charming, fun loving, mischievous, and magnetic. Bart is her little brother, and Ava needs him to be safe.