The bridge at Sagamore was closed when we got there that summer of 1956. We had to
cross the canal at Buzzards Bay over the only other roadway that tethered Cape Cod to
the mainland.
Thus twelve-year-old Lily Grainger, while safe from ‘communists and the Pope,’ finds her family
suddenly adrift. That was the summer the Andrea Doria sank, pilot whales stranded, and Lily’s
father built a house he couldn’t afford. Target practice on a nearby decommissioned Liberty
Ship echoed not only the rancor in her parents’ marriage, a rancor stoked by Lily’s competitive
uncle, but also Lily’s troubles with her sister, her cousins, and especially with her mother. In her
increasingly desperate efforts to salvage her parents’ marriage, Lily discovers betrayals beyond
her understanding as well as the small ways in which people try to rescue each other. She
draws on her music lessons and her love of Cape Cod—from Sagamore and Monomoy to
Nauset Spit and the Wellfleet Dunes, seeking safe passage from the limited world of her salt
marsh to the larger, open ocean.

Excerpt

Prologue
There was no bridge at Sagamore the summer of 1956. We had to cross the canal at
Buzzards Bay over the one slender, arched roadway that tethered Cape Cod to the mainland.
That was the summer the cello proved to be my steadiest companion, although I would have had
it otherwise. My mother had to make do without a piano of her own, which did not augur well:
music had always been her refuge. And my father was dead set on building a cottage—built the
right way, which was to say, better than Uncle George’s—when we couldn’t afford it. We
thought we spotted the Andrea Doria moments before it sank. And I discovered the small ways
in which people try to rescue each other.
Our property fronted a salt pond whose fertile waters hatched clams the size of a toenail,
infant eels no bigger than a bobby pin, and young crabs so fragile you could crush them between
two fingers. When they matured, they found their way to the creek, an outlet booby-trapped with
rocks from an old abandoned mill, and followed it out to Pleasant Bay, that vast shallow body of
water which, like a long adolescence, spanned the distance between our pond and the full-
fledged, fathomless ocean.
Tides filled and emptied our small world and I tried to figure out who belonged to whom.
I longed to belong to my mother. But I learned that summer that she was like a teacup, spilled
out and upside down on the saucer, and she couldn’t right herself. She thought she was mad at
my father; she didn’t recognize that fiercer winds than his tore at her. All summer the storm
gathered and gathered, took its breath from every direction we thought we knew, and lashed us
into spindrift.
And all the while, surrounding us, holding us up like the sea we floated on, was the
music.

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We are doing a tour–wide giveaway of a signed copy of Water Music, along with a chocolate bar. Marcia has 5 sets to give away, US only.

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/463009dc1/