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clump,
clump.
Matt Grearson’s voice says in a long drawl, “Be a real high tide later
tonight.”
“Yep,” says someone else—Donny Madden.
“Marlene’s going to get lonesome out here this winter,” says Matt Grearson
after a while.
Godfrey, thinks Olive from her chair below—run like hell, Marlene. Big flub-
dub Matt Grearson.
“I guess she’ll manage,” answers Donny, eventually. “People do.”
In another few minutes their boots clump back inside, Olive hears the door
close. People manage, she thinks. It’s true. But she takes a deep breath and has
to shift her weight on this wooden chair, because it’s not true, too. She pictures
Henry, not even a year ago, measuring what was needed for the mopboards in
their new room, down on his hands and knees with the measuring tape, telling
her the numbers while she wrote them down. Then Henry standing up, a tall
man. “Okay, Ollie. Let’s widdle the dogs and go into town.” The car ride—what
did they talk about? Oh, how she wants to remember, but she can’t remember. In
town, in the parking lot of Shop ’n Save, because they needed milk and juice
after they went to the lumber store, she said she would stay in the car. And that
was the end of their life. Henry got out of the car and fell down. Never stood up
again, never walked down the pebble path to the house again, never said an
intelligible word again; only sometimes, those huge blue-green eyes would look
at her from the hospital bed.
Then he went blind; now he will never see her again. “Not much to look at
these days,” she’s told him, when she has gone to sit with him. “Lost a little
weight now we don’t have our crackers and cheese every night. But I guess I
look like hell.” He would say that wasn’t true. He would say, “Oh no, Ollie. You
look wonderful to me.” He doesn’t say anything. Some days in his wheelchair he
doesn’t even turn his head. She makes the drive every day and sits with him.
You’re a saint, says Molly Collins. God, how stupid can you be? A scared old
woman is what she is; all she knows these days is that when the sun goes down,
it’s time to go to bed. People manage. She is not so sure. The tide is still out on
that one, she thinks.
Eddie Junior has stayed down there on the shore, skipping stones. His cousins
are gone; just Eddie Junior down there on the rocks alone. Hurling those flat
stones. Olive feels pleased by how good he is at this, skip-skip, skip-skip; even
though the water is no longer flat. She likes the way he immediately bends
down, finding another, hurling that.
But there’s Kerry, and where did she come from? She must have gone down
to the shore from around the other side of the house, because there she is in her
stockinged feet on the rocks, veering over the barnacled rocks, calling out to
Eddie. Whatever she’s saying, he doesn’t like. Olive can tell that from here. He
keeps on skipping stones, but finally he turns to her and speaks. Kerry opens her
arms in a kind of pleading gesture, and Eddie Junior just shakes his head, and a
few minutes later, Kerry comes back up from the shore, crawling up the rocks,
clearly drunk. She could break her neck out there, Olive thinks. Not that Eddie
Junior seems to care. He throws a stone, real hard this time, too hard—it doesn’t
skip, just smashes into the water.
For a long time Olive sits there. She looks out over the water, and on the far
edge of her mind she can hear people getting into their cars, driving away, but
she is thinking of Marlene Monroe, a young girl, so shy, walking home with her
sweetheart Ed Bonney, how happy a girl she must have been, standing at
Crossbow Corners while the birds chirped and Ed Bonney perhaps said, “Gee, I
hate to say goodbye.” They lived right here in this house with Ed’s mother for
the first years of their marriage, until the old lady died. If Christopher had stayed
married, his wife wouldn’t have let Olive live with them for five minutes. And
now Christopher was so different he might not let her live with him either—
should Henry die and she find herself in trouble. Christopher might stick her in
the attic, except he’d mentioned his California house didn’t have an attic. Tie her
to a flagpole, but he didn’t have one of those either.
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