Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [13]
Incoming Tide
The bay had small whitecaps and the tide was coming in, so the smaller rocks could be heard moving as the water shifted them. Also there was the twanging sound of the cables hitting the masts of the sailboats moored. A few seagulls gave squawking cries as they dove down to pick up the fish heads and tails and shining insides that the boy was tossing from the dock as he cleaned the mackerel. All this Kevin saw as he sat in his car with the windows partly open. The car was parked on the grassy area, not far from the marina. Two trucks were parked farther over, on the gravel by the dock.
How much time went by, Kevin didn’t know.
At one point, the marina’s screen door opened wheezily and slammed shut, and Kevin watched as a man moved in slow steps in his dark rubber boots, tossing a coil of heavy rope into the back of the truck. If the man noticed Kevin, he gave no sign, even when he backed up his truck and turned his head in Kevin’s direction. There was no reason they would recognize each other. Kevin had not been to this town since he was a child; thirteen, when he moved away with his father and brother. He was as much a stranger up here now as any tourist might be, and yet gazing back at the sun-sliced bay, he noted how familiar it felt; he had not expected that. The salt air filled his nose, the wild rugosa bushes with their white blossoms brought him a vague confusion; a sense of sad ignorance seemed cloaked in their benign white petals.
Patty Howe poured coffee into two white mugs, placed them on the counter, said quietly, “You’re welcome,” and moved back to arrange the corn muffins that had just been passed through the opening from the kitchen. She had seen the man sitting in the car—he’d been there well over an hour—but people did that sometimes, drove out from town just to gaze at the water. Still, there was something about him that was troubling her. “They’re perfect,” she said to the cook, because the tops of the muffins were crispy at the edges, yellow as rising suns. The fact that their newly baked scent did not touch off a queasiness in her, as they had two times in the past year, made her sad; a soft dismalness settled over her. The doctor had said to them, For three months you are not to even think of it.
The screen door opened, banged shut. Through the large window, Patty saw that the man in the car still sat looking at the water, and as Patty poured coffee for an elderly couple that had seated themselves slowly into a booth, as she asked how they were this nice morning, she suddenly knew who the man was, and something passed over her, like a shadow crossing in front of the sun. “There you go,” she said to the couple, and didn’t glance out the window again.
“Say, why doesn’t Kevin come over here instead,” Patty’s mother had suggested, when Patty had been so small her head had only reached the kitchen counter, shaking it No, no, no, she didn’t want to go there. She’d been scared of him; in kindergarten he had sucked on his wrist so hard it was always a brilliant disk of a bruise, and his mother—tall, dark-haired, deep-voiced—had scared her, too. Now, as Patty put the corn muffins onto a plate, she thought that her mother’s response had been graceful, brilliant almost. Kevin had come to her house instead, and he’d patiently swung a jump rope whose other end was tied around a tree, while Patty had jumped and jumped. On her way home from work today, Patty would stop by her mother’s house. You’ll never guess who I saw, she’d say.
The boy on the dock stood up, holding a yellow pail in one hand, a knife in the other. A seagull swooped in and the boy waved his arm with the knife. Kevin watched as the boy turned to come up the ramp, but a man was sauntering down onto the wharf. “Son, put the knife in the pail,” the man called out, and the boy did that, carefully, and then grabbed the rail and climbed up the ramp to meet his father. He was still young enough that he took the man’s hand. Together they peered into the pail, and then they got into the truck and drove off.
Kevin,