The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [25]
Whaley was reading along in her prissy voice when Maggie spotted Woodrow coming across the creek. Maggie was all after-supper logy from half-listening to her sister call out how much a head of cabbage will run you up in Norfolk, but since Woodrow had come back across from burying Sarah he’d kept to himself, mostly down south near the inlet the storm cut, doing God knows what, Maggie had no idea. She left him alone, though Whaley kept after her to go check on him.
“Now you’re all about checking up on people?” Maggie said, to shut her up, and it worked, though she could tell it was eating at her, Woodrow’s disappearance. They hadn’t seen a soul except that O’Malley who had brought the mail and some food over every few days. Maggie could have been sleeping and still seen a body come across that creek, especially Woodrow.
“Here comes Woodrow,” she said, but Whaley did not look up. Maggie heard her voice hitch up a little and go even prissier, more what Dr. Levinson and them called Elizabethan: her vowels flattened and roiling like breakers across her tongue.
Woodrow took his time coming up the hill. He took a seat third row from the bottom. Whaley read her prices right on. When she stopped to fold up one of those papers in the tight way she had like she was taking a sheet off the line, Maggie said, “Crawl wrote and said you’re going to be eighty this year, Woodrow.”
Soon as she said it she wanted it back. How would she know what Crawl said unless she opened up Crawl’s letter and read it. She knew that Woodrow knew what all they left out of the letters Crawl wrote, how they always stopped just shy of Crawl telling Woodrow he’d be over across to get him tomorrow if Woodrow would just say the word.
Woodrow didn’t say anything for so long that Whaley went ahead on with her prices. Then he said, in the middle of Whaley going on about something called a blow-dryer, “Crawl don’t know nothing about how old I am.”
“Old enough to know better,” Maggie said without even breathing. She liked to tease Woodrow and he was known to take her teasing and smack it right back at her. Sometimes, sitting on the church steps, they fell into an easy rhythm of ribbing—even Whaley had been known to smile at their back and forth—and God knows if ever there were a need for some lightness, it was during that buggy yellow sunset when Woodrow all of a sudden returned to them.
But as soon as her words were out of her mouth here came Whaley with her own. Maggie didn’t even think she was listening. When she was reading her prices it could hail and she would chant right on.
“Too old to change,” Whaley said.
Ever after, Maggie remembered the moment as if she were still sitting on those steps. Slight land breeze winging in an odor of sulfurous marsh. Orange sun lowering itself over the trees to settle, like everything and everyone else, across the sound. The way Woodrow slapped distracted at his neck as if a bug had bit him, then pulled his hand away and opened his palm and discovered there wasn’t any bug after all, as if the hurt he felt right then from her sister’s words and maybe hers too (though she meant no harm by them, was only trying to engage Woodrow in a