The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [38]
Whaley squeezed the rag until water ran down her arm.
“All I do is support you. While you screw some boy in plain daylight for all the children on the island to watch and run up and down telling everyone how they saw the two of you going at it in the dunes. I support you while you run off and get drunk and throw yourself all over Barry Railey, who’s got a wife and three young’uns up in Suffolk …”
“Who said I threw myself at him? Mary Alice told you I threw myself at him?”
“Don’t even go denying it. Mary Alice told me the whole story not a half hour ago.”
“I don’t have to listen to your mess either,” said Maggie. She rose from the table, carried her bowl of oatmeal to the sink, sloshed water in it so wildly that a stream from the pump ricocheted off the basin and sprayed over her shoulder, onto the floor. Whaley was upside her, grabbing the bowl, gimme that, you’re not even fit to wash a dish, and Maggie was all over her sister then, slapping at her with wild loping swings, pushing her back upside the counter, both of them crying, Maggie’s hair streaming wet with tears and sweat and then she was outside, running down to the creek to Woodrow’s. Sarah was sitting on the porch listening to her gospel songs on the radio, Maggie could hear the sleek, sexy guitar chords chugging along underneath the swelling chorus praising God in heaven.
In the summer kitchen she lay down across the bed she shared with Boyd and said his name. She wanted him with her and she prayed a sobbing prayer to God: Please bring him back to me I won’t ever run out on him I will be faithful and good to him and forgive me for what I did to my sister who I know loves me in some long-dry place in her heart. If you just bring him back, please God don’t let him leave me.
He came back late that night to find her passed out in her clothes, the screen door carelessly ajar and the summer kitchen as-warm with mosquitoes. He lit a fire in the trash burner Woodrow had installed for Crawl and his bride and pulled down the storm boards on all the windows and lit one of the El Reeso Sweets he’d brought back for Woodrow. He stripped to his shorts and sat sweating and blowing smoke defensively around the room. He let her sleep. When she woke she was thirsty and her skin was ravaged by bites.
He was lying beside her smoking.
“Hey baby,” he said.
She rolled right over on top of him and was out of her dress in seconds. Later, lying parched and eaten up with mosquito bites and remorse alongside him as he smoked, she wanted him to ask her to go across with him, so she could say yes, for she would have then, and she would have made him leave that very evening, before she could feel better and change her mind. But he didn’t ask. He seemed removed, distant, in a way she’d never seen him before. As if a part of him, his heart—the important part—had remained off island.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I messed up.”
“What happened?”
She sighed. “Can we open some of the windows now?”
He got up and busied himself with the storm boards but did so reluctantly, as if cooping them up in the sticky heat with the mosquitoes she’d let in was part of her punishment.
“You don’t want to tell me,” he said from across the room.
She was holding a sock she’d dipped in water to her head and breathing hot and fast.
“I just don’t like it when you’re gone,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Quit saying that. I know you’re sorry. I can tell by looking at you that you wish you hadn’t done it. Thing is, what did you do?”
She reached for the water he’d brought in, drained the glass, stared defiantly at the emptiness as if willing it to refill.
“Had a little too much to drink,” she said.
“I can see that.”
“Slapped the hell out of my sister.”
“Well,” he said, “isn’t that something you’d do stone sober?”
“Think about it all the time.”
“I used to beat up and get beat up by my brothers every other day.”
“Stops usually when you get into your twenties, though, doesn’t it?”
They had a sad laugh over this. In the wake of the laughter she considered telling him about Barry Railey. Chances were he’d hear it,