The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [49]
Woodrow was with his family now. She wasn’t about to go snooping around Colored Town asking directions to Crawl’s, where Sarah would treat her like a stray cat.
Everything caught up with her then: the sneaking away, the useless suitcase, the sun reflecting off the water, hot salty wind. Sweat streaked down her sides, dampening her dress. Her throat was rusted shut. Where was that boy with her sweet tea? She felt the men staring, heard the stools creek as they swiveled her way.
One sip of beer to tide her over until her tea came. She curled her hand around the bottle, shocked by its iciness against the oppressive air of the diner.
And then it was the next afternoon, and Maggie held her head in her hands, staring at a fish hook floating balefully in an inch of water in the bottom of the boat, which rocked wildly, setting off a lurch in her stomach, as Woodrow helped Sarah onto the seat beside her. Maggie could not lift her head. Snippets of the last twenty-four hours arrived out of sequence and truncated by thunderous pain in her forehead, lobe, stomach, pride, what little dignity she’d ever had. Sarah, scrunched tight on the seat beside her, felt towering and rigid compared to Maggie’s doleful slump. Somewhere in the middle of the sound, out of sight of both mainland and island she both dreaded and longed for, she would collapse from shame into Sarah’s lap. Sarah would hold her shoulders, stroke her dirty white-lady hair. Would not say a word. Would let her cry and babble and even drool onto her skirt while the piecemeal images took slow root in a murky sequence.
Beers appearing on the salt-strewn counter before her, half-eaten and abandoned cheeseburger steak pushed away and heaped with cigarette butts from the smokers who’d pushed in close to engage her in wild trash talk, then, when she declared loudly after four or five bottles of sweaty beer what she would not do to get her hands on some sweet homemade wine, invited her over to some old boy’s body shop where he had him a little something set up. Sweet as mother’s milk was this wine of his. She remembered sort of thinking as she gathered her father’s oiler around her shoulders and stumbled to the bathroom that this was it, dividing line; if she went for the wine she would lose everything she’d worked for, she’d never get him back, her life would be over. But then, she’d never had a chance. Never even had a plan. Come across with a trunk filled with seashells and photographs and eat hamburger steak? The thought of it shamed her into leaving the grill, three drunk fishermen in tow. When they arrived at the body shop, home of sweet-as-mother’s-milk wine, the day grew dimmer, the memories disassociated. More men standing around wide doors wheeled open to expose the bays where dented cars sat ignored. Someone handed her a tumbler, the wine sweet as threatened. Glen Campbell on the radio. He was a lineman for the county. A crowd of men coming and going, Maggie the only girl and not a girl, a grown woman too old to be laughing and grabbing cigarettes out the mouths of smelly fishermen in off the water on a day grown too hot to fish. She’d let slip back at the grill that she was over from the banks and nearly all the men had family somewhere up the chain or had fled the banks themselves, a whole lot of Do you know I bet you know, though she did not bring herself to tell them she rarely got off her island except a few times a year to Meherrituck. She did not mention Boyd for the longest time. When she did, not one of