The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [53]
“Beg your pardon?”
“You said, I’d think. Would think. Never you mind the thinking about what goes where. It ain’t much choice, is it, since we don’t have nothing and got nowhere to put our nothing.”
She knew by his grammar that she’d angered him. He knew she preferred he not speak to her as he would a barmaid.
She said, “I’m sorry, Whaley.”
He said he knew she was sorry. He said in the way people say, “I know you’re sorry,” which makes you understand how pitiful you would be to them were they in the mind to pity you. He lit a fire, went out. She sat in the one crude chair he’d built and did not look at the portrait. Instead she studied her body. She’d spent hours since the moment she’d come to in the widow Royall’s cottage observing the scars and bruises across her arms, legs, and neck, for they kept fresh the debt she owed Whaley. Another reminder was the throbbing in her bones when the sky turned dark and a storm whipped across the island, a new sensation since her injury. Lingering pain she accepted without question, for it was so vastly preferable to the things she’d wasted time worrying about in her other life. She remembered once at DeBordieu an afternoon of incessant worrying over whether Joseph’s family might take offense if she did not come down to dinner that evening.
Now the weight of what she had done hung over everything. He’d hardly looked at her when fetching her from the widow Royall, who, like every other woman on the island who had come to take turns sitting with her and helping dress her wounds and attending selflessly and often brusquely to her condition, assumed they were married. “Yonder your husband comes,” she’d said when she’d spotted Whaley making his way up the lane to her cottage. “He’s a sturdy one,” she’d added, hint of a smile so slight in her choice of the word “sturdy” that Theo did not know whether to appear appreciative or embarrassed.
So too did every exchange she’d had with Whaley that day seem fraught with ambiguity. She was relieved when he went out, but as soon as he was gone she wished for his return. He was gone all day. She set about stowing her few hand-me-downs in the single bedroom that appeared obviously lived in—his clothes on the floor, a blanket on the tick, a conch shell filled with whale oil and a stringy wick on the table—picked at a bit of supper from some salted mullet and biscuits he’d left for her by the fire and waited up for him in bed. But when he came in, well after dark, he stayed in the parlor.
She caught him undressed to the waist as he lay down on a pallet of rags by the fire.
“They think we’re married,” she said. “Every last one of them referred to me as Missus Whaley. So you might as well sleep in the bedroom. Alongside me. Because we’re married and that’s what married couples do.”
She’d not planned on behaving so boldly, though she knew whatever she sacrificed would not come close to equaling what she owed him. That was one way, an obvious way, she might make amends. What surprised her was how she felt no shame, inviting this man to her bed. In the months she’d been away from him, he’d changed greatly. The Old Whaley nickname no longer fit, for he looked younger than she assumed he was, just shy of forty. His beard was graying but it was cropped, his hair had been trimmed, and the muscle he’d put on while building the cottage bunched across his back and shoulders.
She did not think, until after she made her offer, of her own body, of how distasteful she might appear to him. But what he said next pushed the thought out of her mind.
“I believe I know what married folk do. I’ve been married this past going on eighteen years.”
“You’re married?”
“Four children too, God willing they prosper still.”
“But why did you not tell me before?”
“You never tried to be my wife before.”
Now the shame arrived. She wanted to retreat to her bed, but she hurt too much to move. Sometimes her injuries burned wildly and anew, pain triggered by guilt over what she’d done—her vanity, her selfish prideful clinging to her past—and how it had dragged Whaley away