The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [79]
Woodrow looked at his shoes like he always did when he didn’t want to do something she was wanting him to do. In so many ways Woodrow, like Maggie, was like a child.
“I got to take the boat out first thing in the morning,” he said. She knew this already. She’d predicted he’d use this as his excuse. She knew when he fished, knew the tides, knew his hours. She knew where he was fishing now, up the ditch behind Blue Harbor, and she knew he would not want to go up there early, bring back his catch, head out again.
“Surely you can find something to do to amuse yourself for a few hours over there.” She allowed herself a smile. He didn’t seem to notice.
“Fish’ll go bad.”
She said, “They got ice. You got coolers.”
He said, “I ain’t lost nothing over to Meherrituck I got to waste three hours trying to find.”
She said, “Take Sarah over, y’all go visit.” Whaley knew of several colored families over there at that point, assumed that Woodrow and Sarah were friendly with them, that they’d rather be around their own kind any chance they got.
“Sarah ain’t lost nothing over there either,” he said. “She ain’t about to break up her day across over there, you know that. Besides, it’s fixing to blow.”
“Woodrow Thornton!” said Whaley. “There isn’t a cloud in that sky!” She summoned up a shocked tone, tried to shame him, but she’d read the almanac and it called for squalls or worse, though it was true what she said—wasn’t cloud one in the sky that afternoon. Not that it could not change in a matter of hours, especially on the sound.
Truth was, she’d ordered a new dress. It had been well over a year since she’d bought anything for herself, some five or six since she’d ordered something instead of buying off the very limited rack over at Meherrituck. Like everyone else on the island used to, she made her own clothes. But Dr. Levinson and them were due and she wanted to look good for the camera and what was wrong with that? If she did inherit some part of her great-great-great-grandmother Theodosia, it was a love of fine, frilly things, unlike Maggie who went around for ten years in a T-shirt given her by that Boyd. She kept that shirt on her back until it was see-through as Saran wrap. It was stretched out and paint-stained and about as much protection from the elements as a couple of Band-Aids but she wore it right on until one day she was pulling it over her head and it ripped into threads. Just disintegrated. Thing had been ready for the rag bag for a good decade and still Maggie went moping around for weeks like she’d lost her best friend. Whaley wouldn’t be at all surprised if one day some archaeologist unearthed it in a grave marked with clamshell and braided sea oat.
She wasn’t about to go around looking like that herself, even when there wasn’t anyone around to see them. But they were going to have visitors, which beside the tourists the O’Malleys ferried over, who were all the time asking them to pose for pictures and leaving their picnic trash on the island and tearing up the dunes and being general nuisances, was occasion to warrant a tiny indulgence.
Oh, there were a dozen ways to justify what she did.
Woodrow wasn’t having any of her naive “not a cloud in the sky.” He would not dignify such a remark with a serious response. He’d looked straight at her then, a rare meeting of her eyes, and it had made her feel, well, guilty, even though the next moment she was back to manipulating him any way she could to get that dress.
“If it is going to blow, you’ll be back across by the time it gets bad.”
“I don’t want to get stuck over there, leave y’all by yourselves in a storm.”
He said “y’all,” but she knew he was talking about Sarah.
“We’ll look after Sarah,” she said.
Woodrow said, “Y’all check on her if it starts to blow?”
“Good Lord, Woodrow. Of course we will. What do you think?”
It was clear what he thought by the way his gaze