Women and Other Animals Part 4

In the upholstered frontrow pew, my parents' eyes seem covered with the milky substance as well. My mother dabs her face with a Kleenex in the garden she wipes the sweat off her forehead with the bottom of her Ts.h.i.+rt. My father, who didn't even wear a suit to my aunt's funeral last year, is dressed like Fred Astaire and has got his legs crossed. The change in my parents frightens me more than walking on carpeting in threeinch heels, and I'm wis.h.i.+ng that I had carried my own weedy bouquet of wild phlox or had neglected to shave my legs or had worn a necklace of stones, done anything that would make me feel more like myself. I'm letting my sister down by being sucked into her fairy tale. Someone should always remain vigilant.

My job now is to follow the bride and the groom down the aisle. My sister's gown is something out of a 1940s movie, sleeveless and crusted with embroidery, front and back-I wouldn't let her tell me what she paid for it. Her gloves extend past her elbows, to tiny biceps unbefitting a farm girl. Though we are not a touchy family, my father reaches out from the pew and squeezes my free hand with his calloused palm. He taught me to shoot, my father, by pressing his index finger over my own to squeeze the trigger the first time. As I shuffle behind the bride and groom, I let my father's hand drop and look away so he doesn't see that I've started to cry.

When my father taught me to shoot, I was ten. First I shot at a target placed against a side of the hill in the pasture, and then at racc.o.o.ns who tried to get into the chicken house. My sister refused even to touch the shotgun she did not want to be Annie Oakley or Laura on the prairie. She wanted to be Cinderella or Snow White, pa.s.sive and pure at heart. Like the princess who couldn't bear the pea beneath the mattress, when my sister started her period, she spent three days in bed without speaking-she had seen the health movies in school, but she had honestly not believed that her own body would betray her in this way. My father always worried about my sister not learning to shoot he told my mom that a girl like her especially needed to be able to defend herself.

Page 58 From now on she has her husband to defend her, I suppose. And who knows? Maybe the two of them will have one of those lives of enduring bliss you hear about on the radio. I remain six feet behind my sister so I don't step on her train, and I take the hand of the flower girl, my cousin's daughter, who has emptied the basket of rose petals and is now fidgeting at having to walk so slowly. Suddenly, in the first unch.o.r.eographed move of this ceremony, just before pa.s.sing through the double doors beneath the "Exit" sign, my sister turns and looks back toward the altar. Had I antic.i.p.ated that she would then look at me, I'd have straightened out my face and smiled, but she catches my eyes full of tears and my mouth set grimly in the memory of shooting my first racc.o.o.n dead outside the chicken house, of the shot picking its body up off the ground and slamming it against the barn wall.

My sister wears all kinds of waterproof mascara and eye shadow, so her eyes appear especially white and alert but the fairy milk clears the instant her gaze meets mine, leaving the naked look of a girl in the water who can't swim. She stares at me for one second, two seconds. Why doesn't the groom notice my sister's distress?

He should turn her around and kiss her hard, crus.h.i.+ng those flowers in his pocket if necessary. Kiss her, I want to yell. Instead, I collect myself into a halfsmile which does not fool her. There's nothing I can do except reach down and straighten her embroidered train which I have almost just stepped on. The flower girl bends and helps, grateful for something to do. Through the back of my head I feel my parents watching.

When I was thirteen, my sister was nine. That was one of the winters both my father and my mother worked at the Halko plant making automotive armrests and glove boxes on third s.h.i.+ft, leaving the house at tenthirty at night. Though the area is starting to get built up, our house then was a halfmile from the next neighbor the police might take half an hour to get to us, so my father told me to sleep with the shotgun against the wall beside my bed. He placed it there before he left each night. "If you hear anyone outside, you get that gun," he had instructed me. "If anyone comes into this house without your permission, you blow 'em away, honey."

My sister always slept soundly-Sleeping Beauty, my mother Page 59 called her because she was lost to our world for ten or twelve hours a night. I have never needed that much sleep, but I could read without disturbing her in the bed next to mine, or reorganize the sh.e.l.ls and polished stones on the top of my dresser by shape or color or size. After my parents went to work, I sometimes got up and walked the floors of all the rooms, including what would have been my sister's room if she'd been willing to move into it. We'd cleared it out and painted it for her she could have put up filmy curtains instead of living with the burlap ones Mom helped me make. Mom began to store boxes of our outgrown clothes in the room that my sister did not occupy, and eventually she put her sewing machine and ironing board back in.

One night just after Mom and Dad left for work, when the oil burner kicked off and left the house silent, I heard the crunching of driveway gravel, steps in a man's cadence, so that I thought it must be my father returning. I looked out from the window in the landing and did not see his truck, but saw a tall stranger walking toward our porch, glancing side to side, his hands in his pockets. He wore a quilted, redchecked flannel s.h.i.+rt without a jacket though it was below freezing out. I descended the stairs and moved toward the front door as the man ascended to the porch, so that we approached one another with trepidation, he with his lacedup workboots, and myself barefoot with the shotgun loaded and pointed forward, safety off. The man did not knock, but the doork.n.o.b turned halfway. I touched it to a.s.sure myself that my parents had locked the door on their way out. The bra.s.s conducted cold from outside. I stepped back and pointed the gun at the latch.

"Wait until an intruder's in the house," my father had said, "or else you'll have to drag him inside and tell the cops that's where you shot him." He had said this as if joking, but now I envisioned myself dragging that man's body across the threshold by one limp arm or a belt loop. My father had told me to shoot a man anywhere on the abdomen, because I couldn't miss at close range, and the twelve gauge at close range would tear a man apart. When I'd shot that first racc.o.o.n outside the chicken house its body turned inside out.

The man stood on the other side of the door, perhaps deciding which window to break, or deciding how much force it would take Page 60 to destroy the front door hardware. It never occurred to me that the man might have come for warmth or merely to steal money or the television. My sister sleeping upstairs no longer seemed a regular fleshandblood girl, but had become a rare treasure like a unicorn or a living swan made of white gold, and it made sense that our house would be under siege.

The gun grew heavy against my shoulder, but the weight felt natural, and the metal of the barrel and the trigger gradually warmed to my body temperature. Whenever I'd actually pulled the trigger, I'd been bruised by the recoil now I looked forward to that burst of pain again, the price I would pay for exploding this man's stomach or heart. One blast should take him down, but if he was still standing, I'd load and shoot again. After the first, there were four shots in the magazine, enough to kill a bull, or even a vampire. After I shot that racc.o.o.n, my father dug a hole and buried it right there he said the other racc.o.o.ns would smell it and stay away.

The man stepped to the side and looked in through the skinny singlepaned window beside the door. Most likely he saw first the unidentifiable roundness of the end of the shotgun barrel, the size of a nickel, which I had moved to point straight at him. Then he cupped his hands against the gla.s.s and let his eyes adjust to the darkness, in which he gradually made out my face, my strawberry blond hair which has darkened in the years since, my freckles, my gray eyes. My face gave away nothing, and in the several seconds during which the man stared into my eyes, he might have seen his own self turned inside out.

His face seemed surprisingly delicate except for a day's growth of beard his skin was pale and his eyes dark, quiet, and dilated. I had not expected an intruder to be beautiful. I let the gun slide forward slightly, so the tip of the barrel kissed the window, clinked against the gla.s.s like the turning of a key. The pretty gaze dissolved. His jaw fell loose. As the man's face disintegrated, I stood unearthly still, not even blinking, poised to fire. I felt no fear, standing in a flannel nightgown which was both too large and too short, whose pattern of galloping horses had faded, and whose frayed ruffle moved back and forth across my legs, brus.h.i.+ng the bare skin just below my knees. I felt no fear, though my legs were thin, hardly bigger than Page 61 the barrel of the gun, and my arms were strained. I felt no fear at the prospect of shooting this man, of watching his body crumple, then dragging the corpse inside, quickly so the heat didn't escape from the house.

I held the gun up long after the man turned and walked down the steps and ran across our frozen lawn toward the road. His hands were still in his pockets, but he held his arms tight against his sides now. When he looked back over his shoulder at the house, he tripped over an apple tree stump my father had been meaning to dig out with the backhoe. He briefly lay p.r.o.ne before he took his hands out of his pockets to push himself up and continue to the road at a jog. The electricity in the air dissipated, but still I held that gun up, even after my arms began to shake, pointing it at the front door where now only the ghost of the man remained. The house air seemed dusty and suffocating. A screech owl cried broken heartedly from the woods across the road. The furnace kicked on and kicked off twice before I lifted that gun off my shoulder and let my arms hang free. I would not sleep that night but would walk the rooms of the house until morning. Under my weight the floorboards creaked in a thousand places. I returned again and again to the room where my sister slept. Hour after hour, while I kept watch, her princess hair curled onto her pillow, and all night her long dark lashes rested against her cheeks, beneath eyes clenched firmly in dreams.

Page 62 The Fis.h.i.+ng Dog At first Gwen thought it was Jake coming downstream in the boat, but it turned out to be his brother Dan. At the noise of the boat engine, the yellow Labrador retriever across the river moved up the lawn toward its house, and a great blue heron who must have been fis.h.i.+ng on the other side of the cabin launched itself into flight. Gwen watched it ascend, wis.h.i.+ng she'd known the bird was nearby so she could have spied on it. There was another guy with Dan, but she could see he was about half as big as Jake. Maybe they'd brought food. She'd like to eat something besides fish that didn't come out of a can. She reeled in her line and grabbed Dan's prow as he idled alongside the dock.

"What do you think?" yelled Dan over the engine noise.

"You got a new boat, Dan."

He cut the motor. "She's pretty, ain't she? Got a steal on her from a guy getting divorced."

"Where's Jake?" Gwen didn't usually talk to Dan. Usually she stood by while Jake and Dan talked to each other.

"That's what I come to tell you, honey. Jake's in jail."

"For what?"

"For killing a man."

"You're lying."

Page 63 ''I ain't going to lie about a thing like that. Jake didn't mean for it to happen."

"If it's an accident, they'll let him go."

"Except this ain't the first time."

Gwen pointed at the fivegallon fish pail that Dan was lifting off the boat. "Give me that."

"Gwennie, are you crying?" He rested the bucket on the dock and put his arms around her. Dan was fatter than his brother, but he didn't feel all that different close up.

Gwen thought of pulling away from him, of running in the woods until she fell into stinging nettles and poison ivy. She thought of smas.h.i.+ng her fists into Dan's chest. If she'd had an axe in her hand, she'd have swung it into a tree.

She grabbed the bucket, slos.h.i.+ng water on herself and Dan. Two of the three catfish inside were longer than her forearms. Their seaweedy whiskers brushed against the sides as they slid over one another. "I've been waiting for a catfish," she said, holding her head up to let the tears drain through the backs of her eyes.

"These come from Willow Island," said Dan. He seemed even fatter suddenly, unsure of himself, waiting for a cue from Gwen, who wasn't accustomed to giving cues, especially not to men twice her age.

"Who you got with you?" she asked. The other man made no motions to disembark.

"That's just Charley. He works at the plant with me." Charley was skinny and had no teeth so his lips caved in.

Dan took the fish from the bucket one by one and held each carefully as he nailed its head to the nearest oak the three tails strained and curled against the bark. The men stood by while Gwen stunned one with the hammer and began tearing off its skin with pliers.

"Tell me all of what happened." Though she knew better, Gwen brushed against the catfish fins and her fingers burned.

"Well, we left the Pub and was at the Tap in Roseville having a few beers, and Jake and this guy he's playing pool with gets to fighting, and Jake knocks him against a wall. But Jake don't seem to notice the guy is pa.s.sed out so he picks him up and keeps. .h.i.tting him."

Page 64 Gwen could imagine Jake, crazyeyed and drunk beyond talking to, slugging like a slugging machine gone haywire. When he was in that condition, he'd even pick a fight with Dan. Or Gwen if she didn't keep out of his way. Gwen's fingers trailed again across a catfish whisker. The pain was so sharp she was surprised not to see blood on her knuckle.

"Next thing you know, the sonofab.i.t.c.h is dead. Brain hemorrhage or some s.h.i.+t like that. So the cops show up and they figure out right away about the other charge."

"What other charge?" asked Gwen.

"The manslaughter charge."

"What manslaughter charge?"

"Well, whatever the h.e.l.l they're calling it. Up in the U.P. last winter. Jake must've told you about it. Why do you think he's been out here in the woods since February?"

The trees became thicker and taller around her. She tugged on the second catfish skin, trying not to let it split, but she stung her wrist and made a mess of it.

"Hey, Charley, toss me a beer," said Dan. Gwen looked up to see the can fly through the air. When Dan opened it, foam poured all over his hand. "How you coming there, Gwen?"

She worked slowly with the pliers on this last, smallest one, tugging around the sides evenly, removing the skin in one piece down to the tail. If what Jake had done in the U.P. was an accident, why hadn't he mentioned it to her?

"All the police had on that trouble up north was a description including them spaghetti scars on the back of his hand. It was the same deal, Jake drunk and not knowing when to quit."

"Can I see him?"

"It'd be better if you didn't, honey."

What else hadn't Jake told her about in the last five months? A wife, maybe?

Inside the cabin, Gwen fried the fish the way she would have for Jake, with cornmeal and flour in the last of the bacon grease. About the time they finished eating, Dan turned on his batterypowered fluorescent lantern. Gwen was surprised at how bugstained the Page 65 walls were, how ratty the rug looked in the cold light, and how grimy she had let her arms and legs become. She asked Dan to tell her more.

"There ain't nothing more to it."

"Does Jake own this cottage?" she asked.

"Me and Jake own it together. You can stay here as long as you want, Gwennie. Don't you worry your pretty head about that."

Dan and Charley drank beer while Gwen washed dishes with water she lugged in and heated on the propane stove. Gwen, who didn't usually drink, managed to get down three beers before she felt herself nodding off. She awoke with her forehead on the table, with Dan stroking her hair. Dan told Charley he could sleep in the rocking chair on the screen porch and threw him a sleeping bag from the boat. Then he halfcarried Gwen into the tiny bedroom with him. She felt obliged, as though refusing to go to bed with him would've been inhospitable.

Early in the morning, she crawled out of bed and heated water for powdered coffee. There wasn't much propane left. When it ran out she'd have to take the boat to Confluence to get the tank filled, which would cost twenty dollars she didn't have. She walked past Charley slumped sideways in the porch chair-he'd have a terrible stiff neck when he woke up. From her dock she watched the green Jeep pull away from the house across the river. This evening when the man got home she could watch his yellow dog hunker down again at the river's edge. Since Jake had gone, she'd seen it catch a fish in its jaws five times.

After more than two weeks without Jake, Gwen had forgotten how a big man generated heat around him the bedroom had been stifling last night. She'd never meant to sleep with Dan, but she'd let herself forget who he was when he rolled onto her. Guilt p.r.i.c.ked her, as sharp as the catfish stingers. If Jake found out, he'd punch her like she was a man, and maybe she deserved it. She pushed those thoughts below the surface. The steam rose off her coffee as mist rose from the water.

Gwen found her siphon hose and sucked gas out of Dan's tank, enough for a trip up to Confluence, two maybe if she rowed back Page 66 down without the motor. Or maybe she'd take a fis.h.i.+ng trip to Willow Island where last time she'd seen a heron carry a little snake up to its tree nest. She rinsed the fuel taste from her mouth with coffee and spat it into the river. Back in the cottage, she lifted three beers out of Dan's cooler and hid them in the kitchen cupboard. Dan called her name, and she stepped into the tiny bedroom. He didn't look as much like Jake as he had yesterday he looked more like a swollen possum washed up on her river bank.

"Come here, beautiful," he said. She hesitated, but the room was small enough that he was able to reach across, grab her arm, and drag her to the bed. He pulled off her loose jeans without unzipping them and pushed her Ts.h.i.+rt up around her shoulders. She bent her knees and tried to sit up, but he held her down with one hand and ran the other over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and along her stomach. He pushed her knee out to the side and heaved himself onto her, then worked his hand beneath her b.u.t.tock to tilt her, pus.h.i.+ng deeper. He sighed her name in hot breath. She turned her head to look out the window but saw only empty sky. She wondered how she had let this happen. "Oh, Gwennie," he moaned again, and she felt his sickening heat over her face, through her hair, filling the room. She longed to see a heron fly across the sky framed by the window, its neck pressed into a tight S. She needed to feel that prehistoric swoop or hear the monster shriek of an angry male. A flash of bluegray wing and she would survive this.

After Dan rolled off her, he fell asleep. Gwen pulled away from him and picked her clothes up off the floor with shaking hands. In the kitchen she sifted weevils out of the flour for pancakes-she needed to do something measured. Each time she let herself think of Dan lying in her bed, she had to sit and hold her head in her hands.

She thought about grabbing the butcher knife with the burned handle and going back in there. She'd feel for a place between two ribs and sink the blade in. When Charley appeared in the kitchen with his gummy smile, holding his neck, she invited him to sit at the table. She opened a beer, poured half of it in her batter, then handed the open can to Charley. His company calmed her stomach. "Are you hungry, Charley?" she asked. "Did you sleep good?"

Page 67 "You's got a toilet around here?" asked Charley. Gwen directed him to the outhouse.

When Dan and Charley first powered away, Gwen was relieved. But as soon as the boat rounded the bend, she felt lonesome and nauseated. Dan had given her the food from his cooler-cheese, summer sausage, and sleeves of crackers-before pulling away to return to his wife. Later Gwen discovered two twentydollar bills on her pillow. She wished Dan had said something like, "Jake wanted me to give you this."

Hours later, after the Jeep returned, the fis.h.i.+ng dog appeared in his place on the other side of the river. To lighten the boat for rowing, Gwen pulled off the outboard with shaking hands and placed it carefully on blocks so as not to bend the propeller, then rowed across. She had never touched the dog or seen him up close, but when she called him, he jumped into her boat. Gwen petted his head, which seemed to repel drops of water. "I'll call you King," she whispered, thinking of the bigheaded kingfisher bird who lived across the river from her dad's trailer in Snow Pigeon. She didn't consider it stealing when she took the dog to her side and let him out to sniff the water's edge. If he wanted to stay and chase the racc.o.o.ns up trees, that would be his choice. With a companion like him, Gwen wouldn't mind staying in the woods. But it wasn't long before she heard a man's voice shouting, "Renegade!" The dog plunged into the water and swam the fifty or so yards to the other side.

A week of heavy rain made Gwen a prisoner in the cottage. When Jake was there, she hadn't minded so much being without a phone or a radio, but now she longed for voices. Back in Snow Pigeon, after years of pleading, she and her sister Paula had finally talked their dad into getting phone service. They'd been working on getting him to buy a television next. But even just bickering with Paula would have been entertainment enough now. The rain banged on the corrugated roof, making the same sound as rain hitting their trailer.

Years ago Gwen's father used to take her fis.h.i.+ng Paula was too Page 68 fidgety, too noisy, Daddy said. Gwen used to practice sitting stone quiet sometimes so she could be a good girl in the boat. For the last couple years, though, when Daddy came in from work in the evenings, he just brooded and drank. For months before she left, Daddy, quiet in the best of times, hadn't spoken to her except to yell at her, and Paula was mad because Gwen upset Daddy by not staying away from boys. When Jake had started fis.h.i.+ng in the river in front, talking sweet while Daddy was still at work, he had seemed like a knight to the rescue. When he asked her to come down the river with him, she'd hardly hesitated. And since she'd left in April, she'd never dared call Daddy or Paula, even to let them know she was alive. Gwen could still feel their anger flowing with the river's current all the way from Snow Pigeon.

The first day the rains let up, Gwen crossed the river. She called the dog to her boat, and he jumped in. But before she could push off, the man who drove the Jeep appeared from behind the shed and stepped kneedeep into the water to grab the prow of her boat. He was thin and probably only a few inches taller than Gwen.

"Evening," he said calmly. "Where are you taking my dog?"

"Acrcrcross the river. I just . . . I live over there."

"I know where you live, but why are you taking Renegade?" His biceps strained against his bones. Tendons stood out on one side of his neck as Gwen continued rowing in place without speaking. He said, as much to himself as to her, "You're just plain not going to answer me."

Mosquitos lined up on Gwen's legs and arms, and she could feel them settling onto her face and sinking their stingers. She watched two, then three, then five mosquitos land on the man's forehead. His hair fell straight down from a center part if it were any darker, it wouldn't have been blond. When he let go of her boat with one hand to swat at mosquitos, Gwen was able to break free. The man folded his arms and stood in the water watching her, looking more perplexed than angry as she rowed away. His jeans were soaked up past his knees, and his figure grew smaller as Gwen approached her own side. She parked at her dock, and King jumped out and swam to shallower water to sniff along the muskrat holes and mangled Page 69 roots. The man across the river disappeared and returned with binoculars and walked the plank onto his oilbarrel float. Twenty minutes later he called, "Renegade!"

When Gwen motored to Confluence to buy toilet paper and bottle gas, she didn't go near the Pub for fear of seeing Dan. Partway home, just above Willow Island, she cut the engine and floated downstream with the current, rowing only to fix her direction. The miles of dark, empty river belonged to her, but she'd have traded it all for one party, where music played and people danced under lanterns strung treetotree. She'd drift near the bank or near a big island, and the people would motion her over to join them. Instead, she rounded the last bend above her hut and saw a speedboat there. A bright, cold light shone from inside the cabin-Dan's fluorescent lantern. She steered herself toward the opposite bank, soundlessly maneuvering to the downstream side of the fis.h.i.+ng snag just below King's house. She watched her cottage until the light went out, and then she lay her head on a faded orange life vest. Over and over, she shrugged away the memory of Dan's hairy belly and crus.h.i.+ng weight.

Gwen awoke s.h.i.+vering to barking and pale sunlight. King was licking her face. She pushed her fingers into the dog's fur, but when she saw a man standing over her, she jumped up and threw one foot into the boat. The Jeep driver looked into her face.

"I'm sorry," said Gwen. Her clothes were caked with mud.

"Sorry for what?"

"For taking your dog."

"Don't worry," he said. "Dogs are loyal. You feed them and they come back to you." He nodded toward her cabin. ''If you're hiding from this guy, you can come to my house. He's going to see you if you stay here."

She checked the knot holding her boat to the fallen maple, then, unsure what else to do, followed the man along the river path. The dew that coated the weeds and gra.s.s would be slow to burn off. Where the poison ivy had climbed to the tops of trees, the triple leaves had already turned autumn red.

The side door opened into a kitchen with whitepainted walls, Page 70 yellow countertops, and a glossy wooden floor. But the baseboards were pulled away, revealing the uneven gap where the wallboards met the floorboards, and the table was piled with newspapers and books. "Do you want coffee?" the man asked. "Bathroom's through there if you need it."

She ventured onto a raw plywood floor, into what should have been a living room but contained a rumpled, queensized bed. Through the sliding gla.s.s door Gwen saw her dilapidated cabin on stilts, stained cottage green, Dan's boat still parked at its dock. The top drawer of a dresser was open a few inches, exposing a cache of pure white bras and underwear. Gwen hadn't seen a woman here since she'd been watching, since Jake had disappeared. She traced her finger along the scalloped lace edge of a bra. When the man appeared in the doorway, Gwen hurriedly shut the drawer.

"Oh, don't worry. She's long gone. I guess she left those for my next girlfriend."

"I'm sorry." A woman who wore those things was probably a great loss.

The man handed Gwen a mug of coffee almost white with cream. Jake had insisted she learn to drink coffee instant and black. She inhaled the aroma so deeply that she had to touch the dresser to steady herself. She had eaten French fries in Confluence yesterday, but nothing else.

"Do you want to take a shower?" he asked.

"No."

"You can't wear those clothes. Take something of Danielle's."

Gwen looked at the dresser and back at him.

"Why the h.e.l.l not?" He laughed. "I was going to throw all her clothes in the river, anyway, let them float away with the current. Go ahead and take anything you want."

She took a long draw of the coffee, which tasted so good she didn't want to swallow. It didn't surprise Gwen that the man would want to take care of her after Daddy, Jake had taken care of her, and Dan would now if she let him. She looked for a place to rest her cup, but the dresser top looked too clean, and she didn't want to leave a ring. In fact she didn't want to leave any trace that she had been here. In a lower dresser drawer she found and rejected the neatly folded Page 71 blouses in pink, white, and mint green. The other dresser contained a tangle of the man's blue jeans, Ts.h.i.+rts, and sweats.h.i.+rts. She put on one of each, and even the jeans weren't a bad fit when she cinched them at the waist with the most worn of three leather belts. She draped her muddy clothes over the side of the bathtub and wondered if this guy was accustomed to women who dressed as though every day was their wedding day and who never got smeared with creosote or fish guts.

She managed to retrieve her coffee from the plywood floor without spilling it. Another room opened off the living room and was probably supposed to be the bedroom, when it wasn't torn down to wall studs. In the middle of the room, balanced on sawhorses, was the curved wooden skeleton of what looked like a boat.

Back in the kitchen, she found the man cooking. He placed items on the newspapercovered table one at a time, and each thing glowed as it pa.s.sed through a shaft of sunlight: plates, forks, two glistening jars of jelly, a stick of yellowwhite b.u.t.ter on a creamcolored plate.

"You've got to be hungry." He held out his hand and shook hers. "I'm Michael. Mike Appel. I've lived here for a year, and other than the guy next door, you're the first person from the neighborhood who's been in my house. You'd think on a river, people'd always be socializing." He gestured with the spatula. ''But look at you-you get house guests, you run off."

"I'm Gwen. Gwendolyn."

"That's a pretty name." He repeated it wistfully. "Gwendolyn."

They way he laughed as he talked made Gwen want to say more, to add, "It was my mother's name too," but then she might end up trying to explain to a stranger that her mother left a husband and daughters, six and eight, and never even wrote. Michael pushed aside several books that lay open on top of each other and set a gla.s.s of orange juice and half an omelet in front of her. Gwen was careful not to put her gla.s.s down on the pages or the covers. One book with a library sticker was called Building Bookshelves. A paperback was called More Greek Mythology.

"What do you do over there at that little house?"

She shrugged. "I fish." Gwen thought the omelet, with mushrooms, onions, and peppers, was the best thing she'd ever tasted.

Page 72 Next time she was in Confluence, if she had money, she'd buy eggs. She had only six dollars and some change left.

"I've never fished," he said. "Don't even know how to fish, but I'm building a boat."

"Fis.h.i.+ng is easy," said Gwen.