Fortune's Rocks Read Online Free PDF

over the edge of the railing at the stranger in the white linen dress drawing nearer to them, she sees that they all have dark eyebrows (even the boy) and the same strong, wide mouth. The two older girls have shed their baby fat and are quite slender; the eldest girl, Olympia notes, will one day have considerable height since her shoulders are already broad and her legs long. The girl stands with her feet spread slightly apart and with her hands on her hips. Her pale blue dress, with its white collar and delicate embroidery, seems at odds with her athletic stance; and she is, as Olympia watches her, slightly challenging in her posture.
    The other girl is shy and has a hand to her mouth. The youngest girl and the boy are continuously in motion, unable to stop at any one place upon the porch for fear of missing another vista that might prove to be almost unbearably exciting. As the children take in the lawn and the rocks and the sea and then the young woman who is approaching them, they have about them an expression Olympia recognizes from herself the previous day: a nearly frenzied inhaling of the first stingingly heady breaths of summer.
    Once on the porch, she stops first to say hello to the two smaller children, who bend their heads in embarrassment, and then to the middle girl, who shyly takes Olympia’s hand but does not utter a word, and then to the oldest girl, who tells Olympia her name is Martha.
    “I am Olympia Biddeford,” she says. The girl takes her hand but looks over her right shoulder.
    “And I am John Haskell,” she hears a voice announce behind her.
    Olympia makes a half turn. She sees walnut hair, hazel eyes. The man nods almost imperceptibly. His shirt is wilted in the humidity, and the hems of his trousers are frosted with a fine layer of wet sand. He stands with his hands in his pockets, his braces making indentations in his shoulders. The cuffs of his shirt are undone, though he has not gone so far as to roll them. She guesses, in the brief period of time it takes him to cross the porch and extend his hand, that he is about the age of her father, perhaps a year or two younger, which would put him at about forty. He is not stocky exactly, because he has height, but he is broad-shouldered. She has the sense that his clothes confine him.
    As he takes her hand, he steps from the shade of the porch into a rectangle of sunlight. Perhaps there is the barest trembling of her fingers in his palm, for he quickly tilts his head so that the sun is not in his eyes. He glances down at their clasped hands and then again at her face. He does not speak for some seconds after that, nor does she. Not a word, not a greeting, not a pleasantry. And Olympia thinks that her mother, who is just coming out onto the porch at this time, must see this silence between them.
    “I am pleased to make your acquaintance,” Olympia says finally.
    “And I yours,” he says, releasing her hand. “You have met Martha.”
    Olympia nods.
    “And this is Clementine,” he says, gesturing to the shy middle girl. He turns around to find the smaller children. “And those in motion are Randall and May.”
    Olympia feels, through the body, a sensation that is a combination of both shame and confusion.
    “Do you swim?” Martha asks beside her, her voice breaking through the warm bath of John Haskell’s greeting like a spill of ice water upon the skin.
    “Yes, I do,” Olympia says.
    “Are there shells upon the beach?”
    “Many,” she answers.
    Olympia wants suddenly to leave the porch and the watchfulness of her mother, who has not moved over the threshold of the doorway nor spoken a word.
    “What kind?”
    “What kind of what?” Olympia asks distractedly.
    “Shells,” Martha says with some impatience.
    “Well, there are oysters and mussels, of course. And clams.”
    “Do you have a basket?”
    “I think one can be found,” she says.
    John Haskell walks away from them. He leans against the railing of the porch and studies the