Strawberries in the Sea Read Online Free PDF

branch of lilac to smell the damp blossoms, listening to the foghorns beginning. Seal Point Light sounded close enough to be just off her wharf, Ram’s Head was muffled by distance, others were still farther away. When she shut her eyes her head reeled. The day had been so long that now it seemed as if her appointment with the lawyer must have been a week ago instead of early afternoon. She would have to sleep tonight, from sheer weight of fatigue.
    She had moved downstairs, away from the bed she and Con had shared, to the big room off the kitchen and living room that had been her parents’. It hadn’t been much help, but it had been handy for making all the cups of tea and coffee and cocoa she’d drunk at midnight or at two in the morning through the recent weeks.
    In bed tonight she couldn’t sleep after all. She could only go over and over the visit to the lawyer’s office. It was as if she had attended her own hanging and her ghost was still anxiously loitering about the scene of her violent death because it didn’t know yet it was dead. But Con still lived, he was solidly of this earth, involved with life, wound up in it, making love and begetting children, moving from one bed to another as if it were no more than changing his socks.
    She shivered and her teeth chattered, she pulled extra covers up tightly around her and lay staring into the foglight waiting for the spasm to subside.
    Lilacs and fog came in at the windows, the foghorns, a dog barking. Poor Con, no wonder he’d looked stunned and sick when he walked out today, with her screeching after him like a harpy. He was caught in a cleft stick, all right, and she was squeezing it together on him.
    Oh, poor Con, she thought, growing voluptuously warm with pity. She understood. She of all people knew what it meant when he said, “She turns my guts inside out just by looking at me.” All right, so it was another woman he was talking about, and no amount of moaning and whining was going to change that. But, if that was the way he felt about Phyllis, he was no more to blame than if he’d come down with pneumonia. She knew; it was the way she felt about him .
    So, if she wasn’t going to be around this summer, what was the harm in his using the wharf and fishhouse? Besides, to leave them unused would be pure spite, like throwing those perfectly good shoes into an alder swamp.
    She got out of bed and went into the kitchen without putting on any lights till she got to the corner where the telephone was. Then she switched on the pin-up lamp so she could see to dial. But as she lifted the telephone her own excitement repelled her. Sure you just don’t want to hear his voice again? she jeered. Sure you don’t want him rampsing in here tomorrow morning and hugging you up?
    She put the telephone down. Con wouldn’t be back at his boarding house for the night yet, anyway. He’d be at Birch Harbor. She’d have to give the message to Sam or Geneva Rowland.
    And, if you’re willing to talk to one of them, especially Geneva, she thought, that proves—what? Only that you do want Con to come here tomorrow. You don’t care how or why, as long as he comes and you can eat him up with your eyes. And you won’t go away if he’s using the wharf, because you know he’ll come into the house each time till he gets you where he wants you. . . . And you’re such a damn soft custard of a woman you’d take anything you could get.
    She shut her eyes, folded her arms and pressed them against her breasts until they hurt. After a few moments she put off the light and went back to bed.

CHAPTER 4
    S he was overtaken by sleep like a blow on the head and woke up just as suddenly, as if someone had called her or shaken the bed. The light was paler; you couldn’t call it brighter, it had the dead quality of dense fog. It was almost four by her watch.
    She went out into the kitchen and put the tea kettle