Strawberries in the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

on the gas stove, then went through the entry and out onto the back walk in her bare feet. The weathered planks were velvety under her soles, and the mild wet air cooled her hot eyes. She could see the fishhouse and wharf down the slope, and to the end of the wharf. Its one gull on his favorite corner spiling stood like an ink drawing against space. The harbor had disappeared. Something startled the gull, and he raised his wings and took off, and vanished. Anything else that went down that wharf and over the end would also vanish. It would continue to exist in its own world beyond the wall, but for the watcher here it would have ceased to exist.
    It would be so simple.
    She hurried back into the house. The tea kettle was boiling and she made a pot of coffee and then dressed in jeans and a warm shirt, with wool socks under her sneakers. She carried a mug of coffee around with her as she worked; she made her bed, she stowed away her toilet articles, she brought in a carton from the entry and loaded it with food from the bread box, the pantry shelves, and the refrigerator. She poured the rest of the coffee into a thermos bottle and wrapped bread and butter sandwiches in waxed paper.
    She wheeled one load down to the end of the wharf, and came back. This time she added her rubber boots. She hadn’t worn them for a long time, since Con had eased her out of lobstering a year ago, saying the new hydraulic hauler did so much of the work that he didn’t need someone to plug lobsters and keep the bait irons filled. Besides, he told her tenderly, his fingers in her hair, he liked to think of her at home. She had accepted this humbly, ashamed that he’d had to tell her what should have been obvious: a man wanted to be alone sometimes, his work should be his own. Nobody else’s wife went.
    Her only rebellion had been silent. She renewed her lobster license, because she’d had one ever since Papa had given her the dory and ten traps when she was twelve years old, and she felt as incomplete without one as without a driver’s license.
    The new boat was to be eight feet longer than Sea Star , and he planned to go farther offshore and try for lobsters and rig up for shrimping in the winters. Rosa had been proud and happy to sell the shore lot at Back Cove so he could have the boat of his dreams. “Tell you what,” he told her in bed. “You’re going with that boat too, you’d better believe it. We’ll have her fixed up so in the slack time next summer we can go cruising along the coast. Poke into all the gunkholes, go slumming at Bar Harbor—how about that? ”
    â€œOh Con,” she said. “You make life so much fun! I don’t know anybody that has as much fun as we do.”
    â€œAnd we’ll have more instead of less,” he promised.
    In late spring, with the new boat half built, he told her about Phyllis. Rosa was probably the last person in Seal Point to know how long he’d been seeing Adam Crowell’s young widow. Adam had been a prosperous seiner, and had eventually bought the sardine factory that gave work to a good part of both villages. When he dropped dead aboard a carrier one summer evening, he left his wife well provided for. However, he did not leave her pregnant, and, as Con told Rosa, it wouldn’t have been possible to make anyone believe it. “Adam’s been dead just a dite too long,” he said.
    She hadn’t been able to answer; she’d been barely able to think. In shock she was looking back on the months of believing Con’s reasons for being so late in from hauling, and his accounts of poker games at the firehouse, and long talk sessions in someone’s fishhouse.
    Stupefied by pain but not stupefied enough, she heard him say, “You’ll be a good sport about it, won’t you? I told her you would. I told her you’ve got the greatest heart in the world. . . . Well, I’ll just go tell her you know.