Free The Long-Shining Waters by Danielle Sosin

together, and turned his back to her in the bed. Come dawn he acted like nothing had ever happened, just launched in, telling her about his dream. The thought of it gets her blood moving. She slaps the float down in her lap. He thinks that because he won’t discuss something, it somehow ceases to exist.
    The cat is rubbing against her leg, back and forth, her tail up and twitchy. “Go on, Katt-Katt.” She nudges her away, but the cat only moves to her other leg. “Go on now, you’re as stubborn as he is.”
    Berit stands at the window. The lake is dark under bulbous white clouds. She can’t see the boat, but then she didn’t expect to.
    She twirls her arms, stiff from splitting wood, and settles back in her chair with a raw float. Soon, she’s back at the window again. The dark blue lake. The clouds in the sky. Time barely moves when he’s out setting anchors.

2000
     
    “You’re sure you’re going to be okay?” Nora asks a second time from the threshold of her living room. Rose, sitting in the easy chair, nods without taking her eyes from the TV. She’d been planted in that chair for almost three weeks now, watching science shows or the History Channel. The blouse she’d borrowed hangs across her small shoulders, her body looking lost inside. She reaches to the windowsill where the sun is shining through the amber glass ashtray and taps off her ash without taking her eyes from the program.
    Nora runs over her purchases in her mind. She’d bought bourbon, bitters, and sweet vermouth; oatmeal, pancake mix, and the “real maple syrup” Rose had asked for; pickled herring, hot dogs, and toast. The only fruit Rose wanted were bananas and the maraschinos. It’s all on the cupboard’s bottom shelf, so Rose won’t have to climb a chair.
    “Well, you’re well stocked.”
    “I know. Thanks.”
    “The number is on the refrigerator. And don’t forget, Willard is coming by.”
    Nora’s suitcase, a bulky hard box, clunks along the stairwell. Joannie always rolls her eyes when it slides down the carousel at the airport, but it’s in good shape, hardly used, and Nora likes how easy it is to spot.
    She steps into the bright morning. It’s just as well to leave town. She had wanted to stay and see Rose’s reaction to the Casio piano she’d bought for her, but it had to be ordered in. Stay or go, she couldn’t decide. And then, after another harangue with the insurance company, her urge to leave won out over waiting.
    Nora slides her suitcase onto the backseat of the car, situates her notebook on the passenger seat, and closes the long creaky door. From the curb, her window in the old brick fourplex reflects the blue sky and the new green buds of the elm on the boulevard.
     
    “Forget something?” Rose asks on a stream of smoke.
    “No. Saying good-bye is all. Say, there’s a bird on the sidewalk by the stairs. I almost clobbered it with my suitcase. It didn’t even move. It might have flown into the windowpane.”
    Rose nods.
    “Well, I’m not sure how long I’ll stay, but you know where you can reach me.”
    Rose fixes her with her watery eyes, points the remote at the TV, and the room goes still. Smoke curls up from the ashtray. The shadow of a gull glides over the carpet. “Nora, listen to me. You’re going to be just fine.”
     
    The glass float looks like a bottle green baseball, hanging in its netting from the rearview mirror. It swings as Nora rounds the curve off of the bridge, her car now heading through Duluth. It always strikes her the way the lake dominates Duluth, with its hills that angle down to the shore, when in flat Superior all you see of the lake is the shipyards, and the sheltered water of the harbor.
    The wooden paddle marked SS Arnold. Nora flips her notebook open to the page headed “Pool Area,” and, with one eye on the road, adds the paddle to the list. It kills her that she can’t remember. At what point had she stopped seeing her surroundings? It’s crucial that she