Free Sea Glass by Anita Shreve Page A

It sits on a small bluff overlooking the ocean, just at the juncture between the beach and the rocky point. Even before she emerges from the Packard, Vivian can see the water straight through the house’s windows. Scaffolding makes it hard to discern the contours of the building, but she likes the absence of landscaping. The dunes run right to the foundation.
    “I hope you’re not going to put in any lawn or anything,” Vivian says.
    “Haven’t really got that far,” Dickie says.
    “Leave it wild,” she says. “Plant shrub roses if you must.”
    “Come see the inside,” he says.
    When he opens the car door for her, she takes his arm. Already she can feel a slight breeze. Her dress is an inch too long, and she snags the hem when they step up to a boardwalk that runs across what might normally be a front lawn.
    “When was it built?” she asks as she picks up her skirts. “I’m giving up dresses, by the way,” she says.
    “You’ll look swell in pants,” Dickie says. “It was designed in eighteen ninety-nine for a doctor and his wife, but on the day
    they moved into it, she discovered that he’d been having an affair with a fifteen-year-old girl. A whopping big scandal. Well, for then. Not sure anyone would care now.”
    “Fifteen?” asks Vivian, interrupting. “Oh, people would care.”
    “He was run out of town, and the wife and children moved up to York. A writer, a poet, I think, no one you’ve ever heard of, bought the house for a song. But then he went broke almost immediately and the house was abandoned for years. I’ve had heat put in.” He glances at her. “Thinking of staying on a bit after the summer is over,” he says.
    “Really? Whatever for?”
    “Take my hand,” Dickie says. “Dangerous around here with all the unfinished woodwork. Last week a plumber stepped backward off the upstairs landing. The railing hadn’t been installed yet.”
    “What happened to the plumber?”
    “Died, actually,” Dickie says. “Not right away, but after he’d got to the hospital. Internal injuries or something. Not sure I was ever told.”
    “What happened to the girl?”
    “The fifteen-year-old? I’ve no idea.”
    “Sad,” Vivian says.
    “Everything makes you sad,” Dickie says.
    “You’re sounding kind of petulant tonight.”
    “Really, Viv, I don’t think you give a toss about what happened to some ruined fifteen-year-old girl in eighteen ninety-nine. Or to the plumber, for that matter.”
    She thinks a minute. “I like to know the ends of stories,” she says.
    And suddenly Vivian realizes why she and Dickie are together. He’s the only person who makes her tell the truth. “I like the house empty,” Vivian says as they walk into what appears to be a front room. Sandy, the dog, greets Dickie with a series of back flips. Dickie, after advertising for Sandy’s owner and receiving no response, seems more or less to have inherited the pet. “It’s too bad you have to have furniture,” Vivian says. “The rooms are just right as they are.”
    “Won’t put furniture in, then,” he says. “That’s settled. We’ll eat on the floor.”
    Vivian hears the
we.
She watches Dickie feel in his jacket pocket for his cigarette case. He takes one out and tamps it down. “Not sure I’ve ever felt this way about anyone before,” Dickie says.
    She turns away from him and walks to a window. She examines the view. “Don’t get mushy on me, Dickie,” she says lightly, crossing her arms over her chest. The tide is dead low, and the sun, setting behind them, lights up the sand flats with a tangerine light that reminds her of that horrid Tangee lipstick she sees advertised in all the magazines.
    “You never take me seriously,” he says.
    “Give me a cigarette, will you?” she asks. “You aren’t going to play the thwarted lover, I hope. Because it doesn’t suit you.”
    “For God’s sake, Viv. Give it a rest.”
    She sits on a window seat and traces the diamond pattern of the