Free The Four Ms. Bradwells by Meg Waite Clayton Page A

sometimes share a bottle of wine and a soak out there, but we always come inside to make love, if we make love at all. It’s one thing to have an adventurous lover in an anonymous city like New York, another entirely to have reckless public sex in a place where your fellow executives or churchgoers or co-presidents of the PTA might recognize you. Although Ted wouldn’t mind being caught in flagrante delicto himself. It’s the possibility of me being seen that gives him pause. Me, the mother of his children. So I guess the truth, or Ted’s truth, anyway, is that it’s one thing to have an adventurous lover, another entirely to have the woman who breastfed your son brought up on an indecency charge.
    We’ve never even made love outside here on Cook Island, now that I think of it. I have: at Rogues’ Point, in the skiff in Hunters’ Gut and Little Thoroughfare and Kizzie’s Ditch, and the first time, at Fog’s Ghost Cove in bright moonlight, with no fog in which to hide. But whenever Ted and I have made love here on what he calls “Faith’s Island,” it’s alwaysbeen in the old four-poster in Nana’s Room. Quietly, so no one would hear.
    “Did you know that in Christian art, the peacock is a symbol of immortality?” I ask, half expecting Mia and Laney and Betts to roll their eyes. They just look at me like they understand exactly what I’m thinking. Only Max looks perplexed.
    “Immortality and the incorruptible soul,” I say. “Flannery O’Connor raised them. Peacocks. She used to send feathers in her letters to friends. She once sent a five-foot-long one to Robert Lowell, after a particularly bad one of his ‘spells.’ ”
    “That’s what this weekend is missing!” Betts says. “Imagine the trouble we could stir up with a supersized peacock feather or two.”
    I smile even though I don’t feel like smiling, because I know she wants to make me smile. Heartbroken / But wearing / Fresh / Smiles , like Alice Walker’s friend arrives to visit her. It strikes me then that Laney and Betts and Mia haven’t been back here since that spring break, that this can’t be easy for them either. Laney looks a little green, and she doesn’t get seasick.
    “Clearly you ought to be the poet here, Betts,” I say. “That was Lowell’s response, too: ‘That’s all I need, a peacock feather.’ ”
    I look up at Mother’s empty house looming over us. “Well, I’m sorry to report there will be not one drop of tequila in the liquor cabinet, decent or rotgut,” I say. “Believe me, I’ve looked before.”

Laney

    THE CHAWTERLEY PIER, COOK ISLAND
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8
    I ’M FINE ENOUGH till I’m breathing in the stench of sea air and the grumble of bay water I see now I never have quite washed away. Ad undas . “To the waves,” literally, but what it really means is “to hell.”
    I stand on the bird-dropping-splattered pier, trying to attend to what Ginger is saying about her mama’s peacock book. This is hard for her, too. But I can’t find my way beyond the smells and the looming red of the lighthouse, the birds squawking and trilling and something that sounds like a cross between laughter and barking. The joy of them seems worse than anything nasty could be, laughter at the edge of a newly dug grave. Although this particular grave isn’t new. This grave is peeking out from under decades of weedy underbrush.
    It’s only three days, and Betts needs me. Surely I can tolerate three sunny autumn days with my dearest friends.
    I try to focus on how much I did love this place those first days: the white houses at the public end of the island perched like lilies on a soft summer pond; the boats arriving with their catch, all the men here crabbers; the children luring baitfish into mason jars with bits of bread and lines of string. I recall one mama crying out, “Run nor’east, honey!” to a girl with a kite who changed direction as if she were a compass. I almost wish Willie J and Manny and Gem and Joey