Free The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan Page B

“Congratulate me. I’m engaged.”
    Kit had woken up in the bed across from my own and was propped on her elbows, snickering into her sheets.
    “Gracious me,” Sister Bede said, leaning from the window. “Isabel’s down there.”
    “And Boyce,” I called out, “the luckiest fellow in the world.”
    “That I am,” he called back to peals of laughter from Isabel.
    “Hush. You’ll have all the girls up any minute. Mother Febronie, too,” Sister Bede said. “I’m closing the shutters.”
    “Wait. Please,” I said to Sister Bede and turned back to the window. “Yes,” I called down. “I’ll be your maid of honor. I’d like to, very much, more than anything.” No doubt there would be a flock of bridesmaids, but she had singled out me.

    I sabel smoothes a length of wafer paper over a baking sheet and says, “When Boyce broke off our engagement, I reminded him about the ring, that he’d made a promise. He stammered out some nonsense about the ring being a token of affection. Not a promise.”
    “Then why did he take it back?”
    “I threw it at him,” she says. “It chipped his tooth.”
    “He loved you. He was with you at my window that night, saying he was the luckiest fellow in the world.”
    “Never mind,” she says, waving her hand. “Water under the bridge.”

    W hen we hear the Runabout, Isabel unties the strings of her apron and hangs it in the pantry, and Mother signals for me to do the same. All this for Edward, who is unlikely to notice a thing and who would only find it embarrassing on the off chance that he did. “Hurry up,” Mother says. I walk to the pantry slowly, all the while contemplating wiping the flour from my hands on my pretty dress.
    “Edward,” Isabel says in the yard. “What a treat.” Her outstretched hand squeezes his left, which hangs witlessly at his side.
    As I watch him take in the length of me, heat flares in my cheeks. “Heading out?” he asks.
    “No,” I say, “just playing dress up.”
    “Oh.”
    “You’re too used to us in black,” Isabel says.
    His expression remains unchanged, vaguely blank. He has entirely missed the reference to the wool crepe of the academy. In his defense, it has been two years since Isabel graduated. Still, only a month ago he visited his six younger sisters in the Loretto parlor, all of us in somber black.
    “You remember our Loretto dresses?” I say.
    “Of course.” He nods recognition, at long last.
    “Sit down for a bit,” Mother says, nudging the wicker rocker toward him. Once he is seated in the rocker, and Isabel and I in less comfortable chairs, Mother excuses herself and goes into the house.
    A moment later Isabel, in the role of attentive hostess, says she has left the kettle boiling and would he like a cup of tea? She is on her feet and through the screen door before he has a chance to refuse, leaving just the two of us.
    “Well,” I say.
    “Well.”
    I smile, just barely, like a child from behind her mother’s legs, and he glances away. We sit quietly, unable to look each other squarely in the face, until he says, “I hear they took another floater out of the whirlpool yesterday.”
    Like most children in Niagara Falls, Edward and I grew up trading stories about the bodies pulled out of the river and the dreadful men who undertook the task. They were bleary-eyed and lecherous, and would tell you to throw yourself over the brink if you asked. It meant a bottle of rye whiskey as payment, a little wet on their tongues. For generations there had been at least one on the river, waiting to spy a bit of yellow-pink, a bit of flesh, bobbing in a pool. If only the floater could be gotten to and pulled in before the river whisked it away.
    I have long since outgrown such talk; still, the familiar terrain is a relief and I say, “The summer months always mean a rash of suicides.”
    Then we are back to averted eyes and bashful smiles until he jumps up from the rocker, saying he forgot something in the