Free The Bay of Love and Sorrows by David Adams Richards

small solitary figure with her quart jug.
    “Blueberry,” Vincent said. He smiled again, closing his eyes automatically, his teeth perfectly straight and white, and there was a smell of manure in the wind. It was as if her love of blueberries had caught her for them.
    Tom threw down the hay bale, turned and walked, faster and faster, and finally broke into a run across the dried field stubble. All the while he did not know if he should be going towards her.
    He reached the property marker at the back of the field, and he could now smell his own sweat, and something else — fear. He did not know why, but he was very afraid. He watched her a moment. He could not bring himself to imagine why he had not seen her for almost two weeks. And yet, besides this, he was afflicted by a kind of agony of delight.
    He did not walk up the road but climbed the old bare barbed-wire fence and went into the woods. Here it was cool and he could smell the shade. He tried to think. He couldn’t. He felt himself begin to shake, as if he were cold.
    “Ill give her one more chance,” he kept saying to himself over and over again, without realizing he was saying it.
    On his left, the roadway where she had walked was dusty and white. Patches of the road were shaded, and in amongst the trees were the remnants of the old forest-fire growth, where blueberries now flourished.
    Tom, thinking he was going to tell her off, knelt instead and picked as many berries as he could, using his shirt as a catch-bag. He picked enough to fill a quart jug, and stepped onto the lane. He squinted in the sun and at first he didn’t see her.
    Then he realized he had come into the road ten yards above her. She was standing behind him, and had been watching him for some time. The first impression he had was that she was very sad. There was a mixture of kindness and sadness in her eyes. He thought of how he’d kissed her eyes that night in Bathurst when she had sat on his knee.
    He then thought of her father and her stepmother, how one day the week before they had driven behind his tractor, and impatiently honked as they passed him. He was filled with anger at this now-obvious slight, at the idea of the stinginess of the stepmother, and how that would influence Karrie about a wealthy man like Michael Skid. This was what he reflected upon as he stared at Karrie, and he now saw in her those same qualities he had always disliked in her family.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. He did not know why he said that. At this moment she looked inscrutably upon him, while at the same time bending over slightly to scratch her leg below her billowy white shorts. He had once teased her about those shorts, saying he could make two sails with them. She was wearing makeup and he could smell her perfume on the air. It was a delicate fragrance just lingering upon the sweltering heat.
    “So you were spying on me,” she said. She smiled, but her lip trembled just a bit.
    “He’s not our people,” he said. “I can’t tell you what I know — but I do.” He was saying something that was diminishing himself in his own eyes. That is, he wanted to tell her about Michael and Nora Battersoil — her own cousin — but even now he couldn’t bring himself to. He stopped short, almost apologetically.
    “I mean, his farm means nothin because though it’s twice as big as mine he don’t work it — the hay will rot — the stalls are broken — why do he need it? He got that big sailboat from his dad.
    “I could play the geetar — he could play the geetar but it would be different. He got money comin in, but he likes bein poor. I tell ya somethin else — ya’s a play toy for him, if ya thinks yer not.”
    But when he said this, he was admitting to himself and to her that he believed perhaps something had gone on. She gave a slight start with her eyes, just discernible to someone looking into such eyes as he was at the moment.
    He pictured himself at this moment outside of his body and saw a man