Free The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker Page B

look up. Maggie heard her voice hitch up a little and go even prissier, more what Dr. Levinson and them called Elizabethan: her vowels flattened and roiling like breakers across her tongue.
    Woodrow took his time coming up the hill. He took a seat third row from the bottom. Whaley read her prices right on. When she stopped to fold up one of those papers in the tight way she had like she was taking a sheet off the line, Maggie said, “Crawl wrote and said you’re going to be eighty this year, Woodrow.”
    Soon as she said it she wanted it back. How would she know what Crawl said unless she opened up Crawl’s letter and read it. She knew that Woodrow knew what all they left out of the letters Crawl wrote, how they always stopped just shy of Crawl telling Woodrow he’d be over across to get him tomorrow if Woodrow would just say the word.
    Woodrow didn’t say anything for so long that Whaley went ahead on with her prices. Then he said, in the middle of Whaley going on about something called a blow-dryer, “Crawl don’t know nothing about how old I am.”
    â€œOld enough to know better,” Maggie said without evenbreathing. She liked to tease Woodrow and he was known to take her teasing and smack it right back at her. Sometimes, sitting on the church steps, they fell into an easy rhythm of ribbing—even Whaley had been known to smile at their back and forth—and God knows if ever there were a need for some lightness, it was during that buggy yellow sunset when Woodrow all of a sudden returned to them.
    But as soon as her words were out of her mouth here came Whaley with her own. Maggie didn’t even think she was listening. When she was reading her prices it could hail and she would chant right on.
    â€œToo old to change,” Whaley said.
    Ever after, Maggie remembered the moment as if she were still sitting on those steps. Slight land breeze winging in an odor of sulfurous marsh. Orange sun lowering itself over the trees to settle, like everything and everyone else, across the sound. The way Woodrow slapped distracted at his neck as if a bug had bit him, then pulled his hand away and opened his palm and discovered there wasn’t any bug after all, as if the hurt he felt right then from her sister’s words and maybe hers too (though she meant no harm by them, was only trying to engage Woodrow in a little trash talk) were deeply inward, as if what they had done to Woodrow, what caused him to say after a minute of tense silence,
Y’all ought not to have done me like y’all done me,
would thereafter and always be antagonized by the slightest thing they said or did or did not say or do, by even a bug bite, or the threat of a bug bite, by the wind.
    Looking back was a luxury, a chance to tuck and tidy. The stories her sister told the Tape Recorders, especially the ones about her famous ancestor, weren’t all sweetness and light, but they somehow managed to wrap up in a way that left Whaley bathed in light as holy as pink Yaupon dusk. What Maggie remembered thinking and what she thought at the time: the distance between was the Pamlico Sound separating their island from the rest of the world.
    She did not think, as she ought to have thought when Whaley told Woodrow he was too old to change, You heartless bitch, what is wrong with you, you need to be sucking up to the man after what we’ve done to him, and instead you sit up there on your top step insulting him. She did not look to Woodrow, did not appraise his hurt or notice whether there was truly a bug on the hand he pulled away from the skin he slapped. She did not tend to Woodrow because, much as she hated to admit it, her sister’s words—too old to change—made her think about herself.
    Or rather of Boyd, of her life with Boyd.
    She was forty years old when she met him, and he was twenty-four. She had heard of Boyd’s arrival on island even though she did not see him up close until that