Free Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) by Toby Olson

wedlock, though the fact went unspoken, that I’d been the cause of their marriage, which was not a good one, and, in argument, for their fall. They might have gone out on their own otherwise. They may never have married, in the first place, at all.
    “It wasn’t sex that I caught her at, but the dangerous product of imagination, that one fatal step that took her beyond thought and into action, which in truth meant nothing to me, and when she saw me watching her she had reached the other side of the fence and there could be no going back again. I’d caught her denying her life, which was a terrible burden to her and was me, and she hated me for seeing her there, in that desired place, as defined without me. So I’d soiled it just in the moment that she’d reached it, and I think she couldn’t imagine her hate and that I’d seen it and had thus taken the only way out, appropriate that it be her heart.
    “And there was nothing to do, but that I could do something for my father, and after the funeral I told him I’d be leaving.
    “Even now I can see the look in his face, which stays with me even though he is long dead. He had to speak out of that look to hide it, but I noticed, as he was reasoning with me, halfheartedly, saying that I should stay, that he was taller than I, just a little bit, and that for the first time in a long time he was standing up straight in his body, knowing he was at the brink of freedom.
    “He was standing that way still, loose in his legs and arms, his shoulder touching the old porch column, as I headed down the rutted drive. I turned once at the gate and caught him turning away, moving toward the house. He shrugged his shoulders and stepped back to the porch edge, then lifted his arm and waved. I didn’t turn to look again, and by evening I was out of Kentucky and heading north through Ohio.”

Kelly
    I watched the men move slowly through the meadow in their heavy coats, as if they were exhausted refugees escaping a firestorm or a flood. It was three a.m. and moonlight falling on my cheek had awakened me, and I’d risen and gone to sit in my pajamas at the kitchen table near the stove and drink tea. The moon was in the porcelain on the table, and I could see it in the sky beyond the crest, its light in beach grass at the edge, and in a while I felt the weight of sleep upon me again and I’d gone back to my bedroom and crossed to pull the curtains closed, and then I’d seen them.
    John was between them, Larry and Frank, and Gino was behind, pushing the empty chair and leaning into it, spokes caught in bearberry, wheels wobbling in the meadow’s ruts. John can walk sometimes and sometimes he can’t. It’s the chemotherapy and the way he says he feels it in his joints. But he was walking now, though a little haltingly and watching his feet, and I saw Gino raise his arm and call out and the others stop and wait for him to catch up. Then they were through the meadow and climbing up the verge to the road, and I looked beyond them to that tapered cylinder, distinct in its white painted blocks of stone against the moonlit sky. There was no need for the beam on such a night, but I could see the broad circular lenses through the glass and steel rod cage, wearing its conical witch hat at the top.
    There was heavy equipment all around the lighthouse base, and a newfence, and I could see the massive I-beams that supported it, and in the moonlight I could see under them, a space tall enough for a man or a woman to stand in. The beams ran down the center of the road, like tracks, ending where the two small houses sat, awkwardly tilted, shored up and waiting for reattachment when the lighthouse arrived there. I thought about Carolyn and the Ivory soap she told me they’d be using on the beams as a lubricant. She’d be laughing and shaking her head now, then in a while, if they didn’t return, she’d call the police. She wouldn’t call the doctor. The old men had pulled this kind of thing