Free Bark: Stories by Lorrie Moore Page B

the end, when she saw him putting all his stones away. He had heated them in a plastic electric Crock-Pot filled with water, she saw, and now he unplugged the thing in a tired fashion.
    “Where did you get those stones?” she asked. They were smooth and dark gray—black when wet, she could see.
    “They’re river stones,” he said. “I’ve been collecting them for years up in Colorado.” He replaced them in a metal fishing tackle box.
    “You live in Colorado?” she asked.
    “Used to,” he said, and that was that. Later that day they would see each other at the Farmacia de Jesus and look the other way.
    Kit got dressed. “Someday you, like me, will have done sufficientlab work,” Jan had said. “Soon you, like me, in your next life, like me, will want them old and rich, on their deathbed, really, and with no sudden rallyings in the hospice.”
    “You’re a woman of steel and ice,” Kit had said.
    “Not at all,” Jan had said. “I’m just a voice on the phone, drinking a little tea.”
    On their last night of vacation Kit’s suitcase arrived like a joke. She didn’t even open it. They put out the paper doorknob flag that said WAKE US UP FOR THE SEA TURTLES . The doorknob flag had a preprinted request to be woken at 3:00 a.m. so that they could go to the beach and see the hatching of the baby sea turtles and their quick scuttle into the ocean, under the cover of night, to avoid predators. But though Sam had hung the flag carefully and before the midnight deadline, no staffperson awoke them. And by the time they got up and went down to the beach it was ten in the morning. Strangely, the sea turtles were still there. They had hatched in the night and then hotel personnel had hung on to them, in a baskety cage, to show them off to the tourists who’d been too lazy or deaf to have gotten up in time. “Look, come see!” said a man with a Spanish accent who usually rented out the scuba gear. Sam, Beth, Dale, Kit all ran over. (Rafe stayed behind to drink coffee and read the paper.) The squirming babies were beginning to heat up in the warming sun; the goldening Venetian vellum of their wee webbed feet was already edged in dessicating brown. “I’m going to have to let them go now,” said the man. “You are the last ones to see these little
bebés
.” He took them over to the water’s edge and let them go, hours too late,to make their own way into the sea. And one by one a frigate bird swooped in, plucked them from the silver waves, and ate them for breakfast.
    Kit sank down in a large chair next to Rafe. He was tanning himself, she could see, for someone else’s lust. “I think I need a drink,” she said. The kids were swimming.
    “Don’t expect me to buy you a drink,” he said.
    Had she even asked? Did she now call him the bitterest name she could think of? Did she stand and turn and slap him across the face in front of several passersby? Who told you
that
?
    When they left La Caribe, its crab claws of land extending into the blue bay, she was glad. Staying there she had begun to hate the world. In the airports and on the planes home, she did not even try to act natural: natural was a felony. She spoke to her children calmly, from a script, with dialogue and stage directions of utter neutrality. Back home in Beersboro she unpacked the condoms and candles, her little love sack, completely unused, and threw it all in the trash. What had she been thinking? Later, when she had learned to tell this story differently, as a story, she would construct a final lovemaking scene of sentimental vengeance that would contain the inviolable center of their love, the sweet animal safety of night after night, the still-beating tender heart of marriage. But for now she would become like her unruinable daughters, and even her son, who as he aged stoically and carried on regardless would come scarcely to recall—was it past even imagining?—that she and Rafe had ever been together at all.

FOES

Bake McKurty was