Free Open Water by Maria Flook

exactly?”
    “I’ll tell you exactly. My stepbrother thinks he exists. I have news for him. He does not exist.”
    Holly was convinced of Willis Pratt’s conviction to ignore simple irrefutable fact. He twisted the blackened sponge and his cast became cuffed in grey suds. Sometimes his bottom lip betrayed a spasm somewhere else in his body. He handed her the sponge.
    “That’s not mine,” she told him. She wrung it out and handed it back. “That’s from
your
house.”
    Her voice clearly revealed the burden of making his acquaintance. She hated letting on that he was just too much for her. She watched him walk across the driveway. He hadn’t even said good night to her. Except for his radio voice, he didn’t use any small talk. Perhaps he knew that small talk would have tipped it a new way. She waited on her front porch for a minute, searching the black seascape. When she looked again at the big house, she saw a hall light switch on. It was the stairwell window between the first and second stories; Willis was climbing the steps. Holly waited for him to reach the landing. She was startled to see him searching the window for her, shielding his eyes from the overhead bulb. She turned away and went back inside the duplex.

Chapter Five

    W ydette died when Willis was thirteen. Driving home from Horseneck Beach, Willis still wore a white crescent of zinc oxide across the bridge of his nose, imitating the lifeguards. He had spent most of the day with Wydette exploring the salt marsh. Wydette had seen a kingfisher there for the past three seasons. The bird liked to perch on sagging cables along the beach road. The kingfisher had a big scruff of feathers, a beautiful crest like a hatchet, an ivory neck ring, and a strong beak like the blades of Wydette’s sewing shears.
    Wydette had left Cuba as a young girl. She was naturalized in Florida at the age of eighteen, the same year she was named runner-up to Miss Jacksonville. At the beach, Wydette wore a sarong bathing suit, tropic island style, like the one she had worn in the beauty pageant. The suit left a distinct tan line, straight as a carpenter’s level across her cleavage.
    Willis’s father, Lester, preferred to stay put under an umbrella. He had a Coleman cooler with a six-pack of beer all for himself and a six-pack of White Rock ginger ale for the rebound.
    On the drive home from the beach, Lester stopped inFall River to buy drinks and sandwiches. Wydette ordered a sausage and pepper grinder and Willis and Lester chose chili dogs with transparent confetti flecks of onion. In the car, his parents started arguing, insulting one another. Wydette told Lester that she wanted to learn how to water-ski. She wasn’t really serious and Lester knew she was teasing him. He didn’t like her habit of making idle plans just to bargain with him. Lester criticized her, and instead of barking back she giggled with each of his comments about her. She ate her grinder, tugging loose a long strip of green pepper and eating it with her fingers. She encouraged bad table manners and Willis exhaled air through his straw. His iced coffee bubbled over the waxed-paper cup and stained the fabric upholstery. Together, they laughed until his father started swearing and punching the seat between them. Then, with the car going fifty, Lester reached over and took Wydette’s throat with one hand. He shook her. The car swerved onto the gravel shoulder and he had to let her go and take the wheel again. He looked better, relieved just to have throttled her once; it was a release, and his anger had crested. But Wydette had swallowed something whole, a wedge of sausage, and she was choking. Willis leaned over the front seat to pound his mother’s back. Her eyes looked pinched, then wide with fear. She could not tell him what to do, her voice was on the other side of the obstruction.
    Lester pulled the car over to the shoulder and lifted his wife out of the passenger seat. He held her upside down at