Free Andre Dubus: Selected Stories by Andre Dubus

crest like quick smoke; she turned to the beach, watched the wave over her shoulder: breaking it took her with head down and outstretched arms pointing, eyes open to dark and fast white foam, then she scraped sand with breasts and feet, belly and thighs, and lay breathing salt-taste as water hissed away from her legs. She stood and crossed the beach, toward her clothes.
    He was sleeping. In the dark she undressed and left her clothes on the floor and took a nightgown to the bathroom. She showered and washed her hair and when she went to the bedroom he said: ‘Do you always get up when it’s still night?’
    ‘I couldn’t sleep.’
    She got into bed; he placed a hand on her leg and she shifted away and he did not touch her again.
    ‘In three months I’ll be thirty-nine.’
    ‘Thirty-nine’s not bad.’
    ‘I was born in the afternoon. They didn’t have any others.’
    ‘What time is it?’
    ‘Almost five.’
    ‘It’s going to be a long day.’
    ‘Not for me. I’ll sleep.’
    ‘Night worker.’
    ‘They were Catholics, but they probably used something anyway. Maybe I was a diaphragm baby. I feel like one a lot of the time.’
    ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
    ‘Like I sneaked into the movie and I’m waiting for the usher to come get me.’
    ‘Tell him to shove off.’
    ‘Not this usher.’
    ‘You talking about dying?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘What then?’
    ‘I don’t know. But he’s one shit of an usher.’
    She believed she could not sleep until he left. But when she closed her eyes she felt it coming in her legs and arms and breath, and gratefully she yielded to it: near-dreaming, she saw herself standing naked in the dark waves. One struck her breast and she wheeled slow and graceful, salt water black in her eyes and lovely in her mouth, hair touching sand as she turned then rose and floated in swift tenderness out to sea.

KILLINGS
    O N THE AUGUST morning when Matt Fowler buried his youngest son, Frank, who had lived for twenty-one years, eight months, and four days, Matt’s older son, Steve, turned to him as the family left the grave and walked between their friends, and said: ‘I should kill him.’ He was twenty-eight, his brown hair starting to thin in front where he used to have a cowlick. He bit his lower lip, wiped his eyes, then said it again. Ruth’s arm, linked with Matt’s, tightened; he looked at her. Beneath her eyes there was swelling from the three days she had suffered. At the limousine Matt stopped and looked back at the grave, the casket, and the Congregationalist minister who he thought had probably had a difficult job with the eulogy though he hadn’t seemed to, and the old funeral director who was saying something to the six young pallbearers. The grave was on a hill and overlooked the Merrimack, which he could not see from where he stood; he looked at the opposite bank, at the apple orchard with its symmetrically planted trees going up a hill.
    Next day Steve drove with his wife back to Baltimore where he managed the branch office of a bank, and Cathleen, the middle child, drove with her husband back to Syracuse. They had left the grandchildren with friends. A month after the funeral Matt played poker at Willis Trottier’s because Ruth, who knew this was the second time he had been invited, told him to go, he couldn’t sit home with her for the rest of her life, she was all right. After the game Willis went outside to tell everyone goodnight and, when the others had driven away, he walked with Matt to his car. Willis was a short, silver-haired man who had opened a diner after World War II, his trade then mostly very early breakfast, which he cooked, and then lunch for the men who worked at the leather and shoe factories. He now owned a large restaurant.
    ‘He walks the Goddamn streets,’ Matt said.
    ‘I know. He was in my place last night, at the bar. With a girl.’
    ‘I don’t see him. I’m in the store all the time. Ruth sees him. She sees him too much. She was at