Page 43 of Everything You Hate
It is a good match. I have said the words several times since and they remain true each time, which is how I know they are the wrong words.
I have met Mr. Fairchild once, at the Ashworths’, for the length of time it takes to be introduced and to say something about the weather. I remember that he is tall and that his coat was very fine. I remember nothing he said. I am not certainhe said anything to me directly, and I have been turning the evening over all afternoon trying to recall whether I answered a question or only smiled, and I cannot produce the memory, which suggests it was the second.
That is the man. Seven months. I have seven months to learn the rest of him.
Mother came up after and sat on the edge of the bed and told me I was fortunate, and she is right, and I let her tell me. She said that affection follows. She said her own marriage began as an arrangement between two men over a ledger and that she came to love my father in time, and I believe her, and I did not say the thing I was thinking, which was: how long did it take.
She would have answered honestly. That is the trouble with my mother. She would have said four years, or seven, or never, and then we would both have had to sit with it, and she would have gone down to dinner carrying something she has spent thirty years setting down carefully.
So I said I was fortunate, and she kissed my forehead, and we were both spared.
I walked down to the harbor after, which I know I should not do alone, and which I have done twice a week since I was fifteen.
The Haven boat was in. I did not go and speak to him. I stood at the end of the north pier with my hands in my coat and watched three men unload crates in the wind, and one of them was Thomas, and I have known that for the whole of this entry and have taken four pages to arrive at it.
He did not see me. Or he saw me and understood that I was not there to be seen, which is likelier, because he has always understood that sort of thing without instruction.
I thought: I could go down there.
I thought: and say what.
There is nothing to say. He has no money and no name and no prospect of either, and a fisherman does not marry a Merrick, and I have known this since I was seventeen years old and first noticed that I looked forward to Thursdays. It was never a thing that could happen. Nothing has changed today. Father’s announcement altered nothing at all except that it has made permanent a fact that was already permanent, and I am unable to explain why that should be the difference.
But it is the difference. Something closed this morning over the breakfast things, and I have been walking around all day trying to find where.
I will be a good wife to Charles Fairchild. I will learn what he takes in his tea and what he thinks about the tariff and which of his relations must be flattered. I will run his house better than his mother runs hers. I am well suited to this. I have been trained for it the way a horse is trained, patiently and from a great distance, and I will do it well and no one will ever have cause to say otherwise.
And every Thursday for the rest of my life, at four o’clock in the afternoon, I will think about the north pier.
That is not disloyalty. It is only weather. It will pass over, and I will stand in it, and no one will know it is raining.
Chapter Ten
Dean
Bodhi parks the truck sideways across my dock space with the tires on the wood and the engine still running. He doesn’t cut it. He just sits there for a ten-count with both hands white-knuckled on the wheel and his jaw doing that thing where it looks like he’s trying to crack his own teeth.
I set the wrench down and wipe my hands on a rag. Captain squawks from the console, “Abort, abort!” and Bodhi finally shoves the door open and climbs out.
He looks like hell. The dark circles have graduated to full bruises under his eyes, and that button-down he’s been wearing for three days running is wrinkled across the shoulders where he’s been leaning against something. He’s got a travel mug of what I assume is coffee but smells like punishment.
“Morning,” I say.
“You know where she was yesterday?”
I don’t have to ask who he means. “Not offhand.”
“Gus Pemberton’s.” He slams the truck door and crosses the dock toward me. His boots hit the wood hard enough that Dougraises his head from the life jackets, assesses the threat level, and drops it again. Even Doug knows when to stay down. “Gus. The man who hasn’t spoken more than four consecutive words to anyone in this town since I was in diapers. Who walked out of town council when they asked about updating the septic ordinance. That Gus.”
“She talked to Fish too.”
“Everyone.” Bodhi drags a hand through his hair. It sticks up on one side. “Mimi held court at the Driftwood for an hour. I got three texts about it before coffee. Donna talked. The Tangled Net talked. Yesterday afternoon I walked into Saltbox to buy a replacement bulb for the barn and Fish Monroe was sitting on the register counter telling her about the Fairchild manifest like he’d been saving it up.”
“Fish doesn’t sit on counters.”
“He sat on Gus’s. I saw it.”
I bend and pick up the wrench again. Give my hands something to do. “I can’t gag my own family, Bodhi. You wanted her kept close. Keeping her close means letting her close.”
