Read A Widow for One Year for Free Online

least for the first five years that followed the death of his sons—Ted lived with the unhappiest mother of them all.

Marion, Waiting
    Orient Point, the tip of the north fork of Long Island, looks like what it is: the end of an island, where the land peters out. The vegetation— stunted by salt, bent by the wind—is sparse. The sand is coarse and strewn with shells and rocks. That June day in 1958 when Marion Cole was waiting for the New London ferry that was bringing Eddie O’Hare across Long Island Sound, the tide was low and Marion indifferently noted that the pilings of the ferry slip were wet where the fallen tide had exposed them; above the high-water mark, the pilings were dry. Over the empty slip, a noisy chorus of seagulls hung suspended; then the birds veered low over the water, which was ruffled and constantly changed colors in the inconsistent sun—from slate-gray to blue-green, and then to gray again. The ferry was not yet in sight.
    Fewer than a dozen cars were parked close to the slip. Given the sun’s reluctance to linger—and the wind, which was northeasterly— most of the drivers waited in their cars. At first Marion had stood outside her car, leaning against the front fender; then she’d sat on the fender, spreading her copy of the 1958 Exeter yearbook on the hood. It was there, at Orient Point, on the hood of her car, that Marion took her first long look at the most recent photographs of Eddie O’Hare.
    Marion hated to be late, and she invariably thought less of people who were. Her car was parked at the front of the line where people waited for the ferry. There was a longer line of cars in the parking lot, where people taking the return ferry to New London were also waiting; but Marion took no notice of them. Marion rarely looked at people when she was out in public, which she seldom was.
    Everyone looked at her. They couldn’t help themselves. That day at Orient Point, Marion Cole was thirty-nine. She looked twenty-nine, or slightly younger. When Marion sat on the fender of her car and attempted to hold the pages of the ’58 PEAN steady in the unruly gusts from the northeast, her pretty legs, which were also long, were mostly hidden from view in a wraparound skirt of a nondescript beige color. There was, however, nothing nondescript about the fit of Marion’s skirt—it fit her perfectly. She wore an oversize white T-shirt that was tucked into the waist of the skirt, and over the T-shirt she wore an unbuttoned cashmere cardigan that was the faded-pink color of the inside of certain seashells—a pink more common to a tropical coast than to the less exotic Long Island shore.
    In the stiffening breeze, Marion tugged the unbuttoned sweater snugly around her. The T-shirt fit her loosely, but she had wrapped one arm around herself and under her breasts. That she was long-waisted was apparent; that her breasts were full and pendulous, but well contoured and natural-looking, was evident, too. As for her wavy, shoulder-length hair, the on-and-off sun caused it to change color from amber to honey-blond, and her lightly tanned skin was luminous. She was almost without a flaw.
    However, upon closer inspection, there was something distracting in one of her eyes. Her face was almond-shaped, as were her eyes, which were a dark blue; yet in the iris of her right eye was a hexagonal speck of the brightest yellow. It was as if a diamond chip, or a shard of ice, had fallen into her eye and now permanently reflected the sun. In certain light, or at unpredictable angles, this speck of yellow turned her right eye from blue to green. No less disconcerting was her perfect mouth. Yet her smile, when she smiled, was rueful—for five years, few people had seen her smile.
    As she searched through the Exeter yearbook for the most recent photographs of Eddie O’Hare, Marion frowned. A year ago, Eddie had been in the Outing Club—now he wasn’t. And last year he’d liked the Junior Debating Society; this year he was