Read Beach Girls for Free Online Page B

father told me. . . .”
    “And how did your father know?”
    Stevie swallowed hard. “My father was a professor—like you. Dr. John Moore. He was also a poet. He had it all—a Ph.D., tenure, and the soul of Ireland. And then my mother . . . went away, like a mother penguin. She went to France on a painting tour that my father gave her for her thirty-fifth birthday, and she never came home.”
    “What happened to her?”
    “She died in a plane crash.”
    “I'm very sorry,” he said, and seeing that she now did require his handkerchief, offered it again.
    She blew her nose.
    “A lovely call,” he said. “It's quite imprinted upon my heart.”
    She laughed, returning the refolded linen square.
    “And the discipline segment of your story?” he asked, then shook his head. “What a fool I am. Breaking into your tender narrative, for the sole purpose of driving you back on course. See what I mean by the curse of linear thought?”
    “It's okay. What I was going to say is, my father took care of me from then on. Nothing ever got in the way of it. Not his teaching, not his poetry. He stopped publishing after she died—I think I took up too much of his time. He was passed over as department head—because he had to drive me to riding lessons and take me drawing in fields along the Farmington River.”
    “He sounds like a wonderful man.”
    “He was,” Stevie said. “And father.”
    “You make the distinction? They're not one and the same?” he asked, with hunger in his eyes. “Is it possible to be one without the other? Wonderful man, wonderful father?”
    “I think they're the same,” she said.
    “Bloody hell, I was afraid you'd say that,” he said. “I've been the most appalling father to my son. Would I have stood seventy-two minutes on the pack ice with him, never mind seventy-two days? I would not.”
    “I'm sure he'd forgive you.”
    “Forgive me? He bloody worships me. The ground I've walked since the day I left his mother is molten gold to William. Is there any fairness to that?”
    “Your boy loves his father. Sounds fair to me.”
    The professor smiled. “Well, aren't you dear to say that? Very, very dear. Come now—I'll buy you a drink at the Landfall, and you can teach me the fine points of not thinking straight. What's your name?”
    “Stevie Moore.”
    “I'm Linus Mars. Please, come? I think you know things that I need to hear.”
    “About your son?”
    “About my heart.”
    “Oh . . .”
    She thought of Kevin, back in New York, four and a half hours away. He wouldn't eat until she got home and either fed him or bodily forced him to pick up the phone and order Chinese. On the other hand, he would probably have passed out long before she arrived. Her own heart had been pummeled by a marriage she had once desired with all her soul. Staring up at Linus's handsome, angular face, hooded hazel eyes, she felt the first stirrings of long-buried feeling.
    Now, in the dark quiet of her house at Hubbard's Point, she let her brush move across the paper's rough surface. The baby wren stood alone.
    Stevie wiped her brow. Nell's visit had stirred her up. Again she thought of Emma. Stevie, Madeleine, and Emma.
    Hubbard's Point was cut off from the rest of Connecticut by a railroad trestle, passing over the road. Driving though the gate was like entering an enchanted realm where friends were as close as sisters. For three years, as they changed from girls to young women, they had lain on towels in the sun, soaking up warmth and promise, believing that life, and their friendship, would survive forever. They had promised to grow old together, to become just like the leathery old ladies who arranged their beach chairs in a sewing circle and wore their grandmotherly necklaces into the water.
    How easily people give up on things
, Stevie thought, painting.
Why didn't I work harder to stay in touch?
As she feathered the small wren's wings, she thought of all the things she had done in life that the beach