Breathing Lessons Read Free Page A

mystery.) But Serena herself had chosen the most open-faced boy in the world. Funny old Max! Not a secret in him. "This here is my happiest memory," Max had said once. (He'd been twenty at die time, just finishing his freshman year at UNC.) "Me and these two fraternity brothers, we go out partying. And I have a tad bit too much to drink, so coming home I pass out in the back seat and when I wake up they've driven clear to Carolina 'Beach and left me there on the sand. Big joke on me: Ha-ha. It's six o'clock in the morning and I sit up and all I can see is sky, layers and layers of hazy sky that just kind of turn into sea lower down, without the least dividing line. So I stand up and fling off my clothes and go racing into the surf, all by my lonesome. Happiest day of my life." What if someone had told him then that thirty years later he'd be dead of cancer, with that ocean morning the clearest picture left of him in Maggie's mind? The haze, the feel of warm air on bare skin, the phock of the first cold, briny-smelling breaker-Maggie might as well have been there herself. She was grateful suddenly for the sunlit clutter of billboards jogging past; even for the sticky vinyl upholstery plastered to the backs of her arms.
Ira said, "Who would she be marrying, I wonder." "What?" Maggie asked. She felt a little dislocated.
"Fiona." "Oh," Maggie said. "She didn't say." Ira was trying to pass an oil truck. He tilted his head to the left, peering for oncoming traffic. After a moment he said, "I'm surprised she didn't announce that too, while she was at it." "All she said was, she was marrying for security. She said she'd married for love once before and it hadn't worked out." "Love!" Ira said. "She was seventeen years old. She didn't know the first thing about love." Maggie looked over at him. What was the first thing about love? she wanted to ask. But he was muttering at the oil truck now.
"Maybe this time it's an older man," she said. "Someone sort of fatherly. If she's marrying for security." "This guy knows perfectly well I'm trying to pass and he keeps spreading over into my lane," Ira told her.
"Maybe she's just getting married so she won't have to go on working." "I didn't know she worked." "She got a job, Ira. You know that! She told us that! She got a job at a beauty parlor when Leroy started nursery school." Ira honked at the oil truck.
"I don't know why you bother sitting in a room with people if you can't make an effort to listen," she said.
Ira said, "Maggie, is something wrong with you today?" "What do you mean?" "How come you're acting so irritable?" "I'm not irritable," she said. She pushed her sunglasses higher. She could see her own nose-the small, rounded tip emerging below the nosepiece.
"It's Serena," he said.
"Serena?" "You're upset about Serena and that's why you're snapping my head off." "Well, of course I'm upset," Maggie said. "But I'm certainly not snapping your head off." "Yes, you are, and it's also why you're going on and on about Fiona when you haven't given a thought to her in years." "That's not true! How do you know how often I think about Fiona?" Ira swung out around the oil truck at last.
By now, they had hit real country. Two men were splitting logs in a clearing, watched over by a gleaming black dog. The trees weren't changing color yet, but they had that slightly off look that meant they were just about to.
Maggie gazed at a weathered wooden fence that girdled a field. Funny how a picture stayed in your mind without your knowing it. Then you see the original and you think, Why! It was there all along, like a dream that comes drifting back in pieces halfway through the morning. That fence, for instance. So far they were retracing the road to Cartwheel and she'd seen that fence on her spy trips and unconsciously made it her own. "Rickrack," she said to Ira.
"Hmm?" "Don't they call that kind of fence 'rickrack'?" He glanced over, but it was gone.
She had sat in her parked car some