Northwest Angle Read Free Page A

him.
    “I just want to know one thing. And I know you can hear me.”
    “It starts with one thing,” she said with her eyes still closed. “It ends up everything. That’s how you operate.”
    “Old dog, old trick,” he said, waited a moment, then repeated, “So?”
    She righted herself, treaded water, and gave in. “All right, what do you want to know?”
    “Are you going to marry him?”
    “That’s a complicated question.”
    “I think the question is fairly simple.”
    “Well, I can’t answer it.”
    “Because of you or him?”
    “It’s a decision we’re both involved in.”
    “You’d tell your mother,” he said.
    “She wouldn’t put me on the rack.”
    “Have I?”
    “You will if you don’t get an answer.”
    “I suppose you’ve talked to Aunt Rose.”
    She didn’t reply, but her silence itself gave him his answer.
    “But you won’t talk to me.”
    “There are things women understand, Dad.”
    “There are things fathers should be let in on. Look, I don’t know why you can’t give me a straightforward answer, and that’s what concerns me.”
    “There are issues we need to settle first.”
    “Children?”
    “Ah, children,” she said, as if she suddenly understood. “That’s why you brought me here to show me those pictographs. This is all about children, isn’t it?”
    “Not completely. But you indicated there are issues,” he said. “And I’m betting that’s one. He doesn’t want them, does he?”
    “Maybe it’s me who doesn’t.”
    “Is it?” Again, her silence was his answer. “You’ve been down this road before, Jenny.”
    “See? Right there.” She lifted her arm and pointed an accusing finger at him. Water dripped from the tip in crystal pearls. “That’s why I don’t talk to you.”
    “It was only an observation.”
    “It was a criticism, and you know it.”
    “I didn’t mean—”
    “I’m finished swimming. Let’s go.”
    He’d blown it. In his imagining, the discussion had gone differently, had ended with them understanding each other, touching heart to heart in the way they used to when she was much younger. Instead he watched her breaststroke away from him to the dinghy, leaving him feeling stupid and treading water.
    They threaded their way out of the convoluted gathering of islands. Jenny sat rigid in the bow, fiercely giving him her back. As soon as they hit the open water of the main channel, he headed the dinghy again toward the southwest.
    When he saw the sky there, he was, for a moment, stunned breathless.
    “Dad?” Jenny said from the bow. She’d seen it, too, and she turned back to him, fear huge in her eyes.
    “Good God Almighty,” he whispered.

TWO
     
    R ose was in the middle of rolling a piecrust. She’d promised pie for dessert that night, and the kids had volunteered to hunt for blueberries. Though it was late in the season, weeks past the normal time for harvesting berries, at every place the houseboat had anchored so far, they’d had luck with their picking. It had to do with the unusual heat, Rose speculated.
    Behind her, Mal came into the galley and encircled her waist with his arms.
    “They’re finally gone,” he said.
    “Let me wash my hands.” Rose lifted them so that he could see they were covered with flour.
    “No time. They’ll be back before you know it.” He turned her, kissed her long but delicately, and said, “And besides, the smell of piecrust is very sexy.”
    They made love in their cabin. Afterward, she lay cradled in the crook of Mal’s outstretched arm.
    The houseboat was lovely, but there was no privacy. It was a rare pleasure to have the boat to themselves. There was something about this untamed country that stirred the wild in Rose. She smiled, thinking how odd it was to her now that before Mal had come into her life she’d seriously considered joining an order. When she first met him, he’d been a priest, a cleric stumbling in his belief and assigned to a small parish in the greatNorth