The Fisher Boy by Stephen Anable Page B

art sold well. Between painting and giving piano lessons, she made a comfortable living.
    “It’s the usual masterpiece. He’ll love it.”
    Wiping her fingers on a rag she’d wet with turpentine, she said, “Mark, I’m not being callous, but mourning doesn’t undo what’s already been done. I believe in being nice to people when they’re alive. Not that Ian always did. Good Lord, I still remember him torturing poor Jonathan Robson. Of course, coming from that family, from that privilege, that arrogance.”
    She recounted a story often told in Gloucester, of how Ian’s mother, Janet, had run over a mailman while returning from a tennis match she’d lost in Brookline. “Going sixty in a thirty-mile zone. That poor mailman was in a body cast for months. That family was
always
reckless.”
    I smiled because “reckless” was an adjective sometimes flung in her direction.
    “I suppose I’m saying that because it’s comforting, I know. It makes it seem less random if Ian put himself in the line of fire. If he came from a family that used poor judgment.” She was putting the brushes to soak in an old peanut butter jar. “I was hoping you’d drop by. I’ve marinated some chicken. I’m done painting today. I’m ready for a stiff vodka gimlet. How about you?”
    I nodded. We sat in the back yard, beneath the blue-black spruces. My mother loved the sea, and turned out seascapes for corporate boardrooms, and tourists and transplanted New Englanders, yet she had one of the few pieces of property in this part of Gloucester lacking a view of the ocean. “Why don’t you trim these stupid trees?” I asked her, after the vodka made me a bit bolder. “If you trimmed these trees, you could see the water.”
    “I’m an earth sign, darling,” my mother said.
    That excuse was ridiculous because my mother thought astrology belonged in its place on the comics pages of newspapers. “Are you avoiding seeing the sea because it makes you think of my father?”
    “Of course not, darling.” She was still in the ratty housecoat with a Jackson Pollack’s worth of paint dribbled down the front. “Would you like another gimlet?”
    “My head is swimming. I’d better not.”
    “Well, you drank that first one like it was lemonade. Just go easy. You’re not driving back to the Cape tonight surely?”
    “No.” I surrendered my empty glass for a refill, to be sure I kept my word and slept over.
    After dinner, after I’d consumed generous amounts of marinated chicken, potato salad, and corn on the cob, my mother mentioned one of the Snows. “I saw Geoffrey Snow at West Beach. Last week. He was visiting from Phoenix.”
    I hardly knew Geoffrey. The Snows kept to themselves and kept their distance even from the Drummonds.
    “Geoffrey has done well. He designs golf courses, imagine, and the Snows were all so uncoordinated, such poor athletes. Not like Duncan and his gang.” My mother served us home-made rhubarb pie: tart, slimy, and delicious. She said, “Geoffrey says Duncan Drummond isn’t well at all, he’s becoming confused.”
    I remembered Ian’s father at the funeral, his bewildered expression during the service, his folding the program over and over. “He looked lost at the funeral,” I said, “but who wouldn’t?”
    “Mark, I worry about you so. I mean, I’m sure you’re careful, but do you have to go back to Provincetown this summer? Couldn’t you commute like the rest of your troupe? I’ve seen that horrible Hollings Fair speaking on television, so smarmy and vitriolic. And those Christian Soldiers are everywhere, like gypsy moths.”
    I said, “I can’t quit everything.” We both knew what that meant. I’d bailed from the ad world to concentrate on acting. Now, thanks to the fight, I’d blown that as well, but didn’t mention this.
    Drinking the last of my gimlet, I remembered the vodka I’d shared with Ian and the bottle broken on the breakwater.
    “Provincetown is dangerous this summer,”