The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker Page A

we’re out on the water he looks right through me. Sometimes he even tells Crawl something to tell me. Like I don’t speak English.”
    â€œWoodrow likes you fine,” she said. “That’s just the way Woodrow is.”
    â€œTalks to my shoes if he talks to any part of me.”
    â€œYou’d do that to him if you were black and he were white.”
    â€œHard to say. I’ve never been all that good at imagining anything other than what I got.”
    Maggie filed this comment away, and in the years since he’d been gone, she trotted it out often, found ways to use it tojustify what happened between them. She often felt she was the opposite—capable of imagining anything but what she had.
    Six weeks after Boyd arrived on the island, his uncle Skillet from down at Harker’s Island towed over a twenty-one-foot skiff he’d bought cheap off a retired waterman from Atlantic. Probably he did not want his nephew crewing for a Negro anymore, Maggie said, suspicious of such an extravagant gift, but it was hard to harbor suspicion, Boyd was so proud of that boat. Woodrow helped him get it sea-ready—the boat had spent a season set up on sawhorses in some old boy’s backyard—and Boyd promised to take Maggie out with him after he’d bought and set his pots, borrowed from Woodrow a purse seine, hocked half his belongings for setup gear. Maggie’d spent plenty time out on the water with her daddy and brothers, and it wasn’t something she’d dreamed of repeating. It was hard work and even half days could turn tedious, but this was Boyd and the boy was beside himself and she did dearly love passion of any stripe, the more intense the better, and they would be alone, no one around to look askance at her and her emphasis-on-boy boyfriend and what better way to see the sun come up than the way they did those few mornings she went out with him which happened to be smack in the middle of a big moon that made the sea foam shimmer, turned the spray silver. They would trade sips from a thermos of coffee as black as the sea beneath them. She’d tuck her hands up his shirt, cup the muscles rippling his rib cage. He was too giddy andproud-nervous to interrupt his fishing with a little sunrise loving, but being out there all alone, salt breeze batting them as they turned for home, got them so hot they’d barely get the boat tied up before they’d walk run back to the summer kitchen, fling their cast-off clothes at the blinds, and tuck into each other, inside and outside, all of them and the whole shut-tight dead-aired cottage awash in sea-pricked passion.
    Of all the things she could have done, going out with Boyd those mornings was what drew her big sister’s ire.
    â€œYou think I’m here to wait on you while you’re out on the water all day long? It’s not for me to run this house. Last time I checked, Daddy left it to both of us.”
    It was just past noon when she returned—plenty of time yet for whatever chores needed doing, and she told her sister so.
    â€œThat’s not the point. You’re making a trashy fool out of yourself, and of me too in the process. Putting that boy up in Woodrow’s summer kitchen, my God. You got people in Meherrituck talking about the boy lives behind the colored couple, got himself an old lady lover.”
    â€œLet ’em talk is how I feel about that.”
    â€œI know good and well how you feel about everything. You don’t give a damn about anything but feeling good at the moment.”
    â€œDon’t start, Miss Whaley.”
    â€œDon’t call me that. I have a first name.”
    â€œNo one’s allowed to call you by it.”
    â€œWe’re not discussing what they choose to call me. We’re talking about what they’re out there calling you.”
    Maggie said nothing. She was folding wash off the line and the sheets were stiff and sun-warmed, and she held the