The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker Page B

cotton to her cheek and missed her lover, who in her mind had merged with other things she desired: sun and saltwater and dusk and that feeling of finally having found someone you wanted to spend all your time with.
    Though this last part, well—she got to where she didn’t trust it. She wanted him to stay and yet she worried she could not keep him. She did not think he was liable to give up everything you want and even need when you’re young—excitement, loud fast nights, traveling (even it was off Harker’s Island up to Raleigh or Norfolk or down to Wilmington, hell, these were places she’d barely been herself), and most of all, maybe last of all, other women. Say he settled with her. She’d be his first real lover—the backseat girls, the upside-the-shed-girls didn’t hardly count—and he’d nearly be marrying the first girl he went with. She knew that’s how it happened lots of times, but she’d seen a lot of unhappiness in those couples who had to get their parents to sign for them in order to cross over to Morehead and get married.
    It was herself too that she didn’t trust. She had a history, and he did not understand nor want to
learn
to understand history. No one does when they’re young. Whaley loved to talk about how her namesake was so well versed in Latin and Greek, could readold dead poets in French, knew by heart the names of the British royalty and all the stories from the Bible. Maybe that’s where Whaley got her taste for all the ancient things she lived to tell the Tape Recorders. But Whaley wasn’t ever young, really. Not that Maggie was ever so young as Boyd. When she was his age exactly, she was stringing around with a married man as much older than her as she was to Boyd. But there was enough youthful innocence left to remember what it felt like, having to deal with the fact that this man she fancied she loved had slept alongside a wife he swore he could not stomach the sight of (how incredible she found this notion, how oddly repellent, so much so that she would not let herself ponder it even though her mind wanted to go there, like the sight of some washed-ashore half-pecked-apart tern you can’t
not
look at) and had children in a world that should have been slate clean for their own offspring. She knew that sooner or later, her history would get to Boyd.
    And perhaps there was something of the island itself, the fact that every second it was being taken away by wind and water at the same time it was being added to, grain by grain. This place seemed to have something against the notion of forever. Everything felt so
borrowed;
it was hard not to be skeptical of anything lasting longer than a season. But she got around to this reason lastly and treated it lightly, preferring to blame herself over geography and nature.
    It wasn’t that she was a bad person; it was that there was something bad wrong with her. Sometimes she felt like the wind blewright through her. The strangest things made her cry—the yellow suds ebbing around some storm wrack, a dead snake, the first few bars of a song overheard from someone’s window as she passed by at night—but let someone she’d known all her life swell up with a tumor and she paid it no more mind than a mosquito bite. Her sister was always calling her selfish, but that was too easy. She cared about other people so much that she wanted to see inside them, to think their same thoughts. She just did not care to sit for hours in their stuffy parlors, talking about couldn’t that new preacher hear their stomachs growling, why were his sermons so long?
    Boyd, by comparison, was noble and believed in people’s goodness. He wasn’t so good he was boring, but he was a fine thing in this world and she got quickly to where it seemed just wrong to think she could have him.
    Doubt kept at her, a whining bug in her ear even when she tried not to consider it. Still, when they