Read Online The Season of Open Water by Dawn Tripp - Free Book Online Page A

slumgullion scraps of their stealing—the broken hair comb, the empty tins of caviar.
    He knows that there is only one pure love—young love, first love. The heart can only be broken once. Every other love that comes afterward has some restraint, some compromise. After that first, the heart can be winded, skinned, bent, betrayed, or bruised, but never broken.
    His own heart was a door he had walked through long ago and left dangling on busted hinges behind him. He knew enough to leave it open so when the wind came, it blew clean through.
    His leg aches and he sits down on a cask by the door of the shop. He tips his weight back and leans his head against the sidewall. The afternoon sun bathes his face. The warmth soaks into the warped places, the deeper lines. He can hear the wind bristle through the maple leaves.
    The girl shrieks. He opens one eye. They are wrestling again. Luce has pinned her down by both hands but she kicks up. He lets go and she rolls out from under him.
    She has grown beautiful, he thinks—grown up almost overnight, but she does not seem to know it yet. She cut her first two teeth at six months—he remembers this—they broke through the pearly surface of her gums. She did not cut the rest until she was past a year old, and she would squawk at him and gnaw on his thumb with those two teeth like a baby tautog.
    They lie apart now—on either side of one of Cora’s sheets. Only the girl’s feet are visible, dirt ground into her anklebones, overalls rolled halfway up the shin. They are laughing together without seeing one another, the stark white vastness of the sheet dividing them. They talk and snicker, on either side of it, without touching: biting words, nonsense, scathing words that have no apparent context, no clear meaning. They tumble back into laughing.
    Their closeness now concerns him. They have always been close, since they were children, but they are older now, and it doesn’t sit right. Sometimes when he squints he imagines he can see slight pale threads that bind them.
    He looks away from them across the yard to the blue spruce. It is dying, and its needles have begun to blanch out at the ends. There are patches of baldness on the lower branches.
    He stands up and sets out across the yard. He passes the garden and takes the path down the hill into the white pine wood. He crosses the creek and cuts around the swamp, then climbs up to the old Indian ground. There is no fence. No gate to mark the site. The stones are rough. Unetched. They were here when he bought the butt of land. He wouldn’t have known them for what they were but for the ritual pile of clamshells on a clear spot of ground by the small beach below. He notes the deer rub on the sassafras. He sits down on the cold earth.
    The wind has fallen off, and the air is still. The clouds press down over the hills on the far side of the river, blue clouds like sea-pigs diving low. The sun, heavy-lidded in the west, settles until it is a glowing shiver on the earth, then disappears.
    After supper, Cora pulls the shades on the windows that face the road, then goes back into the kitchen to mop the floor. Noel sits in the deep chair in the big room with his pipe, the back window cracked open behind him, while the children play cards on the cleared table. He does not feel the same love for his grandson that he feels for Bridge. Two years older, nearly twenty-one, Luce is slapdash, but not lazy. He works the ice route his father, Russell, used to work. He can handle a gun as well as his sister, but he does not have her cool eye or her patience. Noel has marked a streak in him—a restless greed, a devil nature that pokes its face up from time to time. But Luce knows the river. He has a feel for its channels, its holes and jogs. He can handle a boat up the narrow switch-back turns of Crooked Creek. He can run the rocks around Cory’s Island, even at night, and make a skiff disappear between the mudflats