Read Online The Times Are Never So Bad by Andre Dubus - Free Book Online Page A

some still of brick, and old brick leather factories, most of them closed but all of them so bleak, so dimly lit beyond their dirty windows that, driving or even walking past one, you could not tell whether anyone worked inside.
    On a Wednesday afternoon in May, at a bar in Newburyport, where the Merrimack flowed through marshes to the sea, she sat alone on the second-floor sun deck, among couples in their twenties drinking at picnic tables. She sat on a bench along the railing, her back to the late-afternoon sun, and watched the drinkers, and anchored sailboats and fishing boats, and boats coming in. A small fishing boat followed by screaming gulls tied up at the wharf beside the bar, and she stood so she could look down at it. She had not fished with her father since she started working; she would call him tonight—no, she would finish this drink and go there for dinner and ask him if he’d like to go Sunday after Mass. Then Raymond Yarborough came around the cabin, at the bow, swinging a plastic bag of fish over his left shoulder. One of the men—there were six-gave him a beer. Her hand was up in a wave, her mouth open to call, but she stopped and watched. He had a beard now, brown and thick; he was shirtless and sunburned. She wore a white Mexican dress and knew how pretty she looked standing up there with the sun on her face and the sky behind her, and she waited. He lifted the bag of fish to the wharf and joined the others scrubbing the cleaning boards and deck. Then he went into the cabin and came out wearing a denim work shirt and looked up and laughed.
    â€˜Polly Comeau, what are you doing up there?’
    She wondered about that, six years later, on the July afternoon at Timmy’s; and wondered why, from that evening on, she not only believed her life had changed but knew that indeed it had (though she was never comfortable with, never sure of, the distinction between believing something about your life and that something also being true). But something did happen: when Ray became not the boy she had known in high school but her lover, then husband, she felt both released and received, no longer in the town, a piece of its streets and time, but of the town, having broken free of its gravity, so that standing behind the jewelry counter she did not feel rooted or even stationary; and driving to and from work, or pushing a cart between grocery shelves, were a new sort of motion whose end was not the jewelry store, the apartment, the supermarket cash register, but herself, the woman she saw in Raymond’s face.
    In her sleep she knew she was dreaming: she was waitressing at the Harbor Schooner, but inside it looked like the gymnasium in high school with tables for prom night, and the party of four she was serving changed to a crowd, some were familiar, and she strained to know them; then her father was frying squid in the kitchen and she was there with a tray, and he said Give them all the squid they want; then a hand was on her mouth and she woke with her right hand pushing his wrist and her left prying his fingers, and in that instant before opening her eyes, when her dream dissolved into darkness, she knew it was Ray. She was on her back and he was straddling her legs. She kneed him but he moved forward and she struck bone. He sat on her thighs and his right hand went to his back and she heard the snap, and the blade leaving its sheath; then he was holding it close to her face, his dark-bladed knife; in the moonlight she saw the silver line of its edge. Then its point touched her throat, and his hand left her mouth.
    â€˜Turn over,’ he said.
    He rose to his knees, and she turned on her stomach, her back and throat waiting for the knife, but then his knees were between her legs, his hand under her stomach, lifting: she kneeled with her face in the pillow, heard his buckle and snap and zipper and pants slipping down his legs; he pushed her nightgown up her back, the knife’s edge touched