Read Online Three Junes by Julia Glass - Free Book Online

and on, without touching her cake.
    “Colin’s good to her?” asked Paul, thinking of the foxhounds lined up in Napoleonic ranks. If the collies were Paul’s, they’d live a fat, indolent life of lolling about by the fire, eating biscuits under the table, spending their nights at the foot of a bed. Paul’s childhood dogs had been nothing more than freeloading eager-to-please companions.
    “For now he spoils her—keeps her in the house with those deranged terriers. But once it’s warm, she’ll go to the farm with her brother.”
    When Maureen retreated to the kitchen again, Paul realized that they had passed an entire evening without speaking once of their children; most of her maternal instincts seemed to have turned toward the collies since his return, toward Betsey’s pups. Perhaps this was just because the boys were so seldom at home now; sometimes it felt as if David and Dennis came back to the house only to sleep. And it seemed truer than ever, as they grew older, that having each other rendered their parents obsolete except as providers.
    It was not unusual for Paul to come home each evening to an empty house. If he walked out behind, he would see Maureen’s footprints, mingled with the dogs’, pointing left toward the farm or right toward Conkers. If he was home early, he might hear her whistle in the distance. Later, sometimes not until after dark, he’d see her returning along the path by the wall. She would come in exhausted, and Paul would rub her feet by the fire. Then the twins would come home and gallop around like ponies, fired up from football or cricket.
    THE CAPTAIN ORDERS THEM BELOW, where the air is hot, rancid, and smells of burning petrol. An hour out, they hear the rain turn to hail: the clattering overhead becomes a roar that drowns out all attempts at conversation. Now, except for the boat’s crew and Jack, everyone is sick. Even Jack looks gray. He sits on the other side of Fern, who leans down between her knees. The reeling of the boat throws her back and forth between the two men. Paul feels the heat of her legs through her skirt and wishes desperately for sun and calm. His lunch is long gone; to steady himself, he focuses on one of Fern’s white sneakers and her bare ankle above it.
    There is something so girlish, so ingenuous, about her simple sneaker; without daughters, Paul has no idea what other shoes might seem more her age, but these do not. He saw shoes of various kinds, six months ago, at the Lockerbie crash site; shoes are so ubiquitous at catastrophic accidents that their image has become a cliché of pathos. That week, Paul vetoed at least half a dozen photographs of shoes. In the same week, he was asked to choose shoes for his wife to wear in her coffin (David’s wife did the actual choosing: something formal and black is all Paul remembers).
    How often do Fern’s parents back in the reportedly pastoral Cornwall, Connecticut, stop to worry about her, consciously? When Fenno first went overseas—not the same as going to boarding school, where other parental people watched him, or to university, where hard studies were expected to keep him from harm—Paul would habitually subtract six or seven hours when he was going to bed each night and wonder what Fenno was doing in that foreign late afternoon. Would he, exactly now, be in the library (a good, safe place), or out on the streets marketing for dinner, or choosing a shirt to please a lover? And if Paul woke in the middle of the night, what he hated was imagining Fenno anywhere but dully in bed like his father.
    In Connecticut, where it is now midmorning on a Saturday, whatever those other parents are doing, they couldn’t possibly be thinking that a man probably ten years their senior longs to spirit their daughter away, alone, take off her clothes, lie down beside her equally naked and forget every other need but this one. “Take advantage of her”? “Seduce her”? How would they think of it? When he pictures it