Page 24 - Vol. V #6

It is the last good day of Delmas and Lillian’s fifty-three years together, the last day that they dared the ferry, the beach walk they have relished for so long, the treacherous logs washed ashore.
Delmas
arch over her breasts—her left still there though flattened and empty, the right, a puckered scar that stretches into her armpit. She no longer bothers with a bra.
It is late, and now the cold off the sound slaps and batters their jackets, their ears. It is not raining but it is dark; a sky-sized cloud hangs low, ob- scures the snowy slopes of the Olympic Moun- tains across the sound. Delmas squints against the wind and Lillian threads her frail arm through his, clasps onto his forearm with her weak claw. He keeps his hands in his pockets.
The cancer is back; it has metastasized. The chil- dren don’t know yet.
They make their way haltingly, careful not to step on the fat tubes of bullwhip kelp stretched across their path like brown furry boa constrictors.
The shore pebbles, gray and white and black, so rounded and smooth from the endless tumble and roll of saltwater, shift under their feet and make the going more treacherous yet. A gangly hedge
On the hill above them are the massive gray guns of Fort Casey, bunkers and walks of concrete, handrails of steel, relics of an age when those cannons lobbed rounds into the sound with little more aim than stones hurled from catapults—on the ready for attackers from the sea. When they had been exploring the abandoned army post earlier, the bunkers were empty but for Japanese tourists snapping photos.
of weather-felled trees and debris, bark-less and sea-bleached, hems the entire strand. The wind is a constant white rumble past Delmas’ head.
“Sandy’s boy is coming over to give me an esti- mate on the porch,” she yells, her voice still steady and strong, a voice that might suggest health to a stranger. She tugs at his arm until he leans his ear down close to her mouth. “I want it fixed before one of the kids gets hurt.”
“Did you see...?” Lillian’s voice is swept up by the wind.
“Does he do good work, do you think?”
Delmas nods. Mergansers float out on the blue water. Closer in, shiny black seal heads bob. The seals peer at the two of them with curious eyes, intelligent eyes that seem to betray a knowl- edge of more than swimming and catching fish. Much more.
“Sandy says he does. He needs work, and I don’t care if it doesn’t look great. I just want it safe for the little ones.”
“Did you?” she yells up at his ear. He nods again, more insistently.
“What little ones?” he asks, and immediately re- grets the words, the sardonic tone.
Under her green windbreaker, Lillian is wearing Delmas’s blue moth-eaten cardigan over a gray sweatshirt shed by a lover from before Delmas met her. The cuffs are frayed to almost nothing and Washington & Lee is faded to a shadowy blue
She doesn’t hear him in the wind, at least she does not respond.
15
They turn back, and the roar of the wind goes quiet in Delmas’s ears. He can now hear the occa- sional pebbly crunch of the stones shifting under their feet. He looks for the path, where they had climbed over the sea-bleached tangle of broken
“Let’s try to get the next ferry back,” he yells into the wind.
vic Sizemore