After This by Alice McDermott Read Free Book Online Page B

said, “Well, they are sandwiches,” and winked at Michael,
who seemed suddenly to recognize his father again.
     
“Maybe,” Mary said, “we’d better eat in the car.”
     
Slowly everything was gathered and they made their way out to
    the beach once more and then over the path that returned them to the
parking lot. They placed the blankets and the pillow and the toys into
the trunk, depositing as they did a residue of sand that would be there
throughout the winter. Standing above the knot the three of them had
formed before the open back door of the car—a debate about who
would go first and who would get the middle—their mother said, her
hand on her belly, “Just get in,” and they did, sliding across the soft
fabric of the backseat. Annie was in the middle because Michael
moved so quickly and Jacob had put a definite pair of fingers to her
shoulder to make her follow him.
    Mary Keane eased herself into the front seat. The size of her belly
made her legs feel short, as though they could barely reach the floor
under the dashboard. Her husband closed the door on her, gently, with
both hands, as if he were covering her with a blanket. He crossed in
front of the car, his hair on end and the pale scalp at the back of his
head exposed. He now looked every bit his age, she thought. As he
grew older, it seemed to her that she was not losing sight of his
younger self but coming to recognize instead another man altogether,
one she was just beginning to find familiar. He opened the door, slid
the quilted hamper onto the seat between them, and then got in
behind the wheel. He pulled the door closed and the wind became just
the slightest rush of air against the rolled-up windows. There was
suddenly a pleasant warmth. Their voices, suddenly, seemed rich and
sure now that they could speak quietly, now that their words were no
longer scattered by the buffeting wind.
    Mary, one knee bent up onto the seat—her legs seemed only
inches long, her feet in their small loafers appeared no larger than her
daughter’s—handed sandwiches into the backseat while her husband
poured lemonade from a glass jar into small paper cups.
     
“Careful now,” he said each time he slowly moved the cup over the
back of his seat, bending his arm like a crane, awkwardly, because it
was the same arm he had used to throw the football and it still
seemed to echo with the strain. “Ladies first,” he said and felt his
daughter take the cup from him with both hands. “Careful now.”
There was coffee in the plaid thermos and, when he had screwed the
lid onto the glass jar and placed it back into the quilted hamper, he
poured some for his wife and some for himself. She had packed two
china teacups, wrapped in paper towels. She would not drink from
anything else. He exchanged a cup for one of the sandwiches. The
whole thing was a balancing act: cup and sandwich, napkin and wax
paper—careful now—the three children in the back (the fourth would
have to be up here, in the front seat between them, the hamper on his
wife’s lap, or at her feet), his wife and her belly perched beside him,
the wind shut out and their voices suddenly gentle and clear. A
sweetened cup of coffee, a ham-and-cheese—the bread a little dry but
the meat thick and tender. The wind shut out. It was a balancing act,
to hold off quarrel and worry, the coming years, the coming months,
even tomorrow morning for just whatever time it took to finish a
sandwich, to drink the coffee while it was still hot. Careful now.
    All around them, the parking lot was deserted, only a scrim of
sand moving across the bleached asphalt. Mary Keane stretched her
legs and touched her side. “This baby is doing somersaults,” she said
and Jacob laughed softly, imagining it. Beside him, his sister put the
crust of her sandwich to the line of brown thread that was the bear’s
mouth. Beside her, Michael looked through the rolled-up window,
across the long and