At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott Read Free Book Online Page B

sparkling turquoise globe as big as a bowling ball. It was a place, it seemed to the children, that endlessly celebrated its own contentment with itself and so made them see in Mr. or Mrs. Porter’s quick wave, after one of them had handed their father the key, a kind of pity. Made them see, in the way Mr. or Mrs. Porter, having handed over the key and quickly waved, suddenly disappeared again into the house, that neither would leave the Porters’ own compound for anything, certainly not for the poky little cabin their father now headed them toward.
    Mrs. Smiley, on the other hand, although she owned what seemed to be an endless number of cottages between Three Mile Harbor and Montauk, lived herself in a small apartment above her real-estate office. She was a huge woman with a
face that reminded the children of a jolly illustration of the blowing wind, all pink and pale blue, round cheeks and puckered lips and thin white hair like puffs of cloud. She usually met them at their car, was out her door or down her stairs almost as soon as they pulled up, the key on its thin white string already in her hand. She would peer through the windows, exclaim over how much they all had grown, and then with a startling rush of warm air and sunlight, calico and flesh, pile herself in beside them for the ride to the cottage. Her skin, the wide flank of her arm as she reached to grab the back of the front seat, was surprisingly cool when it passed their own bare arms and cheeks and her presence in the car, although it caused them to smash themselves against the door and each other, seemed to take the staleness from the air as well.
    She laughed easily and had them all smiling, well pleased with themselves, by the time they pulled down the dirt road or into the gravel drive. She would unlock the cottage herself and then stand back as they filed in, calling out questions as the family went from room to room—Did they clean that stove for you? Did they bring that extra cot? I bet they forgot the firewood. I told them to bring in some firewood—making the children wonder just who they were and why she was so convinced they had failed her.
    She would stay long enough to see the bags brought in, the fishing gear and toys and boxes of linens, hanging about not so much to ensure the safety of her house or the appropriateness of her tenants (their mother and father seemed implicitly to understand) but only to savor these first hours of a new vacation. When all was unloaded their father would appear before her as she sat at the kitchen table examining some game or toy the children had shyly offered to show her, or leaned
against the mantel and exclaimed over the lovely color of their sheets or towels, and there would be a flicker of disappointment in her eyes as she saw all was unpacked and he was ready to drive her home. They asked her but she never stayed, although her looks seemed to linger on them all as she said goodbye, do call if there’s anything you need, enjoy, enjoy and pray for good weather.
    If Mr. Porter’s quick send-off made them start their vacations feeling paltry and unenviable, Mrs. Smiley’s elaborate, reluctant leave-taking made them turn to each other, to their toys and linens and their salty little cottage with a new sense of pride and enchantment. Made them feel as expansive, as lucky, as a much larger family might feel in a many-storied clapboard mansion by the sea.
    And yet their father would rent from neither one of them consistently, nor ever take the same cottage two years in a row. This had nothing to do, as Mr. Porter and Mrs. Smiley both no doubt sometimes supposed, with a quest to find something better or something cheaper. He could extol the virtues of the cottage they were in—the large outdoor shower, the proximity to the beach—and at the same time remember with great fondness another cottage they’d had a year or two before and easily could have had again. Sitting in one he