Three Women at the Water's Edge by Nancy Thayer Read Free Book Online Page A

on the Atlantic Ocean. The town itself is set inland a few miles, away from the whims of the sea, but there is a long stretch of public beach that is officially part of the town. It took Dale Wallace fifteen minutes to get from the Rocheport high school, where she taught, to the edge of the Rocheport public beach. She parked her car—a dark-blue Volkswagen Beetle with a gray convertible top—with an abrupt screeching thump, and looked out the window at the beach, and laughed out loud. It was all right if she acted strange, laughed and talked to herself, for most of the houses that ran along the street, facing the ocean, were summer houses, and it was October now, and no one was around to see. It wouldn’t have mattered if people had been around, though, it wouldn’t have mattered at all. Dale laughed, and tore off her clogs and fuzzy green knee socks, and rolled up her Levi’s, and jumped out of the car barefoot.
    The tide was out. The white smooth sand of the beach stretched up and down the coast, far out into the ocean. Dale ran out onto the sand, yelping with shock as her bare feet touched down on the firm cold. She ran for the water, the tantalizing edge of ocean that frothed far out, and when she reached it, she turned and ran along the edge of the water, playing games with the little waves, seeing how close she could get, how long she could stay, before the water surprised her and surged up high, chilling her feet and ankles with an unconcerned painful cold.
    Dale ran and ran. The sun was low and the water was silver, the sand was silver, the sky was silver: the world was silver. It was a fluid jewel. And she was the fire at its heart. She ran and ran. She skipped, she laughed with her head thrown back, she splashed on the edge of the gentle surf till her jeans were wet. She could not stop running. She ran until she reached the rocks at the northern end of the beach, then she turned around and ran back the other way. The ocean reached for, then crested and exploded on, her slender ankles, on her firm smooth legs. Dale put her arms out straight and began spinning around in circles, around and around and around, until she was so dizzy and out of breath she had to stop, bent over, double, hands braced on her knees, laughing and gasping, catching her breath so she could run again. She ran, she ran. She was in love.
    The man she was in love with, Hank Kennedy, might have been surprised to know of Dale’s love. Dale and Hank had seen each other only twice in their lives. Yet Dale felt sure that at last it had happened: she was in love. She was twenty-four years old and had almost decided that it was
never
going to happen to her. Of course there had been high school boyfriends back in Iowa, and lovers—meaning men she had slept with—during college and her two-year sojourn in Europe. But she had never
loved
them, not one of them. She had never felt giddy at the sight of any of them, even though some of them had been quite good-looking. She had never felt that astonishing thump that happened inside her chest the first time she saw Hank, and again the second time, a thump so physically real that it was as if her heart had suddenly come alive, had jumped up with a delirious furious force, had thudded wildly about like a wild live creature inside her skin. The first time it had happened Dale had stood quite still, smiling inanely, happily amazed at the sensation. So this was what they were writing about, all those poets, all the songwriters, so this was what everyone had been trying to tell her about. My God, it was so
sweet
.
    It had happened in the cafeteria of the high school one Thursday evening last month, in September, when she and other teachers had come from all over the region to discuss what new programs to implement with the federal grant the region had just received. Dale was a new teacher in the area; it was her first year and she was full of energy and enthusiasm. She taught biology and French to juniors and