Once Upon a River Page 0,41
with water she’d lugged in and heated on the propane stove.
Margo didn’t usually drink, but she needed to do something different as a kind of protest against this new situation. She opened a beer and, though the first few sips sickened her, she drank it down. She folded up the letter she’d been writing to her mother—in it she’d asked what Luanne thought about being loyal to a man, what it was worth. All these questions she was asking her ma added up to one question: how should Margo live? She had chosen this life for now, and she had chosen Brian to be her anchor, keeping her steady and in place. Now she was adrift. She opened a second beer and found she didn’t mind the taste so much. After finishing the dishes, while the men were still working outside, she reread her mother’s old letter on the yellow stationery with the bumblebees—the flower scent had faded—and she drank a third beer. Afterward, she stumbled to the bedroom and passed out.
Just before sunrise, she awoke with a parched mouth and a headache, and with a man’s heavy arm over her in the bed. She gasped when she realized it was Paul beside her. She extricated herself with difficulty. After more than a week without Brian, Margo had almost forgotten how a big man generated heat around him. The bedroom was stifling. She was grateful he was dead asleep, more grateful to find herself still fully clothed. She heated water for instant coffee. There wasn’t much propane left; Brian had intended to get some in town the day he disappeared. Charlie was curled in a strange position, half on, half off the narrow couch.
She carried her coffee outside, and from the dock she watched the Jeep pull away from the yellow house downstream. She admired the straight diagonal lines the man had mowed into his lawn, all the way down to the river, where he trimmed with a weed whip he swung like a golf club. In contrast to the rangy wild bushes on her side, the hedges around his house were trimmed flat as tabletops. She looked forward to this evening, after Paul and Charlie were gone, when the man would come home and let his dog out to hunker at the river’s edge. The dog was able to catch fish in its jaws; she’d seen it do so a half dozen times.
Margo found her siphon hose and sucked gas out of the Playbuoy’s tank into a milk jug, enough to mix with two-stroke oil for a trip up to Heart of Pines with the small outboard motor, or two trips maybe, if she rowed back down without power. Or maybe she would take a fishing trip to Willow Island, where one time she had seen a heron carry a snake up to its chicks in the trees.
Margo had never given Brian any details about her and Cal, had never suggested he should punish Cal.
She rinsed the fuel taste from her mouth with coffee, spat it into the river. She thought she might be okay living alone here, having the bed to herself, making the breakfast she wanted at the time she wanted, not worrying about what state Brian would be in when he got home from work or the bar. She would have to cash the money order and lay in supplies for the winter, including bacon, flour, and powdered milk. Maybe she would make bread, something she hadn’t gotten around to doing. She would miss Brian, but if she could stay here, she could survive on her own. She would get ammo and sleep with her rifle beside her.
Charlie was stirring on the couch. Margo sifted meal-moth larvae out of the last of the flour for pancakes. Paul and Charlie would appreciate a cooked breakfast. She opened a beer, poured half of it into her dry ingredients, and then handed the open can to Charlie, who sat up to accept it. He tipped it up and drank the remainder in one long slug.
“Are you hungry, Charlie?” she asked. “Did you sleep good?”
“You’s got a toilet around here?” he asked. She led him outside and directed him along the path that led to the outhouse.
Paul called her name from the bedroom. She pushed open the door and stepped inside, where she smelled smoke that wasn’t from cigarettes. She saw a glass pipe on the windowsill by the bed, alongside a pack of matches. He turned to favor his