The Stars Are Fire(8)

In the evening, when Grace is making dinner, Rosie calls to her over the side fence to tell her of the accident. When the waves settled, two men and a young boy, maybe seven or eight years old, visited the beach to fish. One of the men went into the water to untangle his line and was swept out to sea in a riptide, a not uncommon occurrence after a storm. The other man ran for help while the boy screamed and did jumping jacks on the sand.

“The fisherman drowned, and the lifesaving service is waiting for his body to wash ashore,” Rosie says. “Nobody in town knows the men.”

“And what about the boy?” Grace asks.

“It was his father. Awful, isn’t it?”

A few minutes later, after Rosie leaves, Grace stands with a potato and a peeler in her hands, her wrists resting against the lip of the sink, and cries. She didn’t for Merle, and yet she does for a fatherless boy and a man she has never known. The sea claimed its prize after all.

“What’s wrong?” Gene asks as he walks into the house.

“Onions.”

She can’t tell Gene about the accident without fear of tearing up. Gene will register once again that she didn’t weep for his mother.


Gene’s grief is as Grace imagined it. He hardly speaks at the dinner table. Even Claire has stopped chatting to him. Usually, he will say one sentence to Grace, as if fulfilling his husbandly duty. More often than not, it’s an odd fact she can’t do anything with.

“You can go a mile a minute on the Turnpike.”

“That’s fast.”

Gene doesn’t respond. He’s done for the evening.


Rosie says, “Give him time. When Tim’s father died, it took him two years to get back to normal.”

“My mother, too,” Grace says, rounding four down to two. “But these are important years for Claire and Tom.”

“Gene doesn’t interact with them at all?” Rosie asks.

“Nothing.”

Rosie dips her fingers into the sand. She’s fully clothed and has on a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses while she sits under an umbrella. Even so, she can only stay an hour on the beach. Today the waves run like children up the sand.

“How is he in bed?” Rosie asks.

Grace blushes, hoping her tan hides her embarrassment, her despair, her relief. “The same,” she says.

“Tim was a madman. It was all he wanted to do.”

“Proving he was still alive,” Grace says.

“One part of him was alive all right.” Rosie flops back onto the sand, stretching her arms over her head. “I couldn’t walk for months,” she cries, making it clear she loved every minute.

Grace finds this nearly incomprehensible. Is Rosie to be envied or pitied? Envied, if it makes her as happy as it seems to. It’s an arena in which Grace can add nothing, Gene not having been near her in more than two months.


Grace decides it’s her duty to help to relieve her husband’s grief. She gives herself a sponge bath in the washroom and dresses in her cotton nightgown. She lies on her stomach in the bed and draws the nightgown high up on her thighs. She has left the top sheet to dangle from the foot of the bed. This is as clear a signal as she can possibly give her husband without discussing the matter.

She can hear Gene’s tread on the stairway. He walks into the room and stops short. He seems to be looking at her, but she can’t hear the sounds of him undressing. No belt unbuckling, no stepping out of his shoes, no sliding of cloth along his legs. She bites her lip and puts her face directly into the pillow. She’s aware of him sitting on his side of the bed, the mattress depressing, then the sounds of the belt, the shoes, the pants. He lies beside her and brings the sheet up, making sure it covers her shoulders, almost but not quite touching her with his fingers. Then the slight tug on the sheet as he rolls away from her.

Embarrassment paralyzes Grace, and it’s not until she hears Gene snore that she dares to move her body so that she lies on her side, facing away from him. For an hour, she is awake. Does grief depress a man’s sexual drive? It didn’t depress Tim’s. Does her husband no longer find her attractive? Did he dislike Grace’s display? What would happen, she wonders, if she turned in the bed and shook him awake and asked him why he ignored her? Would he pretend not to know what she was talking about?

A new sensation claims her then, a drawing down of hope, of contentment diminishing and sinking into her stomach. She endures the feeling, not quite understanding it, for as long as she can bear it. Then, as if fighting for her life, she wrests the sheet away from her and stands. She descends the stairs and finds her cigarettes in the kitchen. With shaking fingers, she lights one and takes a long drag. The panic eases, and she sits at the kitchen table. The kitchen is hers. Well, it’s always been hers, but in the dark there are no chores to do, leaving it an oasis. She lets the air through the screen wash over her face. Her shoulders relax, and she leans against the chair. There’s a rustling in the rich summer foliage. From somewhere, a snippet of music, a voice. Under the nearly full moon, the house behind hers shines white. She flips her ashes into a glass on the table, and the disturbance of the ash sends a distinctive smell her way. Gin? She holds up the glass. There’s a half inch of liquid at the bottom. Does Gene have a drink when she goes up to bed? A quick one to steady his nerves? To drown his sorrows? She remembers coming down in the morning and finding glasses in the sink. Water glasses, she thought. He must have rinsed those out well. But this one smells of ashes and gin. For how long has he been drinking in secret? She ponders the wisdom of leaving the glass with the ash in it on the table, so that he will know she saw it. She might even leave the stub of her cigarette there, too. Which raises the question of whether she was meant to see the glass, to know that he was drinking.