“I’ll have a cup of your chowder,” he informs their waitress, Alison Hartwig, whose mother will serve Gwen lunch tomorrow in the school cafeteria.
“So what’s with Alan?” Gwen asks after she orders a vanilla Diet Coke.
“He’s a wreck, plain and simple. No one ever sees him, and his boy, Hank, is being raised over at the Farm. I think I’ll have a coffee too,” Jimmy calls to Alison Hartwig. “Black.”
Gwen rolls all this information around in her mind. Why has no one told her this before? This means that Hank is not simply some relative. He’s her first cousin; an embarrassing, odd fact. Is it a crime to fall in love with him? Will people look at them and whisper?
“I hope you know more about racehorses than you do about your family,” Jimmy Parrish says as he spoons sugar into the coffee he’s been served.
“I don’t,” Gwen says.
She has a queasy feeling in her stomach. It sounds as if she and Hank come from the worst possible gene pool. She wishes they weren’t related, that they were perfect strangers who were old enough to make their own plans, without interference from anyone.
“I’ve been riding that horse over at Guardian Farm. The one you were talking about. Tarot.”
Jimmy Parrish has been served his chowder, but now he puts down his spoon. He looks at Gwen, hard, and shakes his head.
“You’re lucky that horse isn’t in his prime, or you’d already be dead.”
“I don’t think so,” Gwen says. She puts a dollar on the counter to pay for her Coke, then grabs all her books. “I’m the one in my family who’s going to live.”
She walks home through the cold late-afternoon sunlight. When she gets to the dirt road, Hank is waiting for her, sitting on a stone fence.
“You didn’t come to tea,” he says, when Gwen perches beside him. “I had to eat all the cookies your mother put out, to be polite. She’s nice.”
“No, she’s not.” Gwen stacks her pile of books between them; her posture is stiff.
“Okay.” Hank realizes he has to be careful here. She’s upset about something, and he has no idea what it might be. “I was only in the house for about half an hour. She seemed nice for that amount of time.”
“We’re first cousins,” Gwen says. “Did you know that?”
Hank leafs through the pages of one of the library books. There is a crow somewhere close by and it starts its insufferable calling.
“Did you know?” Gwen asks.
The grass in the fields is yellow now, and the squirrels are frantically collecting the last of the acorns. She can tell by looking at him: He knew. Gwen shakes her head. “You should have told me.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Hank tells her. “That’s why I didn’t say anything. The way we feel is what matters.”
Gwen stares straight ahead, at the maples and the oaks, then reaches to put her hand in his. Maybe some people would disapprove, but Gwen doesn’t care. When Hank closes his hand around hers, that’s it. They’ve made their bargain; they’ve sealed their fate. What she ever did to deserve him, Gwen will never understand. Maybe she’s a better person than she thought she was; maybe there’s a reason why she would be lucky enough to find someone like Hank. They walk across the hill together, and they keep going, past the fences and the old trees, until they can see almost all of Guardian Farm, a sea of gold and green. Beyond the split-rail fence that lines the driveway, there is the piece of road that leads into Route 22.
“The devil’s comer,” Gwen says.
Hank laughs. “Who told you that?”
“Some guy in town.”
There are several logging trucks going by on Route 22; when they honk their horns the sound echoes into the sky.
“Are you saying there’s somebody else?” Hank teases since it is, at the moment, his biggest fear; the doubt Hollis placed there, for his own entertainment. “Some other guy?”
“No.” Gwen grins to think he might be jealous of old Jimmy Parrish. “How about you? Is there somebody you’re dying to be with?”
“You,” he tells her. Exactly what she wanted to hear. “Only you,” he says.
12
March sits on the braided rug in the living room looking at a photograph of her brother taken when he was sixteen. It was summer and Alan’s hair had been bleached almost white by the sun. He wears a polo shirt and jeans and white sneakers and he’s grinning right at the camera. He hadn’t yet failed at school, or marriage, or fatherhood. He was nothing more than a boy who didn’t know when to quit, or how to treat people; he was fun-loving, but selfish, with a regrettable nasty streak. March has driven out to the Marshes five times, and five times he has refused to answer the door. He’s gone, that’s what it is. Someone lives in that shack, all right, but the boy whose photograph March examines has vanished like a handful of dust.