At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott Page B

walked with their mother to the nearest public phone—to a general store where they bought ice pops to eat while she talked, to a street in town where they sat with a bag of homemade doughnuts on a scuffed park bench gouged with blackened letters, to a gas station where she
bought them small bottles of Coke before feeding a handful of coins into the phone and shouting, a finger in her other ear, “Momma? It’s Lucy. What’s wrong?”
    If they were close enough the children could hear the small leaps of sound Momma’s voice made as she, in a role reversal that would last just these two weeks of summer, enumerated her griefs and their mother nodded silently or cooed in sympathy or said in the mildest, most heartsore protest, “Oh, Momma.”
    The distance from Momma’s chair to the patch of dirt or parking lot where their mother stood was not two hundred miles and yet it seemed to inspire in the old lady all the regret and loneliness and sense of devastating mortality that whole churning oceans or continents of mountain ranges might elicit.
    When their mother had finished off her substantial pile of coins she carefully placed the receiver back in its silver collar and then turned again to her children, usually with tears in her eyes. She touched their heads, their dark hair, and all the green or dusty way back kept at least one of them against her thigh, their shoulders under her arm seeming to satisfy something, so that by the time they returned to the cottage she was no longer carefully preparing them for her imminent departure (“Would you like to come to the train station with me tomorrow?” “Would you like to spend a few days with just Daddy?”) but discussing instead a trip to the drive-in movie tonight or what she might pack for lunch on the beach.
    Once when they returned their father had lunch packed already and four fishing rods were leaning against the deep green shingles beside the screen door. For the first time they could remember, he shook his head when their mother said she would stay home to read while he and the children were out on the boat. “No,” he said simply, “we’re all going,” and
when she once more declined, politely, almost perfunctorily because all of them knew that she never went out on the boat, he suddenly swung her into his arms and carried her, to the delight of his children, to the front seat of the car. He put his hands on the roof and leaned down to speak to her. “I won’t let you drown,” they heard him say.
    She went. The boat dock was down a long, narrow road paved with crushed seashells that popped and broke and grew finer under the heavy wheels of the car. It was ramshackle and fishy and half the boats that nosed the pebbly shoreline were filled with water. There was a small wooden hut with a dark mouth, a table where fish were to be cleaned, and a bright red gas pump, circle on top of rectangle, cartoonish in its simplicity. On this day there were six navy-blue seat cushions trimmed with white and decorated with fading white anchors scattered in the sun across the dock, and even the children could tell by the way they lay, dejected somehow, their plumpness a kind of ill health, that they were sodden.
    The man who rented the boats here might have seemed a cartoon as well were he not, like the candy-store clerk in Momma’s neighborhood, so clearly the authentic version of a caricature. He was thin and wiry with a red face and reddened watery-blue eyes under a white yachtsman’s cap stained yellow with sweat. He greeted their father, who seemed to have known him forever, and tipped his hat to their mother and gave off, as he collected their life preservers from the wall behind him and took a packet of squid from the freezer on his right, the flat, sharp, glancing—glancing like the occasional streak of light against his gold tooth—odor of alcohol.
    As he walked them to their boat he