Saltwater Cowboys by Dayle Furlong Page A

chase other women. Or he could shove off to Boston, stay with his uncle who owned an Irish pub in the university district, take a course with his bar-tip money and become a history teacher like he’d always wanted to be. He could still make that choice; there was time. Angela hadn’t seen him come down the road yet.
    Suddenly Maggie’s eyes flashed into his mind, her beautiful blue, full round eyes, stubborn and righteous, innocent and wise. He couldn’t bear the thought of her in the care of some other father, a man who inevitably would come along and be moved by Angela’s beauty and would quite naturally want to provide for her and the children in place of the nasty old black Irish husband who had deserted them. But there’d be one child the new husband wouldn’t like. It would be Maggie, of course, because she looked so much like her father. And she would grow up and want to be a schoolteacher, just like her father, whom she believed had left them for that very purpose. She would tuck her grief away, like the hair she would tuck behind her ears, clipped in a tight bun, place glasses over it, to smother and drown all of her twisted, convoluted feelings for men: deep love and hate for the man, her father, who had deserted her, and a certain emptiness she’d feel toward the stepfather.
    No. He couldn’t do that to his little Maggie; she was too precious. They all are, especially Angela, oh Christ … Angela …he thought. He put one foot in front of the other and continued toward the house, a bright smile on his stiff face.
    After supper she paced the room while he sat in the easy chair, a hot cup of milky tea in a saucer on the tea table beside him.
    â€œWell, what are we going to do?”
    He took her in his arms and hugged her tightly. “Whatever you want, my love.”
    She smiled and let him hold her. “There’s something else I have to tell you.”
    His stomach tightened. “Yes?”
    â€œYou’ve got an interview, Jack, in St. John’s with Noraldo.”
    He stiffened and his heart thumped. Worry drained the blood from his face but he forced a smile. “This is great news,” he said and squeezed her hands tightly. “How did this happen?”
    â€œI applied. I sent in your resume.”
    â€œWell, I’m glad one of us was thinking,” he said and rubbed her belly, “otherwise we might’ve missed the interview.”
    â€œYou’re not upset, are you?”
    â€œNo,” he said as his stomach and jaw tightened simultaneously. “Don’t worry, my love, everything will be fine. I’ll have a job before you know it.”
    On the morning Jack went to St. John’s for his interview, Angela stood at the kitchen sink and held a box of table salt at an angle, ready to pour the contents into a small clear glass shaker. The salt was held in a white cardboard box with ochre and electric-blue rows of oversized polka dots that faded as the dots got bigger. It trembled in her thin hand, the salt spilling onto the chrome sink.
    â€œWe go through so much salt,” she mumbled and shook her head. She pinched the grains between her fingers and rubbed them lovingly. She dipped the end of her tongue into the white crystals. Saliva dripped from her cheeks and the glands in her neck cramped with pleasure.
    There’s so much salt here, in the fish, in the water, in the rain, on our tables. Too bad it isn’t worth anything , she thought. She had read an article one morning while tidying up the girls’ bedroom in Katie’s junior science magazine she’d found lying on the floor. The article contained all kinds of interesting trivia about salt. Salt had once been used as currency, it said. Roman soldiers were given salt rations known as “solarium argentum” or a salary, and before they went off to battle they rubbed themselves with salt. After reading the article she had gone to the kitchen