To Sea

  The church doors opened and out stepped the priest. Behind him poured the parishioners. All stumbling down the concrete steps to their cars. All driving off under a sun held high in the afternoon sky.

  Jon was the last to exit. His shoulders fell back and his eyes focused to the sand where his boots sunk in heavy. The waves were rougher than that mornings—crashing high on the shore where a line of wrecked scallops and clams settled on the bed of rocks. Jon’s feet wobbled to the porch steps where he entered the house and into the silence of the kitchen.

  “Jon where are you?” read a yellow note stuck to the kitchen table. “Lola picked me up to go shopping. Be home later. –Elea.”

  Jon ripped the sticky piece of paper off the table, reducing it down to a ball he rolled around in his hand.

  “Lola,” he said. “I’m sure it’s with Lola, all right.” Jon pulled at his beard. He tore off a piece of bread, piling the doughy whiteness into his mouth, discarding the brown crust in the trash on top of Elea’s note. “Lola or Margie or whoever. All lies. All infidelity,” Jon said between chews. He walked into the living room. He looked at the décor stagnated from his childhood. Pictures of his father’s past. Pictures of his own past. Souvenir thimbles from port-towns. Babushka dolls from his grandmother’s childhood showcased on the mantel. An oil painting of a snowy mountain range propped up above it all. All laced with thick fuzzy films of dust.

  The faint laugh of a child filled the house. Jon looked up and out the window to across the street at his neighbors. They ran with plastic bats gripped between their hands, hurling plastic balls in a messed reality of wiffleball. Jon frowned and he closed the window, silencing the sounds of the family on the unnatural lush of fertilized green grass. Jon walked back in front of the mountain range in his living room. He looked deep into the snowy whiteness that covered the oily brushstrokes of the green conifers lining the ridge. “My girl in the mountains,” he said, tracing the peaks to the valleys. He reached down to his belt loop, clicking the car key off into his hand, swirling the key ring around his pinky. “My girl left me for the real mountains. Just like the Gully’s. East Marion can’t hold its own no more,” he said. “Fishing’s dead here. Life is only habitable inland. In the mountains.”

  Jon looked back out the window. The father grabbed his son, flipping the boy over. Then the two rolled around in the grass. The mother jumped alongside, joining in not long thereafter. Green grass stained their knees. The sun stained their souls—incasing the family with bright rays of elation. They smiled and Jon could hear their laughs loud through the glass.

  “False,” he mumbled. “Their love is false. Dependant on man. Dependant on a two-to-three hour drive west—five days a week.” He clenched down hard around the metal key and he started for the back door. For the car.

 

  CHAPTER 9