“Take your clothes off.”
She stood up. “Make me.”
He came around the desk at her and she kicked the chair out of the way before they fell on it. There wasn’t time to get to her house, there wasn’t time even to make it to the couch. He ripped her shirt open, buttons flying everywhere, and pulled her jeans down her legs, where they caught on the one shoe she hadn’t been able to get off in time. He didn’t kiss her or caress her, he pulled her legs apart and plunged in. She gasped and arched up, digging her nails into his bucking, heaving back. He bellowed out his pleasure and relief and collapsed on top of her, almost insensible.
They lay together, speechless, for a time. He stirred at last. “Christ.” He raised his head. “May I come in?”
Her laugh was a bare thread of sound. “Depends. Who wants in, my man or the old crank who’s been hanging out in my bar for the last month?”
“Both, I think.” He propped himself on an elbow and smoothed the long strands of thick white hair back from her face. “I’m sorry.”
She gave her hips an experimental flex. “You going to make it up to me?”
He laughed, burying his face in her hair. “You bet.”
They dozed a little, impervious to the fact that they were half-dressed, on the floor, and that one of the wheels of the desk chair had rolled over a lock of Bill’s hair.
“I told her,” he said after a while.
“Finally got up the nerve?”
“Finally got enough beer in me.”
She hesitated. “Moses?”
“What?”
“Are you sure?”
He nuzzled her breast. “I wish I wasn’t.”
So did she. “What do you think she’ll do?”
“Get a lobotomy.”
“Seriously.”
He sighed and rolled to his back, swearing when he cracked his head on the couch. “I don’t know. Up to her. I’ve prepared her as much as I can. I’ve delivered the bad news. She didn’t believe it, but she’s been told.”
She rolled toward him, winced, and pulled her hair free from the caster. “Will it be as bad for her as it is for you?”
He shook his head. “No way to tell. Mine came to me young. They say my mother had them before me, but I don’t remember her. And I haven’t asked a lot of questions.”
She knew why. Half the Bay thought he was God. The other half thought he was the devil. Bill had seen people turn away, step aside, retreat when they saw Moses coming, even though he never gave advice unsolicited. Everybody was afraid he might, though, and that this time it would be something they couldn’t ignore.
“Man.” He raised his head. “This is just pitiful. Lying under the desk, clothes half-off.”
“I was ravished,” she said primly.
He laughed, a wholehearted, rollicking sound that few had heard. “Yeah, right, that’s why you didn’t have any panties on underneath them jeans.”
“What are you saying, sir?”
“I’m saying, ma’am, that I was honey-trapped. I didn’t have a chance.” He pulled her to her feet. “I’m hungry. Feed me.”
They raided the kitchen, half-naked and giggling like a couple of kids, and brought their spoils back to the office and curled up on the couch. They fed each other olives green and black and pickles sweet and dill and pieces of cheddar cheese, washed down with enormous drafts of ice-cold beer. When they were done she licked his fingers clean, which led to other, more interesting places. This time it was long and slow and oh so sweet.
“This is all wrong, you know,” she said drowsily, a little later.
“What is?” he said, facedown, body limp.
“We’re too old to be enjoying sex.”
“Who says?”
She ran one fingernail from his nape to the cleft of his buttocks, and was rewarded by a responsive groan. “Everyone under fifty.”
“Everyone under fifty is wrong.”
She smiled, closing her eyes and snuggling in for the duration. “They sure are.”
The next morning as she was getting dressed and he was hindering her, he saw the gold coin on the desk. “What’s that?”
“Remember that arm, and the coin that fell out of its hand?”
“Oh.” He picked it up and looked at it, couldn’t read the writing, and looked for the half glasses that had sidetracked him earlier. “Twenty dollars. And Lady Liberty in all her glory.” He looked at her over the tops of the glasses. “This is gold.”
“It looks like it, and it’s heavy enough.”
“Where did Liam say it came from, again?”
“John and Teddy found a wreck up near Bear Glacier, and tripped over the arm.”
“They brought it back with them? Why?”
“Who knows why John and Teddy do anything?”
“Good question.” He squinted at the coin. “I always was lousy at Roman numerals. What’s MDCDXXI?”
“Beats the hell out of me. I’m strictly an Arabic-numbers kinda gal, myself.”
“Up on Bear Glacier, huh?”
“Yeah.” She took the coin and tossed it into the drawer. “You owe me breakfast.”
“I owe you breakfast? You seduced me with those glasses of yours.”
“You ravished me,” she said. It was her story and she was sticking to it. They argued all the way to the Harbor Café, which they found packed full of fishermen, a morose group in stained Carhartt’s and dirty white fishermen’s caps pulled down low to hide their lack of hairlines. The air was thick with the smells of coffee, bacon and cigarette smoke. Bill and Moses sat and ordered enormous breakfasts, their digestive systems having long given up any attempt to dictate diet. It came and they ate heartily.
Replete, Bill stretched her arms, her breasts straining at the fabric of her shirt, to the rapt appreciation of the fisherman sitting at the next table. Moses gave him a hard-eyed look, and the fisherman reddened, grinned and shrugged, as if to say,Who wouldn’t? He was maybe thirty-five.
“You’re a vamp,” Moses said out loud.
She did her best to look completely innocent. She hadn’t missed Marvin Engeland’s admiration, or Moses’ reaction to it. She still had it, and she’d use it however long it lasted. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Aw, what the hell, he’s too old for you, anyway; he wouldn’t be able to keep up.”
They staggered, laughing, out of the café together, in time to bump into the four remaining Tompkinses coming out of the building next door. It was a two-story, prefabricated building, housing the offices of the local State Farm representative, the Newenham Telephone Cooperative, Mario E. Kaufman, Attorney-at-Law, Great Land Cable Television, the U.S. Parks Service, and Vanessa Belanger, CPA. Betsy’s eyes were red but her head was high. Stan and Jerry were solemn. Karen looked at Moses, then back at Bill, one eyebrow going up, one corner of her mouth curving into a knowing smile.
It took a moment for Bill to remember about Lydia. “I was so sorry to hear about your mother,” she said to Betsy, the eldest.
Betsy inclined her head. “Thank you.”
“I didn’t know her outside of the book club, but what I saw I liked a great deal.”
Betsy smiled. “We’re getting that a lot.”
The Tompkinses had always been a clannish bunch, not given to associating much with outsiders, but Bill had been a member of Lydia’s book club, the Literary Ladies. It had been a going concern for almost thirteen years, and they’d stuck together through births, deaths, marriages and divorces. There was Bill and Lydia and Alta Peterson the innkeeper and Mamie Hagemeister the police clerk and Charlene Taylor the fish-and-game trooper and Sharon Ilutsik the hairdresser and Lola Gamechuk the cannery worker. They ranged in age from twenty-three to seventy-four. Some of them were married; some weren’t. Some of them were mothers; some weren’t. For one Saturday evening every month, they met to eat and talk about the book they had all read the month before, and the one thing they all had in common was the love of reading. “I know you’re going to miss her,” Bill said out loud.