Strawberries in the Sea (37 page)

After a while Edwin reached a stopping place and got up and stretched. She pointed to his notepad and he handed it to her and then walked off away from her toward some scrub spruces. She wrote, “Con was here. Did you know it? Was that why you tried to get me to come with you? Did you know the news before you came?”

When he came back he took the pad, read it, and sat down beside her. She watched over his arm as he wrote, “I knew he was coming out. But not
when
. The story is out and all over the place like mumps. Was going to get you ready for it. But walked into this other—” The pen hesitated, and she took it and wrote firmly. “MESS.”

“Then you saw the boat coming this morning and you tried to get me away,” she said.

His hands moved fluently in a single question. “Are you going back?”

She answered him in kind. “To him—never.”

As if one or the other of them had clapped a book shut at its finish, he stood up and reached for the bucket. She followed him down to the beach, and they began looking around for a clean board to use as a table. He found a crate door and kicked up loose stones until he'd made a level place. She set out the food. All right now, as long as you didn't see a blood-red jigger sail like a shout in the silvery day. Quickly she wrote, “You know what Con calls us? A couple of nuts. Two of a kind.”

He laughed. “Could be right. Did it wound you to the quick?”

“If I could paint a picture of you,” she said, “know what I'd call it?”

Cutting off cheese on the clean sea-bleached board, he shook his head.

“It just came to me, when I saw you all alone out here except for the gulls. I always wondered who he was, and now I know he's you. The Man in the Wilderness, the one who goes around asking foolish questions of foolish people.”

It wasn't a very good joke, but it would do, and Edwin appreciated it, or at least he appreciated her efforts. He lifted his coffee cup to her, and she lifted hers and repeated True's old toast: “Here's to us. Who's like us? Damn few!”

W
here
Elisabeth Ogilvie
lived in Maine, nature made a lot of the day-to-day news: care and feeding of a litter of raccoon kittens born too late in the fall to make it through the winter unaided; Canadian geese in the cove for the first time ever, resting on their way north; bobcat tracks after the first snow.

The author did most of her thinking and writing in the early morning when nobody and nothing else were up except her two cats who held Olympic tryouts at dawn and managed to rout out the two resident Australian terriers with their decathlon performances. Much of her life was concerned with children, those who had lived with her and those whom she had supported during her eighteen years as a member of Foster Parents Plan.