Dance Lessons: A Novel

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39 The first stone plops through. She picks up another. This one plops, too. No, this way, Ell. See, it’s all in that flick of the wrist. When he came to visit her at her Cape Cod summer job, or, later, when they drove to a lake in New Hampshire, Fintan always skipped stones over the water. He could stand there for hours just watching the stone skip, the plash-plash sound. He said that it reminded him of his youth. So once, he must have stood here on this pebbly lakeside beach, on the shores of Lough Gowna, doing what she’s trying to do now. She can hear music across the water. It’s coming from someplace beyond those trees, the other side of a narrow, overgrown headland. It must be someone in a boat or a car. He told her of a drowning here, out on this lake—a group of men from the opposite side in County Galway, out for a Sunday afternoon’s fishing. Nobody ever figured out what happened, why a group of local men, experienced boaters, suddenly went down. Ellen narrows her eyes to make out the town on the opposite side, the town where families, neighbors, lovers prepared Sunday supper, or woke from an afternoon doze and wondered why their husbands weren’t home. Just like she did. When he drowned, he was attending a colleague’s wedding on Martha’s Vineyard—a girl named Abigail who worked with him in the fund-raiser and development department at the hospital. The day before that Vineyard wedding, Ellen had driven north to the Academy for a late-summer, pre-semester faculty meeting. 40 * Áine Greaney The night before that, she and Fintan had fought. So they weren’t speaking . Again. This time, it was all over a newspaper she’d thrown out in the recycle box, assuming that he’d read it, when he actually wanted an article in there. Or he said he did. A newspaper. A forgotten pint of milk. His perpetual TV watching. That summer, their last summer, it didn’t take much to set either of them off. That morning, she was gathering up her things and car keys for the drive north, when she saw that he’d left a sticky note on her briefcase: “Six o’clock. Joshua’s Bistro.” The reminder nettled her. Of course she damn well remembered that a whole gang of his colleagues were meeting for pre-wedding drinks at a fancy bar in the South End. She hated when he did that—in the midst of a huffy fight, he assumed that she could and would just put on an act, appear in a nice dress at whatever glittery fund-raiser he was attending for work or for one of his many Irish American organizations around Boston. She hated that she was supposed to pretend that they hadn’t spent the evening before shouting at each other, dredging up their verbal ammunition. As she drove north along Route 1, her fury seemed to stoke itself. Jesus, she had to do something. Something. Just tell him she was moving into the Coventry apartment. A temporary separation. Just for a while. She needed to get some real space, just to clear her damn head. And then, the doubts crept in: had she really caused this latest fight? Was she really as inconsiderate , forgetful, stupid as he told her she was? Yes, she had to officially leave him. At least for a while. And she had to tell him. Now. This evening. She stayed for the entire faculty meeting, telling herself that she had to, that it had nothing to do with her rage, her wanting to teach him a lesson. Then she got caught in evening commuter traffic on Storrow Drive. When she got to Joshua’s Bistro, their cocktail table was full of empty glasses, and Fintan and his friends had already paid the check. They were exchanging tipsy good-byes. Across the table, she caught his tight-lipped fury. Dance Lessons * 41 Later, back in their Beacon Hill living room, he exploded. You promised , fucking promised. Their words spat back and forth, back and forth under the ceiling fan in their living room. She accused him of sucking up, that all he damnwell cared about were outward appearances. Not her. Not them. Then, she stamped to their bedroom where...