Cascade by Maryanne O'Hara

Author:Maryanne O'Hara [O'Hara, Maryanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781101583807
Google: _gp-HvZ4BVYC
Amazon: B0072NWJIO
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published: 2012-08-16T07:00:00+00:00

At home in the kitchen, she sat with her head in her hands until she couldn’t stand the silence. Then she roused herself to begin wringing out the second load of laundry. Asa’s white broadcloth shirt, her nightgown, flattening between the rollers as she pushed each item through the wringer. She dumped the wet pile into the wicker basket and carried it outside, where an east wind whipped up from the river, making her eyes water as she wrestled to pin the clothes to the line, bending and pinning, bending and pinning shirts and socks and trousers to the clothesline like some numb automaton.

And then the wind ceased blowing, so abruptly that Asa’s trousers did a final little dance before they slumped and hung limp.

She’d made a cuckold out of her husband. Cuckold—that Middle English–sounding word, more suited to the stage of the Cascade Theater than a modern house on River Road. It is a heartbreaking thing to see a handsome man loose-wiv’d—that line from somewhere. Antony and Cleopatra? Loose-wiv’d.

How could so much have happened so quickly? She looked down at the damp shorts in her hand. She had committed adultery. Adultery. The four syllables reverberating in her head. Seen objectively, what she’d done was unforgivable, so why was it that a deep and central part of her was glad she had done it? At the same time she felt hurt, because how could Jacob have been content to say good-bye like that? When he would come back to Cascade tomorrow and Saturday? She couldn’t stand the thought of him coming here without seeing her again, so how could he stand it? And how could she go back to the business of living when all the hours left to her seemed to hang, suspended in limbo?

She pinned the last shirt to the line and headed into her studio, where she came face-to-face with his painting.

She wished the subject were anyone or anything but his mother with her penetrating eyes. No one is good enough for my son, those eyes said. Especially you.

She turned away from it and sat down. She had to work. The edge of the table pushed against her ribs; it felt real and hard and cold. There was a new set of postcards to conceive and complete.

She had been considering a two-card, duel-type comparison of Cascade and Whistling Falls, but had she interfered in that decision? She’d closed Asa’s dam. The knowledge dropped through her the way the word adultery had. She’d closed Asa’s dam, with none of the nervousness that billowed through her now like those clothes drying in the wind.

But the pond was already filled. Asa’s plan had already worked. She told herself there was no need to worry, to concentrate instead on her work.

Which will it be? Cascade or Whistling Falls? She pressed pencil to paper. She had to start somewhere, with some line, some form, had to concentrate on the task at hand, draw one line and then another until a pleasing concordance of shapes assembled under her hand.

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