Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead

Author:Maggie Shipstead [Shipstead, Maggie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Family Life, Contemporary Women, Azizex666, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307958570
Google: cisX9KIhgo0C
Amazon: B006NKL8M0
Goodreads: 13531447
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2012-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

THEY WALKED DOWN the driveway and along the bike path beside the road, bound for the nearest salt water, a marshy inlet off the long harbor. Livia had gone inside for a flashlight and had also retrieved a canvas bag monogrammed with her mother’s initials for the lobster to ride in.

“I don’t know if he’ll survive in the marsh,” she said to Sterling, who was carrying the lobster bag. “Crabs do. I don’t actually know very much about lobsters. I know they like rocky places, and they move around quite a bit, in different depths, but I don’t know about this kind of brackish environment. We’d have to drive to the marina for anything better, though, and neither of us is in any shape for that.”

“I could drive,” Sterling said. “You should have said so.”

“Really?” she said, skeptical but not wanting to sound prissy. “Next time.”

“What’s the matter, Jacques? Don’t you trust me?”

“Jacques?”

“Cousteau.”

“Oh.”

“The majesty of la mer,” he said in a French accent. “The genius of zee lobster oo pretends to be dead zo as not to be for zee eating. ’E waits in his silent refrigerator tomb, ’oping zat rescue will arrive.”

“Lobsters have really simple brains,” she said.

They walked on, the flashlight bobbling over the asphalt path and the sand and sharp grass at its edges. She should have been playing along, she knew, keeping the flirtation going the way Agatha would have, but she was beginning to sober up and to worry that Sterling was slipping off the hook. If she were with Teddy, she would know what jokes to make, what to say and do. She was always missing Teddy at the wrong times. “I weesh,” she said, putting a lame, semi-Gallic elongation on her vowels, “zat I could be sure ee could survive in zee marsh. I simply do not know.”

Sterling was silent. She wanted to shine the flashlight full in his face to see what he was thinking. “Well,” he said finally, “starving in a marsh beats getting boiled.”

“Does it?”

The few inches of darkness between their shoulders seemed to widen as they walked, spreading into a gulf, and by the time they reached the marsh, he might have been miles away, out to sea even, in a boat she had not been invited aboard. The flashlight, as though powered by the energy between them, began to dim and flicker. “Come on,” Livia said, shaking it. The beam steadied, and she led the way down a side path, through a clump of maples and down to where reeds and cordgrass took over and the soil turned oozy and pulled at her sandals. She stopped where the water began: inert and ominous, punctured by reeds and steamed over with fog. It was no more than a thin black membrane on the silt, but it stretched to become the surface of the harbor and then the skin of the open ocean, touching all the continents. “This is no good,” she said to Sterling. “It’s too shallow and mucky. He’ll just die.

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