Better To Rest

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, gri

“You’re a vamp,” Moses said out loud.

She did her best to look completely i

“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 cla

Betsy nodded again, maintaining her dignity, and they climbed into her Toyota 4Ru

“That is the weirdest damn bunch I’ve ever met, and that’s saying some,” Bill said.

“She was a beauty,” Moses said. “It didn’t translate into her kids, though. Even that Karen, little and cute as she is. She’s just too damn hungry, and it shows.”

“Who was a beauty?”

“Lydia. In high school, she was the girl everybody most wanted to.”

“You, too?”

“Me, one,” he said, and gave her a blatant pinch on the ass. “Let’s go back to the bar.”

“I have to; I have to get ready to open up.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No hanky-panky,” she said sternly. “I have to work.”

He gri

She gave the bar a last swipe and stood back, admiring its gleam. The tables in the booth and on the floor were spotless, the ketchup and mustard and A.1. bottles full, the salt and pepper shakers topped off. She had enough clean cutlery and dishes to feed an army.

It had been a rocky start, all those years ago. She had gotten on one plane after another until she had run out of cash. The bar had had a Help Wanted sign in the window, and she went to work that night. Two years later it was hers, along with a big, fat mortgage she’d paid off early. Newenham had been a boomtown in those days, boats so thick on the water you could walk across the bay and never get your feet wet. Hundreds of boats and billions of fish and no end of buyers from Japan, a country hungry for fresh fish. And in her bar hundreds of fishermen, ready to step up with a fistful of twenties and ring the bell behind the bar. Those had been some wild and very profitable years.