What They Wanted by Donna Morrissey Page B

relationship with Mother, obscured in its brackish waters but requiring only the slightest slackening of the tides for that black edge of a dorsal fin to jut between us.
    “Going to university anyway,” I’d say loudly to Father whenever Mother was lurking within earshot. “And after that I’m moving to Rome.”
    “Learn to navigate Hampden first,” said Mother, patting my head in passing, “or are we just a stepping stone now? Stop pouting, get your boots on, you’re late for school.”
    I sniffed hard at that one and dragged my heels out the door, miffed that my travel aspirations, having once garnered such looks of delight from Mother, had somehow become the family joke.
    Worse, I hated the overstuffed school in Hampden. They made fun of the way I talked. Plus, coming from the quiet of Cooney Arm with simply Chris and Kyle for company, the number of kids I met that first day in a real school felt like a mob, stoning me with words. I got used to it quickly enough, though. The kids even started being friendly, inviting me to birthday parties, bonfires, soccer games in the field behind the school. Sometimes I went, but it was never fun. I simply wasn’t the type to make close friends. And there were always so many of them, and so highly charged and caught up in each other’s lives that they felt like one large family. As with Mother’s house, they were fully formed before I arrived; I never felt a comfortable fit. Besides, I’d already made up my mind sitting at Mother’s table in Cooney Arm that I’d be travelling far and wide the minute I finished school. So why bother planting feet on a stepping stone, I kept asking myself, casting surly looks at Mother.

    ONE WEEK IN EARLY JUNE , about five years after we left Cooney Arm, I got so homesick for the life I’d once had in my own little house with Gran that Father took me for a walk up the road to where the river emptied into the sea. It had been so long since we’d been alone that I almost felt shy walking beside him. The tide was out, the sandbar shimmering wet beneath the sun and spreading about a quarter mile out, almost flush with our house on the wharf. Hundreds of gulls cried and strutted about, their feathers white against the browns of the sandbar as they snatched hold of clams with their beaks and took flight, dropping and cracking the hard shells on the rocks below.
    “Nice way of making supper, hey,” said Father, skirting one of the smashed clams as a burly gull swooped down, suckling the wet, slimy muscle out of the broken bits of shell.
    “Yuh,” I said, and noted his hand swinging by his side as he walked. Somewhere in the past few years I’d grown too big to naturally grasp hold of his hand. I trailed behind as he followed the river deeper into the estuary through little crooked paths amongst the immense alder bed, bringing us to a meadow not too unlike the one in Cooney Arm.
    “Pretty, hey?” Father said, gazing upon the hills to the far side of the river. They rose tall, steep, forming a wall of patch-worked greens. Growing tired, he sat on a rock near where a strong current gutted itself over the rocks, drowning out most other sounds but its own gurgling. I sat beside him, watching as he listened quietly to the song of the river. His thick, dark hair was longish, past his usual cutting point, and there was an ease about him that I hadn’t felt since before the fish went, before the hated move from Cooney Arm.
    “Thought I might build agin, here—near the river—your mother’s getting crippled up, arthritis,” he said to my surprised look. “Needs to get away from the water. Think this might be a nice place?”
    “Is she going to be crippled?”
    “Noo, just aches and pains is all. She’d like it here, away from the wind, have a garden.”
    My twinge of alarm faded, and I looked about disinterestedly. “What about you, you like living near the water.”
    He gave an offhand shrug. A brown-feathered sparrow with a grey crown