The Obvious Woman

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He walked all the way down the beach as far as the inlet, wearing his old tweed jacket, wondering how long it would be before the three of them — his wife, Mary Agnes, and his son, Jimmy, and the girl Jimmy was going to marry — would notice that he was gone.

The sea wind was cold and carried gray scud low over the coast. The three-day blow had scrubbed the stones and the brown sand clean, and he saw one Sunday surf caster, hardy and remote, in the distance. Terns huddled inshore against the wind, and the sea came smashing in.

At the inlet he wandered back toward Rickevy’s Boat Yard and stood out of the wind in the shelter of a shed and lighted a cigarette. He looked at the Gay Lady. She was winter-stored on the old timber cradle, the slicks out of her — forty years old and more, broad and heavy in the beam, mahogany and teak and white oak, with enough auxiliary power and fuel capacity to be almost a motor sailer.

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