“Get out,” she said. “Go back. Get out of here. Get away. I was wrong about you. I thought there was a man behind that little-boy mug of yours. Sitting down here I thought maybe this is happening because it’s what needs to happen. But I could be wrong. Being wrong, that’s something you don’t know the first thing about. But I can be wrong, I know it. So just get out. Go.”

“Jesus, you got a rag or something? I’m bleeding.”

Then she threw the water pitcher at him. This time he ducked and heard it ring out a hollow gong as it struck the wall. Bent over he saw her rise and take up the chair she’d been sitting in and come around the table toward him, the chair held up over her head and he thought he could take her down with a body block and thought of her being pregnant and paused and then she was too close for him to do anything and he scampered sideways away from her, one hand crabbing for his shoes with the socks stuffed in them and then she broke the chair over his bent back. He went down. The wind out of him. A sharp pain in his side. Could have been a piece of the chair run into him. Or a broken rib. He got his wind back and came up onto his hands and knees and slowly stood as if unfolding. His side hurt when he moved. Breathing hurt. There was blood on his face, in his eyes, from the cuts in his scalp. He was still holding the shoes.

She held out his coat. “Get out of here.” Her voice a livid hatred of him.

She picked up the ruins of the chair and set them atop the stack of drift-firewood. Swept up the broken glass. There were a few sprayed spots of blood on the floor and she left those to dry and be swept away with the sand. The pitcher had a dent in it and she set it back on the table. The damage would give the Sloane wife something to ponder next summer. She went out on the porch and took up the quilt from the daybed and wrapped it around her shoulders. Through the screening she could see him. He’d gone maybe a quarter mile up the beach the way he’d come. He’d rolled his cuffs high on his calves and was carrying the shoes and his jacket over one arm, walking down on the wet packed sand just above the waterline. Walking slow. The impatience she felt toward him she knew was toward herself more truly. To have sat waiting for him. An idiot. All making more clear why she’d left New Hampshire that summer past. Now she had not much but to get on with things. Watching him straggle along the beach she only wanted him gone. So she would be freed finally she understood to sit in the house that night with a fire burning, the driftwood throwing off blue and green sparks of burning salts as she determined what came next. For this day, it would be motion enough to do that.