Dawned

Short story | In the summer of 1983, twelve-year-old Margo Stewart grapples with the news of her parents' divorce and meets an unexpected confidant during a trip to the coast of Maine.

Photo by Niko Romo on Unsplash

June 1983

The man in room 119 at Cliff’s Edge always got up before the sun, which on the Maine coast in the summer meant way earlier than six. I didn’t learn this until the second week of our stay, since I couldn’t wake up any earlier than nine when we first got there. Even if I’d wanted to sleep later, the annoying gulls wouldn’t have allowed it. First thing in the morning, the noisy birds circled above the inn, and I could have sworn they were laughing at me as I tried to steal a few extra minutes huddled beneath the warmth of my pillow.

---

I turned twelve in March, and what had started as a normal birthday week, with a chocolate sheet cake and the gift of a Thriller cassette for my Walkman, ended with my dad driving me to the small park near our home to tell me that he and my mother were splitting up. He was moving to an apartment on the other side of town.

“I’m so sorry, Margo,” he’d said without crying and in a calm, careful voice that sounded like he’d been practicing.

The news knocked the wind out of me and I searched for words that weren’t there. When he placed his hand on my arm I felt my body hardening like a shell.

All I could muster was “Why?”

“It’s complicated, honey. I know this seems sudden, but your mom and I have been in counseling for more than a year. Even if we’re not together, we’re still your mom and dad, and we both love you very much.”

Sudden, maybe, but not totally surprising. The three of us shared a tiny three bedroom with paper-thin walls and if one person inside was upset everyone else knew it. Their arguing had become louder and louder lately, and then they stopped talking altogether, and the only sounds left in our hollowed-out house were drawers and doors slamming shut.

He promised this had nothing to do with me. “There’s really no one to blame. Your mother and I think we’ll be better parents living happily alone than unhappily together.”

I’m happily happy for you. But what about me?

“Where am I going to live?”

“We’re still figuring out the specifics, but part of the time with me and part of the time with your mom.”

I had more questions, but I could tell he was relieved to have said what he needed to say and was already somewhere else in his mind by the way he glanced at his watch.

He hugged me and the clean familiar smell of his Old Spice aftershave almost tricked me into thinking the last few minutes had been a bad dream. Nearby, two young mothers talked as they pushed their toddlers on the chain-link swings. One of the children, a little blonde boy with bright pink cheeks, screamed with happiness and shrieked, “Higher, Mommy. Higher!”

I wondered if I’d ever feel joy like that again or whether my best childhood memories would fade away, like any trace of my parents’ marriage.

“Can you just please take me home?” I’d asked, suddenly aware that home would never be the same again.

---

Three months later—two days after school ended—my mom and I had driven for what seemed like forever to the small town of Ogunquit, Maine, and the Cliff’s Edge Inn where we were staying. The plan was for mom to work on the novel she’d started years ago, get away from the heat and humidity of Kentucky and, although she never said it out loud, avoid my dad.

This was my mother’s third summer at Cliff’s Edge and my first. She’d discovered the town and the inn in a travel magazine and had spent two weeks there during the previous two summers on break from her job as an eighth grade Language Arts teacher.

Even though my parents had promised not to bad-mouth each other in front of me, she occasionally slipped up, like the boiling hot day we arrived in Ogunquit and she called her best friend Sally from the pay phone at the Texaco station. Maybe she was in the early stages of heat stroke, but I was impressed by the blast of cuss words she let loose about my father. Dickass? Never heard that one before.

Cliff’s Edge was a ten room, one-story inn that reminded me of a ratty roadside motel with better views. In less than a minute you could walk out your door and be on a grassy cliff overlooking the endless blue of the Atlantic.

Mom told me it had been built in the 1930’s and when you got up close it was obvious how the salt and sea air had about wrecked the place. The white shingle siding and dark green shutters were scarred with flaking paint and the old metal roof was striped with rust. On the lawn between the inn and the cliff sat a dozen white wooden chairs, grouped in twos, facing the ocean.

The room at the far end of the inn and closest to the cliff was 119. Mom and I were at the opposite end, closest to the parking area, in room 128. There was nowhere to eat on the property so we stocked our small refrigerator with food from the market in town or brought back sandwiches wrapped in red-checked wax paper from Luca’s Deli.

---

It was early evening when I met him. Mom was writing, pink tongue between her teeth, on the lined yellow pad that held some section of her novel. I left our room. The gulls must have been asleep, and the only sound was the occasional whoosh of wind blowing in from the water. He was sitting in one of the wooden chairs with his long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. There was a balled-up piece of red-checked paper on the wide arm of the chair next to a short, fat glass filled with clear liquid and a lime.

When I sat down in the chair next to him, I could see he was a lot older than my parents. There were lines on his forehead and in the area around his mouth. He had squinty eyes. Cottony hair grew from his ears, and the remaining pieces on his head waved around in the wind.

“Do you mind if I sit here?”

“Little late to ask permission but suit yourself.”

“Margo,” I said, looking him in the eye and offering my hand as I’d been taught.

“Don’t you have fine manners? Hello Margo. I’m Henry.” He offered his hand, which was thick and leathery, like he had a glove on.

“How long have you been sitting here? Are you going to watch the sunset?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably an hour or so. Long enough for my ice to melt and finish my ham sandwich. The sun won’t be setting for a while, but I’d say from the looks of these light clouds we’re in for a pretty one. I’m more of a sunrise man myself.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means I like to get up while it’s still dark outside and come out here and watch the world wake up. I’m out here every morning by five thirty. We’re about as far to the east as you can get, so this spot is one of the best places in the country to see the sunrise. There’s a reason the Indians who settled this land were called the ‘People of the Dawn’. I started coming here in 1949.”

“Jeez, that’s a long time. This is my first time. My mom’s been here before though. She’s working on her book in our room. At least she says she is. She’s never let me read any of it. Plus I feel like she rips up and throws away about every other page.”

“Writing a book is a lot of work. You should be proud of her.”

I hadn’t really thought of it that way. But I guess I was proud of her. Sometimes it was hard to think of your parents as people who had thoughts and feelings outside of being parents. And that as a kid they might need or want you to be proud of them, like you wanted them to be of you.

“What are you doing here? I mean...You don’t just come here to sit and look at the sun. Do you?”

“That’s a long story, Margo. But the short version is I used to come here with my wife. Some friends in Albany told us about this place just after we got married. Those first few summers were some of the best times of my life.”

“Is your wife here now?”

“Oh, no, she passed away in ‘78. It’s still hard to believe it’s been five years.”

It took me a minute to do the math in my head. “Wow, you’ve been coming here for thirty four years.”

“No, that’s not true. We never came back together after 1953.”

“Why not?”

He started to answer but stopped. He puffed out his cheeks, blew the air out, and then took a big drink. He stared straight ahead like he was in some kind of trance and then started confessing, the way I’d seen people in the little boxes in church do on TV.

“Because I was unfaithful to her. And everything changed after that.” He grabbed the ball of red-checked paper and squeezed it until his knuckles whitened and blue veins popped up on top of his hand. He must have been waiting a long time to tell someone that because his whole body sank into the chair after he said it.

“Did you get divorced? My parents are getting divorced right now.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Margo. That must be very hard for you.”

“It’s not great,” I admitted. “So, did you get divorced?”

“No, surprisingly, we didn’t. Divorce wasn’t as common back then. We managed to work our way through things. I think it helped that we didn’t have children. But even though we stayed together, I never felt like things were quite the same after my indiscretion. It’s like our marriage was this beautiful vase and I chipped a big piece out of it. Over time we fixed the chip. Or I tried to anyway. But even if we turned the chipped side of the vase toward the wall so no one else could see it, we both knew it was there.”

“So you didn’t come back here after you cheated?”

“No, not together. I only started coming back after she died. Those early memories are still the sweetest and the older I get the more they mean to me.”

“What are you drinking?”

He picked up the glass. “This here’s a gin and tonic. The drink of summer as far as I’m concerned.”

“Can I try it?”

“It’s got alcohol in it.”

“I know.”

He considered my request before handing me the glass. “Just a sip.”

The ice had melted but the glass still felt cold in my hand. I tasted it and immediately regretted having the bitter liquid in my mouth.

“That’s so gross,” I said, handing him back the glass even quicker than I’d taken it.

He chuckled and shrugged like he was saying “What did you expect?”

---

I heard a screen door slam behind me and turned to see my mother making her way toward us. She looked young and pretty in a yellow sundress with her long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail.

“Margo, are you bothering this poor man?”

“No bother at all,” he replied. “Margo’s been keeping me company and doing a fine job at that.”

“Well, that’s very sweet of you to say, Mr.—”

“Weaver. Henry Weaver.”

“Nice to meet you,” my mother said without offering her hand. “I’m Margo’s mom. Catherine Stewart. Come on in kiddo. We need to get you something to eat and start winding down for the night.”

“Aww, do I have to?”

She answered with a look that made it clear I shouldn’t ask again.

“I guess I have to go in now, Henry.”

“Good night Margo, I’ll see you around, I’m sure.”

A little while later, as I was squeezing a white blob of toothpaste onto my brush, I tossed a casual question in my mother’s direction, “Did Daddy have an affair?”

“Good Lord, Margo. What makes you think that?”

“Well, I always thought cheaters were bad people, so it didn’t occur to me to ask anything about Daddy because I know he’s not a bad person. But Henry doesn’t seem like a bad person either, and he told me he cheated on his wife a long time ago, and they used to come here but then they stopped because, well I guess they had to work things out. But they didn’t get divorced after all.”

“You got all that tonight?”

I decided she didn’t need to know about the gin and tonic. “Yes. He’s a nice man. I liked talking to him and he listens to me.”

“Actually, Margo, it was me.”

“What was you?” Then I got it. “You cheated on Daddy?!”

“Yes…Well no, not exactly. I developed feelings for someone while I was still married to your father. But we never acted on them. By the time your father and I decided to split, this person had relocated across the country for his job and it just didn’t seem to make sense anymore.”

I couldn’t sleep and I lay in bed trying to figure out who I should be mad at about this crappy situation. Then I realized I was mostly mad because there was no one to be mad at and maybe my father was right that there really was no one to blame for the divorce. All I knew is that I had a lot of strong feelings and no idea what to do with them.

“Goodnight sweetheart.”

“Goodnight Catherine,” I said, turning away from her and toward the wall.

---

I woke up in the still dark of the morning and carefully pulled on my clothes. My mother snored softly in her bed, wrapped in a tangle of blankets. I left the room like a thief, paying extra attention to how quietly I closed our screen door. When my bare feet hit the wet grass I saw the back of his head peeking over the curved top of one of the chairs. There was a faraway faint light over the water.

“Is this seat taken?” I smiled to myself as I thought how grown up that sounded.

“Well, look who it is. It’s not taken and I’d be delighted if you joined me Margo.”

Henry blew into his brown coffee cup before taking a cautious sip. I could hear the gulls in the distance. The wind and water were still.

“So this is it? We just sit here and wait?”

“Wait, yes. But we don’t have to be silent.”

“Ok. But I don’t know what to say. I can’t figure out if I’m mad or sad. Or scared. I’m just really confused. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel normal again.”

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, Margo, but there is no normal. The older you get the more you realize things change all the time. The more determined you are for things to be normal, the harder it will be for you when those things inevitably change. But just because something changes doesn’t mean it won’t work out. Maybe not exactly how you wanted, but in a way you can live with.”

“Like your marriage?”

He grinned. “Yes, like my marriage. And just like the situation with you and your parents. When I come out here early it reminds me that every morning is a chance at a new beginning.”

Way out in front of us, the dawn spread like spilled paint in an orange line that separated sea from sky.

I reached over and squeezed his leathery hand. “Thank you, Henry. It looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day. But I guess that could change too, and that’s okay.”