The Boulder

Rain pelted the windshield in waves. Some with force such enough to startle the vehicle’s occupants and provoke a small remark about the storm. A silence had encompassed the interior and hung like the smoke from a cigarette long since snuffed out. The grey sky, the sickly color of lead was growing darker by the minuet. Had it been clear, they would be witnessing the moon rise over the horizon. A shining sphere in its own sea of dark blue. But tonight, a gale was making its presence known on the Maine coast. Growing worse by the hour, the tempest was causing tourists who straggled after labor day to scramble for overnight lodging and had owners of leisure craft anxiously awaiting news that their fifty thousand dollar toy was sitting high and dry atop half rock, it’s shredded mooring line drifting in the dark green water of Casco Bay.

Had it been any day other than this, he’d have been giddy as a child on Christmas morning discovering a hidden present beneath the couch. He lived on the Maine coast for weather like this. The howling wind and the power of the ocean awakened life in him that laid dormant during the warm, uneventful, summer months. Tonight however, he failed to notice the deteriorating conditions outside the car. His head still hurt. The storm inside that Volvo was worse than any hurricane. More damaging too.

“My Mother said she’ll get me a job at the laundry mat once we get settled.” She said, staring out the window into the darkness. The fact that the we she was referring to didn’t involve him hurt like an ice cube trapped in his throat. “I’ll talk to Randy in the morning…” she said rubbing the back of her neck “… about the lease.”

“Good plan. You can tell to him that your breaking the lease because you suddenly couldn’t care less about me and your moving to Massachusetts to fuck a scumbag named Steve.” His words pierced the car, and her, with a viciousness he hadn’t intend. He apologized.

She sighed.

“I don’t blame you for being angry…” a wave of rain hissed at the windshield and rocked the car on its suspension. “…I just have trouble believing that you never saw this coming.” She turned to him. His eyes still gazing
into the darkness. “You can’t honestly think that this is all out of the blue.”

“Well then, forgive me for thinking our love…” he took a breath in order to keep from raising his voice “ and faithfulness, was mutual.”

That hit her hard. Right between the eyes. She opened her mouth as if to say something, decided against it and sat back in her seat, looking down into her lap.

He stared out into the tempest. It was almost completely dark now, but he was able to make out the silhouette of the boulder in the darkness. The round mass of rock sitting neatly upon a narrow precipice half its size. He could see the two of them sitting atop it.

A tourist magnet for decades, people loved to have their picture taken by it and share theories about its origins. Some surmise that wind and water wore out softer rock beneath it giving it the appearance of a teed up golf ball. Others are convinced its simply a man made attraction built to siphon cash from easily entertained tourists. Locals, and perhaps anyone living within driving distance of a rocky coast know; it wasn’t built there, but thrown there some 50 years prior during a winter hurricane that did considerable damage to the town and sunk more that one ship out in the open waters where the true might of nor’easters are felt. A massive wave, (its assumed since no one was actually there to witness it) tossed the massive rock up the shore line to the jagged point it sits on today.

¨ ¨ ¨


Atop that boulder is where they shared their first kiss. An early September evening they met while at a get together thrown for an elderly lobsterman who had decided to sell his traps and move to a coast down south where they have a preference for sand over rocks. They talked over shipyard and sea bugs until the party ended and the catholic church (whose basement held the party) closed it doors. Neither of them wanting to say goodnight, he invited her to one of the bars in Portland which she quickly accepted.

They never did stop in Portland , instead, they kept on
driving. Driving and talking. They drove down the coast discussing every topic under the sun. If she were any other girl, he’d have brought her to one of the more scenic ocean vistas and tried to charm his way into her pants. She Interested him too much. He was convinced she would see through any cheap attempts at romance. Instead they drove for hours. Down to where the river spills into the Atlantic, the jetty abutting it causing endless grief for homeowners who’s properties were built there before it. They doubled back and flew past the shipyard where massive sections of destroyers 10 stories tall were being assembled by ants in welding masks. As the eastern sky grew light blue preceding the dawn, they found themselves parked in the lot of Patty’s Clambake By the Shore, hopping over the jagged rocks and ocean worn stones.

They sat atop that boulder breathing the cool dew filled air. She shivered, cueing him to wrap his sweatshirt over her shoulders. She leaned against him, her head resting neatly on his shoulder as the first rays on light pierced the horizon. He was nervous. Like a child daring himself to hold hands with the girl next door. He brought her head to his with a hand beneath her chin, barely breathing, they kissed. The world was nothing but ‘bullshit and they purveyors of bullshit’ they surmised in the car, but for that moment it was paradise. The Ocean, the boulder, the two of them, silhouettes against the sunrise.

That Image blew away in the increasing northeast wind. Replaced by the stormy reality of the present.

“We should go…” she mumbled. “…before the road through the marsh floods.” He hesitated before starting the car. He felt, he knew, that when that rock disappeared from his rearview mirror, so would any hope of the woman he loved changing her mind.

¨ ¨ ¨


The day began beautifully. Unusually warm for November. A south breeze was drawing the last of the retreating fall air before winters bitter northwest winds took hold. She was already at work when he woke up. He laid in bed basking in her smell that still lingered in the sheets. He rolled over to the nightstand where, next to the alarm clock, was a picture taken two months prior on their one year anniversary. They smiled atop the rock, their rock, as a tourist from Iowa took their photo then explained how he figured the curious boulder was “probably a relic from prehistoric times back when all this magma…” he waved his hand gesturing towards the shore “…was still cooling.” They tried not to laugh.

He arrived at his fish packing job at the wharf to find the ship scheduled for the morning was stuck at sea east of Cape Cod in “one helluva blow”. No work today. He had his boss Gary put him in for vacation time and drove to Amato’s to get some sandwiches and surprise her at work for lunch.

He sat in the Shaw’s Parking lot staring at her while she smoked at a picnic table by the entrance. He was waiting for her to see him. To recognize the car. To smile. Surprising her in little ways like this was his specialty.

A man walked over to her and that’s when he saw her smile. She rose from her seat to meet the stranger. She put her hands on the man’s hips, her eyes sparkling. He realized he wasn’t breathing. He began to inhale when the very air was sucked out of him and the blood drained from his face. Her fingers running through the strangers hair, this strangers hands on the hips of the woman he planned to make his wife, their lips embraced.

His vision was fading from the edges. His heart was pounding in his chest, kaboom-ing in his head. He felt around for the ignition and started the car. He threw it in gear and hit the accelerator, yanking the steering wheel hard to the right. He was gasping for breath as a voice in his head screamed GET AWAY! JUST GET AWAY! The car jerked into motion and that when his vision went completely. He felt the sudden stop, the yank of the seatbelt, the impact of his forehead on the steering wheel, then darkness.

When he came too, a small woman was outside the driver’s side window on a cell phone and a crowd was gathering. The front of the car was crunched into a V around a light pole in the middle of the parking lot. He couldn’t quite remember where he was, or how he got there until he saw her, standing halfway between the picnic table and the wreck, her hand over her mouth. She knew instantly whose car that was, and why it had crashed. The man she slept aside for 14 months half conscious in their wrecked ford, and she could only think about Steve’s chewing gum; which was now her chewing gum.

¨ ¨ ¨



He sat on a cot in a hallway in the emergency room with an ice pack on his forehead. He would have a shiner in the morning. No doubt. Maybe two. His head ached terribly. He asked a nurse if she had any more aspirin but she only looked at him and kept walking. She was sitting in a small chair against the wall across from him. She was silent, staring into her hands that sat on her lap. At first sitting in the car, he wondered why she wasn’t running to see if he was ok. It wasn’t until he saw Steve lurking outside the crowd that he remembered exactly what had happened.

He wanted to say something, anything. He thought if only he could say something it would magically undo what he saw. He scrounged through his mind and found nothing. He ignored the deep hurt caused by seeing her kissing another man. He was angry but he loved her. More than anything. He was waiting for her to beg for forgiveness. He was ready to grant it. Things would be different from now on, but he wasn’t ready to lose the only person he’d ever loved.

The longer he waited, the more he realized it wasn’t coming. He still couldn’t believe what had happened. What was happening. He saw shame in her face, but he didn’t see remorse. The more he thought about it, the less he felt able to breath. A growing pain in his chest blurred any attempt at thought. It was a dull physical pain, the physical manifestation of a lifetime of despair piling atop him all at once.

To her, the silence was growing unbearable. As he struggled to get his mind started, her mind was running on all 8 cylinders. She had been trying to come up with an explanation that made this not her fault since the ambulance. She hadn’t found anything.

“I’ve been sleeping with him for a month and a half…” she decided to be frank. She spoke as if there was a soufflé between them she didn’t want to break with her voice. “…and I’m leaving.”

Those three words echoed through his head; from one side to the other while never seeming to lose strength. He removed the ice pack from the bridge of his nose and stared at her. She might as well have been a stranger. He had no idea who this woman was. What happened to the woman he loved.

Steve had already singed a lease for an apartment in Gloucester where he had a job waiting for him. She had already agreed to leave with him. She’d been waiting for weeks to find the courage to break his heart. She stared at her shoes while reciting reasons to end the relationship. He had no idea that they didn’t talk as much as she liked. The fact that that they did nothing but argue now a-days was news to him. He sat quietly. He didn’t know how to refute these accusations. They never seemed to stop. He didn’t know where to start.

“A month and a half?” is all he managed to get out.

“It just kinda happened… And It felt right.”

She continued about how Steve was showing her a side of herself she’d never known before. He didn’t hear her though. He couldn’t get over those last three words. It felt right. How many times had they made love in the past few months? How many times was she thinking of Steve while they had sex? At what point did his love for her, which was more powerful than anything else on the planet, start to feel wrong?

He saw guilt in her face. But she wasn’t guilty about cheating on him. She wasn’t guilty about leaving him, she was guilty about how he found out. It occurred to him that she had yet to apologize. He could see she wasn’t going to. At that point he knew she was already gone. She was already in Gloucester with Steve.

He gave up waiting for the nurse to give him his release papers. He’d had concussions before. Having his entire world ripped out from beneath him, that was something he doubted he could get a prescription for.

He had Gary at the wharf pick them up and loan them his Volvo. Gary was busy hauling small sailboats and fishing skiffs from the docks in anticipation of an exploding nor’easter that was bearing down on the southern coast of Maine.

He wasn’t supposed to be driving but he did anyway. He was trying to come up with a brilliant heart wrenching speech that would keep her with him. He had that knack for always knowing the perfect thing to say to her. He didn’t know why but he hadn’t questioned it. Today, that well of romantic anecdotes went dry. She sat silently in the passenger seat staring at the passing telephone polls. It was overcast now and considerably cooler that a few hours earlier. It started to rain.

The paralyzing pain had subsided and was being replaced with a volatile mix of rage, despair, love, and hate. He wanted to scream at her. He wanted to beg her not to go. He wanted to jerk the steering wheel and hit another light pole. This time hard enough to kill him. Each time he thought of something to say, it would be gathered in his throat about to spill out when she would sigh or make an off hand remark about the storm and just like that, any courage he’d built up disintegrated.

He wasn’t sure why he drove to Patty’s Clambake by the Shore. Seeing the Boulder made him feel a little less like dying. The boulder on its throne, unmoved by decades of wind an surf, reminded him of their relationship prior this this evening. Solid. Lasting. Something people were drawn to. His friends were envious of him with his beautiful girlfriend who they all thought would dump him like a dead trend when she found out he was just a meat packer at the Fish market. Her friends were jealous of her with her burly, “rough around the edges” boyfriend when she would tell them about the romantic things he’d done for her, the things he said that seemed to be exactly what she wanted to hear. When other couples saw them together, often the woman would turn to her man and complain, “Why cant we be more like them?”

They were home just as the full might of the storm was unleashed. They lost power around 9. The roof leaked and the 3rd floor apartment creaked and moaned with the wind. The waves of wind driven rain lashing at the windows kept them awake. He was on the futon under an old quilt. He thought about how if their roles were reversed and she was the one coming home with a concussion after learning that he was sleeping with another woman and leaving her forever, he still be the one sleeping on the couch.

¨ ¨ ¨


She was gone when he woke up. It was a crystal clear morning. A note on the TV read…

Work called, 4 people called out or
didn’t show up. Be there until 5. We’ll
talk when I get home?



He didn’t sleep well. His head still ached and his neck was sore. Both his eyes had grayish purple rings around them. The morning news was abuzz with damage reports. The tempest had grown to hurricane force during the night. The coasties were out searching for a long liner that disappeared off radar during the early hours of the morning. The same boat that had been stuck east of Cape Cod that previous morning. Apparently they decided to try and make it back with the wind to their stern but disappeared without so much as a mayday 20 miles east of Kennebunk. NOAA buoys measured waves over 40 feet tall with winds gusting over 90mph. One Helluva blow.

The shore was in pretty poor shape. Several piers along Commercial street in Portland were severely damaged, if not falling into the water, by the storm surge. Beach front homes were missing the shingles on half of their roofs. Some windows were smashed, basements flooded, fences knocked down. 2 houses that sat next to the infamous jetty by the mouth of the river were no longer there. Since 1900, the number of homes swept into the ocean on that street grew to 47.

There was no work due to damage to the wharf that held the meat packing building. There weren’t any boats coming in to deliver a catch anyway. He drove the Volvo he had forgotten to give back to Gary along the shore to scope the damage for himself.

The flood of emotions from the night before had been replaced by a numbness so powerful he barley batted an eye at the carnage along the road. The trees that still stood along the shore all seemed to be leaning away from the water. Branches and debris littered the road all the way to a police Barricade at the turn off to Patty’s.

“Too many trees down across the road!” the cop hollered while leaning against the door of his cruiser. He asked the police officer if the restaurant was ok. “The outdoor seating decks have been all torn up but the building held up pretty well all thing considered.”

He parked the car a few hundred feet up the road and walked down to Patty’s. He occasionally hopped over trees lying across the road and noticed that the amount a branches above him seemed considerably less than that of the night before.

He was still struggling to understand what had happened. A storm of self pity was swirling in his head when something about the shore line caught his attention. Something wasn’t right. He was standing in the parking space he had been in 18 hours before. Sand and pebbles covered the asphalt now. The stiff breeze coming off the water was cold and throwing spray from the still massive breakers almost to his feet. Something wasn’t right. He couldn’t spot it at first. Like walking into your home and feeling like someone had been there while you were gone.

It wasn’t what he could see but what he couldn’t see. The boulder was gone. The point it sat upon was bare. Upon closer inspection, the boulder was sitting in two pieces amongst the rocks below. The King thrown from its throne. Humpy Dumpty in pieces next to his wall.

“Can you believe it? 50 years that thing sat there!” A man in a black Patty’s work shirt was approaching. “That thing sat through three hurricanes and some of the worst storms this coast has ever seen! I guess last night was the last straw ey?” He didn’t respond. He just continued to stare at the broken boulder. Their broken boulder. “Had to fall down at some point. Couldn’t sit up there forever.” The man continued, “But hey there’s probably another one out there now. Lord knows that storm was bad enough to toss another big rock up somewhere round here” the man gestured to the shoreline.

“Yeah maybe…” was the response.

He doubted it.