Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [106]
He hesitates. “All right,” he says. “I could use some coffee.”
She brings the percolator to the table and shakily pours him a cup. Normally she adores the smell of coffee, but this morning it threatens to give her a headache. She sits at the only remaining chair. “The others are asleep?” she asks.
“I tried to wake Mahon twice,” he says, “but I can’t budge him.”
She folds her hands in front of her and waits.
“I’m not coming back,” he says, “so I suppose I think that gives me the freedom to tell you all the things I might have said in another life.”
“In another life,” she repeats.
“I wish you were free,” he says.
She puts her hands together and presses them hard against her lips. A sensation of heat rises and floods her limbs and face.
“I love your mouth,” he says.
She shakes her head.
“I hate your husband,” he says. “I’m sorry about that, but it’s true.”
She takes a quick breath.
“I love the way you are with Alphonse.”
A feeling of panic rises within her.
“Last night,” he says, “on the grass, I wanted to make love to you. I wanted it so bad I thought I would do almost anything to make it happen.”
She closes her eyes. She releases a hand, and he seizes it.
“You were afraid,” he says.
She shakes her head no. “Yes,” she says.
He kisses the inside of her wrist. “I think that’s it,” he says.
Alphonse
He wakes dreaming of bacon and when he sits up he realizes there is actually bacon cooking and so he stands and hops on one foot to get his pant leg on. He is starved, or maybe he was only dreaming he was starved, and he is so glad he didn’t get stuck in Portsmouth or Ely Falls and have to spend the night at home instead of coming here and going to the dance hall in Rye. He buttons his shirt and pats his hair forward and realizes that McDermott is already up and so he looks out the window. But no, the sun is only a little bit over the horizon; he hasn’t overslept. He runs out into the hallway in his bare feet and hooks an arm around the post at the top of the stairway and takes the stairs two at a time and then slows down in the front hall because he doesn’t want to look too eager, does he? He takes a breath and listens for any of the others, but he can’t hear a thing. And then he walks as though nothing in the world were ever important to him, and when he gets to the doorway of the kitchen he stops.
McDermott and Mrs. Beecher are sitting at the table. McDermott has his back to Alphonse, and Mrs. Beecher has her eyes closed and Alphonse thinks it can’t be true but it is, Mrs. Beecher’s eyelashes are wet. McDermott and Mrs. Beecher are holding hands in an awkward sort of way, and Alphonse wants to know why she is crying. It scares him and he wants to ask them, but he doesn’t dare move or breathe because he understands that this is one of those private moments that adults sometimes have to have to themselves. And then Mrs. Beecher opens her eyes and smiles and makes a little choking sound and looks up at McDermott, and that is when she sees Alphonse, who wishes he could evaporate on the spot.
He watches Mrs. Beecher pull her hand away from McDermott’s.
“Alphonse,” she says.
Honora
She moves from room to room, scarcely knowing what she is doing or what time it is. It has been this way since Sunday, since the men left, and when she tallies up her accomplishments at the end of the day, she is always astonished at how little she has done. Sometimes she feels heavy limbed and slow and wants only to sleep. At other times, she simply sits down and weeps — brief squalls within a chartless sail. She eats leftovers from the icebox, a few bites when she can manage to get them down, always thinking she is hungry but then discovering she is not at all. When Alphonse entered the room on Sunday morning, McDermott stood and mussed Alphonse’s hair and said that he would be leaving, and then the door was open and he was walking through it, and Honora never had a chance to say another word to him — which has left her feeling constantly poised on the brink of speaking a sentence she