Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [107]
In her dressing gown, she cooked breakfast, everyone except Louis expressing surprise that McDermott had gone. She had not laundered Sexton’s clothes (she would never again wash his clothes, she decided), leaving him to scrounge through his drawers to find shirts and pants to take with him. And that is, of course, where he made his biggest mistake. Had he been truly innocent, she thinks, he would have been more distraught that she hadn’t done his laundry.
He might return midweek, he said as he left, kissing her on the side of the mouth as if nothing had ever happened. And then the men and Alphonse were gone, and she was alone in her house, and all she could do was wander from room to room, looking out the windows and replaying the few moments at the roadhouse and at the kitchen table over and over and over until she had extracted from them every possible nugget of meaning. At the time, it seemed to take place before her mind could comprehend what was happening, though it was clear her body knew immediately, and she thinks it is astonishing the way the body can respond all on its own, without the mind quite keeping up.
She wanders into the front room, which she has not cleaned in two days. She drifts here often, each time intending to throw away the balled-up trash that overflows the wastebasket, sort the stacks of clean paper on the table, empty the ashtrays, dust the Copiograph machine and the typewriter, pick up the glasses that are strewn under chairs, behind the couch, and on the windowsills. But each time she stands in the room, a sort of paralysis overtakes her so that she finds herself sitting on one of the available chairs, staring out to sea, remembering the conversations and gestures of the past several weeks. And then she wanders onto the porch and continues her daydreams, vaguely guilty, vaguely aware that she should be tending to her house instead.
A slithery movement at the side of the house catches her eye. Moments later, she hears a timid knock on the glass panes of the back door. When she walks into the kitchen to open it, a woman in a gray cotton dress is standing on the back stoop. Honora has heard that women who do not eat lose their hair and their teeth, and that this can happen even to women in their twenties. The woman before her has a bald patch on one side of her head.
“I’m sorry, miss,” the woman says even before Honora has spoken.
The sight of the woman, in her misshapen sleeveless dress, brings Honora sharply to her senses in a way that nothing else since Sunday has done.
“You’re looking for something to eat?”
“Yes, miss, if you would. My husband and I haven’t eaten since Friday.”
Honora calculates the time — four days without food. “Come in,” she says quickly.
“Oh, no, miss, I couldn’t do that. Please, miss. If you could just give me some bread or some soup, I will just go away.”
“Come in and sit down,” Honora says in a voice she does not often use, a commanding voice that is reminiscent of her mother’s. The woman does as she is told, hunching her shoulders as she walks through the door. Honora sees now that the woman’s hair is stiff; she has been bathing in the sea.
There is more food than Honora has remembered inside the cupboards and the icebox. She takes out the remains of a chicken, a bowl of baked beans, a peach pie that somehow did not make it back with the men. In a cupboard above the icebox are two dozen cupcakes that Mahon brought in that didn’t get eaten. She finds green beans and tomatoes and half a dozen fresh peaches.
“Do you have water?” she asks the woman.
“No, miss.”
Honora finds a pair of large crocks that came from Jack Hess’s store. One had beans in it, she remembers, and the other dried peas. She washes them out and fills them with water and puts them on the table. The woman immediately bends forward and takes a sip.
Honora pours cold water into a tall glass and gives it to the woman, who gulps it down. “Not so fast,” Honora says. “You’ll get a stomach cramp.”
She fixes a plate of chicken and baked beans and sets it in front of