Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [19]
In the days that follow, Sexton constructs a platform bed on which they lay the mattress. They use wooden crates for bedside tables, and Honora makes curtains from the fabric she found in the carton at the foot of the stairs. Sexton removes peeling strips of wallpaper, and Honora polishes an abandoned set of andirons.
Each evening, after they have done their chores, Sexton and Honora take their baths. Honora likes to bathe alone, but Sexton says he prefers company. He bends slightly forward, and Honora soaps his neck and shoulders and spine. As she washes him, she thinks about how fate contrived to have Sexton Beecher open a map and select a route and drive to Taft, New Hampshire, and walk into a bank and find Honora Willard on the other side of the grille. What if it had been her lunch break? she wonders. What if he’d seen the sign for Webster and taken it instead? What if he’d gotten waylaid in Manchester? What if his tire had gone flat?
One evening, after Sexton and Honora have bathed and eaten, they go for a walk along the beach. The sun, just about to set, lights up the cottages and the water with a rosy hue. The surf at the waterline is pink. Honora stops and bends to pick up a piece of pale blue glass. She rubs her fingers along the edges, which are smooth. The glass is cloudy, as though a fog were trapped within the weathered shard.
“What’s that?” Sexton asks.
“It’s glass,” she says. “But not sharp. Here. Feel it.”
Despite his bath, Sexton’s fingers still have white paint in the creases. He holds it up to the light. “It’s being in the ocean gives it that effect,” he says. He hands the shard back to her. “The color’s nice,” he says.
“Where do you suppose it came from?”
“It’s trash,” he says. “It’s garbage. Other people’s garbage.”
“Really?” she says. “I think it’s kind of beautiful.”
* * *
“I have to go back to work,” Sexton says early in July.
Honora has known all along that this will happen, but still, the announcement takes her by surprise. “So soon?” she asks.
“Someone’s got to make a living.”
This is said genially, without arrogance or irritation. Honora has worked, at the courthouse and then the bank, since she was fifteen, but there has been no talk of her taking a job. It is assumed by both of them that she will stay behind and make a home. There is enough work to occupy any woman for months.
“I could go with you,” Honora says.
“It’s against company policy,” Sexton says. “They would fire me.”
They are sitting at the kitchen table, having just eaten a turkey loaf and an onion pie. For practical reasons, she has replaced the embroidered tablecloth with a rectangle of blue-checked oilcloth bought at Jack Hess’s store.
“How will this work?” she asks.
“I’ll give you money,” he says.
She glances at the headlines of the newspaper beside his plate. CELEBRATION OF FOURTH COSTS 148 LIVES. She turns the newspaper around so that she can read the article. There is a grid next to the report. Seven people died from fireworks, seventy-one in automobile accidents, and seventy drowned.
“How much do we have?” she asks.
He looks up and thinks a minute. “Eighty dollars,” he says.
She reaches across the makeshift table and puts a hand on his forearm. “Just thinking about having you gone, I need to touch you,” she says, surprising both of them.
His skin is warm through his shirt. Already, she has washed and ironed the shirt several times. By her count, he has six dress shirts, two work shirts, two suits, one pair of work pants (stained now with paint),