Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [27]
When the man with the blue shirt goes inside, Alphonse gets off the sill and kneels on the floor and peers over the ledge because he doesn’t want to be noticed by anyone else, just in case. Marie-Thérèse comes into the room then and says, Look at Alphonse, he’s praying, and he stands up quickly. Didn’t get enough at mass? Marie-Thérèse asks in that horrible taunting voice that she has, and his mother, who is cooking a stew, laughs with her. And then, because of Marie-Thérèse, his mother is reminded that Alphonse doesn’t have anything to do on the hot Sunday afternoon and tells him to go wash the sheets in the tub. Alphonse is so mad at his sister that he gives her a kick on her anklebone when he passes her, which makes Marie-Thérèse scream (she exaggerates everything), and then his mother cuffs his ear.
After he has scrubbed the sheets against the washboard — the sheets so heavy in the tub they make his arms tremble — he puts them through the double wringer and then hangs them on the line over the back deck. He hops down the stairs before his mother can ask him to do anything else. Alphonse thinks he should have one afternoon off a week, though it is pretty clear that his mother doesn’t even get that and so he feels a little guilty leaving her alone with Marie-Thérèse, who is practically useless.
He thinks of going round to Louis Desjardins’s house to see what he and his brothers are up to, to see if they want to go to the beach. Louis’s mother works a second job at the rectory on Sundays and so Louis and his brothers and sisters usually have the place to themselves and you can count on it to be pandemonium over there. Alphonse reaches the bottom of the back stairs. Normally he’d cut through the alley to get to Louis’s but instead he finds himself moving around the wall of the tenement to the front. He hugs the bricks and hopes no one will notice him, but that’s just as stupid, he realizes, as the men who’ve been sneaking through Mr. Nadeau’s front door. He wonders if the men are still inside. It has taken Alphonse at least a half hour to do the sheets and so maybe they have left already. He could go up to the door and knock as if he were just looking for Arnaud. That would be a perfectly ordinary thing to do, and then he could get a quick peek inside while Mr. Nadeau tells him Arnaud isn’t home.
But when Alphonse reaches the front of the building he loses his nerve. The street is deserted. Even the women aren’t out and about, which is unusual. Sunday is visiting day whether it’s stifling or not. Sometimes his mother keeps her Sunday dress on and goes to visit his father’s cousins on Fourth Street.
The front door opens. The dark-haired man in the blue shirt with the rolled sleeves comes out. Alphonse sucks in his breath. The man has his hands on his hips and his head bent and he steps off the cement stairs and walks in a small circle on the sidewalk in front of the tenement. His tie is loosened at his collar and his shirt has sweat stains in the armpits. You can tell the man is thinking about something. Maybe he is mad. The man raises his head to the sky, and Alphonse takes a step backward, thinking that two more steps and he’ll be around the corner and out of sight, but on the second pass around his circle the man looks down from the sky and runs his hands through his hair and that’s when he sees Alphonse.
“Hey,” the man says.
Alphonse cannot move or breathe.
“You’re the kid in the window,” the man says.
Alphonse shakes his head.
“Come over here.” The man beckons with his hand. “Come on, I won’t bite.”
Alphonse takes a breath as if about to drown. The man laughs and beckons again. Common sense tells Alphonse to run, but the man is smiling. Though Marie-Thérèse smiles a lot and she is a snake.
Alphonse puts his hands in his pockets and moves toward the man, who squats down