Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [32]
Love,
Mother
Sexton
Sexton parks the Buick behind a J. C. Penney store. A large elm tree provides a canopy of shade. The parking lot is nearly deserted on this Friday afternoon before the Labor Day weekend.
“How long will you be gone?” Honora asks.
“Forty-five minutes at the most,” Sexton says. “Want some gum?”
“I’m set.”
“Cigarettes?”
She holds up her pack of Old Golds. “I’ve got my magazines,” she adds.
He leans across the front seat and kisses his wife. She is happy. She is going home to see her mother. Her mouth tastes like Wrigley’s Spearmint gum. Her hair has lost its sheen in the heat, and her skin is damp. Lately, they have taken to sleeping outside, on the porch. At night, there is sometimes the suggestion of a breeze from the water. The mosquitoes are fierce, but sleeping inside these days is unthinkable.
Honora waves him away with her hands. “Go,” she says, smiling. “I’m fine.”
Sexton lifts his jacket from the hook in the backseat. He has packed the Buick for the trip to Taft and has rigged up a kind of icebox so that Honora can take her pies. If this appointment goes well — and then the next — they will be on their way to Taft by five this evening. With any luck, they will get there before eight, and already he is planning to go swimming with Honora in the lake shortly after they arrive. They will wait through all the visiting and for Harold and Honora’s mother to go to bed. Then he’ll take Honora down to the lake. He’ll tell her to forget her suit.
He tosses his jacket over his shoulder. He turns and gives Honora a quick wave through the windshield. Because of the reflection in the glass of the dappled shade, he can see only part of her face. He thinks that she is beautiful. She isn’t classically beautiful and she isn’t magazine beautiful either, but she is wife beautiful. He loves catching her face when she is ironing or making a bed. In those moments, she will look content, and contentment suits her features.
As Sexton walks, he rehearses his speech. Everything depends upon timing. He is counting on Rowley being half in the bag, getting a head start on the long weekend. The weekend itself is part of Sexton’s plan, and he prays that Albert Norton, the loan officer at the Franklin Institution for Savings in Franklin, won’t decide to leave early for his summer house. If Sexton can get in and out of Rowley’s office before three-thirty, he can make it to Franklin by four, which is when he told Norton he would be there. It’s a risky plan, and in odd moments it takes Sexton’s breath away, but it’s the only way Sexton can see to raise the money for the house. Besides, the deception is a minor one, isn’t it? Merely a matter of dates.
And Sexton wants the house. He wants it so much that it sometimes makes his hands shake. He can’t explain the feeling to himself rationally. Rationally, the house is no bargain. It’s too big, too hard to heat, and in a community that virtually shuts down during the winter. And yet, if he can just secure this one thing, have this one possession, he will feel that somehow he’s ahead of the game. That he’s gotten the jump on life.
The stone entryway to the bank feels cool, and for a moment Sexton savors the sensation. He slips his jacket on over his shirt, nearly soaked through with sweat. He tucks in his shirttails and sets his hat on his head at an angle. As he opens the large glass door to the bank’s lobby, he has a sharp and visceral memory of opening the door of the Taft Savings and Loan last March and seeing Honora across the room. Her shiny walnut-colored hair snagged his attention, and he found himself moving in her direction, even though another teller was closer to the door. Her hair was cut in a neat shingle that seemed to elongate her long white neck. He took out the roll of tens and fives and put it in the trough under the grille, and he watched her hands, the skin like smooth white silk, as she counted out the money. The urge to touch those hands shuddered through him like a punch. He left only reluctantly, knowing for a certainty