Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [47]
“Have one,” she says, sliding the packet of gumdrops across the bench. His eyes seem blue today. They change color every day, depending on his skin tone or what he is wearing that day or the color of the sky. Mini chameleons in his face. Blue, gray, blue gray, gray green, hazel.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You hardly ate any dinner.”
“It was a good dinner.”
“Thank you.”
“I went to Manchester,” he says, pocketing the gumdrops. “I had an account at the Manchester Five Cents Savings Bank. They had an Eight I had sold them that had jammed. My plan was to pick up the machine, give them a replacement, and then sell them a new Copiograph machine as well.” He pauses. “That was the plan.”
“And what happened?”
“When I got to Manchester, I couldn’t find the bank. At first I thought I’d forgotten the correct street, so I drove around and around. Then I consulted my address book. I had the right address.” Sexton leans back against the bench. He opens his palms.
“There was nothing there,” he says. “Just a building. No sign. Nothing. I tried to find out if the bank had moved and had notified the head office instead of me. But no — the bank had simply failed.” Sexton puts his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. In the flat light of a late-November afternoon, Honora thinks he looks years older than he did just the week before.
“Overnight,” he says.
For suppers, Honora serves baked macaroni and stewed tomatoes, or codfish cakes and white sauce. She watches the pennies closely and consults her recipe book for meals that are both filling and cheap. Sexton reads the paper almost incessantly, as if the words there might rearrange themselves into more palatable stories. He sits at the table with one of his adding machines, calculating and recalculating the sums, but no matter how many times he reconfigures the numbers, the end result is always the same: Sexton Beecher has risked everything he owned on the eve of the single biggest economic disaster in American history.
Honora finds a large rectangle of lavender glass. She discovers, half buried in the sand, a nugget of such vivid blue that she thinks at first it is a piece of cloth. When she holds it up to the light, the shard takes on an inner glow of smooth teal, a color unlike anything she has ever seen before at the beach. She hesitates over a round starburst in the sand, thinking, despite the season, that it might be a jellyfish. But when she dares to poke it with her finger, she discovers that it is the bottom of a crystal goblet, the stem snapped off at the base, the crystal battered and misshapen, but a treasure nevertheless.
She tells herself that Sexton will pull through this difficult patch, that marriage is about surviving the bad times as well as enjoying the good. She has imaginary conversations with her mother in which Alice Willard gives advice about how to live with a preoccupied husband in the same way she might tell Honora that a woman can make her own cake flour by combining regular flour and cornstarch, and that vinegar is best for windows.
Alice Willard
Dear Honora,
Harold and I missed you at Thanksgiving. I made my butter turkey and we had Richard and Estelle over. Estelle made me furious when she said she couldn’t eat the stuffing because it had onions in it, you know how irritating Estelle can be. I stewed about that until we had the pies, and I wish you had been there to talk me out of it, which I know you would have done.
Try not to worry so much about Sexton and his work. You could always take up sewing. I used to do custom work for the mill in Waterboro back when