Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [59]
The woman turns abruptly, and McDermott nearly walks into her.
“It’s not mine,” she says. “I hope I can get it to start.”
Her eyes are watering some in the cold. He judges her to be about his age, perhaps a year younger. Under her hat, there is just a fringe of hair. Dark like her eyes.
“I’m sure that between us we can manage something,” McDermott says.
“Are you good with engines?” she asks.
“I’m good with machines,” he says and holds out his hand. “I’m Quillen McDermott.”
The boy flashes him a dubious look. “He’s just called McDermott,” the boy says.
“My name is Honora. Honora Beecher. What’s your name?”
“Alphonse,” the boy says. “I saw you at the beach one time.”
“Really?”
“You had on a brown bathing suit.”
“So I did,” she says, sounding mildly surprised. “Are you brothers?” she asks, gesturing from McDermott to Alphonse. McDermott notes that Alphonse hesitates a moment before he shakes his head.
“I think we can all easily fit in front,” the woman says.
The Ford’s seat is taut and springy. The floorboards are covered with sand and wet snow. The woman’s coat falls open, and her skirt rides up over her knee. McDermott watches her slim leg move back and forth. Between them, the boy stares bug-eyed out the window. Every time McDermott catches sight of the green sweater under the boy’s jacket, he has to turn away and smile.
The car glides along the icy road. He wants to tell the woman to take it easy because they might skid on such a slippery surface, but he doesn’t know her well enough to give advice. The three bodies, wedged together, are producing a sort of warmth.
The woman asks him a question, but with the rumble of the car, McDermott can’t quite make out what she has said.
“He’s almost deaf,” the boy says protectively. “You have to look right at him so that he can see what you are saying.”
The woman smiles. “Well then, I won’t say anything at all,” she says lightly. “My husband taught me to drive only recently and I don’t dare take my eyes off the road.”
“I’ll just lean forward,” McDermott says. “Like this.”
He has a good view now of the woman’s face. There’s a neat furrow of concentration between her eyebrows. She drives hunched forward over the steering wheel, a slight smile on her lips. “Were you born deaf?” she asks.
“The mills did it,” he says. “The looms. The sound of all those looms in one room. Almost everyone gets a bit deaf. Mine is just worse.”
“We both work in the mills,” the boy says.
The woman looks surprised. “Aren’t you too young to be working?” she asks.
Lights have been lit in farmhouses, and smoke rises from intermittent chimneys. McDermott has nearly lost the feeling in his feet. He wants to wrap the boy’s wet boots in his jacket and dry them. He wonders where the woman lives. He tries to imagine what sort of house she is going back to, but all he can picture are the displays in the Simmons Department Store windows of the impossibly fake old-fashioned Christmases. No one really lives like that, do they? In the distance, he can see the silhouettes of chimneys against the night sky. The mills are silent now — no plumes of smoke spreading across the city — and already this afternoon he noticed that the air was cleaner. Men and women are joining the unions in droves now, and when the weather is warmer, McDermott is certain there will be a strike. You have to have a strike in summer, Mironson said, so that the workers who get evicted from their apartments won’t freeze to death in the tent cities.
Fucking bosses, McDermott thinks.
He gives the woman directions to the boy’s house, though, truthfully, he wishes they could just keep driving. He imagines them