Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [66]
And yet. And yet. If asked — if pressed — Honora would have to say she is strangely content. It’s an odd feeling that she cannot describe to anyone — not to her mother and certainly not to Sexton, whose unhappiness seems to have no bounds, whose unhappiness is defined now by what he does not have, which is almost everything. He will always, in his mind, be the salesman who no longer has anything to sell. A man who longs for the open road but who cannot ever take it.
Whereas Honora, oddly, now has more purpose than she ever did before. She is a dutiful wife who tends to her husband in spite of his weaknesses. She is a woman with ingenuity. She is a woman without illusions. She is a woman who, above all, is too busy trying to make a go of it to fret about her marriage.
Honora has hired herself out as a caretaker to five of the cottages on the beach, one job leading to the other, the first the result of a recommendation from Jack Hess. Most of the time, Honora’s duties consist of making sure there are no burst pipes in the basement or animals in the cupboards or glass panes cracked in a storm. On good days, she opens all the windows to dry out a house, to rid the place of the smell of mildew. In the best of the five cottages, she will take the sheets off the furniture if she knows that the owners are arriving for a visit. When there is an emergency (bats in a bedroom, a shutter blown off in the wind), Sexton comes with her on the weekends and helps to make the repairs. For this work, Honora makes fifteen dollars a month, all of which goes to meet the mortgage payment.
Every time Honora visits Jack Hess’s store she is struck by how much barer the shelves are now than they used to be, and she wonders how it is that Jack feeds as many people as he does when he appears to have less and less to offer. It is a conjurer’s trick, and Honora has sometimes imagined a kind of alchemy in the back room, a modern-day reworking of the loaves and fishes. Today she would dearly love two pats of butter, but she won’t be able to get them home in the heat. She hasn’t ridden in an automobile since she drove Vivian’s beach wagon to her house on Christmas Day and then walked back to her own empty house. Honora needs rice and beans and flour and greens of some sort, though a quick perusal of the store tells her Mr. Hess has little in that line. And today she will splurge on strawberries and sugar. She wants to make a strawberry-rhubarb pie with the rhubarb that grows wild near the street. Today is her wedding anniversary.
One year ago today, Honora and Sexton were married and they were happy. Why not celebrate that event, she has been asking herself all week, even if the marriage that followed is complicated and cloudy? She cannot imagine a life in which the day of her wedding is never acknowledged, never honored.
“Good mornin’, Mrs. Beecher.”
“Good morning, Mr. Hess.”
Jack Hess’s back is so stooped she cannot figure out how it is he stocks the shelves himself, how it is he sleeps. He has on, as usual, his bow tie and hat. A fresh shirt.
“You were lost a bit there,” he says.
“Yes, I was.”
“How are you?”
“Just fine, thank you.”
“And Mr. Beecher?”
“He’ll be home tonight. It’s our anniversary.” She hadn’t planned on saying that aloud; it isn’t like Honora to discuss something personal. But she cannot deny that she has wanted to tell someone.
“I remember clear as day when