Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [67]
Jack Hess stands behind the counter with the grabber he uses for the items on the high shelves. As Honora selects a product, he puts it on the counter and then writes the price in pencil on a paper bag into which he’ll later put the groceries. Then he’ll add the figures, and the sum will always be five or ten cents below an accurate total. At first Honora felt obliged to point this out (once walking all the way back to the store), but now she knows better. It is Hess’s way of helping. A cynic, she thinks, might say it was his way of making sure a customer returned to the store, and that his shortages represented little more than advertising specials, but Honora knows that Hess’s contribution to the community consists of far more than just creative mathematics.
“By the way, Mrs. Beecher, I just wanted you to know that for the next couple of weeks, or however long this durned thing lasts, I’m not taking cash from mill families.”
Honora looks up.
“Till it’s over,” he says, explaining.
Honora, baffled, shakes her head.
“The strike,” Hess says.
Honora’s grocery list vanishes from her thoughts.
“I thought you knew,” Hess says.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, I expect your husband didn’t want to worry you until it actually happened. I’m sorry to have been the one to tell you.”
Honora approaches the counter.
“The day the new pay cut takes effect,” Jack Hess says. “Monday. All the mills are involved. They say the tension is so thick over to Ely Falls that the air is just cracklin’.”
No, Honora has not heard about the impending strike. She knows only what her husband tells her. And when he is home, he never mentions his job. In the beginning, she would ask him about his work, ask him if he had friends, if he had met anyone he liked in the boarding house — the same way a well-meaning mother might query an awkward son who didn’t quite fit in at school. But shortly it became clear that Sexton didn’t welcome the questions, and she gave up. When he comes home weekends now, he never speaks of where he’s been, and if it weren’t for the lint in the laundry and the grime in the tub, she is certain they would simply pretend that he had been “on a trip.”
“I don’t like to see any family go without,” Hess says. “But conditions over to Ely Falls are inhuman. I go in there every once in a while to visit my sister and her family. Arlene married a Franco, don’t you know. And I tell you I never saw anything like that mill housing. No one can make do on the wages them mills pay. My sister’s kids are unsupervised most of the time because there’s no one at home to watch them. They’ve never had such a problem with gangs as they do now.” Hess pauses. “I’m sorry I put my foot where it wasn’t wanted,” he says, “but I expect your husband was going to tell you this weekend — after your celebration, that is.”
Honora pays for her groceries. She puts the paper bag in her satchel.
“We’ll manage,” she says.
“Course you will,” Hess says.
Her pace is furious as she walks along the beach, the surf competing with the noise in her head.
Why didn’t you tell me?
She is tired of the withholding, sick of the deception. How is she to trust the man? The unfairness, the injustice of it, fills her with rage. She will tell Sexton so tonight. Tonight they will have it out as they should have done months ago. She will scream at him if need be. She cannot be silent any longer. What is the point of scrimping and saving? They will lose the house anyway. They can’t survive even a two-week strike. All their savings have been poured into the house, their entire marriage ruined by a mortgage.
She stops abruptly on the beach. The lobster bodies stink today. They just stink. She reaches into her satchel and takes out the waxed bag with the shellfish carcasses in it. She walks to the water’s edge and hurls them into the sea.
McDermott
The machines might be organs or violins or pianos, the men and women at them as fluid as musicians. Their movements