Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [87]
“The laundry is in the hallway,” she says.
“Yeah. I saw that.”
“Are you going to need forks?”
“They give us forks in the boardinghouse,” he says impatiently, although he doesn’t know if this is true. Madame Derocher is a harpy. She keeps the forks locked up. Anyway, they’ll eat the pie in the truck with their fingers is his guess.
“I can’t use all this food,” she says. “You might as well take it with you.”
She puts the sandwiches into a paper bag. He hasn’t much liked the way the other guys have been ogling Honora this weekend when they think he isn’t looking. Though he can’t deny that he is proud of her. In a way, he would have to say that Vivian is a prettier gal — she is certainly sleeker and better dressed (and definitely funnier) — but, oddly, not as sexy, not even for all her brassy talk. And of course she’s much older — nearly thirty, he would have to guess. No, Honora is the more alluring of the two. And if he hadn’t been so drunk these last two nights, he might have done something about it.
Jesus, these guys can really put the booze away. It was all he could do to keep up with them. Ross, especially. Sexton is actually glad they’re going back to the city now, even if he hates the boardinghouse. Just to have a night off.
This strike thing is a miracle, he thinks. Just a miracle. Mironson is now taking care of the mortgage — and what a load off Sexton’s mind that is — and he and Honora are eating better than they have since October. And all because of the Copiograph and the Eight he’d squirreled away in the attic. He knew he’d made his sale even at lunch that first day at the boardinghouse. He’d seen it on McDermott’s face. Not a cash sale, but as good as. Better, in fact.
Funny about the way the guy can’t hear unless you look right at him. A little spooky, actually.
“When were you going to tell me about the strike?” Honora says, turning and speaking so that only he can hear.
“What?”
“The strike,” she says close to his face. “When were you going to tell me?”
For a moment Sexton is so surprised by the question and the tone in her voice that he can’t think of how to answer her. “What does it matter when I was going to tell you about the strike?” he says.
“I need to know what you know,” she says.
“It would have upset you,” he says.
“You’d keep something from me if you thought it would upset me?” she asks.
He darts a quick look into the hallway, but he can’t see the men. They must be outside by the truck. “I have to go,” he says.
“If you had a girlfriend,” Honora is saying, “and thought that telling me would upset me, would you keep that from me too?”
“Jesus, Honora, what is this?”
“I need to know what you know, Sexton. That’s what a marriage is all about. It’s about trust, and you’ve made me not trust you.”
“Why are you bringing this up now?” he says.
“Because I haven’t seen you alone and awake in a room since you got here,” she says.
Jesus Christ, why is she doing this? Doesn’t she see that it’s the first time he hasn’t felt like a bum since Christmas? He hasn’t felt this good, this useful, since the late fall, nearly a year ago. And she wants to pick this particular moment to have this fight? Has she forgotten what it was like all winter and all through the spring, when he was so tired and depressed and . . . ashamed . . . that he could hardly look at her?
“If it weren’t for Louis and McDermott and Jack Hess,” Honora says, “I wouldn’t have the faintest idea what’s going on.” She folds the dish towel in her hands.
“I tell you what you need to know,” he says.
“Like the fact that you had a Number Eight and the Copiograph in the attic? Machines we could have sold instead of starving ourselves and burning the mantel when we didn’t have money for coal?”
“That’s none of your business,” he says, though truthfully he has felt guilty about that ever since he took the machines out of the Buick before the auctioneer came. Nonexistent deliveries to a nonexistent bank from a soon-to-be (though Sexton didn’t know that then) nonexistent business machine manufacturing company. He’d