Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [93]
“I’m not sure,” she says. “It was hard enough just finding the job he has now. We could always move, I guess; go live with my family.”
“Where’s that?” McDermott asks.
“In Taft. It’s a small lake town north of here. Near Lake Winnipesaukee.”
“Your folks still alive?” he asks.
“My mother.”
McDermott watches Honora spread her fingers over the sandwich to hold it together, and then cut beneath her splayed hand. She has clean, precise movements in the kitchen, nothing extra, nothing wasted. He has never seen her flustered, even when there have been a dozen or more men in the house, a dozen or more mouths to feed.
“I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t be in there too,” she says. “On the picket line.”
“You’re doing your part,” he says. “More than your part, really.”
“Still, though.”
“Still, though,” he says, and he wonders if she will remember this particular exchange from Christmas.
Honora looks up quickly and smiles at him, and the smile moves through him like a warm rush of water. “That seems like so long ago,” she says.
He puts his hands in his pockets. “And to think this is where you came back to that night,” he says.
He walks over to the window and glances out at the lawn and the hedge and beyond the hedge at the narrow road that leads, he now knows, to a tiny village with a fish shack and a general store. One day, a couple of weeks ago, itching for a walk, he set out on foot along the coast road, not knowing where it might lead. He stopped in at the general store, had a Moxie and a chat with the owner.
“Seems like you must get a lot of peace and quiet here,” he says.
“Not lately,” she says, smiling.
“It can’t go on much longer,” McDermott says. “This strike, I mean. The city is a powder keg.”
“In your heart,” Honora says, speaking of an organ that seems to have a life of its own these days, that has lately led him to places he thought he would never go, “do you believe that capitalism is evil? I mean, we both listen to this all day. I was just wondering how you feel. Deep down.”
McDermott watches as she tears open another waxed packet of bread and cuts another dozen slices on the bread board. “There are basics I’d like to see everyone have,” he says. “People like Alphonse’s mother, for example. I’d like to see her have, minimum, hot water, indoor plumbing, food for the table, access to a doctor who isn’t a quack, some kind of assistance since she’s trying to raise a family without a husband — but I’m not convinced that overthrowing capitalism is the answer. Truthfully, I’m not very political. I like the job I’ve been given to do, but I hardly ever think about the stuff Mironson talks about.”
“Can you understand it?”
McDermott laughs.
“I seldom see you laugh,” she says. “It’s nice. I like it.”
He blushes and hopes that the sudden color will be hidden by his blotchy pink sunburn.
“How come you don’t have a girlfriend?” Honora asks. “I would think you’d have lots.”
“I had a girlfriend,” he says, “but it didn’t work out the way I hoped it would.”
“What was her name?”
“Evangeline.”
“Like the poem,” she says.
“I guess,” he says.
“You don’t know the poem?” she asks.
“Eileen told me about it,” he says. “I don’t read too much poetry.”
She smiles. “I didn’t think so,” she says.
“She got pregnant by another guy,” he says, confessing a fact he has never told anyone.
Honora looks up from her work, her expression giving away her considerable surprise. “You didn’t know?”
“I didn’t know anything,” he says. “I’d never even . . . I was completely in the dark. I was about to ask her to marry me.”
She puts the knife down. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “That’s too bad.”
“Just as well,” he says, shrugging. “I might have married her. And that would have been too bad.”
She turns away and picks up the knife again, and he wonders if she regrets anything about her marriage. Sometimes it drives McDermott crazy to be in possession of a fact about her husband that he can never tell her — the one piece