Sea Glass Read Online Free PDF

someone named Mironson from the Trade Workers Union,” he says. “They want rolling strikes like they had in the south. Break the backs of the mills in New England.”
    “Great,” McDermott says. “Then none of us will have jobs.”

  Honora
    Beside her, Sexton is snoring, his arms thrown up against his pillow as if he’d just been robbed. She slips out from under the blanket, pulling the sides of her blouse together. When she stands, Sexton, still sleeping, rolls away from her. The smell of his skin is on her neck and arms. She looks for blood and finds a smear on the sheet, random spots on her slip. Not as much as she’d been led to believe.
A massacre,
she remembers Ruth Shaw saying at McNiven’s, though Ruth was given to exaggeration. Her mother never mentioned it, never said a word.
    She crosses the room, the floorboards cool on the soles of her feet. She snatches up the picnic basket and her suitcase and Sexton’s coat. The latch makes a soft click as she closes the bedroom door.
    She finds a towel in her suitcase and washes herself at the sink in the bathroom. She puts on a nightgown, draping the blouse and slip and brassiere over the lip of the tub. She slides her arms into the brown overcoat, pushing the long sleeves up to free her hands. If she doesn’t eat something, she thinks, she will die. She walks into an empty room, sits on the floor, opens the picnic basket, and looks inside. She puts the heels of her hands to her eyes.
    She is on the other side of something now, removed forever from who she was only yesterday. Removed from her mother’s home. She thinks of her mother rising that morning with only Harold in the house, Harold who wakes up every day coughing.
    In the basket, carefully arranged, are bowls of potato salad and coleslaw, a wax packet of fried chicken, a loaf of wheat bread, a jar of wild strawberry preserves, two bottles of Moxie, and two small peach pies, individually wrapped. In a tissue packet, she finds a tablecloth, hand embroidered with her new initials, HWB, Honora Willard Beecher. She holds it to her face, then sets it down on top of the basket. She removes a pie with fluted edges.
    As she eats, she walks through the house, taking huge ravenous bites, careful not to get any on Sexton’s coat. The sunlight pushes at the frosted windows and makes her want to be outside. She runs lightly down the center stairway, the coat skimming the broad steps. In the hallway, she is momentarily disoriented, but then she finds a passageway to the front of the house. She opens the door.
    She has to put a hand up to ward off the light. It is diffuse but intense. The room is long, with floor-to-ceiling windows facing east. Six pairs, she counts, her eyes adjusting to the glare, the world beyond the salt-encrusted windows a temporary mystery. The room is empty save for one item, a grand piano in a corner. Honora stands at the keyboard and picks out a tune, the notes muffled, as if small puffs of air prevented the hammers from striking the strings. One key doesn’t sound at all. Her fingers are sticky from the pie, and she licks them.
    She walks to a window, trying to see out the margins, but the view is slivered and unrewarding. She tries the front door and, surprisingly, it gives. She steps out onto the porch.
    And, my God, there it is. The ocean. The sun seemingly rising from its surface even as she watches. The color of the water a splintery white, too painful to look at for any length of time. The dune grass is overgrown with sweet pea and beach roses and something else she cannot name. To the south is a long crescent of sand with intricate lacings of seaweed, and to the north a scarred bit of earth, dotted with new growth, a darkened slab in its center. She makes her way to the porch railing, its wood long weathered, rotted out in places. Beyond the front steps is a boardwalk that leads to a wooden deck overlooking the water.
    She walks the length of the boardwalk, the wood weathered dove