Sea Glass Read Online Free PDF Page B

gray. All along the beach’s span, there are cottages and one hotel. She draws the coat around her for warmth, letting her hands slide up into the sleeves. She steps off the deck onto the sand.
    “Honora.”
    She turns. Sexton’s face is sideways in the slit of a second-floor window, stuck open from the damp.
    “Come back to bed.”
    His face leaves the window and then immediately reappears.
    “And bring the picnic.”
    The shout startles a flock of seagulls. They spread out in a fan pattern from the roof of the house and then swoop down low and skim the dune grass. In the wet sand by her foot, a bit of color catches her eye. She picks it up and studies it. The glass is green, pale and cloudy, the color of lime juice that has been squeezed into a glass. The edges of the shard are weathered and smooth and do not hurt at all. She brushes the sand off and presses the sea glass into her palm, keeping it for luck. She thinks that she and Sexton might need the luck.

  Vivian
    Razors of light flicker behind the shades at the windows. A stale metallic taste is in her mouth, and her temples are caught in a vise. Still the knocking continues.
    “Go away,” Vivian calls faintly from the bed.
    She lifts her head from the pillow and a wave of nausea ripples to the back of her throat. She has no memory of returning to her room last night, or was it actually this morning? She
does
remember seeing the ugly scissored scar on Dickie’s knee, and then, later, finding him in the bathroom, naked, dozing on the black and white tiles in a fetal position. And, oh God, did she really sleep with the man?
    The images come with the jerking motions of a Movietone newsreel: emerging from Dickie’s room at eight o’clock in the evening and changing into the rose opaline while Dickie sat at the end of her bed, smoking and recounting a story about a woman who drowned in the Hotel Plaza rooftop pool in Havana; Sylvia crying at dinner, she was that drunk, and John saying to her, in his affected drawl,
You’re stinking;
walking barefoot into the hotel from the beach, her wet feet covered with sand, while the weasely Franco desk clerk pretended not to notice her. Under the covers, Vivian moves her legs and notes with dismay that her underwear is missing.
    She sits up sideways from the bed, not straightening her neck until she is certain she won’t be sick. She will have to pretend it didn’t happen at all. Dickie will do that for her; he is good at dissembling. If she encounters him today, she will simply suggest she was elsewhere and see if he takes the hint and runs with it. Is it too much to hope that he has already moved into his new house?
    She studies the skirt of the rose opaline with its hundreds of new small wrinkles, tributaries of streams surrounding the lake of a stain. When did she spill the highball? At dinner with John and Sylvia?
    There is one shoe beside the bed. She has no idea where the other is. She thinks briefly of packing, of leaving the hotel altogether, but where exactly would she go? Her head hurts terribly, and the sun threatens behind the shades.

  Sexton
    “I’m going to get supplies,” he says, and leaves the house as if he’s done it all his life.
    His breath is high and tight inside his chest, and he wants, ridiculously, to shout. It isn’t the sudden east wind, against which he raises the collar of his coat. No, he feels like a kid again, a kid with a new bike, riding it hard over a bump, soaring, getting air under the wheels. He’s left Honora sleeping on the bed, her hair mussed all around her face, the flawless white skin of her back begging to be touched. Hard to walk away from.
    He slides into the driver’s seat of the Buick, more gray than blue now with road dust. He will have to buy a bucket, give the car a wash, maybe Simoniz it afterward. He puts the clutch in and adjusts the power lever. He stabs the starter button on the floor with his foot and feels the familiar lurch and purr. He picks up a