Sea Glass Read Free Page A

and a long face. He once asked her why she did it, and she said simply that the money was better than in the mills and she didn’t have to work as hard. He thought it was the most honest answer to a difficult question he had ever heard.
    The air coming through the window is soft and cool. There are nine, maybe ten days a year like this, days that leak out between the tight cold of winter and the suffocating humidity of summer. Days that make him think of picnics as a boy, when his mother felt well enough to make the meat pies and the iced tea. Before Sean died. Before his father pissed off.
    McDermott can tell simply by his inner clock (never wrong) that there are eighteen minutes left in the lunch break. Eighteen minutes before the mill horn sounds and everyone comes out of all the doorways along the street below him, rolling shirtsleeves, slipping arms into jackets, still chewing their food. The bosses lock the gates at 12:45, and anyone who is out stays out and forfeits a day’s pay, if not the job itself.
    “I count only a dollar and forty-seven cents,” the girl says. Her voice floats up to him from the bottom of a jar.
    He bends and fishes through the pockets of his pants on the floor. She is nineteen, the same age as his sister Eileen. She has a thin cotton robe wrapped around her body. Her nipples are hard, but McDermott knows it has nothing to do with excitement. More to do with money. He lays the copper pennies on the chenille bedspread, hastily pulled up and lopsided. He wants silence and he wants to sleep, but the pain the start-up horn will cause him isn’t worth the exquisite pleasure of the stolen oblivion.
    He watches the girl squirrel the money away under the bed.
    “All right then,” she says.
    She takes her glasses off and lays them on the windowsill. She has a large eyetooth, just the one, and it makes her mouth crooked. The tooth sticks out a bit when she smiles, which isn’t often. She has on a vivid orange lipstick that he sometimes asks her to take off. She stands and lets her robe fall from her body. She tugs the blue spread from the bed with the dexterity of a housekeeper. If they are quick about it, he’ll have five, six minutes left of peace and quiet.

  Alphonse
    Every day Alphonse gets up and rolls off the galvanized bed and goes to the outhouse, and if he is lucky and there isn’t a line, he is in and done in no time and can get a head start on the lunch pails for his two brothers and three sisters. He especially wants a head start because if they see him making the lunches in the buckets they will complain and one will be sure to say I don’t want the potato, give it to Augustin, and then it will begin and he’ll have nothing but trouble.
    It is his job to make the lunches and to scrub the floor in the morning because he is only working bobbins and makes the least money, and besides, he is the fastest sprinter and can get to the gates inside of a minute, which leaves him five or six anyway to scrub the floor after the girls, who are the laggards, leave the house.
    His mother has the night shift and has to sleep in the mornings, so it is his job to get everybody off even though he is the youngest. Well, not the youngest, Camille is still in school, but the youngest of those who go to the mill.
    They live on the top floor of number 78 Rose Street and have only the back stairway in and out. Last winter his father slipped on the top step and went all the way down the three flights, and if it wasn’t for the ice he might not have broken his neck, but the mill doctor said the steps were brick hard because of the ice and that was the problem.
    After that, his mother, who hadn’t worked in the mill because of having six children, started on the night shift, and that was when Alphonse’s troubles started and the chores got worse.
    Marie-Thérèse should be doing the lunch pails, but she wouldn’t and then they wouldn’t have any lunch at all. You can’t make Marie-Thérèse do what