Sea Glass Read Free Page B

she doesn’t want to do.
    It is forbidden to speak English in the house because his mother is afraid that America will swallow her children, but sometimes words slip out and she hits him if he says
newspaper
or
milk
or
thirsty
by mistake. But then when he is doing the bobbins, he isn’t allowed to answer in French because the second hand is American, or maybe he is Irish, and he pretends he doesn’t understand you even if you only say
oui
or
non.
    On Sunday mornings they all go to mass at St. André, and once in a while he will see Sister Mary Patrick from a distance. She tried to keep him out of the mill and threatened (for his own good, she said) to tell the bosses that he was only eleven, which is illegal, but then she didn’t, probably because she forgot.
    On Sunday afternoons now that the weather is good Alphonse takes the trolley to Ely with one of the two dimes he keeps from his pay packet. He walks the rest of the way to the beach. He doesn’t have a proper bathing suit, but that is just as well because he’s afraid of the water. He likes to sit on the sand and search for shells and look at the ocean and feel the sun on his face and get burned and not come back until it is very late so that he doesn’t get asked to do one of the Sunday-night chores.
    He wears overalls and a shirt and a cloth cap, and his mother prides herself on keeping everyone in shoes, even though Alphonse is still wearing Gérard’s old ones and they are too small and lost their laces months ago. He doesn’t pack a pail for himself but instead puts a piece of bread and a hunk of cheese and a boiled egg in a sack that once had coffee in it. He can run better with a sack than a pail.
    He hears his mother stirring in the bedroom. He rinses the scrub brush and gets the rag out and tries to damp-mop the water away with the rag under his foot the way his mother taught him. He wants to go in and see her and say good-bye and he knows she won’t mind if he wakes her up — she says she loves to see his face — but he has only a minute left and if he goes into the bedroom he will find it hard to leave.
    When he gets off his shift and runs home, he has fifteen minutes to see his mother before she has to go to her own shift. Usually she just gives him instructions. Once in a while she calls him My Boy.
    Alphonse grabs his sack from the table. He lays the rag over the wooden railing on the back stoop and flies down the stairs, taking only three or four steps each flight. There is no one on the street, but he will make it to the gate before it closes. He always does.

  Vivian
    “I’m absolutely certain there has been a mistake,” Vivian says.
    The desk clerk, a weasely looking Franco, consults his pebbledleather register for the third time. “It says here that you are due to arrive on the twenty-fourth, madam.”
    “I can’t have been due on the twenty-fourth,” Vivian says patiently, “because I am here now.”
    She sets her train case on the mahogany desk and pulls off her gloves. She wants to shed her town clothes and slip into a lighter dress — the cowslip yellow might be good, she thinks. Over by the doorway, a porter waits with her eight glazed-linen trunks. She tucks a strand of hair under her cloche. She hates the humidity. Her hair is frizz now, just frizz.
    “I believe you are two days early,” the desk clerk says in his horrid accent. His suit is shiny and bears traces of dandruff all along the shoulders.
    “Impossible,” Vivian says.
    “I am sure we can arrange something, madam.”
    “Thank you,” she says. “But I want my usual corner room. And it’s miss, not madam.”
    “Which corner would that be?”
    Vivian suppresses a sigh. “The southeast corner, fourth floor,” she says.
    “Yes, of course,” the desk clerk says, catching her eye. And she is certain that he is smiling.
    The insolence. As if she’d just stepped off the street. As if she hadn’t been coming to the Highland for twenty years, ever since she