Read Online Sea Glass by Anita Shreve - Free Book Online

against each other because the beds are so narrow.
    “You’re very long,” Sexton says to her one afternoon.
    Honora feels his breath at the tip of her ear. Her nightgown is rucked up and down so that it seems that only a flimsy bit of cloth covers her stomach. When she shifts position even a little, fluid spills from her body and onto the sheets. She is awed by the intimacy, something her mother, even if she had wanted to, could not have told her about.

  Sexton
    “They say that Bill Stultz was drunk when his plane crashed,” Rowley says. “You ever been up, Mr. Beecher?”
    Sexton catches a whiff of whiskey breath across the bank president’s desk. It isn’t even eleven in the morning. Kenneth Rowley is youngish for a bank president — thirty-eight, maybe forty. He must have inherited a job he didn’t want, Sexton decides, letting his eyes slide around the room: mahogany-paneled walls, windowsills so high he could rest his chin on them, an oddly immaculate desk.
    “No, I haven’t,” Sexton says. “But I certainly would like to.”
    Actually, Sexton isn’t sure if this is true. He likes adventure well enough, and the open road more than most, but what exactly keeps the plane aloft? he has always wanted to know.
    A secretary of indeterminate age enters the room carrying two tall glasses of iced coffee on a silver tray. She sets the tray down, smooths the skirt of her summer-weight tweed suit, and eyes Sexton. Miss Alexander, her name is, if memory serves. Sexton winks at her as she leaves.
    “Cream?” Rowley asks Sexton.
    “Yes, please.”
    “Bizarre the way they’re all going for a record of some sort,” Rowley says. “Portsmouth to Rome, I hear now.”
    Sexton watches the ivory liquid swirl through the coffee and wonders when he should begin his pitch.
    “What are you driving?” Rowley asks, stirring the cream. He slides a glass on a coaster across the desk toward Sexton.
    “A Buick,” Sexton says. “A twenty-six.”
    “Like it?”
    “Love it,” Sexton says.
    “Have you seen the new Essex?”
    “Not up close.”

    “Bought one for my wife last week,” Rowley says, leaning back in his chair. “Hydraulic shock absorbers. Four-wheel brakes. Radiator shelters. Air cleaner. Paid six hundred ninety-five.”
    “How’s it drive?”
    “Smooth as a fucked mink. You married, Mr. Beecher?”
    “A month tomorrow.”
    “Congratulations.”

    Sexton takes a sip of coffee and thinks of Honora back at the cabin. He likes to imagine her still in her nightgown, the one with the loose straps that slide over her shoulders. When they woke earlier in the morning, the sheets and the pillows were damp.
    Rowley sets his coffee glass down. “So what have you got to show me, Mr. Beecher?” he asks.
    “Well,” Sexton begins, divesting himself of his glass of iced coffee and sitting slightly forward. “We’re awfully excited about our nineteen thirty line. Of course, we still carry the Number
    Six and the Number Seven, and we have another model I’d like to tell you about — I’ll get to that in a minute — and also a terrific new tool called a Copiograph machine that will just knock your socks off, but the machine I think you’ll be the most interested in is our new flat-surface accounting-writing machine.” Sexton pauses for emphasis. “It’s a machine that will allow you to keep in touch with every transaction from every department without adding an extra man to the payroll,” he says. “It consolidates accounting methods into a simple, unified plan. I’ve got a picture of it right here.” Sexton reaches into his leather case and pulls out a catalog. He finds the page and hands it across the desk.
    “What do you think about those Athletics?” Rowley asks as he looks at the brochure.
    “I think they can go all the way,” Sexton says. If Rowley reads the description of the accounting-writing machine all the way to the end, Sexton knows he’ll have his sale.
    “Boston’s pitiful,”