Read Sea Glass for Free Online

crumpled napkin and tosses it out the window. He likes to keep the Buick tidy.
    The only stores he’s seen are in the mill town they drove through the day before. He remembers a five-and-dime where he could get cleaning supplies, a market where he could buy food. And he ought to get gas there as well, he thinks, at the Texaco station.
    But first he wants to check out the coast road. An open road always tempting, promising surprises, the possibility of luck. It’s why he is a traveling salesman, why he chucked it all back home. Nothing better than to find an unfamiliar road on the map, see where it takes him. He got the Claremont Bank account that way, and the Mutual Life account in Andover. It’s how he found Honora, for that matter — that bit about the courthouse true only after he had met her.
    He looks at the fuel gauge. A quarter of a tank, more than enough for a spin.
    Sand drifts across the cracked pavement like blown snow, but the Buick handles well, the weight of the typewriters in the backseat giving it welcome ballast. He likes the products that he sells, understands their value and knows that he can convince almost anyone of their necessity. But he likes the typewriters as objects even more: the enameled keys with their silver rings, the gold engraving on the black casing, the satisfying thunk of the carriage return. The Fosdick is a good and serviceable machine, heavy as a son of a bitch.
    Christ, he thought the house would have some furniture: a table, a couple of chairs, a bed. He and Honora would have brought furniture with them if they had known, and surely Honora’s mother would have given them some household bits and pieces, just to get them started. Sexton has eighty dollars saved from his commissions — a fat one just last week, though he had to shave off a bit for the earrings. He thinks about Honora’s face when she saw the earrings in his hands. Smiling, but still there was that solemn thing in her eyes, taking in the ritual. He couldn’t remember exactly what old Harold had said and so he’d had to make it up as he’d gone along. Odd that bit about unlocking secrets, he thinks now. Where had that come from?
    The coast road hugs the contours of the beach, leaving only the cottages between the Buick and the water. Beautiful they are, even boarded up before the season starts in July, as if their eyes and mouths were taped. Old dames facing the sea. The houses mute till someone comes and rips the tape off.
    He turns a corner and skids a bit on the sandy pavement.
    Take it easy,
he thinks.
    The road is a ribbon now, threading through the beach on the right, a marsh on the left. A marsh and something else, he sees, as he pulls out from the shadow of a house. A tidal pool, maybe half a mile across, and at its entrance a feisty current tossing whitecaps against the banks of a narrow channel. There are boats anchored in the pool, half a dozen lobster boats and someone’s yacht, its mast tilting wildly in the chop. A channel has been dredged.
    He hadn’t planned on getting married so soon. Jesus, he’s only twenty-four. And for a while there he thought he might not ever get married, the thrill of the open road too deep inside his bones. But he knew, even that first day at the bank, with Honora behind the grille, that this might be something different, something worth staying put for. He will never forget the sight of Honora’s hands, long fingered and slender and white, so white, slipping out beneath the grille, as if she were a nun and that was all she would allow him to see. The hands snagging his thoughts — practically the only thing that could take his mind off the car, the shine of the paint job a gleam across the front of his brain.
    He looked up then at her face, the dark eyes blanketed with lashes. Her hair shingled back from her cheekbones. A beautiful jawline, almost masculine, and a long neck. She had on that day a low-waisted dress that was pinkish beige with complicated buttons along