Leaving Lucy Pear(12)

“Is it such a difficult question?”

No, Emma could say, no, it’s not so difficult and no, your hair doesn’t need cutting, in my opinion. But lurking behind his plaintive tone she grew aware of Susannah in the room, not the faultless myth of Susannah but the real one who must not have liked her husband looking frowsy. Susannah was with them as unmistakably as the candle and the ridiculously heavy white robes on their hooks, which Story had asked Emma not to use because he really didn’t know her at all, didn’t know that she would never even think to wear another person’s robe. Emma shivered with disgust. She had no intention of entering into a debate with Susannah—however indirectly—about her husband’s hairstyle.

“No,” she said. “And yes, it does need cutting.”

He groaned and was on top of her, catching the afghan in his teeth and backing down the couch, uncovering her as he went. The wool tickled, raised her hairs, made Emma gasp despite herself. How could it be? And yet it was. Later, composed, she wouldn’t be able to explain it to herself. She would decide it was time to go to confession. (She had not been in nearly three weeks.) But now, here, she was on her back in a glowing bathhouse, a man she barely knew biting her hip bone, licking it, now her legs opened and she was barely required to give in because she already had.

? ? ?

“Will the children miss you?” he asked, once they were cooling again under the afghan.

“If they wake. Maybe. But they won’t wake.” They were like Susannah, she thought, trained early to sleep through anything. And this was mostly true. But it was also what Emma had to tell herself, to stave off the part of her that wondered, as she lay here on a white sofa in West Parish, divided from them by the winding, dark river: What if? She was hateful, to have left them.

His chin nodded against her. “Do the boys like their duties?”

“They tell me you’ve moved them straight to carrying drills. You didn’t have to do that. I thought you’d make them water boys.”

“You want them in mortal danger?”

“Of course not.”

She was quiet for a moment. “Let’s not talk about the boys.”

“All right. Let’s talk about you. You came to me with a proposition, now I have one for you. A position, to be exact, nursing a wealthy old man. Thirty dollars a week, funded by yours truly. You can’t spend all day making a perry shack, can you?”

She lifted her head to look him in the eye. Thirty dollars was more than many men were paid, more than Emma made in a month cleaning rooms at the Blue Heron Hotel, and that job had lasted only one summer, two years ago. They wanted younger, unattached women who wouldn’t frown, as Emma had, when guests leered at their too-short uniforms. Emma had knocked at other hotels. She had inquired at restaurants and tennis clubs. She had applied for situations she had no real skill at: assistant to a seamstress, arranger in a flower shop. She had looked until Roland had made her stop looking. He was embarrassed by his wife roaming about, embarrassed by their need, which had grown sharp that summer after he showed up late too many times to the boat he’d worked on for a dozen years, furred and sloshing in his boots, violent with remorse. Roland had always liked to drink, but without warning he’d become a drinker. The men came to Emma for help, but what could Emma do? Since then he had worked shoveling gurry on the docks, and sometimes pulling traps for the few lobstermen willing to take him. He worked at everything that was offered to him, but it still wasn’t enough, even with fewer children in the house. Peter had sent money from Canada a couple times, which Emma had used for food and clothing, hiding it from Roland until it ran out. She grew a kitchen garden but the rabbits and deer and coyotes always managed to outwit her fence and make off with half the crop. She tapped a few maple trees out back but Roland insisted they have store sugar on birthdays and there was always a birthday. Juliet offered to help with groceries but Emma refused her even as she wished that Juliet would simply stuff flour, sugar, and butter into Emma’s pantry without her permission. Emma was not as proud as Roland. She had put her perry idea into action as soon as he left for the Grand Banks. But her anxieties about the perry were only growing. She worried they didn’t have enough manpower for the rowing (to Ipswich!) and picking and pressing, worried people wouldn’t pay as much as she was counting on, worried that even if they could squeeze a good drink out of the wrong pears, it was too late in the wet game to introduce a whole new libation to the market. By next year—when this year’s crop would be ready—it would be even later. She worried about Roland, who might come home in the middle of their pressing, as Lucy said, and, ashamed they’d had to do it, put an end to the whole thing. Then he would feel regret, which would increase his shame, which would cause misery for them all.

She could share none of this with Josiah Story, of course. He was their patron. And they were not giving up: the shack was nearly finished, the picking schedule fine-tuned. They were forging gamely ahead. But the idea of a regular job, a well-paying job, had Emma’s heart pounding.

“Thirty dollars?” Emma twisted her mouth, wanting Story to interpret the wobble in her voice as equivocation, wary of how many things she had already taken from him. She found one of the few hairs on his chest and tweezed at it with her fingers. “I’m not a nurse, but I could probably manage. What’s in it for you?”

“Ouch. It’s politics.”