Sea Glass

Her pace is furious as she walks along the beach, the surf competing with the noise in her head.

One day a man has a job, and life is full of possibilities. The next day the job and the car are gone, and the man cannot look his wife in the eye.

But before that, before the farm went bad, Alphonse remembers being happy. He didn't know it was happiness and couldn't have put a name to it then - in fact he's pretty sure he never even thought about it - but now he knows that it was happiness.

And though her husband will appear to come alive, she knows that it is lust - too quickly ignited and too quickly extinguished - that animates him.

Poverty, her mother has written, makes you clever, and Honora knows that this is true.

And yet. And yet. If asked - if pressed - Honora would have to say she is strangely content. It's an odd feeling that she cannot describe to anyone - not to her mother and certainly not to Sexton, whose unhappiness seems to have no bounds, whose unhappiness is defined now by what he does not have, which is almost everything. He will always, in his mind, be the salesman who no longer has anything to sell. A man who longs for the open road but who cannot ever take it. Whereas Honora, oddly, now has more purpose than she ever did before. She is a dutiful wife who tends to her husband in spite of his weaknesses. She is a woman with ingenuity. She is a woman without illusions. She is a woman who, above all, is too busy trying to make a go of it to fret about her marriage.

All the picketers look bored and hot and like they

You have to do what your heart dictates," Vivian says. "Do you believe that?" "Not sure, actually. It's always annoyingly inconvenient, isn't it, the thing about the heart?