expected. Then he came back toward her with a pair of rubber overshoes in his hand. The rings on them were perfect. Sylvia had made a point of painting perfect rings since he'd started bothering her again, to give him as little excuse as she could.
But, being the foreman, he didn't necessarily need an excuse. Sylvia dipped her brush in the can of red paint by the line and painted two more perfect rings on the galoshes in front of her.
'Tried to slip these by on me, did you, Sylvia?' Best asked. He thrust the overshoes in his hand at her.
'I don't see anything wrong with them,' Sylvia said.
That turned out to be a mistake-not that she had any right course. 'Here. Take a closer look,' Best said, and stepped up right alongside her. He brushed her breast with his arm as he brought the galoshes up and held them under her nose. That might have been an accident-had he not been bothering her all morning.
She took half a step back-and knocked over the can of red paint so that most of it spilled on his shoes. That might have been an accident-had he not been bothering her all morning.
'Oh, Mr. Best!' she exclaimed. 'I'm so very sorry!' I'm so very sorry Ididn 't think of that a long time ago.
He jumped and hopped and used language no gentleman would have employed in the presence of a lady. He'd already proved he was no gentleman by treating Sylvia as if she were no lady. 'You'd better watch yourself!' he said when something vaguely resembling coherence returned to his speech. 'You'd better clean this mess up, and you'd better make sure nothing like it ever happens again, or you'll be out on the sidewalk so fast, it'll make your head spin.'
'Yes, Mr. Best. I'm terribly sorry, Mr. Best,' Sylvia said. The foreman stomped off, leaving a trail of red footprints.
Sylvia soaked up as much of the red paint in rags as she could. She got some on her hands, but none on her dress or shirtwaist- she was careful about them, where she hadn't cared at all about Best's shoes. She opened another can of paint and went right on giving galoshes red rings, too. If she hadn't done that, Best would have got another reason to come back and have a word with her.
As things worked out, he didn't speak to her for the rest of the day. That suited her fine. Women from all along the production line found excuses to come by and say hello, though. Under their breath, they found considerably more than hello to say, too. She got more congratulations than she'd had on any one day since Mary Jane was born. If any of the women had a good word to say about Frank Best, nobody said it where she could hear.
Sarah Wyckoff said, 'That was even better than knocking his teeth down his throat, on account of it made him look like the fool he is.'
May Cavendish added, 'Now all the girls will be bringing paint to work, Sylvia, and it's your fault, nobody else's.'
'Good,' Sylvia said. May giggled.
When the closing whistle blew, Sylvia left the galoshes factory with a spring in her step that hadn't been there at quitting time for quite a while. She got her children off the school playground, and was far from the only mother doing so. The school didn't take care of children in the classrooms after teaching was done for the day, as it had during the war. But it did let kids play in the yard till their parents could pick them up. That was something, if not much.
'I'm frozen, Ma,' George, Jr., said.
'Me, too,' Mary Jane added. Half the time, she agreed with whatever her big brother said. The other half, she disagreed- violently. Sylvia never knew in advance which tack she would take.
'We'll be home soon,' Sylvia said. 'We've got the steam radiator, and I'll be cooking on the stove, too, so things will be nice and toasty. The more time you spend complaining here, the longer it'll be before you're back.'
For a wonder, the kids got the message. In fact, they ran to the trolley stop ahead of her. She might have had a spring in her step, but they were children. They didn't need to spill paint on anybody to feel energetic.
After they all got back to the apartment, Sylvia boiled a lot of cabbage and potatoes and a little corned beef for supper. The vegetables were cheap; the corned beef wasn't. The children loved potatoes and ate cabbage only under protest. Sylvia had been the same way when she was small.
As long as she was boiling water for supper, she also heated some for the bathroom down at the end of the hall. The children were old enough now that she couldn't bathe them together any more. That meant going down the hall first with Mary Jane, then with George, Jr., and last by herself. By the time she got to use the tub, she could hardly tell any hot water had ever gone into it.
That meant she bathed as fast as she could. Then she got out, threw on a robe, wrapped her wet hair in a towel, and hurried back to her flat. It was just as well that she did; she found the children doing their best to kill each other. Size favored George, Jr., ferocity and long fingernails Mary Jane.
'Can't I leave the two of you alone for five minutes?' Sylvia demanded, despite the answer obviously being no. She did her best to get to the bottom of what had started the brawl. The children told diametrically opposite stories. She might have known they would. She had known they would. This time, she couldn't sort out who was lying, or whether they both thought they were telling the truth. With fine impartiality, she whacked both their bottoms.
'I hate you!'' Mary Jane screamed. 'I hate you even worse than I hate him.' She pointed to George, Jr.
Ignoring his sister, he told Sylvia, 'I'm never going to speak to you again as long as I live.' He'd made that threat before, and once made good on it for a solid half hour: long enough to unnerve her.
She went into the bedroom and looked at her alarm clock. 'It's after eight,' she said. 'You both need to get ready for bed.' That produced more impassioned protests from the children; George, Jr., abandoned silence so he could squawk his head off. It did him no good. In fifteen minutes, he and Mary Jane were both in bed, and asleep very shortly after that.
Sylvia sat down on the couch with a weary sigh. She would have to go to bed pretty soon herself. When she got up, all she had to look forward to was another day at the galoshes factory. Life was supposed to be better than that, wasn't it?
Life would have been better-she was sure of it-had George lived. Then he would have been going out to sea, true, and complaining about the drudgery when he was back on land. But, no matter how hard the work was, he'd liked it. Sylvia wouldn't have liked making galoshes even had Frank Best not bothered her whenever he wasn't bothering someone else. It was only a job, something she did to keep food on the table. She wished she could quit.
She sighed again. She was trapped. The only difference between her and a mouse in a trap was that her back wasn't broken… yet. 'If I had that limey submersible skipper here,' she said, 'I'd shoot him right between the eyes. What the hell was he doing in that part of the Atlantic?' She didn't own a pistol; George hadn't kept one in the flat. She would gladly have learned to shoot one, though, if she could have avenged herself on that Englishman. She shook her head. For all she knew, the King of England had pinned a medal on him. If there was any justice in the world, she had a devil of a time seeing where.
A nasty wind blew snow into Lucien Galtier's face. He pulled down his hat and yanked up the collar of his coat as he made his slow way from the farmhouse to the barn. His way had to be slow; because of the snow, he could hardly tell where the barn lay. But his feet knew.
He accepted Quebec winter with the resignation of a man who had never known and scarcely imagined anything different. Moving to a warmer climate had never crossed his mind. Quebec boasted no warmer climates. Besides, moving would have taken him off the land his family had farmed since the seventeenth century. He was less likely to leave his patrimony than he was to leave his wife, and never once in all the years since the priest joined them together had he had any thought of leaving Marie.
When he got to the barn, he let out a sigh of relief. The horse snorted, hearing him come in. It was not a snort of friendly greeting, in spite of all the hours of conversation that had passed between the two of them as they traveled the roads around the farm. No, the only thing that snort meant was, Where's my breakfast, and what kept you so long?
'Compose yourself in patience, greedy beast,' Galtier said. The horse snorted again. It was not about to compose itself in patience, or any other way. It wanted hay and it wanted oats and it wanted them right this second.
He fed all the livestock and cleaned up the muck. By the time he was done with that, the muscles in the small
