Did You Ever Have A Family (4 page)

Now, did you know the caterer never got paid?
At first, she thinks the loud one is still talking about her daughter’s wedding in Nantucket, but she’s moved on to the past tense, another subject, a different wedding. It is soon clear which one.

Lydia scans the place for the waitress, the pregnant blonde named Amy, who she’s pretty sure used to work at the grocery store. She sees her each day and keeps meaning to ask, but after she orders her coffee she can’t ever seem to find the words. Lately, Amy just brings the coffee, which excuses both of them from speaking.

The lunch crowd has mostly left. Lydia pivots back, slightly, careful not to turn all the way around and be seen by the loud one or any of the women with her. She still doesn’t know quite who they are, but given what they are now talking about, she doesn’t want to be recognized. She wants to leave as quickly and quietly as possible. She looks again toward the kitchen, hoping to see Amy and signal for the check, but there is no one. She’s stuck and there is nothing she can do to keep from hearing this woman, who seems to not take even the shortest breath between her words.

I don’t think the tent was burned. But the big oak tree behind the house caught fire. They still haven’t cut down what’s left. It stands there, black and horrible, like some scary Halloween decoration. Now, can you imagine?

My brother used to work for Luke Morey. . . .
Someone else is speaking now, someone younger
. He was at the house the day before it happened, with his friends—mowing the lawn, picking up sticks, weeding the flower beds. . . . Silas still won’t talk about it. He’s only fifteen. The police asked him questions, the fire marshal, too, but he didn’t know anything. He worked for Luke for three summers.

Lydia thought this kind of talk had died down. And even if it hadn’t, she wasn’t usually within earshot to hear it. Most people, if they saw her coming, changed the subject or got quiet. She’d become used to conversations ending abruptly and eyes looking away from her as she passed people in the pharmacy and the grocery store, or
even here at the coffee shop. But these women don’t see her.

Amy must be resting—the lunch rush looked like it had been busy, and she’s at least five months along. Lydia remembers cleaning houses until her ninth month and going back to work with Luke when he was only two weeks old. She had to. Earl had thrown her out without a penny, and no one blamed him. Luke’s biological father didn’t know he existed, nor would he ever, and her mother had been barely scraping by on what she made at the bank. Lydia and her mother had been on their own for as long as she could remember. Her father died of a heart attack soon after she was born, and all he left behind was debt. An outstanding loan with the bank and payments on the truck he used to plow driveways with in the winter to make money.
There is no pension plan when you sell firewood and plow snow for a living,
Lydia’s mother would say when she was paying bills and smoking cigarettes at the table in her kitchen.
He worked hard
was half of the only other comment she’d make about Patrick Hannafin, who was, from the few photographs Lydia had seen, the source of her dark brown hair and high, sharp cheekbones. In every photograph he looked the same: handsome, tall, serious.
He worked hard,
Natalie Hannafin would say of her late husband,
but his hands were allergic to money
. His family had been in Wells since the 1800s, and at one time there had been as many of them as Moreys, but over the years, sickness and wanderlust and more
baby girls born than boys dwindled the fold, and now Lydia was the last Hannafin standing.

Still, Lydia’s mother insisted she keep Earl Morey’s name after the divorce and that Luke keep it, too. It made no sense, and what was worse was that it seemed like an aggressive stance to take against a family who not only took their name seriously but didn’t take any more kindly to an open challenge than they did infidelity. Lydia knew her mother held out some tissue-thin hope that Earl would change his mind, forgive her daughter, and take Lydia and Luke back. Retaining that name was her one demand at the time, and because her apartment was the only place Lydia could go after the hospital, she agreed. Lydia slept on her mother’s couch for six months, and since there was no money for a sitter, Lydia would bring Luke with her to the Betsy and into the houses she cleaned, still in his car seat, setting him on kitchen counters, window seats, and beds while she worked. Her mother always said the boy could sleep through a war.

The loud one is at it again, filling everyone in on the details. The same grim facts the papers and the New York and Connecticut news stations repeated for months. A gas leak, an explosion, four people dead, a young couple to be married later that day, the mother of the bride standing on the lawn watching it happen, her ex-husband asleep upstairs and her boyfriend in the kitchen,
an ex-con,
she makes sure to emphasize,
and black, not that it matters,
she adds in a whisper.

My God,
she can hear one of them say quietly.
What a nightmare,
she hears another mumble with what Lydia imagines is a slowly shaking head and crossed arms.

Finally, the fourth woman speaks. She must be the only one not from around here, Lydia thinks, and it must be for her benefit that these women are so painstakingly reporting the story.
How do you recover from that? How would you even begin?

Lydia puts both hands in her lap and closes her eyes as the loud one winds up.

You don’t, that’s how, and she didn’t. Now can you imagine watching everyone you love just disappear? Have you ever even heard of such a thing?

There’s nothing she can do to stop them. Nothing she can do to shut them up or shut them down. They are like the horseflies that circle her head when she walks along the town green in the summer. They dart and poke and buzz and dive, keeping pace no matter how slowly or quickly she moves.

She’s left town, apparently. West, or south, or something. After the funerals she just vanished.

For a few long seconds there is silence. The clang of lunch dishes being washed and stacked in the kitchen. The gentle beeping sound of a delivery truck backing up, somewhere.

There was an investigation,
says the woman who does not sound at all familiar but who must be from Wells or nearby to assume the role of storyteller
. There’s no hard
proof but it looks like it was that black boy she was seeing. And forgive me, he was a boy and on the one hand good for her, but look what happened.

Do you really think it was his fault?
the younger one asks nervously. Since she spoke about her brother earlier, she has remained silent
. Silas says Luke was a good boss. Our mother disagrees but Silas liked him.

Now . . . c’mon . . . I don’t think anyone really doubts that it was his doing. He was the one in the kitchen. Everyone else was asleep. And besides, he’d been in prison. For using drugs, dealing, the whole shebang. Cocaine or crack or methamphetamines or something. They were quite a pair. She ran art galleries in the city and I think she moved up here full-time. To be with him, no doubt.

How would a woman like that end up with a local thug like him anyway?
the fourth one asks, as if on cue.

How do you think?

NOW HEAR THIS,
Lydia has shouted, the words not even hers. She is standing, her chair scraping like a scream as she rises, turning to face these women.
NOW,
she shouts again, her voice a shock to her ears, the loudest sound she has made in many months. When was the last time she even spoke? Yesterday? Last week? She is standing in front of these four women, three of them near her age, midfifties, early sixties, and one of them much younger, in her twenties, the only one she recognizes. Her name is Holly, and Lydia grew up with her mother, who was a few years older and never friendly. Seconds
pass as she stands in this now-almost-empty coffee shop before a table of women, who, besides Holly, she imagines have not once worked a day of physical labor, who have been attended by loving parents and friends and colleagues and boyfriends and husbands and children and grandchildren every pampered, taken-for-granted minute of their lives. These are comfortable women, cherished women. They look at her as if the forks in their hands have told them to be quiet.

I’m sorry, who are you?
The loud one, attempting to impose order, breaks the silence and deflates Lydia’s momentary authority. Who am I? Lydia thinks. I’m nothing. I’ve never been anyone except someone’s housekeeper, daughter, wife, girlfriend, or mother, and in all of those roles I have failed and now I play no role. Her knees are twitching and she can smell her sharp body odor. She is standing before these women with nothing to say beyond the demand that they listen. Holly begins to speak:
Lydia . . . I mean . . . Mrs. Morey, I’m so . . .

As she speaks her name, Lydia’s face flashes with heat, and a panic that registers as physical pain knuckles through her chest. Before another word is spoken, she turns away, shakily places a sweaty five-dollar bill on the table, and, as she does, mumbles,
That thug is my son.

Excuse me, what did you say?
the loud one asks, her voice high, tight, scolding more than curious.

Lydia turns to face her.
My son, you stupid bitch. He is . . . He was my son.
She steps toward her as she says the
words, and when she sees the woman flinch, she realizes that her hand is raised, her palm open. She stops abruptly and hurries as quickly and as steadily as she can manage toward the door, out across the shopping-center parking lot, and onto the sidewalk that leads home.

She has heard, finally, what she feared people believed. It took more than six months for the words to reach her ears, and now that they have, she needs to get as far away from them as she can. She has no one to call, no one to rush home to. But when has she? She reviews the few possibilities—Earl; her mother; her father, who died before she knew him; Luke’s father, for only a little while; Rex, for too long, for which she will never forgive herself; Luke; June. None of these people were ever hers. They either belonged to someone else or had lives or lies that put them out of reach, or should have. This is not news, but what surprises her, after being alone for so long, is that it’s only now that it feels unbearable.

The sidewalk that leads to town is slick with leaves. They turned color late this year, some as late as Halloween, and clung to their branches until a nor’easter blew in and finally knocked them to earth. They are everywhere. She wants to run, but instead walks slowly, careful not to slip and cause another scene as she passes in front of the auto shop, the hospital thrift store, the flower shop, the historical society, the fabric store, the town library, the elementary school.

Each day, even in the rain, she walks. Her car, an old,
light blue Chevy Lumina, parked behind the apartment building where she lives, hasn’t been driven in over a month. She only ever used it for cleaning jobs, and if she needed to go somewhere in town, she always saved gas by walking. The grocery store and the coffee shop are her only destinations now and she goes to both on foot.

She walks past St. David’s, where Luke’s funeral was held, the same church her mother took her to on Christmas Eves and Easter Sundays when she was growing up.
Whether God is or isn’t, we cover the base
, is what she’d say. And for that reason insisted she and Earl get married there, too. Luke’s funeral was the first time Lydia had stepped foot in the place since her wedding day and it surprised her that nothing had changed in over thirty years. The same dark wood, the same gloomy stained glass.
God isn’t
, she whispered that day, to herself and to her dead mother. And if He was, Lydia knew He’d long ago looked past her.

She walks past the small house she grew up in next to the firehouse, the two-family Victorian where she lived when she was married, briefly; the apartment above Bart Pitcher’s garage, where her mother lived the last fifteen years of her life; the apartment three streets away, behind the liquor store, where she went to live after her divorce was final and where she raised Luke. She should have left this town by now, she thinks, ducking under a low-hanging branch. There is no one here, but there is no one anywhere. For a while there was, when Luke was
young and it was just the two of them. But as he grew older, he found swimming and friends and started to occupy a world apart from her, even though they lived under the same roof. Then much later, after prison and years of avoiding her, he came back, and only because June made him. That began a brief time, so anomalous and happy, she remembers it now as if she’d made it up. Like a fable in which some wretch is given a glimpse of paradise only to have it snatched away. She is that wretch. Luke, letting her back in his life, and with him, June: so much more than she had expected. And now both of them, in a puff of black smoke, gone.

She kicks at a pile of leaves that have been raked and left uncollected on the sidewalk and considers the thousands of times she’s walked here—as a little kid, a teenager, a mother, and now. She can’t imagine anyone walking these sidewalks as many times as she has. My feet are famous to these sidewalks, she thinks, and the idea almost amuses her, its novelty breaking for a split second the panic that drove her from the coffee shop. She holds her breath as she walks past the cemetery—perhaps the only childhood superstition she still holds on to. She clears the street corner that marks the end of the property and exhales, imagining all the thwarted ghosts—including her parents—who wait inside the cemetery gates for her to join them. Luke is buried in the small cemetery behind St. John’s Church, where Lolly Reid was supposed to be married. It’s across the road
from where June’s house had been and seemed to Lydia the obvious place. In addition to Luke’s plot, she bought two more—one for her and, though she never had the chance to tell her, one for June.