He felt no longer himself.
He said, quietly, “God, what have I done?” And he meant that he was really asking God. And then he said, “Where are you, God?” But the car remained the same, warm, still slightly smelling from the presence of Pete Barton, just rumbling over the road.
He drove more quickly than he usually did. Going past him were the fields of soybeans and corn and the brown fields as well, and he saw them only barely.
At home, Shirley was sitting on the front steps; her glasses twinkled in the sunlight, and she waved to him as he drove up the small driveway. “Shirley,” he called as he got out of the car. “Shirley.” She pulled herself up from the steps by holding on to the railing, and came to him with worry on her face. “Shirley,” he said, “I have to tell you about something.”
At the small kitchen table, in their small kitchen, they sat. A tall water glass held peony buds, and Shirley pushed it to the side. Tommy told her then what had just happened that morning at the Barton home, and she kept shaking her head, pushing her glasses up her nose with the back of her hand. “Oh, Tommy,” she said. “Oh, that poor boy.”
“But here’s the thing, Shirley. It’s more than that. There’s something else I need to tell you.”
And so Tommy looked at his wife—her blue eyes behind her glasses, a faded blue these days, but with the tiny shiny parts from her cataract surgery—and he told her then, with the same detail he had told Pete Barton, how he had felt God come to him the night of the fire. “But now I think I must have imagined it,” Tommy said. “It couldn’t have happened, I made it up.” He opened both his hands upward, shook his head.
His wife watched him for a moment; he saw her watching him, saw her eyes get a little bit bigger then begin to break into a tenderness around their corners. She leaned forward, took his hand, and said, “But, Tommy. Why couldn’t it have happened? Why couldn’t it have been just what you thought it was that night?”
And then Tommy understood: that what he had kept from her their whole lives was, in fact, easily acceptable to her, and what he would keep from her now—his doubt (his sudden belief that God had never come to him)—was a new secret replacing the first. He took his hand from hers. “You might be right,” he said. A paltry thing he added, but it was true: He said, “I love you, Shirley.” And then he looked at the ceiling; he could not look at her for a moment or two.
Windmills
A few years ago, with morning sunlight coming into her bedroom, Patty Nicely had had the television on, and the sunlight had caused whatever was on the screen to be unseen from certain angles. Patty’s husband, Sebastian, was still alive then, and she was getting herself ready for work. Earlier, she had been making sure that he was set for the day; his illness had only begun back then and she was not sure—they were not sure—what the final outcome would be. On the television was the usual morning show, and Patty watched intermittently as she moved about the bedroom. She was sticking a pearl earring into her earlobe when she heard the woman announcer saying, “Lucy Barton will be with us after the break.”
Patty walked toward the television and squinted, and in a few minutes Lucy Barton—who had written a novel—came on and Patty said, “Oh my gosh.” She went to the bedroom door and called, “Sibby?” Sebastian came into the bedroom then, and Patty said, “Oh, honey, oh, Sibby.” She helped him into bed, and smoothed his forehead. The reason she remembered this now—the fact that Lucy Barton had been on television—was because she had then told Sebastian about the woman. Lucy Barton had grown up terribly poor, right nearby in Amgash, Illinois. “I didn’t know them, since I was in school in Hanston, but they were the kids that people would say, Oh, cooties!, and run away from, ” she explained to her husband. Here was why Patty knew this: Lucy’s mother had made dresses, and Patty’s mother had used her as a seamstress. A few times, Patty’s mother had taken Patty and her sisters to Lucy Barton’s home. The place the Bartons lived in was tiny, and it smelled! But here was Lucy Barton: Why, she had become a writer and was living in New York City. Patty said, “Look, honey, she looks nice.”
Sebastian had become interested; she saw his keenness as he listened to this story. In a few minutes he asked some questions, for example, had Lucy seemed different from her brother and sister? Patty said she didn’t know; she hadn’t known any of them, really. But—here was something odd: Lucy’s parents had been asked to the wedding of Patty’s oldest sister, Linda, and Patty had never figured that out, she couldn’t imagine Lucy’s father had even owned a suit, why would they have been at her sister’s wedding? Sebastian said, Maybe your mother didn’t have anyone else who would talk to her at that point, and Patty realized he was exactly right. Patty’s face had turned bright red as she saw the truth to this. Sweetheart, said Sebastian, and reached for her hand.
A few months later Sebastian was gone. Having met in their late thirties, they’d had only eight years together. No children. Patty had never known a better man.
Today she drove with her car’s air conditioner turned on high; her extra weight made Patty get hot easily, and it was already late May and the weather was lovely—everyone kept saying that the weather was lovely—but for Patty that meant it was really too warm. She drove by a field where the corn was just inches high, and by a field of soybeans bright green and close to the ground. Then she drove through the town, winding her way around the street where some of the houses had explosions of peonies by their porches—Patty loved peonies—and then to the school where she was a high school guidance counselor. She parked, checked her lipstick in the rearview mirror, gave her hair a bounce with her hand, then heaved herself from the car. Across the parking lot was Angelina Mumford getting out of her own car; she was a middle school Social Studies teacher, and her husband had recently left her. Patty gave a big wave, and Angelina waved back.
In Patty’s office were many folders, and also a cluster of small-framed photographs of her nieces and nephews, and there were pamphlets from colleges, all in an array on top of her filing cabinet and on her desk. And there was her scheduling book on her desk too. Lila Lane had missed her appointment from the day before. There was a knock on the door—which was open—and a tall, pretty girl stood there. “Come in,” Patty said. “Lila?”
Unease came into the room with the girl. She slouched in her chair, and the glance she gave Patty made Patty frightened. The girl’s hair was long and blond, and as she reached to pull it up and across one shoulder, Patty saw the tattoos—like a small barbed wire fence—that went across the girl’s wrist. Patty said, “That’s a nice name, Lila Lane.” The girl said, “I was supposed to be named for my aunt, but at the last minute my mom said, Fuck her.”
Patty took the papers and bounced their edges against her desk.
The girl sat up straight, and spoke with suddenness. “She’s a bitch. She thinks she’s better than any of us. I never even met her.”
“You never met your aunt?”
“Nope. She came back here when her father died, my mother’s father, and then she went away and I’ve never met her. She lives in New York and she thinks her shit doesn’t stink.”
“Well, let’s look at your scores here. These are pretty good scores.” Patty never liked her students to speak roughly; she found it disrespectful. She looked over at the girl, then back at the papers. “Your grades are good, too,” Patty added.