—
It was funny. At first I was kind of glad to have him gone. There was a freedom to the house without him, I thought. I called a friend in New York and we spoke for a long time, and we laughed, and then I hung up and the house was silent. I went for a walk down by the water because it was low tide, and I loved seeing the different periwinkles, there were larger white ones and then many more smaller brown ones. And sometimes—not often, and not that day—a starfish. And always the seaweed, slippery and deep yellowy brown, straggled across the rocks. So I did that, and then I felt a little frightened, because I started to think my balance was not all that good anymore, and what if I fell? So that took the pleasure out of what I was doing, and also the clouds were coming in—all day it had been a beautiful shining day—and I went back up to the house, and I thought: I will read. But there was nothing I wanted to read. I could not read; as I said, I had been able to read only very little since I’d arrived. And I could not write either.
It was not yet noontime.
* * *
—
I thought then of all the people who were enduring these times alone. My friend in New York that I had just spoken to was alone. Twice a week, behind her building, she sat at one end of a table with a friend who sat at the other, far end of this table, and they visited. With William away, I thought of this differently now; I understood my friend’s predicament more, I mean. But my friend could read, and I could not. Still, she was alone.
* * *
—
I wished I could see Bob Burgess. I wished the girls would call me, but they did not, and I did not call them.
* * *
—
So I lay down on the couch and I took my iPhone and my earbuds and started to listen to some classical music. This time I did not react the way I had the few other times when I had listened to the music that David (sometimes) used to play. This was the first time I was able to feel that I was lying on a soft cloud of an almost golden color, and I did not move because I was afraid the feeling would go away. I thought: I am resting! I was able to rest, and it was extraordinary.
* * *
—
At eight o’clock, as the sun was going down, William returned. I went to the door, but he did not come in, and so I stood there. After a moment I walked outside, and his car window must have been open, because then I heard him: He was weeping. He was sobbing. I went hurriedly out to the car, and his head was leaning on the steering wheel. He looked up at me, and he could not speak; water was all over his face. And he continued to weep like that.
“Oh Pillie,” I whispered.
After another few moments he got out, and he let me hug him, but he did not hug me back. He followed me into the house and sat down on the couch, and I said, “What happened?”
And he said, “Nothing happened. It was fine. I’m just so sad, Lucy. I’m so sad.”
* * *
—
I had only seen William weep like this one time before in our lives, and it was the day he told me about his affair with Joanne. She had been a friend of both of ours from college, and he had told me three months earlier about having different affairs, but when he told me about his affair with Joanne he wept as he was weeping now. He said that day, “I’m sick, Lucy. I’m a loser.” I had never heard him say such a thing, and after a while he stopped crying. I did not cry about Joanne. I was too stricken, I was far too sad to cry. Joanne became his second wife, for seven years.
* * *
—
And now I could only watch him and wait, and he stopped his crying and said again, “It was fine, it was good to see them both.” Apparently it was not until he had said goodbye to Bridget—she had started to cry—and watched Estelle drive away with his daughter in the passenger seat that he began, as he also drove away, to cry himself.
“Was Estelle nice to you?” I asked tentatively.
And William said, “Oh yeah. Of course. She was great, couldn’t have been nicer.” He shook his head and said with more strength, “It’s just that I’m sad, Lucy.”
And I understood.
Two
i
Here is one story about people we met through Margaret and Bob:
* * *
—
It was not quite the middle of June and the weather was really lovely, and Bob and Margaret invited us with another couple and we sat down at the marina—we took up two picnic tables a few feet away from each other, it was a beautiful evening, hardly a breeze even by the water, and the man of the other couple had just retired from working for the state in the Department of Health and Human Services, and his wife was a social worker at the hospital in town.
The wife’s name was Katherine Caskey, and she sat at the far end of the table across from me, and Bob sat across from me at the other far end of the table. I really liked her. Katherine was about my age, but she had a youthfulness to her, and she had reddish-brown hair that was clearly touched up, I mean there was no gray in it, and I wondered how she had kept it so nice during the pandemic. She was not a big person, and there was a litheness to her as she got up to throw away something in the trash can nearby, and then she came back and sat down again.
As we talked, Katherine Caskey spoke of her childhood. She had spent the first six years of her life in West Annett, she said, a town about an hour away, a small town; her father had been the minister there, and her mother had died when Katherine was just five. She spoke of her mother at length that evening, and I understood: This was Katherine’s wound. She had loved her mother dearly, and her mother had adored her. And then her mother died. Her father tried to hold things together; Katherine’s baby sister, Jeannie, had been sent to live with their father’s mother in Shirley Falls, and Katherine and her father struggled along with a housekeeper named Connie Hatch. “Oh, I hated her,” Katherine said, shaking her head. “That poor woman. I just hated her because she had a big birthmark on her nose, and she frightened me.”
Katherine went on to say that the church congregants had started vicious rumors about her father and Connie—which had been ludicrous, of course—and that her father had broken down in front of the congregation one day—Katherine was in Sunday school and didn’t see this, but all the kids talked of it for days to come: her father weeping in front of his congregation. And then the congregation realized they had gone too far, and—according to Katherine—they apologized to her father, though he still left the place six months later.
“But here’s what happened to poor Connie,” Katherine said, and her eyes widened, they were green eyes, and she said, shaking her head so slowly, “Lucy, she murdered people at the county farm.”
“She did?” I was about to take a sip from my plastic cup of wine, but I put it back down.
“Yup. A few old people who were paralyzed. She suffocated them. To relieve their suffering, she said. And then she went to prison, and my father would go visit her there.” Katherine gazed at me as she said this.
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“She died there.”
“Oh my God!” I said. And Katherine agreed that it was a terrible story.
* * *
—
Bob, I had noticed this, had stopped eating as Katherine was talking. Half a lobster roll sat in front of him on the waxy paper it had come in. When Katherine finally stopped talking he said to her, “Your father was the minister? In West Annett?”
And Katherine said, “Uh-huh.”
“Did you live in a farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere?” Bob asked. His mask was off, because he had been eating, and his face had taken on a strange look of almost wonder.
“We did!” Katherine said, turning toward him. “It was an awful old farmhouse that had been left to the church, and they made it the rectory.”