“Hold on,” Bob said. He reached into his pocket for his cellphone and poked a number, then, putting the phone to his ear, he said to Katherine, “What was your father’s name?”
“Tyler. Tyler Caskey,” said Katherine. I thought she seemed pleased that Bob had asked about her father.
Bob stood up and said into his phone, “Susie, it’s me. Listen—” And he walked away from the table. Katherine looked at me with raised eyebrows. After a minute Bob was pushing another number and I heard him say, “Jimmy?” And then he walked farther away. But very shortly he returned to the table and he sat down, and he seemed almost breathless, and he said, “Katherine Caskey, I know who you are. Your father did my father’s funeral, my father died when I was four, and the minister in Shirley Falls was on the outs with my mother, no idea why, and she drove to West Annett to find your father and he did the funeral. But, Katherine, that was you on the porch! You were standing there next to your father the entire time, and I never forgot you. Katherine, that was you?”
And here was something funny. She kept looking at him and looking at him. She had a strange look on her face, and then she said, “You were in the backseat next to a little girl.”
“Yes!” Bob said. “My sister, Susan. And my brother was sitting in the front seat and my mother was rude to your father, I mean she was agitated because her husband had just died—”
“It’s you—” Katherine said this quietly. “Oh my God, that was you.”
“You remember? Seriously?”
“Oh my God, I do. I never, ever forgot that little boy in my entire life. You looked so sad, and we kept staring at each other.”
Bob almost yelped. “I can’t believe you remember that! Because I have always remembered that little girl who stood there and stared at me with her big eyes. I felt, I don’t know—I felt like we were connected.”
Katherine had now turned fully toward Bob, who was straddling the picnic table bench. “Well, we were,” she said. “We were connected! Because we had both just lost a parent.”
“I just called my siblings and Susan couldn’t remember but Jim said, Yes, the guy was from West Annett, and he remembered we went there, and he remembered my mother yelling at your father. But your father did the funeral anyway.”
“I don’t remember her yelling at my father. I just remember watching you.” Katherine looked over at me; her face was filled with awe. And she looked back at Bob. “Oh my God,” she said again, quietly. She shook her head slowly, and then she turned to where her husband was sitting at the picnic table near us, and she yelled, “Honey! Honey, this is the little boy I told you about!” But her husband was talking to William and Margaret, and Katherine turned back to Bob and said, “I can’t believe this. I honestly can’t believe this. We’ve known each other for a few years now, but it was you all along.”
Slowly I began to understand what had happened, and a warmth moved through me.
Katherine said, “Bob Burgess, when this pandemic is over, I’m going to hug you so hard, I can’t tell you how hard I am going to hug you.”
“I look forward to that,” Bob said, emotion moving over his face.
“How did your father die?” Katherine asked him then, and Bob told her the story of his father being hit by the car with his kids in it as he walked down the driveway to check the mail.
“Oh,” Katherine said. “Oh Bob, I’m so sorry.”
He even told her the part where Jim had confessed to him years later that he, Jim, was the one who had done it, who had fiddled with the gearshift, and how hard that had been for Bob, because he had—all his life—thought he was the one responsible for it. Katherine watched him with her green eyes. Then she said simply, “I’m so sorry about that, Bob. But I cannot believe it was you that I saw in the backseat of that car so many years ago. I found you.” She shook her head slowly.
Bob bit into his lobster roll. “I know,” he said, his mouth full. “I know.”
* * *
—
So there was that kind of thing that happened. There were these times, is what I am saying, where the people I met were interesting. And their stories interwove! I was so glad for those two that night. When I told William, he did not seem impressed. He said, “They could be making it up. There are a lot of memories people have that aren’t accurate.”
* * *
—
I thought about this, and I remembered certain things from my own childhood that stood out as clearly to me as any memory: I remember my brother being beaten up on the playground one day; he was crouching with his hands to his ears and a few boys were kicking him. I had run away when I saw this, I mean I had run away from my brother and those boys. And there was another memory I had too, of my brother and my mother; that memory was too painful for me to think about—it only flashed through my mind. I didn’t bother to answer William. I was just happy for Bob. And for Katherine Caskey too.
ii
There was a streak of good weather, and William and I would go exploring in the car. We had our Maine plates on again and we drove along small roads that wound around and ended up always by the ocean. I had traveled through tiny roads in Italy and Croatia, many different parts of Europe I had been to with my career, but this was like nothing I had ever seen, and I thought: It’s so American. Because it was.
We went by old cemeteries and we stopped at one and read the names and dates on the headstones. William, walking ahead of me, said, “Lucy, look at this.” And I went to where he was standing, he swept his arm, and I saw that there were a number of tombstones that had death dates in 1918 and 1919, and they were not always old people who had died. “The flu epidemic,” William said to me.
And I thought: The world has been through this before.
It seemed far away, remote, yet for those who had friends and family die in the flu epidemic, it was as distressing to them as what we were living through now.
* * *
—
But we went exploring, is what I am saying, and the weather grew increasingly better. There was a sense of the physical world opening its hand to us, and it was beautiful. And it helped.
* * *
I looked up the flu epidemic on my computer and saw that the schools had been closed and also the churches. There were old photos of many people—usually men—lying on low-to-the-ground beds in makeshift hospitals.
William said to me, “Maybe someone in your family died in the flu epidemic. Want me to get you a subscription to an online ancestry thing?” He had a look of almost excitement as he asked me this.
I said, No. I did not want to know anything about my family.
iii
But I was sad because of the girls, I missed them almost constantly, and when we spoke they never said, “I miss you, Mom.” I thought suddenly of how often Becka would say that to me even when she was married to Trey. But she did not say it these days.
Some mornings I woke even before William did, and I would take my walk because I was so anxious. And I was anxious because of the girls. One day I called Chrissy and asked her how Becka was doing—I knew she would tell Becka I had done this, but I wanted to know—and Chrissy said, “Mom, don’t worry about her. She’s got her shrink, Lauren, and she’s got Michael and me, and she’s doing okay.”
“She doesn’t call me anymore,” I said.
Chrissy hesitated before she said, “I think she doesn’t need you like she used to. Even those years married to Trey she still needed you, but, Mom, you did your job. She’s on her way.”
“Okay,” I said. “I hear you.”
And I did.
But it sort of killed me, I will tell you that.
* * *
Chrissy called me back two days later. She said, “Okay, now I have something to tell you, and it will make you happy. I didn’t think we should talk about it in the same conversation about Becka.” She said, “But I bet you already know.”
“You’re pregnant,” I said.
The baby was due in December. “Don’t tell Dad, I’m going to call him myself as soon as we hang up.”