Penny didn’t bother going to work that day. She didn’t take her son to the babysitter’s. She stayed in her house and wondered how this could have happened.
But she went back to work the next day, and every time she looked up from sewing, Crystal’s bench was empty. It was the strangest, most terrible sight. And it remained empty. It was empty during the ice storm of 1998 and it was empty when her son graduated high school. It was empty as the other benches emptied around the last remaining hand-sewers, as shoe production went overseas and the end of the Shop drew near.
11
* * *
before
Mom and Tom were separated for about a year before divorcing, and it was probably during this time that she met a young man named Dale Morton. The meeting itself was unexceptional—two attractive young people, a dark bar, plenty of beer, a careful drive back to his place—but from that night on they fell into step. He had sandy, light brown hair, kind pale blue eyes, and a bristly mustache. He was tan from fishing and canoeing on quiet lakes. He was laid-back and quick to laugh, a mellow drinker who must have seemed like a safe harbor after Tom’s volatile outbursts. Their mutual attraction quickly became love, and right before I started kindergarten, we moved into a tiny house with him, on Route 302 near the southern edge of town.
Dale had suffered a back injury while working construction a few years earlier; he lived on state workers’ compensation checks while awaiting a settlement from his former employers. He spent his days gardening and fishing and working on a couple of beat-up Firebirds—one dull brown, one metallic speedboat teal—he kept in front of our house. He taught me the function of a carburetor when I was just a little kid.
Dale took me with him on long walks in the woods, teaching me the names of trees and birds, and he cleared a spot in front of our house for me to plant orange and yellow marigolds. That first house, the first place I have real memories of, was so run-down we called it the Dump. It was brown and squat, with an attached garage that was collapsing in on itself, too dangerous to enter and home to a colony of bats that came swooping out against the pink sky at dusk. I fell asleep every night to the whoosh of cars on Route 302, a few dozen feet away. The house had two tiny bedrooms, a seventies-yellow kitchen, and a bathroom so moldy that the floor bowed even under my weight. In the center was a living room and a woodstove, our only source of heat. Mom constantly warned me not to touch the stove’s black iron belly, but when I got a little older I was allowed to feed twists of newspaper into the fire, or dig in the glowing coals with a long, heavy poker.
One morning, soon after we moved in, some commotion woke me up and I shuffled out into the living room to find Dale pulling a snake down from a gap between the ceiling planks. I was too sleepy to be scared; he was like a hero in a dream.
We lived in the Dump for about three years. It was where Mom and Dale enjoyed the early days of their love, and where I spent the happily simple first days of my childhood. For my sixth birthday, Mom and Dale redecorated my bedroom, installing rose-colored carpet and putting up dreamy wallpaper I’d picked out myself: puffy pink clouds with V-shaped birds scattered in the distance, an endless beach sunrise. We kept the curtain of bamboo beads that served as my door; I liked the gentle clicking noises they made when I walked through, and the fact that they let in the sounds of the television in the living room. Every night I fell asleep to the Cheers closing credits, or the M*A*S*H opening theme song. I had a little TV, too—black-and-white, with a big metal antenna—and all the stuffed animals I wanted. During the day I spent long hours playing school—filling stacks of paper with wavy crayon “writing”—or catching caterpillars in the yard.
Living with Dale allowed Mom to settle in, and finally she bought a little black Ford Tempo after saving up for the down payment. That car was so simple, a small four-door in a basic shape, but I thought it was the coolest thing, with its sunroof and red vinyl interior.
When the Dump felt too cramped, especially in the hot, muggy summer, the three of us would go on long drives, in the Tempo or in whichever Firebird was running. We would go to the beach near Portland, spending long, sunburned hours on the yellow sand. I would bodysurf the waves with Dale and take long walks down the horizon with Mom. Or we’d head to New Hampshire and wind along the mountainous roads of the Kancamagus Highway, stopping occasionally to splash in glacier-cold river waters.
Meanwhile, Tom had gone out west, was roaming from one odd job to another, impossible to track down for weeks at a time. Mom filed for divorce, citing abandonment. The fact that he didn’t show up for the hearing only strengthened her case. It’s possible she began dating Dale before their official separation, but even Tom admits now that he abandoned her long before he left town.
But around the time I entered first grade, he returned to Bridgton and told my mother that he wanted to start seeing me again. Although legally she had sole custody, she agreed to weekly visits, perhaps feeling, despite her frustration with him, that she needed to give me a chance to get to know my father. Besides, he could be charming, and she might not have had it in her to deny him, despite her desire to sever ties, despite his already spotty record of child support payments.
So once every couple of weeks, Mom would drop me off at Tom’s apartment, a damp-smelling place in a large, mustard-yellow building on Lower Main Street, considered the seedy part of Bridgton. The people in those apartments didn’t seem to have any privacy, crammed together in clapboard apartment buildings and carved-up old Victorian houses. They did not have marigold gardens.