by Bill Clegg
Sweat soaks her clothes and her hands tremble on the wheel. An oncoming car flashes its headlights, and she remembers that a speeding ticket will end her flight. She has no identification, no Social Security card or birth certificate, which would be the least she’d need to secure a new driver’s license. She slows the wagon to 55 and lets a green pickup truck pass. Had the driver seen the flashing headlights? Judging by how fast he was going, she doubts he had. We never pay attention to the right things, she thinks, as she watches the truck vanish beyond the bend ahead, until it’s too late.
She opens her side window and air blows through the car, chilling her damp skin and tossing the shoulder-length blond and silver hair she’s worn in a short ponytail and not washed for weeks. To her right, the Housatonic River snakes closely alongside the unruly road, midday sun sparking off its lazy currents. She relaxes, less from the coolness in the air and more from its turbulence. She opens the passenger-seat window and, feeling the added chaos, opens the remaining two behind her. Wind explodes through the car. She remembers Lolly’s long-ago Etch A Sketch and how upset she became once when a friend shook it and the mysterious sandy insides wiped clean whatever careful scribble she had made there. She remembers Lolly’s screaming—piercing, wild, indignant—and how she refused to be consoled or touched. It would be over a year before Lolly would allow that friend back for a playdate. Even young, her daughter held grudges.
June closes her eyes and imagines the wind-blasted car as an Etch A Sketch hurtling forward, the rough air wiping her clean. She hears that particular sound of shaken sand against plastic and metal, and momentarily the trick works. Her mind empties. The imagined roadside calamities and their self-pitying culprits vanish. Even Lolly—tear-streaked and furious—disappears.
June settles deeper into her seat and slows the car just below the speed limit. She passes a farm stand, a newish CVS where a video store once stood, miles of crumbling stone walls, and a dusty white house with the same pink-painted sign in front that has been there for as long as she can remember, CRYSTALS stenciled in pale blue underneath black letters that spell ROCK SHOP. For years, these were the things she saw on this drive—each marking the distance between the two lives that had for so long passed as one. She tries again to summon the Etch A Sketch—this time to erase the memory of all the giddy Friday-afternoon flights from the city and the too-soon Sunday-evening returns with Lolly in the backseat, Adam in front, driving too fast, as always, and June pivoting between them, talking about teachers and coaches at school, which movie to see that night, what to eat. Those car rides flew by and were the least complicated part of their lives. The memory of them steals her breath, surprises her with an ache for a time she almost never remembers fondly. If it could only have been as simple as that: the three of them in a car, heading home.
The river disappears from view and she slows the car to 20 as she approaches the half-mile stretch that everyone who travels this road regularly knows is a speed trap. She crosses from Kent into New Milford and passes the McDonald’s she has long considered the unofficial border between country and suburb. In the parking lot, children climb from the open doors of a dark green van like clowns out of a circus car and stand restlessly before a row of elaborate motorcycles parked in front. A young man jogs beyond them, a sturdy chocolate Lab keeping perfect pace by his side. They cross in front of an old gas station, boarded up and empty, the pumps removed. June remembers stopping there twice, maybe three times, in the years she’s been driving this road but cannot remember its going out of business. Weeds have sprung up in the cracked pavement of its parking lot, and she notices the Lab circle a scruffy bunch of dandelions and grass, on which he lifts his leg and pees. His master jogs patiently in place a few yards away.
The light ahead blinks red and she slows to a halt behind another Subaru wagon, this one dark green, newer, and filled with what appear to be teenagers. She avoids looking at them and instead focuses on the blue Connecticut license plate and the Nantucket-ferry stickers peeling on the back window. A siren signaling noon sounds from a nearby fire station. It starts low and soft, like a French horn, and builds gradually to a high, wide wail so loud and overwhelming she covers her ears with the thin linen sleeves of her coat. The light finally turns green, and as it does, she closes all the windows. The bus driver behind her taps his horn—once, politely—and she eases her foot from the brake until the car begins to roll forward.
The siren dies. The air inside the car is still again. She passes restaurants and clothing stores and supermarkets she’s driven past for decades but never entered. OPEN signs hang from windows, garlands of tiny, multicolored flags snap in the wind above a Cadillac dealership. Through the rearview mirror she watches it all get smaller.
Edith
They wanted daisies in jelly jars. Local daisies in fifty or so jelly jars they’d collected after they were engaged. Seemed childish to me, especially since June Reid wasn’t exactly putting her daughter’s wedding together on a shoestring. But who was I to have an opinion? Putting daisies in jelly jars is hardly high-level flower arranging, more like monkey work if you want to know the truth. Still, work is work, and the flower business around here is thin, so you take what you can get.
The jars were at June’s place, stored in boxes in the old stone shed next to the kitchen. I was supposed to bring the daisies that morning and arrange them on the tables in the tent behind the house once the linens and place settings had been laid. I’d picked them the day before, from the field behind my sister’s house, which is chock-full of the things. I’ve never been much a fan of daisies—they’ve always struck me as bright weeds more than actual flowers. Never mind that they’re cheap, but for a wedding, they’re not appropriate. Roses and lilies and chrysanthemums, even tulips and lilacs if you’re going for something less fancy—but daisies, no.
I remember when the two of them came into the shop. Hands held, dripping with dew. She looked like her mother, but curvier. June has, at least as far as I can remember, more of a boyish figure. And he was just fine, perfectly handsome, I suppose, in the way that nice, clean-cut boys who went to college can be.
They were young. That was the strongest impression they made on me. I didn’t think people got married that young anymore. At least not from well-to-do families. Local girls with no plans and knocked up, that’s one thing, but a Vassar girl with a job at a magazine in New York and a law student at Columbia, these are not the types of kids you see rushing willy-nilly to the altar. But they certainly were sweet together and had a cloud of luck and love around them that not only stung a little, old, bitter spinster that I am, but surprised me. That kind of affection is not something you see so much around here. Local couples, even the young ones, are worn-out from two jobs, school schedules, family obligations, and too much debt. And the older ones, with their late mortgage payments to make, propane-gas tanks to be filled, and sons and daughters skipping school and smashing cars and getting in fights at the Tap, are too tired, not to mention too busy performing their roles as jolly country folk on the weekends for the pampered and demanding New Yorkers, spending every last drop of civility and patience on these strangers with none left over for their wives and husbands. The weekenders from the city not only take the best houses, views, food, and, yes, flowers our little town has to offer, but they take the best of us, too. They arrive at the end of each week texting and calling from trains and cars with their demands—driveways to be plowed, wood to stack, lawns to mow, gutters needing cleaning, kids to be babysat, groceries to be bought, houses to be cleaned, pillows needing fluffing. For some, we even put up their Christmas trees after Thanksgiving and take them away after New Year’s. They never dirty their hands with any of the things the rest of us have to, nor shoulder the actual weight of anything. We can’t bear them and yet we are borne by them. It makes for a testy pact that for the most part works. But every once in a while there are some slips. Like when Cindy Showalter, a waitress at the Owl Inn, spat in the face of an old woman w
ho muttered something insulting under her breath when Cindy did not understand the type of cheese the woman was asking for. Who has ever heard of an Explorer cheese?!? she asked me at church. I shook my head and later went on the Internet to find a cheese called Explorateur, which I’m sure has never been served in any restaurant around here. There was also the fire that broke out in the barn at Holly Farm and killed three horses. No one ever proved it, but we all know it was Mac Ellis, the former caretaker, who set the place ablaze after being fired by Noreen Schiff for padding the receipts each month. He’d done it for years, apparently, and her accountant in the city finally caught on. He never got arrested but word got out and he lost a few jobs. There’s a lot of resentment simmering underneath the smiles and so good to see yous and no problem, happy to do thats of this town. So when someone crosses the line, it can get uncomfortable.
Many people, the younger girls mostly, felt June Reid had crossed a line when she started up with Luke Morey. They always made a fuss about him. He was good-looking, I’ll give you that. Not a surprise since Lydia’s father was devil handsome in his day, and Lydia has always been what men seem to find attractive. Even so, much of Luke’s looks came from the fact that he didn’t look like anyone else around here. He was like a wild orchid growing in a hayfield. No one ever knew who his father was, but they sure knew he was black. I hate to say what it suggests about this town that there is virtually no one who could have been the father. The older couple in Cornwall, dead now, were retired scientists from Boston, and mixed—her black, him white; and the principal’s adopted son, Seth, he’s black but was only six or seven when Luke was born. This was our town at the time, which no one much thought of to be honest except in instances that exposed it like when Lydia Morey had her baby. It’s been at least three decades since that boy was born, but nothing much—at least on that front—has changed. More weekenders, of course, fewer local families, who one by one have sold their farms and land and houses to people who spend maybe a few weeks total in them every year. Saturdays and Sundays, a week or two in the summer. The truth is that most of the houses in this town stand empty. They blink with security gizmos, are scrubbed and dusted and jammed to the ceiling with beautiful furniture, but there’s no one home. I drove down South Main Street a few months ago—middle of the week, nine o’clock in the evening after supper at my sister’s house—and not a light on anywhere. The moon was out, so I could see the chimney tops and the dormers, but one after the next, all the way down to the town green, dark. It occurred to me that night and since that we no longer live in a town, not a real one anyway. We live in a pricey museum, one that’s only open on weekends, and we are its janitors.
It used to be that most of the big, old houses in Wells were owned and lived in by local families. I ought to know because I grew up in one. Granted, it was the rectory at St. David’s where my father served as rector for over thirty years, but back then the job came with a six-bedroom house with four fireplaces and a barn down in back. Now there’s a rector—some woman called Jesse, if you can believe it—who splits her time between three churches and lives in an apartment in Litchfield. The church rents out the rectory to a young family from the city who come up, yes, you guessed it, on weekends. Of course they have never, not once to my eye anyway, stepped into St. David’s. Which is hardly surprising since there are only fifteen or so of us who still come Sunday morning. Like the houses along the green, the old church sits empty save for a handful of hours on weekends. My father retired years ago, and died not long after, but I still go every Sunday. I kept his old key, so I let myself in early and set up the altar flowers with whatever is unsold from the shop and on its way to the garbage. No one can see wilting petals from the pews.
It might shock some of the old-timers at St. David’s to find out that I gave up on God a long time ago, when my mother started to disappear into Alzheimer’s, which has to be the slowest, cruelest way out there is. She started to go when I was in high school and died a week after my fortieth birthday. By then and for a long time before she was unrecognizable. Angry, awful, and completely dependent on me. My sister went to college and I stayed home to help with what my father was too proud and cheap to hire anyone else to do. Not that I needed one, but it’s not exactly easy to find a boyfriend let alone a husband when you’re living as an unpaid round-the-clock nurse in your parents’ house. I don’t waste my time wishing things had gone differently, and I don’t pretend that if I’d prayed any harder it would have. I’ve been on my own without God’s help or a husband for a long time now.
Most of the people I grew up with have moved to Torrington or across the state line to Millerton or Amenia, and even those towns are getting expensive. But some manage to burrow into the corners of the town, tuck into its folds, and stay, as I have. Lydia Morey has, too, though it’s hard to imagine why. She’s the last of her family around here, and by family I don’t mean Morey. It’s amazing to me she kept that name. She’s a Hannafin and she knows it. Who can guess what that woman was ever thinking, so her choice to keep that name is no more of a surprise than her choosing to stick around after she gave birth to that black baby boy. When Luke was born, it was clear to everyone that Lydia’s husband, redheaded, freckle-faced Earl Morey, was not the father. He packed Lydia’s bags that very night and told her not to come back. She went straight from the maternity ward to her mother’s couch. Her mother was still around then, and she took them both in for a while, but she made no secret of her disgust. She worked as a teller at the bank in those days, and you could hear her carrying on at the drive-through to anyone who’d listen about her lunatic daughter, who she was certain had gotten caught up with cults and black men and God knows what. Everyone sided with Earl, who comes from a big family that’s been around here forever, and Lydia Morey was for a while as banished as one can be in a town of fifteen hundred people, half of whom barely live here.
Over time, people came around, for the most part. Luke was always liked, especially there for a bit in high school when he was breaking state records for swimming and even, I think, being whispered about for the Olympics; but Lydia remained a loner, save for a few poor choices in the man department. To be fair, the pickings are slim around here, and the poor woman, pretty as she is, did the best she could. With pickings this slim, someone like Luke Morey, once he finally cleaned up his act, became a prize goose at the fair to the women in town. His skin was definitely his father’s, whoever that was, but he had his mother’s wide-set, green eyes and high cheekbones. Add to that at least six feet and a somewhat successful landscaping business, and you’ve got enough to turn a few heads. He turned heads his whole life, but never so much as when he went to jail, just a few months after high school, and then, later, when he moved in with June Reid, who was over twenty years his senior and from the city. From the time that boy was born he was the talk of the town, and given what happened, how he went, and how many he took with him, he always will be.
When I drove over to June Reid’s that morning with the daisies and saw the nightmare surrounding her property—all that smoke, the old stone house destroyed by fire, the empty tent—I did not stop. I just kept driving. Without thinking, I drove straight to my sister’s place, where we sat and drank a pot of mint tea picked fresh from her garden. She’d already been called—by whom I don’t know—and she told me what happened. Killed, all of them—the young couple, June’s ex-husband, and that doomed Luke Morey. For a long time, we just sat and watched the steam rise from our mother’s old, pale green china teacups. Later, I walked out the back door and into the field behind her house. I was out there for hours, unsure what to do or where to go. I wandered through the high grass and all those horrible daisies, from the wood line to the road, back and forth, back and forth, running my old, wrinkled hands over all those bright and unlucky weeds. Eventually, I came in. I stayed the night. And the next night, too.
The daisies did not go to waste. Every single one was put to use. They never did see the inside of any jelly jars,
but they found their way into a hundred or more funeral arrangements. Even when no one asked for them—and let’s face it, most did not—I still found a way to make them work. No one ever accused me of being a soft touch, but when something like what happened at June Reid’s that morning happens, you feel right away like the smallest, weakest person in the world. That nothing you do could possibly matter. That nothing matters. Which is why, when you stumble upon something you can do, you do it. So that’s what I did.
Lydia
They arrive before she knows they are there. She has no idea when exactly they settled in at the table by the window, two down from the one where she sits nursing her cold cup of coffee, but it’s long enough ago that they have ordered soups and salads and been served their cups of tea. They are behind her, she cannot see them, but by their polite laughter she knows it’s tea they are sipping, not coffee; soups and salads they have ordered, not hamburgers and fries, or the meat loaf. She doesn’t know these particular women, these mothers and daughters and wives, but she knows them. She has cleaned their houses, ferried their children to train stations and sleepovers, and yanked the weeds from their sidewalks for most of her life. She has heard them fret about global warming, mercury levels in tuna, and pesticides choking the life out of the lettuce they stab with their forks but barely eat. She has witnessed up close their girlish and convincing surprise at the arrival of each relentless windfall and victory. A husband’s unexpected bonus at the end of the year, the new station wagon in the driveway strung up with birthday or Christmas or Mother’s Day ribbons. What she finds the most difficult to bear is hearing them brag about their children—the early acceptances to impossible-to-get-into schools, the job offers from prestigious law firms, the promotions and awards, the engagements to attractive people from happy families; their weddings.