by Bill Clegg
June Reid didn’t stick around long enough to clear up any of these stories. I used to get worked up about it and sometimes I guess I still can, but I’ve learned that people will believe what they believe no matter what you say or do. What I know about Luke is that he was a friend of mine. He was a good man who had come through some hard times who got to be happy for a little while. And now he’s gone.
I didn’t want Sandy and Liam to see me blubbering that day, so after I dropped the cake off at the firehouse, I drove to my mother’s place. She still lives in the same house I grew up in, the same place where Sandy and I lived when we were trying to get on our feet. Funny how in a small town like ours things play out, circle back, end up. Who would have thought that one day Earl Morey, with his son Dirk, and all their brothers and cousins, would be eating Brazilian wedding cake made by my mother and meant for the daughter of Luke Morey’s older, city-rich girlfriend? No one, that’s who. But the crazy, haphazard upside down of it all somehow made sense.
I sat in my childhood driveway and watched my mother turn on the porch light, something she always does before opening the front door, since I was a kid and even in broad daylight. I watched her shut the door behind her and pull her thin housecoat tight around her bony shoulders and button the top two buttons. I thought of her squeezing all those damned oranges and cracking all those coconuts for the last two days, sprinkling the little silver balls that the Moreys were now crunching in their tobacco-stained teeth down at the firehouse. And then I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. Nothing was funny, not one thing, but it was all so absurd and fucked-up. Tears and snot were everywhere, and here was my mother, making her way from the stoop to the driveway, shuffling in her slippers, old. She’d left her glasses in the house and I could see her squinting to see me more clearly. Rick? You okay? she asked as she stepped to my side of the car and tapped the window. This was my mother: both hands on the roof of the car, leaning into the window, half-blind, worried. Funny how disasters can make you see what you could lose. I don’t think I’d ever seen my mother as clearly as I did that day: sixty-six, widowed at fifty, a secretary at the elementary school for over thirty-five years; a single mom who raised two kids, who took care of her granddaughter while my divorced sister went to nursing school in Hartford; a breast-cancer survivor who let her grown son move back in with his nineteen-year-old wife and one-year-old boy.
You okay in there? she asked, tapping the window again. Rick? I unlocked the door and got out of the car. It was now evening. Tell me, she said, her hands on my shoulders, her feet balancing on tippy-toes. I leaned in and put my arms around her little body. It was a good cake, Mom was all I could think to say. They would have loved it.
Rebecca
Some days she doesn’t come out. Some days you never see so much as a flicker of light behind the curtains. We’ve gotten used to her and it’s convenient that she pays cash for the room. She leaves a forty-dollar tip each week for Cissy, too, which has to be a record here at the Moonstone. Cissy, like us, is in her early fifties, maybe a bit older. She walks to work from her house down the road, brings our mystery guest a thermos most days and occasionally cookies, and spends nearly an hour cleaning her room when she barely spends twenty minutes in the others. She also, I have seen recently, takes away a small bag of laundry each week from Room 6 and returns it the next day, presumably washed and folded.
Why this woman would want to stay here as long as she has is not our business, but of course I wonder. When she checked in, she had no ID. She’d lost her driver’s license, she explained, and then asked if she could pay cash, a month in advance. I called Kelly, who is a better judge of character than I am, to come over from the house before agreeing. She asked the woman how long she planned to stay, and she answered that she didn’t know but she would pay each month up front in cash and wouldn’t expect a refund if she left early. Kelly asked her where she was from, and even though she answered vaguely, Back East, Kelly still turned to me, gave me a wink and a squeeze on my arm, and said to the woman, Stay here as long as you like. If she were some rough type or strung-out junkie, there’s no way we’d go along with it, but this woman could be anyone’s mom or wife and seemed, and still seems, only sad, not dangerous. The night she checked in, I asked her what we should call her, and she said Jane, which of course can’t be her real name. But even saying that one word, that fake name, seemed like an effort, and I immediately regretted asking. I walked her out to Room 6—the one closest to and facing the ocean—because she’d asked for it specifically. She must have known someone who’d stayed at the Moonstone once or been here before we owned it. Room 6 also has the best mattress, which we had to buy last year after an older man who’d come down from Seattle for the weekend fell asleep with a lit cigarette in his hand and caught the bed on fire. Burned a hole right through to the other side in the short time it took for him to wake up from the smoke, thank God, and come running to our door in his bare feet and boxer shorts. Which is all to say, since she’s staying for as long as she is, I’m glad she’s at least sleeping on a decent mattress.
When I showed her to the room, I offered to give her a little tour, but she politely declined. She simply unlocked the door with the key, went in without another word, and stayed inside for nearly a week. It was Cissy who got her out of there the first time. Ma’am, MA’AM! she yelled as she knocked. Out you go, ma’am. Out. I only need a few minutes but you gotta get out. Kelly and I stood a few doors down to see what would happen. Few people stand up to Cissy. She is tall and thin and strong with one long braid, once black and now silver, thick as rope, down her back. Her hands are bigger than most men’s and her chest is as flat as a board. She looks like a Native American, but when I asked her once, she didn’t answer. Her husband was from a long line of fishermen in Aberdeen, just down at the mouth of Grays Harbor, but he died of lung cancer fifteen years ago and since then she’s been living with her sisters, who I think mostly all lost their husbands one way or another and ended up back in the house they grew up in. Cissy has lived here in Moclips all her life and has worked at the Moonstone since her husband died. According to her sister Pam, Cissy’s husband left her the house they’d lived in together, which she sold, so I don’t think it’s the money Cissy is after so much as something to do and somewhere to go each day. Pam is the only real estate agent in Moclips and the one who sold us the Moonstone from an old couple who’d had it since the sixties. That was four years ago. The first morning in our little house next to the Moonstone, Cissy showed up with a blue tin of orange drop cookies and told us what she charged, what time of the day she worked, and the week in July she took off every year. I don’t remember us offering her the job so much as agreeing to her terms. We didn’t find out she was Pam’s sister for months.
Cissy isn’t much for hanging around and gabbing. At first we thought it was because she felt uncomfortable with us because of the gay thing, but when gay marriage was legalized in Washington State this year, she came into the office the morning after the election and said, It’s none of my business, but if you two decide to get legal, I happen to be an ordained minister thanks to the good old Internet and I’d be happy to do the honors. Kelly is hardly ever at a loss for words, but it did take her a few beats to say thank you and let her know we weren’t sure whether we would or wouldn’t, and if we did, we’d likely call on her services. Funny how you think people are one way or the other and most of the time you end up completely wrong. We’re still not sure about getting married. We’ve talked about it, of course, and we cheered the night of the election when we saw on television that voters passed the referendum. But beyond Kelly’s brothers and nephews, who we see once or twice a year, neither of us have much by way of family anymore. And we’ve been together for so long now—twenty years, twenty-one, it’s hard to remember—it seems like something to let the young ones get excited about. But you never know.
Cissy has never once mentioned her husband, whose name we know was Ben only because Pam told u
s one night when we cooked her supper. She’d had a few glasses of wine and had been loud and laughing until the subject turned to Cissy, when she quieted to a whisper as if Cissy could hear from their house down the road. They met at a bar in Aberdeen one night when they were both teenagers. Ben was the only man tall enough for Cissy is what most people thought at the time—and even though you’d never hear them say much to each other, there was a spark between them, always, a kind of animal energy. Cissy used to say I have my sisters for talking and Ben for everything else. They never had kids. Neither of them ever went to a doctor to find out why. They just accepted it and went about their lives. They lived in the house three doors down from ours for almost twenty years, and Cissy asked me to find a buyer the day Ben died, which was also the day she moved back in with us. I found a buyer a little while later, a couple from Portland who came with their kids to teach at the elementary school. They moved away after the last one went off to college. I think Pam regretted spilling so many beans about Cissy that night because she’s turned down the few invitations we’ve made since. She’s perfectly friendly when we run into her at the grocery store or gas station in Aberdeen, but she keeps her distance.
It’s hard to believe it’s been more than half a year since that morning Cissy pounded on the door of Room 6, sounding like some cop on TV. Ma’am, I have a key so my knocking is just a formality. Ma’am, I’m reaching for my key and this door will open whether you want it to or not. And just as she went for the key, the door opened and Jane stepped out. Thank you, she said, her hand waving a kind of apology as she pulled her tan coat on. She hurried away, down the steps toward the beach, where she stayed most of the rest of the day. Since then we’ve seen her wander down the beach for hours, barefoot, with her lace-up tennis shoes in one hand, the other arm usually wrapped around her waist. One morning at the end of the summer we thought she might have spent the night out there, because there was no light coming from her room, no clanking of water pipes or flushing toilet as there usually is. Her lights came on that evening and we saw the usual shadow passing across her curtains, so wherever she’d been the night before she made it back in one piece. I think she mainly lives on Cissy’s cookies, because I’ve only twice seen her carrying bags from Laird’s General Store into the room. Maybe she squirrels packets of nuts or candy bars in her jacket pockets when she goes down to the gas station ATM for cash each month, but if that’s what she’s doing, I’ve never seen any of it. What I have seen is Cissy lugging around a large thermos, the kind you carry soup or hot chocolate in. What’s inside I don’t know, but neither Kelly nor I ever saw that thermos before Jane came along. We’ve seen it out on the front stoop of Jane’s room in the mornings, too. Cissy isn’t one to gossip in general, but when we’ve tried to talk to her about Jane, she won’t say more than that she keeps a tidy room. Even though it’s well within our rights to want to know about the only long-term resident of the Moonstone—especially one who checked in under an alias and without ID—we always feel ashamed when we mention her in front of Cissy, and so we don’t anymore. We just accept her as part of our lives, a quiet woman named Jane from somewhere east of here.
Lydia
The first call from Winton came in December. There are a few things to remember about that day, and she’s tried, but the one thing she doesn’t struggle to recollect was that the phone hadn’t rung for weeks. It’s an old, beige thing with thick buttons that make loud beeps when you press them, mounted on the wall by the door in the kitchen. It came with the rental she’s living in, and carved into the doorframe next to it are phone numbers. She recognized a few when she moved in a little more than six years ago. Gary Beck’s, for one; he had a funny relationship with her mother and would come by every once in a while with schnapps they’d drink in the kitchen. They both loved country music and listened to a station out of Hartford that played Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty songs. When Lydia was a teenager, and even later, she thought their nights in the kitchen were the grimmest she could imagine. Smoking cigarettes, drinking peppermint schnapps, and turning up the radio when some sad song came on. Funny, she thinks now, remembering those nights, how things change when you look at them with older eyes.
She wonders if Gary Beck is even still alive. As far as she can remember, he never had a wife or kids or any relations. He wasn’t involved in the volunteer fire department or church or any of the organizations that host spaghetti-and-meatball dinners at the elementary school to raise money. She never saw him outside of her mother’s kitchen. He ran the post office in town until he had a stroke and was put in a state home for the elderly in Torrington. That all happened sixteen years ago, the year before her mother died. She’d told Lydia about Gary one morning on the phone but didn’t convey any emotion, just enough interest to relay the facts. She doubts her mother ever went to visit him in Torrington. She never could quite figure out what their relationship was, but as attractive as her mother had been, and as much as she always dolled herself up each morning for work at the bank, she was pretty sure she’d shut the door on men after Lydia’s father died. Still, she and her mother had never been what anyone would consider close, and so she wondered if anything more than companionship had gone on with Gary. He was harmless and he brought booze and always had a flattering thing to say when her mother opened the door to let him in. Looking good tonight, Natalie was as specific and flirtatious as he ever got. He was still coming around when Lydia and Luke moved in with her mother the year he was born, but after that she never saw him. It was hard for her to imagine who might have needed Gary Beck’s number often enough to carve it into this wall. Maybe someone who worked at the post office. Maybe some other old gal he’d bring schnapps to and listen to country songs with. When she looked at the numbers gouged into the pine doorframe, she hoped so. She hoped he had a different one every night.
The other names could be anyone’s—Lisa, Matthew, Evelyn. Only Gary Beck had the honor of his last name carved into the wood. And then there’s the one number she can never forget. Her former mother-in-law’s, Connie Morey. The Moreys must have had that same number since telephones were first installed in Litchfield County. The family had been in their old, broken-down house off Main Street since the late 1800s. They built it themselves, as they were all quick to tell you, and were still there. On the wall it just says Connie and those same digits Lydia used to dial when she was in high school, when Earl Morey was, for a short time, the only person she wanted to speak to or see. He was jumpy and mischievous, a soccer player with a big bush of red hair on his head. He loved the Grateful Dead and ice fishing and smoking pot and could mimic anyone he laid eyes and ears on for more than a minute. His favorite target was his older brother, Mike, who had a lisp and was not very bright. He also did a blistering impersonation of Lydia’s mother, which it took her only one time to overhear from her bedroom to run him out of the apartment. Still, she loved him, but more than him she loved the idea of his family, which was not by any stretch of imagination wealthy—most of them electricians and housepainters and groundskeepers at Harkness, the boarding school just over the town line in Bishop. It was and is their size and longevity that made them formidable. There is safety in numbers, Lydia’s mother would say as she blew clouds of menthol smoke through the kitchen from behind the Formica table where she sat each night with her schnapps, like a general at her battle station making speeches to the troops. I know because I’ve been out on my own for so long. Even before your father died a hundred years ago, it was just us. Just him and me against the world.
Safety was not what attracted Lydia to Earl Morey. What she loved about him was that he made her laugh. Sometimes she’d laugh so hard she couldn’t breathe, which would egg him on more. In high school, he had a short fuse, was a bit of a bully, and more than a few times was called off the soccer field for instigating fights with players on the other teams. That mean streak made Lydia nervous sometimes, but she told herself he was all talk, harmless, a showboat. And besides, no one could make her
laugh as hard as he could. She experienced that laughter as a kind of exorcism. It quieted the voices of the girls at school who whispered behind her back and drowned out her mother’s tipsy rants, and for a brief spell there was nothing but heaving lungs, pounding heart, and tears running down her cheeks.