Did You Ever Have A Family

by Bill Clegg

  She laughed with Earl for a while before they got married and not much after. After high school Earl went to work with his brothers on the maintenance crew at Harkness and joined the volunteer fire department. Within a few months, he stopped coming home for dinner. He’d go straight from work to the firehouse or to the Tap, where he’d eat beef jerky and potato chips. He’d come in after ten, drunk and cranky about something or someone. He’d pinch Lydia’s ass and tell her to lay off the snacks. And soon he just called her Snacks. First at home and then in front of his family. His father thought it was funny. Toughen up, girl, he said to her at Christmas dinner that first year, you know how he is. And then there were the nights, in the beginning once every six weeks or two months, and then later every weekend, when he’d come home smashed and wake her up, speaking gibberish. Whether she responded or not, sat up in bed or curled into her pillow pretending to sleep, the result was the same. A hard blow either to the side of her head or her body. Usually, it was just one. Two at the most. And sometimes afterward he would grab her by the shoulders and shake her violently. Mostly it would be dark, so she wouldn’t see him, but the few times he turned on a light or the moon outside would brighten the room enough, she would see a face so tortured and far away it was as if he were possessed, like some kind of zombie demon. She knew by then that the only thing capable of driving a demon away was another one; so when she recognized something that could drive Earl and most likely the rest of the town away, she didn’t hesitate. That their demon would be her son was the awful consequence, but she didn’t think she had a choice. Which was not how other people saw it, certainly not her mother or Connie Morey, who is long dead and whose number is still, like some threat from the underworld, carved into the wood next to Lydia’s phone.

  She’s turned the ringer down as low as it goes, but she still jumps every time it rings. Ever since the morning when she got the phone call from Betty Chandler. He’s done it now, Lydia, is what she said, clipped and cold and distant as if she were reporting that the high school football team was on a losing streak. You need to get over to June Reid’s house right away, she added before hanging up. Betty Chandler and Lydia grew up together, went to the same kindergarten, elementary, and high school. They were even best friends one summer and fall when they were twelve—making barrettes with pink and blue ribbons and selling them for a dollar each—but when Betty’s chubby older brother, Chip, tried to kiss Lydia, unsuccessfully, after the eighth-grade dance and then told people she let him go to third base, Betty turned on her and spread rumors that she was loose. Just like that, based on so very little, she became her enemy and managed to stay so for more than thirty years. Later, when Luke was born and Earl had thrown Lydia out, her mother said she’d heard Betty telling people she’d been accepting money to have sex with the migrant workers at Morgan Farm across the state line in Amenia, the ones who came from Mexico or the Caribbean every season to pick apples, and that’s how she’d gotten pregnant. Her mother asked her if it was true. As painful as that was, Lydia never blamed her mother or any of them. She knew when she realized she was pregnant that if her baby’s skin was even half as dark as its father’s, she would be cast as the hussy. She never refuted any of the stories, never told anyone the truth, not even Luke, and when he was old enough he didn’t want anything to do with her, let alone a father who had been kept a secret all his life. There were good reasons for keeping his father a secret. And if they weren’t good, they were, she believed for a long time, necessary. Only one marriage would be upended by this baby and it would be hers.

  Many times she came close to leaving, throwing Luke in her car and driving away. But somehow she got used to the snickering whispers in the grocery store, the nasty gazes from the women, and the lewd once-overs from the men. One year became two, became five, became so many she couldn’t count them. After Earl there were other men, but most didn’t amount to much more than a few boozy sleepovers. Only Rex, who turned up many years later, stuck around long enough to look like a future, but the wreckage he left in his wake cured Lydia of ever again expecting one. After Rex, there was no more going to places like the Tap on weekends, no more men, and no more hope left that her life would ever happen any differently than it had.

  Beyond visiting Luke in prison in the Adirondacks the one time and going to Atlantic City for her honeymoon with Earl, she’d never left Wells. Some trees love an ax, a drunk old-timer mumbled one night at the Tap, back when she still went there, and something in what he said rang true, but when she later remembered what he’d said, she disagreed and thought instead that the tree gets used to the ax, which has nothing to do with love. It settles into being chipped away at, bit by bit, blade by blade, until it doesn’t feel anything anymore, and then, because nothing else can happen, what’s left crumbles to dust.

  After Luke died, the phone rang a lot. The funeral home, the insurance company, the bank, the police. There were consoling calls, too, but mostly from people in Luke’s life, not hers; people who adored him and worked with him, some who were in jail with him, a few old girlfriends, ones she’d never met, and a few guys who used to swim with him in high school, his old coaches. She heard their voices as if they came from the end of a long tunnel. Their words were like echoes, and often she would hold the phone away until she sensed the talking about to come to an end. She did her best to be polite, but it was hard to hear from strangers about her son’s life, which she barely knew and had only just begun to be included in again.

  Everyone she worked for called. The Moodys, the Hammonds, Peggy Riley, the Tucks, the Hills, and the Masseys, who owned the bed-and-breakfast in Salisbury where she used to drive each day to change beds, clean linens, and scrub the toilets and tubs. Even Tommy Ball called, though she hadn’t seen him in years. All of them offered their condolences and told her to take her time and to please just let them know when she was ready to come back. She never called any of them. But she did take her time, all of it, she mumbled to herself more than a few times. From the age of thirteen until the morning Betty Chandler called her, Lydia had worked nearly every day of her life. From that moment forward, she was done. She figured that with the little money she had saved, there was enough to pay her living expenses for a year or so, and carry the minimum payments on her two credit cards if she had to use them to pay for food. Without having to go to work, she barely ever drove, so she didn’t have to pay for gas. Propane and electric were included in her rent, which was only four hundred dollars a month, and the phone and cable bills were the cheapest possible.

  It turned out later that Luke had a life insurance policy and Lydia was, inexplicably, the beneficiary. He also had a will, the kind you download from the Internet and get notarized, which he did. He left Lydia what he had—his savings, his landscaping company, and his belongings, which, because he’d been living at June’s, were destroyed. Between the insurance and the savings and the twenty thousand the Waller brothers paid her for the landscaping business—two trucks, a few wheelbarrows, a backhoe, and a pile of tools—she could exist as she lived now for a long time without working. For most of her life she had dreamed of the day she wouldn’t have to stoop and scrub and haul and shine for other people. And so it came. One more demon replacing another.

  June never called, not once. She hugged Lydia briefly at Luke’s funeral but left town before she could say anything. Lydia wasn’t surprised given how she behaved the morning Betty Chandler called. She’d done what Betty had instructed her to do and went straight to June’s. She dropped the phone and in her slippers and robe drove the three miles to Indian Pond Road. June was squatting next to the mailbox, doubled over and away from the house, just at the top of the short, curving asphalt driveway. Lydia got out of her car and went toward her. Around them swarmed what looked like hundreds of firemen and police officers and EMTs. As she came closer, June turned her face away as if avoiding a hot flame and, as she did, held her arm up and flicked her hand toward Lydia, the way you wave away an unwanted animal, or a be
ggar. It was chilling, even in that unreal scene, to be greeted this way by a woman who had only ever shown her kindness. It is that gesture she remembers most clearly from that morning. Not Betty Chandler’s heartless phone call, not the red flashing lights, not the army of stunned emergency workers, not the police officer telling her that her son was dead. It was June’s hand, sending her away, the first signal that everything was about to change, had already changed, and that she was about to find out how. Those flicking, flapping fingers still jump before her eyes like a black flag snapping in the wind, commemorating all that was over. But Lydia never blamed her. Not only were her losses greater than Lydia’s that day, if losses are measured in people, but June was the one who saw it happen. Whatever she had gone through, whatever she had seen, meant that Lydia was no longer bearable.

  She assumed that June blamed Luke, like so many others had. But the truth was she had no idea. What Lydia knew was that in addition to the agony of losing Luke, there was a hard and recurring stab of pain from missing June—so strange to miss another woman—this woman who she never believed she could relate to or like, let alone love. And Lydia still loved her. She had given her back her son. When June met Luke, Lydia had not spoken to her son in over eight years. Not a word since that afternoon in the freezer section of the grocery store. One year and then eight. And then June.

  She appeared on Lydia’s doorstep. After no one answered her knocking, she waited on the front porch. When Lydia came home that afternoon, she saw a woman, roughly her own age, or older, who looked like every woman she’d ever worked for. Faded jeans, fit, simple but tailored cotton T-shirt, blond hair with streaks of silver pulled back in a ponytail, flashes of expensive metal at her wrists and throat and ears. She thought at first she was some weekender from the city looking to hire a housecleaner. When she introduced herself as the woman in Luke’s life—We’ve been living together this year, she said—Lydia immediately asked her to leave. She knew about June Reid. She knew where she lived and where she was from. She’d even once driven by her old stone house on Indian Pond Road between the apple orchards and the fields that led to the Unification Church property. It was surrounded by old pine and locust trees, and in the winter it looked like a Christmas card. She’d overheard people she worked for, people who knew June Reid from the city, mention how she’d taken up with a local guy, much younger. And then Bess Tuck, one of her employers who lived in the city during the week, asked her point-blank whether Lydia knew whom her son was dating. When Lydia answered that she did not, Bess told her the woman was someone who’d had dinner in this very house, she emphasized, as if it were the most spectacular and impossible coincidence.

  Lydia knew about June Reid but had never seen her. And here she was. As much as she’d wondered how Luke was and what he was doing and whom with, she knew right away she couldn’t bear this woman telling her about her son. It was as if she had taken her place or succeeded where she had failed. But even if the kind of love they had was a totally different kind of love than a mother and son’s, she didn’t want it rubbed in her face by someone whose motives for being with a man so young could not be good. Leave, she said to her as she struggled to unlock the door to her apartment. I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to. Go away.

  June came back a few weeks later and again Lydia rushed inside. But the next time she came, Lydia didn’t duck into her apartment or tell her to go. She stood on the porch and let her speak. It embarrasses her to remember, but she was flattered this elegant woman was so determined to spend time with her. After a little while, she asked her in. She stayed and she talked, and she came again, and after that again. Eventually, Luke came with her. The first few times he barely spoke, and Lydia, terrified she’d say the wrong thing and cause him to storm out, kept quiet. Lydia remembers June teasing Luke about the kids he hired—Perverts, pickpockets, and potheads, she’d chant—and each time would get a reaction. He’d try to get mad, but when he did, she would poke him in the stomach or under his arms and he would, against his will, melt. During those first few sessions, June’s light joking was the only sound to break the silence, and as difficult as it was to see Luke so at ease with a woman her own age, she was grateful. Slowly, after a few visits, he began to talk about work, even ask Lydia questions about the people she cleaned for. And then one morning, before Lydia left for the day, he showed up alone. They sat on the bottom step of her porch, mostly in silence, and watched two teenage boys scrape paint from the fence of a house on Lower Main Street. Eventually Lydia turned toward Luke and cautiously placed her hand on his shoulder. She began to speak, Luke, I . . . but he interrupted her, rushing his words, which sounded as if he’d rehearsed them. We’ll be okay. . . . I don’t ever want to talk about it because there’s nothing you can say to change what happened. And I don’t want you to try. I’ll never understand. I don’t want to. But we’ll be okay. Before she could respond, he hugged her—quickly, the first time in years, his neck against her face, his smell, his skin, all of a sudden so close. He stood, and as he turned toward his truck to leave, he stumbled awkwardly and nearly fell. I have to, he started to say, righting himself, then pausing a beat, stop drinking in the morning, a smile flaring, his eyes bright. This was less than one year before he died. Nothing, and then so much, then nothing.

  After those first few weeks following the accident, Lydia stopped picking up the phone. Sometimes she’d leave the apartment, walk down to the town green and back to avoid it. Other times she’d just let it ring and ring. She’d turn the volume up on the television to drown the sound out, or if someone kept calling, she’d get in the shower and turn on the radio that hung from the showerhead. Eventually, the phone went quiet.

  When the first call came from Winton, she picked up. It was the day she ran from the women at the coffee shop. When she came home that night, she sat down at the kitchen table. That first flash of anger when she’d heard the women gossiping frightened her, and panic drove her home. But the longer she sat in the kitchen and the more she replayed what she’d heard, the more that anger returned, and she felt again the hot violence from before. Something about those women—no more careless or cruel than anyone else she’d ever come across, and probably less so than many—something about what they said and how they said it that made her want to hurt someone. That anger and the ugly fantasies it fueled had her shaking in the dark kitchen. She sat there for so long and so still that when the phone rang, she jumped to her feet. Even at its lowest volume it startled her, and she rushed across the kitchen to pick up. The voice on the other end was a man’s, a younger man’s. She was relieved it was no one she knew. He sounded British but with a lilt or swerve in the accent that she couldn’t place. He asked if she was Lydia Morey, and when she said yes, he said, Miss Lydia Morey, you’ve won the lottery. Silly, she knew. Obviously some kind of scam, but she was caught off guard. I don’t win anything, she said without thinking, then told him he must have the wrong person because she hadn’t entered any lottery. As if anticipating her response, he said, Sometimes we enter lotteries and do not know; for example, if you have a magazine subscription or a Triple A membership, you may have automatically been submitted for a lottery. She told him she didn’t have any magazine subscriptions and was not a member of anything, and then he laughed. A big, wide warm laugh. After that, he said her name, slowly. Miss. Lydia. Morey. He just said her name, the same one when spoken out loud at the coffee shop earlier had caused her to flee. As he said it, heat rippled across her chest. A funny bone she didn’t even know was still there had been tickled, and something like a smile wrinkled her lips. Before she let him speak another word, she slammed the phone in its cradle.

  June

  There is no lake. She has been inching along this rock-strewn dirt road for hours, and there has been no sign of water, no cars, no humans, no evidence that she took the right exit after Missoula, or pointed the car in the right direction each time the almost-road forked. She is lost and alone and it does not matter. Nothing does, she
thinks, not for the first time. She circles the idea again and again—that no choice she might make would have any impact on her or anyone else. Before now she would have felt exhilarated by the idea of existing without obligation or consequence, but the experience is nothing like she once imagined. This is a half-life, a split purgatory where her body and mind coexist but occupy separate realities. Her eyes look at what is ahead—the road, a fallen tree—but her mind scours the past, judges each choice made, relives every failure, roots out what she overlooked, took for granted, and didn’t pay attention to. The present scarcely registers. The people she sees are not the ones pumping gas into the Subaru, passing her on the highway, or making change when they sell her bottles of water and peanuts at mini-marts and gas stations. Instead it is Luke, pleading with her in a kitchen that no longer exists; Lolly, shouting at the top of her fourteen-year-old lungs from across a restaurant table in Tribeca; Adam, looking up at her, shocked, a young girl’s hand in his; Lydia stepping toward her that morning, before she knew what had happened, and the confusion and hurt on her face as June waved her off. She returns to these memories and replays them over and over, scrutinizes every remembered word, witnesses again each mistake. When she exhausts one, another appears. Another always does.

  Her mind leaps to her childhood friend Annette. Annette lived two streets away in the same neighborhood in Lake Forest, and they spent their Saturday nights at each other’s house, playing with Annette’s collection of porcelain horses, listening to Shaun Cassidy and Jackson 5 records, making lists of where they would live when they grew up, what car they would drive, and what their husbands would look like. She remembers convincing Annette to come with her to sleepaway camp in New Hampshire the summer between fifth and sixth grades. Annette was timid, a careful creature who was reluctant to agree. For both it would be their first time away from home without parents, and Annette cited plenty of reasons not to go—the high school boys who lifeguarded at the club pool, an Arabian-horse show coming to Chicago. But June kept at her over the Christmas holiday, even convinced her mother to call and explain to Annette’s protective mother the place where she herself had gone as a girl. June can’t recall why it was so important she come with her, but remembers clearly the triptych of cousins from Beverly Hills who naturally and without ceremony established themselves at the top of the social pecking order from the first day. They had glamorous names—Kyle, Blaire, and Marin—and all three had the same feathered, shoulder-length, light brown hair.