Did You Ever Have A Family

by Bill Clegg

  Before she reaches the sidewalk, she notices a boy in a green sweatshirt circle the parking lot on his bike and cross in front of her. She’s seen him before. Hanging out on the green with his friends, smoking. He worked for Luke, but dozens of kids in Wells between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two worked for Luke at one time or another. What did June call them? Pickpockets and potheads? Lydia winces at the memory of June’s teasing and watches the boy swoop in tight circles with his bike.

  Could this be Kathleen Riley’s boy? she wonders, and imagines what he’s heard his mother spewing about her. Lydia reminds herself that Kathleen’s name is no longer Riley, that it’s been Moore for many years. Kathleen married a contractor from Kent who built her a big house on Wildey Road and was a nurse at the hospital before she started having kids. Funny, Lydia thinks, to think of Kathleen Riley as a nurse and a mother. Her sharpest memory of Kathleen is from high school, when she accused Lydia of stuffing her bra. Lydia was the first in her seventh-grade class to noticeably need a bra, and so by the time she entered high school she was more developed than any of the other girls her age. On the second day of high school she was given the nickname Lactadia. No one claimed credit for the name but it stuck, and soon the older boys were writing her lewd notes and slipping them into her locker, asking to go for a walk behind the bleachers at school, catcalling when she got on the bus. I’m thirsty, they’d yell from the backseat in the mornings, and in the afternoon from the open windows once she got off at the bus stop at the end of the town green. By the second week of school many of the girls in the higher grades, Kathleen Riley among them, took a fierce disliking to Lydia. Being younger than Kathleen by two years, Lydia had been invisible to her in elementary school. Now that they were in high school, Kathleen not only saw her, she waged war against her. Lactadia has no milk was her favorite chant, and in the stairwell once between classes she and her friends cornered Lydia. Kathleen demanded she lift her shirt to prove she wasn’t stuffing her bra with tissues. Lydia was so frightened that instead of walking away or telling Kathleen to fuck off, she slowly lifted her blouse above her head and exposed her very real breasts. Lydia remembers standing there, shirt up, covering her face, hearing kids pass her on the stairs and one of them grabbing her right breast and squeezing it hard. She couldn’t see whose hand it was and she was too stunned to respond. By the time she lowered her blouse, Kathleen and the others had turned away and were rushing down the stairs. Lydia could hear the word freak echo as they descended in a storm of cackling laughter. There were other humiliations, and thousands of half-heard whispers, but the memory of being exposed and mauled before the accusing eyes of Kathleen Riley and her friends is the most mortifying. Not until the older girls had graduated and Lydia began dating Earl, who was popular and feared and came with a force field of protection, did the terror she felt approaching school each day begin to lift. Now, every few weeks or so, Lydia will see Kathleen coming down the aisle at the grocery store or standing in line at the pharmacy, and when she does, she is always careful to keep her head down and avoid eye contact. As if they were still in high school, she gets out of the way, becomes invisible.

  Lydia squints to get a better look at the boy on the bike though still can’t be sure he’s Kathleen’s son. She’s always known most people in town, but once Luke was out of school and later, after Rex left and she stopped going out to the Tap and places like it, she kept to herself and had little to do with anyone beyond those she worked for. Slowly, without noticing, she started losing track of the marriages and births, the breakups and new people. But this kid she’s noticed. And lately, too often. She remembers one of her mother’s kitchen-table wisdoms, which she’d typically trot out on the occasion of hearing some piece of local, fallen-from-grace gossip: Good apples get picked, it’s the rotten ones that fall close to the tree. It never made sense to Lydia. It still doesn’t, but it begins to as she watches up ahead, where the boy who is probably Kathleen Riley’s son swerves off Main Street onto Low Road and disappears. Lydia walks faster and, in her coat pocket, crushes money in her fist.

  Silas

  He ditches his bike behind a garbage shed on Low Road and cuts back through the field behind the elementary school to Herrick Road. At first, she is out of sight, seven or eight driveways ahead, but soon he is close enough to see her arms swing at her sides, her jeans pockets ride the wild movement of her ass. It’s been like this for months. She walks, he follows, closer and closer, narrowing the gap between them each time. Lately, he’s been close enough to see the faint outline of panties and bra straps behind her clothes. He’d heard from someone that Luke’s mom was in her fifties, but as he watches her ass rock back and forth and jiggle up and down in her tight jeans, he thinks, No fucking way. He’s seen it in shorts, sweatpants, tight skirts, loose skirts, and many times and most often in jeans that look like these. Lydia Morey walks a lot. Mostly to the coffee shop, the bank, and the grocery store, and she walks as if she’s stoned or in a trance of some kind. She never turns around, hardly ever looks to either side. He’s pretty sure she has not seen him, even once, in the weeks and months that have passed since he started following her.

  He rushes his pace to get closer. That ass! He’s spellbound by the metronomic perfection of its movement—up-down, down-up—and thinks, This is no mom’s ass. He winces, ashamed by his racing mind, regretting this particular thought. His gaze pulls back to take in the rest of her. He sees her hands, her ringless fingers, her wrists, her worn sneakers, the dark brown hair piled on her head tumbling in loose strands down around her shoulders. For the first time, he sees a few gray hairs. With these she becomes again a whole person, not just a few thrilling body parts. She returns to being the reason he parks his bike four doors down from her apartment on Upper Main Street in the mornings before work in the summer and on Saturdays now that school has started up again. She becomes, again, his dead boss’s mom. Lydia Morey. The woman people in town talk about. The woman he’s heard described as the mother of the crackhead whose negligence blew up a house and killed three people and himself; the sex-mad slut who cheated on Earl Morey with a migrant worker, a drug dealer, a hitchhiker, a Zulu tribesman; the mother of the hustler who conned June Reid into being his sugar mama until she threw him out and he came back on a suicide mission; the monster who gave birth to a bad seed who finally got what was coming to him. He’s heard it all and has kept quiet every time. The only remotely nice thing he’s ever heard said about Lydia Morey was that she had the best rack in Litchfield County. His father made the comment this summer as they waited at a stop sign in town and she crossed in front of them wearing a tan halter top. Not even the young girls at the Tap can compete with that, he added. Silas’s mother, who never liked Lydia Morey, was not in the car. When her name was mentioned in their house, she was always quick to comment that Lydia was someone for whom she had no use. She also said, after getting off the phone with one of her friends a few days after everything happened, I suppose no one ever told Lydia that when you lie down with dogs, you not only get fleas, you get pregnant with more dogs. How June Reid ever got mixed up with that mutt son of hers I’ll never know. Even through this Silas stayed silent.

  The only time he ever spoke about any of it was when he was questioned by the police and the fire marshal about working at June Reid’s the day before the wedding. They came to the door of his house that night and he sat in the kitchen and told them the same thing Ethan and Charlie told them. That Luke had them do what he usually had them do for New Yorkers like June Reid: pick up twigs and sticks, pull weeds from the sidewalk, and edge the flower beds. The only difference was that Luke paid everyone in advance that day and double their regular twelve bucks an hour. As he was handing out their cash, he asked them to do twice as good a job as usual. You guys are good, but today I need great. Silas told the police officers that Luke had said this, but they didn’t seem interested. They kept asking about Luke’s mood, whether he seemed drunk or high or upset when they saw him last. Silas said
he seemed like he always seemed. A little stressed-out, busy, but fine. He told them that he and the other guys showed up at June Reid’s place around two that day, and Luke worked alongside them for the first couple hours. He rode the John Deere, mowing the front and back lawns, while Ethan, Charlie, and Silas did everything else. Around four o’clock, Luke said he had errands to run, so he left them to finish working until six thirty, after which Charlie and Ethan piled into Ethan’s old Saab and Silas rode his bike down Indian Pond Road to his house, which was less than a mile away.

  What none of them told the cops was that not long after Luke left, the three of them booked across the field behind the house to the trails that led to the Unification Church property, what kids in town called the Moon because, as everyone knew, the Unification Church was just another name for the Moonies. They did not say that they had sprinted to the Moon and took turns pulling from Silas’s bong. They also did not say that it turned out all three had a stash, so they mixed a little from each into the bowl and smoked what Charlie called, sarcastically, a wedding salad. They lost track of time on the Moon, and when they got back it was almost six. After Silas ditched his yellow knapsack inside the stone shed outside the kitchen, the three of them rushed through the rest of the work and left before dark. By then, the driveway was packed with cars and the house was full for the rehearsal dinner, so they took off without saying anything to Luke, who they assumed was pissed that they were nowhere to be seen when he returned. They also didn’t want him to clock that they were high. Before leaving, Silas remembers, he saw Lydia inside the screened porch. She was sitting with June on the wicker sofa, laughing, small candles all around them flickering on tables holding flowers and food. He cannot remember anything more about seeing these two women, but he remembers clearly the sweet smell of freshly cut lawn, the sound of tent fabric slapping the air, and the first streaks of sunset painting the sky pink. These were the seconds before he left for home, and he has replayed each one a million times.

  It is hard to believe the woman on the porch that night in May is the same one walking with grim purpose ahead of him now, bundled in a purple fleece, trudging across Herrick Road to Upper Main Street. Not once since that night has he seen her smile or heard her laugh.

  Silas slows down to let a gap expand between them. He wonders if Lydia even knows who he is. He’d worked for Luke on and off for three summers and on weekends in the fall and spring. He wonders if she saw him that day at June Reid’s. He remembers standing by the stone shed and rushing away when he heard Luke’s voice coming from the kitchen. He remembers running toward the driveway and flying on his bike along the green cornfields that stretch from the edge of June Reid’s property past the church where June’s daughter was getting married the next day. He slowed down when he came upon Indian Pond, reflecting the red-and-purple sunset stretching above him. He remembers fireflies blinking from the brush and woods on both sides of the road as he pedaled. He remembers stopping to crawl down the rocky slope to the water’s edge to take a leak, the wild sky and the surface of the pond still as glass until his piss sent it rippling. The effect was trippy and especially so since he was still high. At one point the clouds shifted and above him spread what looked like a great dragon with wings as wide as the world. Silas stumbled back from the lake as the creature came into view: jaws jagged with teeth and blasting fire, smoke curling from its snout, magnificent wings expanding in scales of cloud, its gigantic tail twisting past the horizon. It was a spectacular beast, its eyes the only visible blue, long slits that appeared to widen as its head turned slowly toward Silas where he sat against the bank, dazzled and afraid.

  All these months later, he had forgotten about the dragon and how, for a few terrifying seconds, he believed it was real. He’d forgotten that it was dark by the time he found his way up the bank to the road, and how at first he could not find his bike. He thinks about those moments when he stumbled in the dark before finding his bike, which had fallen down next to the tree he’d leaned it against earlier. He wishes he could return to that stumbling. To that perfectly blind minute before he knew anything. Not where his bike was. Not what would happen later that night, or the next morning. Not that a full moon would soon rise and light the whole valley. Or that later, after everyone in his family had gone to sleep, he’d scramble back onto his bike to pedal furiously down this same road, counting on the light of the moon to guide his way to June Reid’s house.

  Without noticing, he has quickened his pace and closed the gap between him and Lydia. After crossing Herrick onto the sidewalk that runs the length of Upper Main Street, he forgets he’s supposed to remain hidden. What had only minutes before been at least three or four car lengths has now collapsed to only a few yards. When he realizes how close he is, he knows he should slow his pace to a quiet halt and bank left down one of the driveways out of sight. But he’s never been this close before. He thinks he can hear her breathing. The air is cold, but he can see perspiration beading on the back of her neck. She has taken off her fleece and he can see patches of skin through the sweat-soaked cloth of her white T-shirt. His eyes move from one patch of almost exposed skin to another. He leans closer. His shoe scuffs the pavement, scrapes loudly against the loose sand, and for the first time he can see her register his presence. His other foot accidently kicks a twig that hits the back of her ankle and she stops abruptly, turns around. He freezes. She is inches away.

  June

  After the maze of rock-strewn, erosion-destroyed dirt roads leading away from Bowman Lake, the smooth asphalt of Route 93 south of Kalispell is a relief. When she sees the sign for Butte, she drifts toward the exit for Interstate 90 and, later, takes another exit when she sees the sign for Salt Lake City. A few miles into Idaho she can feel the wagon pulling to the left. It gets worse, so she gets off at the next exit, and by the time she finds a Texaco she can barely keep the car moving in a straight line. The kids at the register have no idea how to change a tire. The place is more of a grocery store that happens to sell gas than a gas station where anyone knows anything about cars. She waits for someone to pull in who looks like they know what to do. Soon, an older guy with a thick head of white hair and closely trimmed beard, wearing a red flannel shirt, backs his truck up to a pump. When she asks him if he knows how to change a tire, the amused look on his face makes it clear she’s picked the right guy. He puts out his hand and says, Brody Cook reporting for duty. She shakes his hand but says nothing. All right then, he says, still cheerful. He smiles and finishes pumping and paying for his gas. After he pulls his truck away from the pumps and parks next to the Subaru, he asks where she keeps the spare and she says she isn’t sure the wagon has one. One of two places, he says, heads or tails? He looks at her expectantly and she has no idea how to respond. Okay, let’s try heads. He pops the hood and after one quick look around the engine says, Tails it is. When he steps to the back of the wagon and opens the hatch, she hears him ask where she’d like him to put the bags. He asks again. When she doesn’t answer, he walks around the car with a suitcase in one hand and a duffel bag in the other and puts them down on the asphalt. I’ll leave you in charge of these, he says before returning to extract the spare tire from under the panel beneath the rug.

  They had been with her all along. Shoved in the back of the Subaru, packed and ready and forgotten. Is it possible, she wonders, that she hasn’t opened the hatch since she started driving? She’s had no reason to go back there. She brought nothing with her, acquired nothing on the way besides the toothbrush and paste she picked up at a gas station in Pennsylvania the first day. How long has it been? A week? Two? She lost track of time almost as soon as she left Connecticut. Even now she can’t remember how many nights she slept in the wagon next to Bowman Lake. Three nights? Four? She stayed until the bottles of water and bags of peanuts and raisins she’d stocked up on in Ohio ran out. However long she’s been on the road, these bags have been with her the whole time.

  It is obvious who belonged to each one. Will’s is
a sleek arrangement of zippers and pockets with wheels and collapsible handle; Lolly’s is a frayed olive canvas duffel with taped leather straps and ink stains. Lolly would never have been so organized as to pack everything the night before and have the bags waiting in the car. This was Will’s handiwork. Will was the son-in-law Adam always dreamed of: the kind of guy to read up on infectious diseases in foreign countries before traveling there, who paid all of his bills on time, filled the coffeemaker with water and ground beans and set the timer the night before. The kind of guy to make sure the bags for his honeymoon in Greece were packed and waiting in his mother-in-law’s car the night before his wedding. June can hear him walking Lolly through the schedule. Wedding at one, reception from two to six, out the door and in June’s car by seven so that June and Luke would get them to Kennedy Airport no later than 9:30 for their 11:45 flight to Athens. He even e-mailed the itinerary to Lolly, Adam, his parents, and Luke and June so that no one was unclear when everything needed to occur.

  Lolly’s duffel is only half zippered, and at one end, sticking out just a few inches, June sees the edge of a pale blue towel. Brody turns the jack to raise the front left corner of the car, and she feels like walking away. From him, the car, the bags, the towel. As she steps back, quietly, one foot slowly behind the other, she hears Lolly calling to Will, Wait! I forgot my vitamins! This is after the rehearsal, after the dinner, after Luke has cleaned up the mess from making chili for everyone. After Adam has gone to bed and Lydia, a little tipsy, has gone home. June is at the kitchen table sorting neglected piles of mail. Wait! Lolly calls from her room after Will is already out the front door with the bags. She slams down the back stairs like she always has—loud and fast and sounding like an avalanche. She flies out the door in bare feet clutching in both hands a light blue towel from the upstairs bathroom she’s made into a makeshift satchel for her bottles of vitamins. Come back! I have no shoes! June hears them laughing just outside the house and thinks, with a loose knot of nostalgia and envy, that this moment in their relationship, in their lives, is as good as it will ever get. The before. The top of the Ferris wheel, a man she went on a date with in London once told her as they rode above the city in the newly opened Eye. This blind date was arranged by a pushy but well-intentioned colleague at the gallery. The man was her colleague’s uncle and a widower, and for both of them it was too soon. Most of that evening has faded from memory, but when they reached the top of the great wheel and saw the golden lights of London fan out in gorgeous chaos below, she remembers him explaining his theory with an exhausted patience she had gotten used to in English men. This is the pivot between youth and age, the thrilling place where everything seems visible, feels possible, where plans are made. On the one side you have childhood and adolescence, which are the murky ascent, and, on the other, you have the decline that is adulthood, old age, the inch-by-inch reckoning of that grand, brief vision with earthbound reality.