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.
It is a wedding they are talking about now. The loud one, the one that begins every sentence with Now. Now, you’ll never believe. Now, Carol, listen to this. Now, I never. Now, can you imagine. NOW HEAR THIS, she seems to be commanding each time she speaks. As if her voice, two or three decibel levels above the clank and chatter of the restaurant, didn’t already demand your attention. She has a daughter getting married in Nantucket. From the shimmy in her voice Lydia can tell it is this woman’s favorite thing to talk about. Thank God for the wedding planner, bossy like you wouldn’t believe, but a genius with the details. She even helped organize the honeymoon, a gift from the groom’s parents. A month in Asia. To be honest, I think it’s too much—the whole thing waiting like a giant game-show prize on the other side of what we expect to be a perfectly nice but by no means over-the-top wedding. They’re from New Jersey, she explains. Big Italian family, she adds, and just in case anyone missed the point: They don’t know any better.
She keeps going. The trip is endless. Her voice is a furrowed brow, bragging. India, Vietnam, Thailand, each country’s name rolling off her tongue like the brand names of pricey clothing Lydia sees ads for in the thick beauty magazines these women drop on the bathroom floor like just-once-used towels.
As she continues on about the groom’s family—the limousine service they’ve owned since the 1950s, their accents, their Catholicism—Lydia looks out the window to the only motel in town, the Betsy. The sign is large and wooden and covered in white paint that has been cracked and peeling for as long as she’s lived here, which is always. The sign has a large pediment on top as if announcing a grand colonial inn and not the twenty-one-room, one-story, white-brick motel that sits out of sight, beyond the tree line, at the end of the drive. Nothing is grand about the Betsy except maybe the room numbers painted in robin’s-egg blue with gold borders on the small oval plaques hanging from each door. The owner’s mother fancied herself a folk artist, and they were a gift to her son Tommy when he opened the motel in the late sixties. He told Lydia the story one night at the Tap, a few years after he sold the place. Lydia had cleaned the rooms there for six or seven years before the new owners came in and hired Mexicans, who arrive on foot each morning from across the state line in Amenia or Millerton. She’d never said much to Tommy when she worked for him, nor he to her, but since time had passed and they were both bellied up to the same bar, he got chatty. I hated that color blue, he spat, many drinks in and looking like a sixty-five-year-old teenager—gray hair, liver spots, cracking voice, bright blue eyes, lost. Wearing the same white, button-down shirt and khaki pants she remembered him wearing in church when she was a kid. She covered everything in that blue and insisted I put her silly paintings in the rooms. She even painted flowers on some of the beds. I named the place after her thinking it would open her purse a bit more, but it didn’t. I was supposed to live off the earnings but there never were any. No one comes to Wells to stay in a motel.
Everyone in town knew Betsy Ball had, long ago, married the heir to a liquor fortune who died young and left her everything. Tommy lived with his mother most of his life, sleeping in the same bedroom he slept in as a child, in the house he still lived in. Lydia wondered if he ever left that room, ever moved to another one in a different part of that big brick house on South Main Street after his mother died. Except for four years in Pennsylvania for college, and a few years after in the city, Tommy Ball never really left town. Never dated anyone that anyone can remember and never married. Betsy Ball saw Tommy every day and he hated her, Lydia thought. Her son hated her but she was not alone. Even when the town library, to which she eventually left a good deal of money, threw her a party for her one hundredth birthday, her son arrived and left with her. She was widowed and deaf, probably wearing diapers and not knowing her own name, but she did not go home alone that night.
Alone and home is where Lydia has been the most during the last six months since Luke died. She walks to the coffee shop after lunch most days to get a break from the television, which has become like a full-time job. If the morning talk shows start without her, she feels like she’s dropping the ball, as if she’s failed in the one measly duty she has each day. There aren’t as many of the old-time Phil Donahue–type shows anymore, the kind with regular people with extraordinary problems. Now the shows are more specific: medical, food-focused, or exclusively dedicated to celebrities, who at times feel like family—like cousins you hear about in Christmas letters doing this and that, who you catch glimpses of at graduation parties, christenings, or weddings. It comforts Lydia to see the same people pop up on the same couches and guest chairs through the years. They age, she ages, the talk-show hosts age. For a little while it seems like they are all in it together.
Now, did you know the caterer never got paid? At first, she thinks the loud one is still talking about her daughter’s wedding in Nantucket, but she’s moved on to the past tense, another subject, a different wedding. It is soon clear which one.
Lydia scans the place for the waitress, the pregnant blonde named Amy, who she’s pretty sure used to work at the grocery store. She sees her each day and keeps meaning to ask, but after she orders her coffee she can’t ever seem to find the words. Lately, Amy just brings the coffee, which excuses both of them from speaking.
The lunch crowd has mostly left. Lydia pivots back, slightly, careful not to turn all the way around and be seen by the loud one or any of the women with her. She still doesn’t know quite who they are, but given what they are now talking about, she doesn’t want to be recognized. She wants to leave as quickly and quietly as possible. She looks again toward the kitchen, hoping to see Amy and signal for the check, but there is no one. She’s stuck and there is nothing she can do to keep from hearing this woman, who seems to not take even the shortest breath between her words.
I don’t think the tent was burned. But the big oak tree behind the house caught fire. They still haven’t cut down what’s left. It stands there, black and horrible, like some scary Halloween decoration. Now, can you imagine?
My brother used to work for Luke Morey. . . . Someone else is speaking now, someone younger. He was at the house the day before it happened, with his friends—mowing the lawn, picking up sticks, weeding the flower beds. . . . Silas still won’t talk about it. He’s only fifteen. The police asked him questions, the fire marshal, too, but he didn’t know anything. He worked for Luke for three summers.
Lydia thought this kind of talk had died down. And even if it hadn’t, she wasn’t usually within earshot to hear it. Most people, if they saw her coming, changed the subject or got quiet. She’d become used to conversations ending abruptly and eyes looking away from her as she passed people in the pharmacy and the grocery store, or even here at the coffee shop. But these women don’t see her.
Amy must be resting—the lunch rush looked like it had been busy, and she’s at least five months along. Lydia remembers cleaning houses until her ninth month and going back to work with Luke when he was only two weeks old. She had to. Earl had thrown her out without a penny, and no one blamed him. Luke’s biological father didn’t know he existed, nor would he ever, and her mother had been barely scraping by on what she made at the bank. Lydia and her mother had been on their own for as long as she could remember. Her father died of a heart attack soon after she was born, and all he left behind was debt. An outstanding loan with the bank and payments on the truck he used to plow driveways with in the winter to make money. There is no pension plan when you sell firewood and plow snow for a living, Lydia’s mother would say when she was paying bills and smoking cigarettes at the table in her kitchen. He worked hard was half of the only other comment she’d make about Patrick Hannafin, who was, from the few photographs Lydia had seen, the source of her dark brown hair and high, sharp cheekbones. In every photograph he looked the same: handsome, tall, serious. He worked hard, Natalie Hannafin would say of her late husband, but his hands were allergic to money. His family had been in Wells since the 1800s, and at one time there had been as many of them as Moreys, but over the years, sickness and wanderlust and more baby girls born than boys dwindled the fold, and now Lydia was the last Hannafin standing.
Still, Lydia’s mother insisted she keep Earl Morey’s name after the divorce and that Luke keep it, too. It made no sense, and what was worse was that it seemed like an aggressive stance to take against a family who not only took their name seriously but didn’t take any more kindly to an open challenge than they did infidelity. Lydia knew her mother held out some tissue-thin hope that Earl would change his mind, forgive her daughter, and take Lydia and Luke back. Retaining that name was her one demand at the time, and because her apartment was the only place Lydia could go after the hospital, she agreed. Lydia slept on her mother’s couch for six months, and since there was no money for a sitter, Lydia would bring Luke with her to the Betsy and into the houses she cleaned, still in his car seat, setting him on kitchen counters, window seats, and beds while she worked. Her mother always said the boy could sleep through a war.
The loud one is at it again, filling everyone in on the details. The same grim facts the papers and the New York and Connecticut news stations repeated for months. A gas leak, an explosion, four people dead, a young couple to be married later that day, the mother of the bride standing on the lawn watching it happen, her ex-husband asleep upstairs and her boyfriend in the kitchen, an ex-con, she makes sure to emphasize, and black, not that it matters, she adds in a whisper.
My God, she can hear one of them say quietly. What a nightmare, she hears another mumble with what Lydia imagines is a slowly shaking head and crossed arms.
Finally, the fourth woman speaks. She must be the only one not from around here, Lydia thinks, and it must be for her benefit that these women are so painstakingly reporting the story. How do you recover from that? How would you even begin?
Lydia puts both hands in her lap and closes her eyes as the loud one winds up.
You don’t, that’s how, and she didn’t. Now can you imagine watching everyone you love just disappear? Have you ever even heard of such a thing?
There’s nothing she can do to stop them. Nothing she can do to shut them up or shut them down. They are like the horseflies that circle her head when she walks along the town green in the summer. They dart and poke and buzz and dive, keeping pace no matter how slowly or quickly she moves.
She’s left town, apparently. West, or south, or something. After the funerals she just vanished.
For a few long seconds there is silence. The clang of lunch dishes being washed and stacked in the kitchen. The gentle beeping sound of a delivery truck backing up, somewhere.
There was an investigation, says the woman who does not sound at all familiar but who must be from Wells or nearby to assume the role of storyteller. There’s no hard proof but it looks like it was that black boy she was seeing. And forgive me, he was a boy and on the one hand good for her, but look what happened.
Do you really think it was his fault? the younger one asks nervously. Since she spoke about her brother earlier, she has remained silent. Silas says Luke was a good boss. Our mother disagrees but Silas liked him.
Now . . . c’mon . . . I don’t think anyone really doubts that it was his doing. He was the one in the kitchen. Everyone else was asleep. And besides, he’d been in prison. For using drugs, dealing, the whole shebang. Cocaine or crack or methamphetamines or something. They were quite a pair. She ran art galleries in the city and I think she moved up here full-time. To be with him, no doubt.
How would a woman like that end up with a local thug like him anyway? the fourth one asks, as if on cue.
How do you think?
NOW HEAR THIS, Lydia has shouted, the words not even hers. She is standing, her chair scraping like a scream as she rises, turning to face these women. NOW, she shouts again, her voice a shock to her ears, the loudest sound she has made in many months. When was the last time she even spoke? Yesterday? Last week? She is standing in front of these four women, three of them near her age, midfifties, early sixties, and one of them much younger, in her twenties, the only one she recognizes. Her name is Holly, and Lydia grew up with her mother, who was a few years older and never friendly. Seconds pass as she stands in this now-almost-empty coffee shop before a table of women, who, besides Holly, she imagines have not once worked a day of physical labor, who have been attended by loving parents and friends and colleagues and boyfriends and husbands and children and grandchildren every pampered, taken-for-granted minute of their lives. These are comfortable women, cherished women. They look at her as if the forks in their hands have told them to be quiet.
I’m sorry, who are you? The loud one, attempting to impose order, breaks the silence and deflates Lydia’s momentary authority. Who am I? Lydia thinks. I’m nothing. I’ve never been anyone except someone’s housekeeper, daughter, wife, girlfriend, or mother, and in all of those roles I have failed and now I play no role. Her knees are twitching and she can smell her sharp body odor. She is standing before these women with nothing to say beyond the demand that they listen. Holly begins to speak: Lydia . . . I mean . . . Mrs. Morey, I’m so . . .
As she speaks her name, Lydia’s face flashes with heat, and a panic that registers as physical pain knuckles through her chest. Before another word is spoken, she turns away, shakily places a sweaty five-dollar bill on the table, and, as she does, mumbles, That thug is my son.
Excuse me, what did you say? the loud one asks, her voice high, tight, scolding more than curious.
Lydia turns to face her. My son, you stupid bitch. He is . . . He was my son. She steps toward her as she says the words, and when she sees the woman flinch, she realizes that her hand is raised, her palm open. She stops abruptly and hurries as quickly and as steadily as she can manage toward the door, out across the shopping-center parking lot, and onto the sidewalk that leads home.
She has heard, finally, what she feared people believed. It took more than six months for the words to reach her ears, and now that they have, she needs to get as far away from them as she can. She has no one to call, no one to rush home to. But when has she? She reviews the few possibilities—Earl; her mother; her father, who died before she knew him; Luke’s father, for only a little while; Rex, for too long, for which she will never forgive herself; Luke; June. None of these people were ever hers. They either belonged to someone else or had lives or lies that put them out of reach, or should have. This is not news, but what surprises her, after being alone for so long, is that it’s only now that it feels unbearable.
The sidewalk that leads to town is slick with leaves. They turned color late this year, some as late as Halloween, and clung to their branches until a nor’easter blew in and finally knocked them to earth. They are everywhere. She wants to run, but instead walks slowly, careful not to slip and cause another scene as she passes in front of the auto shop, the hospital thrift store, the flower shop, the historical society, the fabric store, the town library, the elementary school.