Did You Ever Have A Family Read Online Free PDF Page A

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. Wearingthe 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 mostduring 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