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

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. Secondspass 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