Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have A Family

Ten days after she mails the letter, a padded manila envelope with a Newark, New Jersey, postmark arrives, and in it are seven hundred-dollar bills and a fifty. No note, no paper of any kind. Just the money. Later that day, she tucks the roll of bills in the pocket of her fleece pullover and walks to the coffee shop. It is early February but Christmas decorations are still taped to the windows. They are the kind you buy at the drugstore or the supermarket: thin, cardboard Santas, plate-size snowflakes, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Along the ceiling and at the top of the windows are strung small, white lights, and on the counter by the register is a miniature artificial Christmas tree wrapped in a silver garland with a plastic angel on top. The money in Lydia’s pocket gives her an unfamiliar energy, a lift. She knows it’s hers, that she’s been given nothing, won nothing, but still the large bills and the way they arrived give her a surge. She drinks her coffee quickly, and when the check comes, she pays with the fifty. The waitress, Amy, who now looks like she is well into her eighth month, picks up the bill and returns the change without comment or any evidence of interest. Lydia leaves a five-dollar tip, pulls on her fleece jacket, and starts home.

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.

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.