Bill Clegg: Did You Ever Have A Family

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…