Bill Clegg: Did You Ever Have A Family

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.

Each day, even in the rain, she walks. Her car, an old, light blue Chevy Lumina, parked behind the apartment building where she lives, hasn’t been driven in over a month. She only ever used it for cleaning jobs, and if she needed to go somewhere in town, she always saved gas by walking. The grocery store and the coffee shop are her only destinations now and she goes to both on foot.

She walks past St. David’s, where Luke’s funeral was held, the same church her mother took her to on Christmas Eves and Easter Sundays when she was growing up. Whether God is or isn’t, we cover the base , is what she’d say. And for that reason insisted she and Earl get married there, too. Luke’s funeral was the first time Lydia had stepped foot in the place since her wedding day and it surprised her that nothing had changed in over thirty years. The same dark wood, the same gloomy stained glass. God isn’t , she whispered that day, to herself and to her dead mother. And if He was, Lydia knew He’d long ago looked past her.

She walks past the small house she grew up in next to the firehouse, the two-family Victorian where she lived when she was married, briefly; the apartment above Bart Pitcher’s garage, where her mother lived the last fifteen years of her life; the apartment three streets away, behind the liquor store, where she went to live after her divorce was final and where she raised Luke. She should have left this town by now, she thinks, ducking under a low-hanging branch. There is no one here, but there is no one anywhere. For a while there was, when Luke was young and it was just the two of them. But as he grew older, he found swimming and friends and started to occupy a world apart from her, even though they lived under the same roof. Then much later, after prison and years of avoiding her, he came back, and only because June made him. That began a brief time, so anomalous and happy, she remembers it now as if she’d made it up. Like a fable in which some wretch is given a glimpse of paradise only to have it snatched away. She is that wretch. Luke, letting her back in his life, and with him, June: so much more than she had expected. And now both of them, in a puff of black smoke, gone.

She kicks at a pile of leaves that have been raked and left uncollected on the sidewalk and considers the thousands of times she’s walked here — as a little kid, a teenager, a mother, and now. She can’t imagine anyone walking these sidewalks as many times as she has. My feet are famous to these sidewalks, she thinks, and the idea almost amuses her, its novelty breaking for a split second the panic that drove her from the coffee shop. She holds her breath as she walks past the cemetery — perhaps the only childhood superstition she still holds on to. She clears the street corner that marks the end of the property and exhales, imagining all the thwarted ghosts — including her parents — who wait inside the cemetery gates for her to join them. Luke is buried in the small cemetery behind St. John’s Church, where Lolly Reid was supposed to be married. It’s across the road from where June’s house had been and seemed to Lydia the obvious place. In addition to Luke’s plot, she bought two more — one for her and, though she never had the chance to tell her, one for June.

As she crosses the street and rejoins the sidewalk, she has a sharp sense that someone is behind her. She thinks she hears footsteps, but when she stops and turns around, no one is there, just a teenager riding his bike on the street, heading in the opposite direction. The ghosts are out today, Lydia remembers her mother saying on dark winter days like this. She starts walking again, faster now, and remembers how Luke once called her a ghost. He didn’t say it kindly and it was before he began to forgive her, before June. He was standing in the section of the grocery store where the ice cream and frozen pizzas are displayed in clear-doored freezers. She had seen him enter the store and followed him in, kept a distance as she watched him move from aisle to aisle and fill his cart. He’d been out of prison for an entire summer and she’d still not spoken to him, even though she’d left him many unanswered notes and phone messages. His shirt was too small and it rode up his back as he bent to lift a bag of ice. She could see the thick cord of his spine and the muscles on either side wriggling like snakes under his dark skin. How on earth could I have created something so beautiful? she thought. When he saw her, he stood still and stared for several seconds, and then began to turn away. But before he did, he stopped abruptly and spat, Go away, ghost .

She crosses the village green toward the small apartment building where she has lived on the first floor for more than six years. She climbs the rickety porch steps and notices she left a lamp on in the living room. She figures a moth of some kind must be banging against the bulb, because the light dances and casts small, fast shadows across the couch, the chair, the wall. She pauses at the door and lets herself see for a moment what she imagines most people come home to — lit rooms, voices, someone waiting.

It is raining now. Somewhere on Upper Main Street a metal mailbox slams shut. She thinks she hears footsteps again, this time rushing away, but soon there is only the sound of raindrops tapping the fallen leaves, the parked cars, the gutters. She closes her eyes and listens. No one calls her name, there are no more footsteps behind her, but still she turns around before unlocking the door and stepping inside. She takes a long, late-day look at the town where she has lived her whole life, where there are no friends, no family, but where her feet are famous to the sidewalks.

My mom made Lolly Reid’s wedding cake. She got the recipe from a Brazilian restaurant in the city where she went one night after going in with her friends to see a show. It was a coconut cake made with fresh oranges. She prepared for days. It didn’t have any pillars or platforms or fancy decorations; just a big sheet cake with a scattering of those tiny, silver edible balls and a few purple orchids she had special-ordered from Edith Tobin’s shop. She was proud of that cake. She bakes and decorates cakes for all the birthdays in our family, and she made the wedding cake for my sister’s wedding, and mine; so when June Reid hired us to cater her daughter Lolly’s wedding, I thought, Why not?