I only glimpsed this and was further maddened by it and turned my back to them so I couldn’t see their fear and disapproval, and I slammed the steel against the ground with increasing force, again and again, until finally I was out of breath and the nerves of my hands were vibrating painfully from the blows. I stopped attacking the ground at last, and as my head cleared, I remembered the girls, and I slowly turned to say something to them, something that would somehow gather them in and dilute their grief-stricken fears. I didn’t know what to say, but something would come to me; it always did.
But the girls were gone. I looked across the yard, past the rusting swing set toward the house, and saw the four of them disappear one by one between the house and the garage, Vickie in the lead, then Sasha holding Andrea’s hand, and Caitlin. A few seconds later, they reappeared on the far side of the house, walking up the lane toward the home of my ex-wife. Now Vickie was holding Andrea’s hand in one of hers and Caitlin’s in the other, and Sasha, the eldest of my ex-wife’s three daughters, was in the lead.
That’s more or less the whole story, except to mention that when the girls were finally out of sight, Scooter, my black cat, strolled from the bushes alongside the brook that marked the edge of the yard, where he had probably been hunting voles and ground-feeding chickadees. He made his way across the yard to where I stood, passed by me and sat next to Sarge’s stiffening body. The blanket around her body had been blown back by the breeze. The cold wind riffled her dense white fur. Her sightless eyes were dry and opaque, and her gray tongue lolled from her open mouth as if stopped in the middle of a yawn. She looked like game, a wild animal killed for her coat or her flesh, and not a permanent member of the family.
I drove the body of the dog to the veterinarian’s, where she was cremated, and carried the ashes in a ceramic jar back to my house and placed the jar on the fireplace mantle, thinking that in the spring, when the ground thawed, the girls and I would bury the ashes down by the maple tree by the brook. But that never happened. The girls did not want to talk about Sarge. They did not spend as much time at my house anymore as they had before Sarge died. Vickie moved in with her boyfriend in town. By spring the other girls stayed overnight at my house every other weekend only, and by summer, when they went off to camp in the White Mountains, not at all, and I saw them that summer only once, when I drove up to Camp Abenaki on Parents’ Weekend. I emptied the jar with Sarge’s ashes into the brook alone one afternoon in May. The following year I was offered a tenure-track position at a major university in New Jersey, and given my age and stage of career, I felt obliged to accept it. I sold my little house down the lane from my ex-wife’s home. From then on the girls visited me and their old cat, Scooter, when they could, which was once a month for a weekend during the school year and for the week before summer camp began.
CHRISTMAS PARTY
Harold Bilodeau’s ex-wife, Sheila, remarried, but Harold did not, and though he told people there was a woman down in Saratoga Springs he was seeing on the occasional weekend, he was not. Their divorce had been, as they say, amicable. She’d had an affair and fallen in love with Bud Lincoln, one of Harold’s friends and their Hurricane Road neighbor, and Harold had soon realized there was no way he could prevail against it.
“I guess love happens,” Harold told folks, and shrugged. “Can’t fight it.”
“We married too young, Harold and me. Right out of high school, practically, for God’s sake,” Sheila explained.
People in Keene understood romance and forgave Sheila, and they respected Harold for his quiet acceptance of his wife’s love for another man. Keene is a village in the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York with barely a thousand year-round residents, most of whom keep careful track of the births, deaths, marriages and divorces that occur among them. They monitor remarriage, too, especially when both parties are longtime residents of the town and continue after the dissolution of their previous marriages to live there, as both Harold and Sheila Bilodeau had done. Bud Lincoln had not been previously married and lived in his parents’ house, but until he took up with Harold’s wife he had been regarded in town as a “good catch,” so people watched him anyway.
After the divorce, Harold got a bank loan and bought out Sheila’s interest in their double-wide and lived in it alone with their three dogs and two cats, all mixed-breed rescues from the North Country Animal Shelter, the half-dozen chickens, and the Angora goat.
That was three years ago, and Sheila and Bud had been married now for two of those years. While the two men were no longer close friends, they frequently ran into each other at the post office or gassing their trucks at Stewart’s or grabbing coffee to go at the Noon Mark Diner, and there appeared to be no lingering hard feelings on Harold’s part. Harold seldom saw Sheila in town, but when he did she was friendly and full of chat, and he, in his taciturn way, reciprocated.
Bud Lincoln was a building contractor, and he had built for Sheila a splendid three-bedroom, solar-heated house with mountain views up on Irish Hill. In spite of how friendly everyone was since the divorce, Harold was not surprised when back in October he wasn’t invited to Sheila and Bud’s housewarming party. In fact he was almost grateful not to be invited. It meant he didn’t have to decide whether to attend or stay home.
But when in mid-December he opened a printed invitation to Sheila and Bud’s Christmas party, he was surprised and almost displeased. It meant he’d have to admit to himself that the divorce and Sheila’s remarriage still stung his heart, and he’d have to invent an excuse for declining the invitation, or else he’d have to test his ongoing pain against the new reality and attend the party. He’d have to act like an old family friend or a distant cousin, someone more than merely a neighbor and less than a cuckolded, abandoned ex-husband.
“Help us decorate our tree!” the invitation said. “Bring a decoration!” The return address listed them as Sheila & Bud Lincoln. So she had taken Bud’s last name, just as she had once taken Harold’s.
Sheila and Bud Lincoln had built their new high-tech log house expressly to establish and celebrate their marriage. It was more than a fresh start; it was a repudiation of the past. Her past, especially. The new house turned a simple case of adultery and divorce into a story about finding true love. Sheila’s decade-long, childless life with Harold was now a closed book.
Nor was the divorce itself a part of Sheila and Bud’s story either. Otherwise they wouldn’t have stayed in Keene and built their fancy new house on Irish Hill, barely three miles from Harold’s place. They wouldn’t have adopted a baby from Ethiopia, big news in an otherwise all-white, all-American small town. And they wouldn’t have invited Harold to their Christmas party, which they hoped to make an annual event. That was her story. And Bud’s.
To Harold, however, Sheila was the past that wouldn’t stop bleeding into his present and, as far as he could see, his future too. Nearly every night, alone in the queen-sized waterbed they’d once shared, she appeared in his dreams, looking the same as when they went to Montreal on their honeymoon, a smiling blond swirl of a girl who adored him for his quiet, stoical ways. Now every morning, before heading to the garage for his truck, when he fed the dogs and cats, the chickens and the goat — creatures they’d acquired at her urging, not his, and which she, not he, had fed and cared for — he had visions of Sheila setting out the pans, casting the corn, filling the bins, gathering eggs in the morning sun with her long, tanned hands, and he ached all over again with the pain of knowing that she’d wanted the animals because she couldn’t get pregnant.