She laughed with Earl for a while before they got married and not much after. After high school Earl went to work with his brothers on the maintenance crew at Harkness and joined the volunteer fire department. Within a few months, he stopped coming home for dinner. He’d go straight from work to the firehouse or to the Tap, where he’d eat beef jerky and potato chips. He’d come in after ten, drunk and cranky about something or someone. He’d pinch Lydia’s ass and tell her to lay off the snacks. And soon he just called her Snacks. First at home and then in front of his family. His father thought it was funny. Toughen up, girl, he said to her at Christmas dinner that first year, you know how he is. And then there were the nights, in the beginning once every six weeks or two months, and then later every weekend, when he’d come home smashed and wake her up, speaking gibberish. Whether she responded or not, sat up in bed or curled into her pillow pretending to sleep, the result was the same. A hard blow either to the side of her head or her body. Usually, it was just one. Two at the most. And sometimes afterward he would grab her by the shoulders and shake her violently. Mostly it would be dark, so she wouldn’t see him, but the few times he turned on a light or the moon outside would brighten the room enough, she would see a face so tortured and far away it was as if he were possessed, like some kind of zombie demon. She knew by then that the only thing capable of driving a demon away was another one; so when she recognized something that could drive Earl and most likely the rest of the town away, she didn’t hesitate. That their demon would be her son was the awful consequence, but she didn’t think she had a choice. Which was not how other people saw it, certainly not her mother or Connie Morey, who is long dead and whose number is still, like some threat from the underworld, carved into the wood next to Lydia’s phone.
She’s turned the ringer down as low as it goes, but she still jumps every time it rings. Ever since the morning when she got the phone call from Betty Chandler. He’s done it now, Lydia, is what she said, clipped and cold and distant as if she were reporting that the high school football team was on a losing streak. You need to get over to June Reid’s house right away, she added before hanging up. Betty Chandler and Lydia grew up together, went to the same kindergarten, elementary, and high school. They were even best friends one summer and fall when they were twelve — making barrettes with pink and blue ribbons and selling them for a dollar each — but when Betty’s chubby older brother, Chip, tried to kiss Lydia, unsuccessfully, after the eighth-grade dance and then told people she let him go to third base, Betty turned on her and spread rumors that she was loose. Just like that, based on so very little, she became her enemy and managed to stay so for more than thirty years. Later, when Luke was born and Earl had thrown Lydia out, her mother said she’d heard Betty telling people she’d been accepting money to have sex with the migrant workers at Morgan Farm across the state line in Amenia, the ones who came from Mexico or the Caribbean every season to pick apples, and that’s how she’d gotten pregnant. Her mother asked her if it was true. As painful as that was, Lydia never blamed her mother or any of them. She knew when she realized she was pregnant that if her baby’s skin was even half as dark as its father’s, she would be cast as the hussy. She never refuted any of the stories, never told anyone the truth, not even Luke, and when he was old enough he didn’t want anything to do with her, let alone a father who had been kept a secret all his life. There were good reasons for keeping his father a secret. And if they weren’t good, they were, she believed for a long time, necessary. Only one marriage would be upended by this baby and it would be hers.
Many times she came close to leaving, throwing Luke in her car and driving away. But somehow she got used to the snickering whispers in the grocery store, the nasty gazes from the women, and the lewd once-overs from the men. One year became two, became five, became so many she couldn’t count them. After Earl there were other men, but most didn’t amount to much more than a few boozy sleepovers. Only Rex, who turned up many years later, stuck around long enough to look like a future, but the wreckage he left in his wake cured Lydia of ever again expecting one. After Rex, there was no more going to places like the Tap on weekends, no more men, and no more hope left that her life would ever happen any differently than it had.
Beyond visiting Luke in prison in the Adirondacks the one time and going to Atlantic City for her honeymoon with Earl, she’d never left Wells. Some trees love an ax, a drunk old-timer mumbled one night at the Tap, back when she still went there, and something in what he said rang true, but when she later remembered what he’d said, she disagreed and thought instead that the tree gets used to the ax, which has nothing to do with love. It settles into being chipped away at, bit by bit, blade by blade, until it doesn’t feel anything anymore, and then, because nothing else can happen, what’s left crumbles to dust.
After Luke died, the phone rang a lot. The funeral home, the insurance company, the bank, the police. There were consoling calls, too, but mostly from people in Luke’s life, not hers; people who adored him and worked with him, some who were in jail with him, a few old girlfriends, ones she’d never met, and a few guys who used to swim with him in high school, his old coaches. She heard their voices as if they came from the end of a long tunnel. Their words were like echoes, and often she would hold the phone away until she sensed the talking about to come to an end. She did her best to be polite, but it was hard to hear from strangers about her son’s life, which she barely knew and had only just begun to be included in again.
Everyone she worked for called. The Moodys, the Hammonds, Peggy Riley, the Tucks, the Hills, and the Masseys, who owned the bed-and-breakfast in Salisbury where she used to drive each day to change beds, clean linens, and scrub the toilets and tubs. Even Tommy Ball called, though she hadn’t seen him in years. All of them offered their condolences and told her to take her time and to please just let them know when she was ready to come back. She never called any of them. But she did take her time, all of it, she mumbled to herself more than a few times. From the age of thirteen until the morning Betty Chandler called her, Lydia had worked nearly every day of her life. From that moment forward, she was done. She figured that with the little money she had saved, there was enough to pay her living expenses for a year or so, and carry the minimum payments on her two credit cards if she had to use them to pay for food. Without having to go to work, she barely ever drove, so she didn’t have to pay for gas. Propane and electric were included in her rent, which was only four hundred dollars a month, and the phone and cable bills were the cheapest possible.
It turned out later that Luke had a life insurance policy and Lydia was, inexplicably, the beneficiary. He also had a will, the kind you download from the Internet and get notarized, which he did. He left Lydia what he had — his savings, his landscaping company, and his belongings, which, because he’d been living at June’s, were destroyed. Between the insurance and the savings and the twenty thousand the Waller brothers paid her for the landscaping business — two trucks, a few wheelbarrows, a backhoe, and a pile of tools — she could exist as she lived now for a long time without working. For most of her life she had dreamed of the day she wouldn’t have to stoop and scrub and haul and shine for other people. And so it came. One more demon replacing another.