Most of the people I grew up with have moved to Torrington or across the state line to Millerton or Amenia, and even those towns are getting expensive. But some manage to burrow into the corners of the town, tuck into its folds, and stay, as I have. Lydia Morey has, too, though it’s hard to imagine why. She’s the last of her family around here, and by family I don’t mean Morey. It’s amazing to me she kept that name. She’s a Hannafin and she knows it. Who can guess what that woman was ever thinking, so her choice to keep that name is no more of a surprise than her choosing to stick around after she gave birth to that black baby boy. When Luke was born, it was clear to everyone that Lydia’s husband, redheaded, freckle-faced Earl Morey, was not the father. He packed Lydia’s bags that very night and told her not to come back. She went straight from the maternity ward to her mother’s couch. Her mother was still around then, and she took them both in for a while, but she made no secret of her disgust. She worked as a teller at the bank in those days, and you could hear her carrying on at the drive-through to anyone who’d listen about her lunatic daughter, who she was certain had gotten caught up with cults and black men and God knows what. Everyone sided with Earl, who comes from a big family that’s been around here forever, and Lydia Morey was for a while as banished as one can be in a town of fifteen hundred people, half of whom barely live here.
Over time, people came around, for the most part. Luke was always liked, especially there for a bit in high school when he was breaking state records for swimming and even, I think, being whispered about for the Olympics; but Lydia remained a loner, save for a few poor choices in the man department. To be fair, the pickings are slim around here, and the poor woman, pretty as she is, did the best she could. With pickings this slim, someone like Luke Morey, once he finally cleaned up his act, became a prize goose at the fair to the women in town. His skin was definitely his father’s, whoever that was, but he had his mother’s wide-set, green eyes and high cheekbones. Add to that at least six feet and a somewhat successful landscaping business, and you’ve got enough to turn a few heads. He turned heads his whole life, but never so much as when he went to jail, just a few months after high school, and then, later, when he moved in with June Reid, who was over twenty years his senior and from the city. From the time that boy was born he was the talk of the town, and given what happened, how he went, and how many he took with him, he always will be.
When I drove over to June Reid’s that morning with the daisies and saw the nightmare surrounding her property — all that smoke, the old stone house destroyed by fire, the empty tent — I did not stop. I just kept driving. Without thinking, I drove straight to my sister’s place, where we sat and drank a pot of mint tea picked fresh from her garden. She’d already been called — by whom I don’t know — and she told me what happened. Killed, all of them — the young couple, June’s ex-husband, and that doomed Luke Morey. For a long time, we just sat and watched the steam rise from our mother’s old, pale green china teacups. Later, I walked out the back door and into the field behind her house. I was out there for hours, unsure what to do or where to go. I wandered through the high grass and all those horrible daisies, from the wood line to the road, back and forth, back and forth, running my old, wrinkled hands over all those bright and unlucky weeds. Eventually, I came in. I stayed the night. And the next night, too.
The daisies did not go to waste. Every single one was put to use. They never did see the inside of any jelly jars, but they found their way into a hundred or more funeral arrangements. Even when no one asked for them — and let’s face it, most did not — I still found a way to make them work. No one ever accused me of being a soft touch, but when something like what happened at June Reid’s that morning happens, you feel right away like the smallest, weakest person in the world. That nothing you do could possibly matter. That nothing matters. Which is why, when you stumble upon something you can do, you do it. So that’s what I did.
Lydia
They arrive before she knows they are there. She has no idea when exactly they settled in at the table by the window, two down from the one where she sits nursing her cold cup of coffee, but it’s long enough ago that they have ordered soups and salads and been served their cups of tea. They are behind her, she cannot see them, but by their polite laughter she knows it’s tea they are sipping, not coffee; soups and salads they have ordered, not hamburgers and fries, or the meat loaf. She doesn’t know these particular women, these mothers and daughters and wives, but she knows them. She has cleaned their houses, ferried their children to train stations and sleepovers, and yanked the weeds from their sidewalks for most of her life. She has heard them fret about global warming, mercury levels in tuna, and pesticides choking the life out of the lettuce they stab with their forks but barely eat. She has witnessed up close their girlish and convincing surprise at the arrival of each relentless windfall and victory. A husband’s unexpected bonus at the end of the year, the new station wagon in the driveway strung up with birthday or Christmas or Mother’s Day ribbons. What she finds the most difficult to bear is hearing them brag about their children — the early acceptances to impossible-to-get-into schools, the job offers from prestigious law firms, the promotions and awards, the engagements to attractive people from happy families; their weddings.
It is a wedding they are talking about now. The loud one, the one that begins every sentence with Now. Now, you’ll never believe. Now, Carol, listen to this. Now, I never. Now, can you imagine. NOW HEAR THIS, she seems to be commanding each time she speaks. As if her voice, two or three decibel levels above the clank and chatter of the restaurant, didn’t already demand your attention. She has a daughter getting married in Nantucket. From the shimmy in her voice Lydia can tell it is this woman’s favorite thing to talk about. Thank God for the wedding planner, bossy like you wouldn’t believe, but a genius with the details. She even helped organize the honeymoon, a gift from the groom’s parents. A month in Asia. To be honest, I think it’s too much — the whole thing waiting like a giant game-show prize on the other side of what we expect to be a perfectly nice but by no means over-the-top wedding. They’re from New Jersey, she explains. Big Italian family, she adds, and just in case anyone missed the point: They don’t know any better.
She keeps going. The trip is endless. Her voice is a furrowed brow, bragging. India, Vietnam, Thailand, each country’s name rolling off her tongue like the brand names of pricey clothing Lydia sees ads for in the thick beauty magazines these women drop on the bathroom floor like just-once-used towels.
As she continues on about the groom’s family — the limousine service they’ve owned since the 1950s, their accents, their Catholicism — Lydia looks out the window to the only motel in town, the Betsy. The sign is large and wooden and covered in white paint that has been cracked and peeling for as long as she’s lived here, which is always. The sign has a large pediment on top as if announcing a grand colonial inn and not the twenty-one-room, one-story, white-brick motel that sits out of sight, beyond the tree line, at the end of the drive. Nothing is grand about the Betsy except maybe the room numbers painted in robin’s-egg blue with gold borders on the small oval plaques hanging from each door. The owner’s mother fancied herself a folk artist, and they were a gift to her son Tommy when he opened the motel in the late sixties. He told Lydia the story one night at the Tap, a few years after he sold the place. Lydia had cleaned the rooms there for six or seven years before the new owners came in and hired Mexicans, who arrive on foot each morning from across the state line in Amenia or Millerton. She’d never said much to Tommy when she worked for him, nor he to her, but since time had passed and they were both bellied up to the same bar, he got chatty. I hated that color blue, he spat, many drinks in and looking like a sixty-five-year-old teenager — gray hair, liver spots, cracking voice, bright blue eyes, lost. Wearing the same white, button-down shirt and khaki pants she remembered him wearing in church when she was a kid. She covered everything in that blue and insisted I put her silly paintings in the rooms. She even painted flowers on some of the beds. I named the place after her thinking it would open her purse a bit more, but it didn’t. I was supposed to live off the earnings but there never were any. No one comes to Wells to stay in a motel.