Everyone in town knew Betsy Ball had, long ago, married the heir to a liquor fortune who died young and left her everything. Tommy lived with his mother most of his life, sleeping in the same bedroom he slept in as a child, in the house he still lived in. Lydia wondered if he ever left that room, ever moved to another one in a different part of that big brick house on South Main Street after his mother died. Except for four years in Pennsylvania for college, and a few years after in the city, Tommy Ball never really left town. Never dated anyone that anyone can remember and never married. Betsy Ball saw Tommy every day and he hated her, Lydia thought. Her son hated her but she was not alone. Even when the town library, to which she eventually left a good deal of money, threw her a party for her one hundredth birthday, her son arrived and left with her. She was widowed and deaf, probably wearing diapers and not knowing her own name, but she did not go home alone that night.
Alone and home is where Lydia has been the most during the last six months since Luke died. She walks to the coffee shop after lunch most days to get a break from the television, which has become like a full-time job. If the morning talk shows start without her, she feels like she’s dropping the ball, as if she’s failed in the one measly duty she has each day. There aren’t as many of the old-time Phil Donahue — type shows anymore, the kind with regular people with extraordinary problems. Now the shows are more specific: medical, food-focused, or exclusively dedicated to celebrities, who at times feel like family — like cousins you hear about in Christmas letters doing this and that, who you catch glimpses of at graduation parties, christenings, or weddings. It comforts Lydia to see the same people pop up on the same couches and guest chairs through the years. They age, she ages, the talk-show hosts age. For a little while it seems like they are all in it together.
Now, did you know the caterer never got paid? At first, she thinks the loud one is still talking about her daughter’s wedding in Nantucket, but she’s moved on to the past tense, another subject, a different wedding. It is soon clear which one.
Lydia scans the place for the waitress, the pregnant blonde named Amy, who she’s pretty sure used to work at the grocery store. She sees her each day and keeps meaning to ask, but after she orders her coffee she can’t ever seem to find the words. Lately, Amy just brings the coffee, which excuses both of them from speaking.
The lunch crowd has mostly left. Lydia pivots back, slightly, careful not to turn all the way around and be seen by the loud one or any of the women with her. She still doesn’t know quite who they are, but given what they are now talking about, she doesn’t want to be recognized. She wants to leave as quickly and quietly as possible. She looks again toward the kitchen, hoping to see Amy and signal for the check, but there is no one. She’s stuck and there is nothing she can do to keep from hearing this woman, who seems to not take even the shortest breath between her words.
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.