Did You Ever Have A Family (6 page)

I didn’t know much about June Reid before she starting seeing Luke. I knew the house—it was one of the oldest in Wells, and I remember going there as a kid at Halloween for candy and being frightened because the place looked haunted. It’s funny to imagine that she would have been roughly my age now when I came knocking at her door in my He-Man costume. When I first heard about her with Luke, I thought it was a little weird, but when I saw them together, I was mostly glad to see Luke lighten up, begin to have fun again. He was a pretty depressed guy when he came out of prison. And he didn’t hang out much. He crashed in a room above Mr. Delinsky’s garage for those first few months and then got an apartment near the hospital. I’d see him at the lake and then at Harkness, but besides that he kept to himself, went to the gym at the high school and still swam laps in the pool. I saw him there with June a few times, working
out. I think it was the first time I heard him laughing or saw him smiling since high school. I remember one time watching him attempt to teach her a complicated exercise with free weights and was surprised to see how quickly he got frustrated by how uncoordinated she was. She didn’t seem to mind and instead teased him by mimicking his serious face and exaggerating his careful movements. He was clearly annoyed but she was relentless and eventually he couldn’t help but smile. I don’t think most people would have expected June Reid to have a silly side, but she did, and I think it was just one of a number of things about her that brought Luke back to life.

When my mother found out what happened, she asked me to bring the cake down to the firehouse for the guys who’d been called out to June’s place that morning. Dirk Morey was there when I arrived and so was Earl, along with all the others. For once these guys had nothing to say. I brought the cake into the kitchen and told Dirk’s cousin Eddie that I’d come back next week for the tray. I got out of there as fast as I could. I didn’t want to hear any of the grisly details. I just wanted to get home to Sandy and Liam and lock the door. I started back to our place, but for the first time since my dad died when I was in eighth grade, I started to cry. Maybe it was because both were accidents—my dad’s car got hit head-on by a drunk driver on Route 22 after he picked up some part for Mom’s dishwasher. Or maybe it was because Luke had become a friend. We were always
friendly growing up, but he had his eyes elsewhere—girls, swimming, college—and for better or for worse we never were that tight. But after he got out of jail and was up and running with his landscaping business, we saw each other all the time. He’d swing by with the Waller boys for a cup of coffee and a pastry in the mornings while we were opening up. We never got too deep into anything, never talked about his arrest or his time in jail or the life he missed out on, but I knew he and his mom were patching things up after a lot of years of not speaking. He never said a word about it to me, but Sandy knew that June had brokered some kind of truce. When you see someone every day for a while, you settle into a rhythm and you come to count on them even if for nothing more than the fifteen minutes each morning they spend sitting at your counter, on one of your stools, talking about the weather and giving you a big smile and thumbs-up when they sink their teeth into a poppy-seed muffin. I never talked to Luke about my dad or Sandy or Liam, our money troubles, or my mother’s second breast-cancer scare last year. I don’t talk about that stuff with anyone but Sandy.

People say Luke was responsible for what happened. That June was dumping him and he wanted to get back at her or that he was high that night and accidently left the gas going. For a while a hateful rumor went around that one of the Moreys from the volunteer fire department found a crack pipe in the kitchen near Luke’s
body. Sure they did. But facts never got in anyone’s way when it came to Luke, so I guess it should be no surprise that the story of what happened that night would be no different. What might have cleared things up would have been a proper investigation, but for reasons that no one can explain, what was left of the house was bulldozed and destroyed before the state could examine the wreckage properly and locate the exact cause of the explosion. The county fire chief told me when I called to ask what the hell was going on that they
cleared the site
for safety reasons, to prevent accidents; but given that June Reid had no neighbors besides the Moonies and the Episcopal church down the road, my guess is that it was the town protecting itself from liability. Thoughtless fuckers. One more time the system failed Luke Morey and trampled the facts to serve itself. Funny how no one seemed to mind. June Reid vanished, Lydia Morey quit her housecleaning jobs and now keeps to herself, and the family of the guy who was going to marry Lolly left right after the funerals and went home to California or Washington State, somewhere on the West Coast. There was no one left to push for the truth, and everyone else didn’t care. What use was the truth when they had Luke, the ex-con, bastard black son of the town floozy who landed in a pot of honey with an older gal from the city.
It follows a logic,
one of my customers said at the time. He’s an old-timer who comes in every morning for a grilled cheese with egg and coffee and he’s not a bad
guy, just an old man who never left this town and never will. I let him finish his toast and sip his coffee and I didn’t say a word.

June Reid didn’t stick around long enough to clear up any of these stories. I used to get worked up about it and sometimes I guess I still can, but I’ve learned that people will believe what they believe no matter what you say or do. What I know about Luke is that he was a friend of mine. He was a good man who had come through some hard times who got to be happy for a little while. And now he’s gone.

I didn’t want Sandy and Liam to see me blubbering that day, so after I dropped the cake off at the firehouse, I drove to my mother’s place. She still lives in the same house I grew up in, the same place where Sandy and I lived when we were trying to get on our feet. Funny how in a small town like ours things play out, circle back, end up. Who would have thought that one day Earl Morey, with his son Dirk, and all their brothers and cousins, would be eating Brazilian wedding cake made by my mother and meant for the daughter of Luke Morey’s older, city-rich girlfriend? No one, that’s who. But the crazy, haphazard upside down of it all somehow made sense.

I sat in my childhood driveway and watched my mother turn on the porch light, something she always does before opening the front door, since I was a kid and even in broad daylight. I watched her shut the door
behind her and pull her thin housecoat tight around her bony shoulders and button the top two buttons. I thought of her squeezing all those damned oranges and cracking all those coconuts for the last two days, sprinkling the little silver balls that the Moreys were now crunching in their tobacco-stained teeth down at the firehouse. And then I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. Nothing was funny, not one thing, but it was all so absurd and fucked-up. Tears and snot were everywhere, and here was my mother, making her way from the stoop to the driveway, shuffling in her slippers, old. She’d left her glasses in the house and I could see her squinting to see me more clearly.
Rick? You okay?
she asked as she stepped to my side of the car and tapped the window. This was my mother: both hands on the roof of the car, leaning into the window, half-blind, worried. Funny how disasters can make you see what you could lose. I don’t think I’d ever seen my mother as clearly as I did that day: sixty-six, widowed at fifty, a secretary at the elementary school for over thirty-five years; a single mom who raised two kids, who took care of her granddaughter while my divorced sister went to nursing school in Hartford; a breast-cancer survivor who let her grown son move back in with his nineteen-year-old wife and one-year-old boy.

You okay in there?
she asked, tapping the window again.
Rick?
I unlocked the door and got out of the car.
It was now evening.
Tell me,
she said, her hands on my shoulders, her feet balancing on tippy-toes. I leaned in and put my arms around her little body.
It was a good cake, Mom
was all I could think to say.
They would have loved it.

Some days she doesn’t come out. Some days you never see so much as a flicker of light behind the curtains. We’ve gotten used to her and it’s convenient that she pays cash for the room. She leaves a forty-dollar tip each week for Cissy, too, which has to be a record here at the Moonstone. Cissy, like us, is in her early fifties, maybe a bit older. She walks to work from her house down the road, brings our mystery guest a thermos most days and occasionally cookies, and spends nearly an hour cleaning her room when she barely spends twenty minutes in the others. She also, I have seen recently, takes away a small bag of laundry each week from Room 6 and returns it the next day, presumably washed and folded.

Why this woman would want to stay here as long as she has is not our business, but of course I wonder. When she checked in, she had no ID. She’d lost her driver’s license, she explained, and then asked if she could pay cash, a month in advance. I called Kelly, who is a better judge of character than I am, to come over from the house before agreeing. She asked the woman how long she planned to stay, and she answered that she didn’t
know but she would pay each month up front in cash and wouldn’t expect a refund if she left early. Kelly asked her where she was from, and even though she answered vaguely,
Back East,
Kelly still turned to me, gave me a wink and a squeeze on my arm, and said to the woman,
Stay here as long as you like
. If she were some rough type or strung-out junkie, there’s no way we’d go along with it, but this woman could be anyone’s mom or wife and seemed, and still seems, only sad, not dangerous. The night she checked in, I asked her what we should call her, and she said Jane, which of course can’t be her real name. But even saying that one word, that fake name, seemed like an effort, and I immediately regretted asking. I walked her out to Room 6—the one closest to and facing the ocean—because she’d asked for it specifically. She must have known someone who’d stayed at the Moonstone once or been here before we owned it. Room 6 also has the best mattress, which we had to buy last year after an older man who’d come down from Seattle for the weekend fell asleep with a lit cigarette in his hand and caught the bed on fire. Burned a hole right through to the other side in the short time it took for him to wake up from the smoke, thank God, and come running to our door in his bare feet and boxer shorts. Which is all to say, since she’s staying for as long as she is, I’m glad she’s at least sleeping on a decent mattress.

When I showed her to the room, I offered to give her a little tour, but she politely declined. She simply unlocked
the door with the key, went in without another word, and stayed inside for nearly a week. It was Cissy who got her out of there the first time.
Ma’am, MA’AM!
she yelled as she knocked.
Out you go, ma’am. Out. I only need a few minutes but you gotta get out.
Kelly and I stood a few doors down to see what would happen. Few people stand up to Cissy. She is tall and thin and strong with one long braid, once black and now silver, thick as rope, down her back. Her hands are bigger than most men’s and her chest is as flat as a board. She looks like a Native American, but when I asked her once, she didn’t answer. Her husband was from a long line of fishermen in Aberdeen, just down at the mouth of Grays Harbor, but he died of lung cancer fifteen years ago and since then she’s been living with her sisters, who I think mostly all lost their husbands one way or another and ended up back in the house they grew up in. Cissy has lived here in Moclips all her life and has worked at the Moonstone since her husband died. According to her sister Pam, Cissy’s husband left her the house they’d lived in together, which she sold, so I don’t think it’s the money Cissy is after so much as something to do and somewhere to go each day. Pam is the only real estate agent in Moclips and the one who sold us the Moonstone from an old couple who’d had it since the sixties. That was four years ago. The first morning in our little house next to the Moonstone, Cissy showed up with a blue tin of orange drop cookies and told us what she charged, what time
of the day she worked, and the week in July she took off every year. I don’t remember us offering her the job so much as agreeing to her terms. We didn’t find out she was Pam’s sister for months.

Cissy isn’t much for hanging around and gabbing. At first we thought it was because she felt uncomfortable with us because of the gay thing, but when gay marriage was legalized in Washington State this year, she came into the office the morning after the election and said,
It’s none of my business, but if you two decide to get legal, I happen to be an ordained minister thanks to the good old Internet and I’d be happy to do the honors
. Kelly is hardly ever at a loss for words, but it did take her a few beats to say thank you and let her know we weren’t sure whether we would or wouldn’t, and if we did, we’d likely call on her services. Funny how you think people are one way or the other and most of the time you end up completely wrong. We’re still not sure about getting married. We’ve talked about it, of course, and we cheered the night of the election when we saw on television that voters passed the referendum. But beyond Kelly’s brothers and nephews, who we see once or twice a year, neither of us have much by way of family anymore. And we’ve been together for so long now—twenty years, twenty-one, it’s hard to remember—it seems like something to let the young ones get excited about. But you never know.

Cissy has never once mentioned her husband, whose name we know was Ben only because Pam told us one
night when we cooked her supper. She’d had a few glasses of wine and had been loud and laughing until the subject turned to Cissy, when she quieted to a whisper as if Cissy could hear from their house down the road.
They met at a bar in Aberdeen one night when they were both teenagers. Ben was the only man tall enough for Cissy is what most people thought at the time—and even though you’d never hear them say much to each other, there was a spark between them, always, a kind of animal energy. Cissy used to say I have my sisters for talking and Ben for everything else. They never had kids. Neither of them ever went to a doctor to find out why. They just accepted it and went about their lives. They lived in the house three doors down from ours for almost twenty years, and Cissy asked me to find a buyer the day Ben died, which was also the day she moved back in with us. I found a buyer a little while later, a couple from Portland who came with their kids to teach at the elementary school. They moved away after the last one went off to college
. I think Pam regretted spilling so many beans about Cissy that night because she’s turned down the few invitations we’ve made since. She’s perfectly friendly when we run into her at the grocery store or gas station in Aberdeen, but she keeps her distance.