Lucy by the Sea (25)

And I understood.





Two

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Here is one story about people we met through Margaret and Bob:



—

It was not quite the middle of June and the weather was really lovely, and Bob and Margaret invited us with another couple and we sat down at the marina—we took up two picnic tables a few feet away from each other, it was a beautiful evening, hardly a breeze even by the water, and the man of the other couple had just retired from working for the state in the Department of Health and Human Services, and his wife was a social worker at the hospital in town.

The wife’s name was Katherine Caskey, and she sat at the far end of the table across from me, and Bob sat across from me at the other far end of the table. I really liked her. Katherine was about my age, but she had a youthfulness to her, and she had reddish-brown hair that was clearly touched up, I mean there was no gray in it, and I wondered how she had kept it so nice during the pandemic. She was not a big person, and there was a litheness to her as she got up to throw away something in the trash can nearby, and then she came back and sat down again.

As we talked, Katherine Caskey spoke of her childhood. She had spent the first six years of her life in West Annett, she said, a town about an hour away, a small town; her father had been the minister there, and her mother had died when Katherine was just five. She spoke of her mother at length that evening, and I understood: This was Katherine’s wound. She had loved her mother dearly, and her mother had adored her. And then her mother died. Her father tried to hold things together; Katherine’s baby sister, Jeannie, had been sent to live with their father’s mother in Shirley Falls, and Katherine and her father struggled along with a housekeeper named Connie Hatch. “Oh, I hated her,” Katherine said, shaking her head. “That poor woman. I just hated her because she had a big birthmark on her nose, and she frightened me.”

Katherine went on to say that the church congregants had started vicious rumors about her father and Connie—which had been ludicrous, of course—and that her father had broken down in front of the congregation one day—Katherine was in Sunday school and didn’t see this, but all the kids talked of it for days to come: her father weeping in front of his congregation. And then the congregation realized they had gone too far, and—according to Katherine—they apologized to her father, though he still left the place six months later.

“But here’s what happened to poor Connie,” Katherine said, and her eyes widened, they were green eyes, and she said, shaking her head so slowly, “Lucy, she murdered people at the county farm.”

“She did?” I was about to take a sip from my plastic cup of wine, but I put it back down.

“Yup. A few old people who were paralyzed. She suffocated them. To relieve their suffering, she said. And then she went to prison, and my father would go visit her there.” Katherine gazed at me as she said this.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“She died there.”

“Oh my God!” I said. And Katherine agreed that it was a terrible story.



—

Bob, I had noticed this, had stopped eating as Katherine was talking. Half a lobster roll sat in front of him on the waxy paper it had come in. When Katherine finally stopped talking he said to her, “Your father was the minister? In West Annett?”

And Katherine said, “Uh-huh.”

“Did you live in a farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere?” Bob asked. His mask was off, because he had been eating, and his face had taken on a strange look of almost wonder.

“We did!” Katherine said, turning toward him. “It was an awful old farmhouse that had been left to the church, and they made it the rectory.”

“Hold on,” Bob said. He reached into his pocket for his cellphone and poked a number, then, putting the phone to his ear, he said to Katherine, “What was your father’s name?”

“Tyler. Tyler Caskey,” said Katherine. I thought she seemed pleased that Bob had asked about her father.

Bob stood up and said into his phone, “Susie, it’s me. Listen—” And he walked away from the table. Katherine looked at me with raised eyebrows. After a minute Bob was pushing another number and I heard him say, “Jimmy?” And then he walked farther away. But very shortly he returned to the table and he sat down, and he seemed almost breathless, and he said, “Katherine Caskey, I know who you are. Your father did my father’s funeral, my father died when I was four, and the minister in Shirley Falls was on the outs with my mother, no idea why, and she drove to West Annett to find your father and he did the funeral. But, Katherine, that was you on the porch! You were standing there next to your father the entire time, and I never forgot you. Katherine, that was you?”

And here was something funny. She kept looking at him and looking at him. She had a strange look on her face, and then she said, “You were in the backseat next to a little girl.”

“Yes!” Bob said. “My sister, Susan. And my brother was sitting in the front seat and my mother was rude to your father, I mean she was agitated because her husband had just died—”

“It’s you—” Katherine said this quietly. “Oh my God, that was you.”

“You remember? Seriously?”

“Oh my God, I do. I never, ever forgot that little boy in my entire life. You looked so sad, and we kept staring at each other.”