Lucy by the Sea (Amgash, #4)(18)

There were times, as William would sit at the small table in the corner of the living room and work on that puzzle of Van Gogh’s self-portrait, when I would suddenly sit across from him—as I said, I hate doing puzzles—but I might find a piece of Van Gogh’s cheekbone, let’s say, and I would snap it into place in the unfinished puzzle, and William would nod, “Good job, Lucy,” and I would think to myself: I am not unhappy.





v


One morning as I started out on my walk, Bob Burgess was just pulling into the driveway. He stuck his head out of his car window and said, “How’s my negative friend?” And I said, Bob, come for my walk with me! And so he parked the car and he and I walked, and he walked more slowly than I did. He was not, as I said, a small man, and he walked with his hands in the pockets of his jeans; they were baggy, sad-looking jeans. There was blue sky, but clouds kept blocking out the sun, and then the sun would shine again, a bright yellow.

“Boy, I’m missing New York,” Bob said to me that day, and I said, “Oh, me too!” He said this was the time of year he’d usually make his annual trip down to see his brother, Jim, who lived there, and he’d sometimes see Pam when he was there as well. He told me he had met Pam at the University of Maine in Orono; she’d come from a small town in Massachusetts. He turned his face toward me and said, with his eyes laughing, “It snowed on September twenty-ninth of our senior year, and I said, Pam, we’re out of here. And so we left for New York right after graduation. Ah, Lucy,” Bob said, shaking his head slowly, “we were just kids.”

“I get it,” I said. “I do.”

And then Bob told me again how he had grown up poor. “Not as poor as you were, though.” He told me that day about his father’s death. Bob had been four years old, and he and his twin sister, Susan, and his older brother, Jim, had been in the car at the top of the driveway, and their father—while the car was warming up—went down to check the mailbox at the bottom of the driveway. The car rolled down and drove over their father, killing him. Bob said, “All my life I thought I had done it. I thought I was the one who fiddled with the gearshift. My mother thought so too, and she was super nice to me, I think, as a result of that. She even sent me to a shrink, and believe me, nobody went to shrinks back then, but the guy couldn’t do anything for me, I wouldn’t talk.” And then Bob told me how it had only been fifteen years ago when his brother, Jim, said to him—Jim was older and said he remembered the accident more than Bob could—that he, Jim, had been the one playing with the gears, that Bob had actually been in the backseat with his twin sister, Susan, and all his life Jim had never confessed this. Bob shook his head. “It kind of fucked me up when he told me that.”

I said, “God, I should think so!”

Oh, we had a wonderful time on that walk. I told him about David, and how he had played the cello for the Philharmonic, and how he had been kicked out of the Hasidic Jewish community when he was only nineteen, I told him all sorts of things, and he kept turning his head to listen to me, his eyes kind above his mask. When I said that some days I felt like a fresh widow, he stopped walking and touched my shoulder briefly and said, “Of course you do, Lucy. You are a fresh widow, my God. Lucy.”

We began to walk again.

I said, “It makes it all the stranger somehow for me to be up here,” and he said, nodding, “Tell me how exactly.”

So I told him it was weird to be with William—except that it wasn’t always weird, I said, which made it extra weird—and to be out of New York, and to not know when anything was going to change, and Bob glanced at me as he walked his slow walk and he said, “I hear what you’re saying, Lucy.”

We sat on the bench that looked out over the sweet cove, even though we were not quite six feet apart, but he sat on one end and I sat on the other, and the sun shone down with that yellow glory, and Bob said, “Do you mind if I have a cigarette?” He took one out of its package and pulled his mask down below his mouth. “I hope you don’t mind.” He added, “Margaret thinks I gave up years ago when I married her, but this pandemic—I don’t know—I guess it’s made me anxious, every so often I really want a cigarette.”

I told him I didn’t mind at all, that I liked the smell of smoke, which is true, I always have. And Bob sucked down that cigarette so fast, my heart unfolded toward him even more. Two seagulls flew down to the dock and then back up far into the sky.

As we sat there I thought about Bob’s brother, Jim, and how famous he had become as a lawyer defending the soul singer Wally Packer, who had been accused of killing his girlfriend. It had been a huge national trial, and Jim had gotten Wally Packer acquitted. So I said, “Jim always knew that Wally Packer was innocent, right?”

And Bob looked at me then; without his mask I could see his full expression and there was a great tenderness to it. He raised his arm as though to touch my shoulder, but he did not touch it and he put his arm back down. Then he said, “Oh Lucy, sweet thing.” And I felt embarrassed. “So he was guilty?” I said. “Did Jim know that when he was defending him?”

Bob inhaled deeply, looking at me with his kind eyes, then exhaled the smoke from the corner of his mouth. “Lucy, I used to do defense work myself, and I suspect Jim did what all defense attorneys do. I suspect he never asked Wally if he was guilty or not.”