Always the Last to Know(65)

And then there was me. I’d run into a few old classmates since coming home, and they seemed confused to see me. Wasn’t I in New York? Art, right? Still painting? Anything good? Oh. Private collections? (It sounded better than couch paintings.) What was I doing back? Was I staying? No kids? Oh. Still not married? This last one was always said with a little meanness, as if getting married would have proven my worth in a way that the other parts of my life could not.

I was a stranger in my hometown, in some respects. I knew the names of the people I’d grown up with—Mrs. Churchill from the library and her four grown sons, or Caroline DeAngelo, who taught me to double Dutch in sixth grade. There were the kids I used to babysit, now grown, and their parents, who still recognized me. There were the middle-aged women who used to babysit me.

So I knew people, but I didn’t have any friends here. Jules let me come over and hang with the girls, and Oliver smiled and smiled. My New York pals felt far away, and the truth was, I didn’t have a lot to say to them on the phone. My dad is still recovering. I’m painting a little. I, uh . . . got a dog. No, I can’t have guests just yet, it’s kind of tiny here, and the roof leaks . . .

There were nights when I was alone in my little house, wishing someone would text me or drop by, feeling a little afraid to reach out in case I’d be rejected. (You’d think a woman in her thirties wouldn’t have those feelings. You’d be wrong.) I worked on the house every morning, learning what wood rot was, finding mouse droppings in my insulation, realizing that one outlet downstairs was probably not enough. In the evenings, I painted for my interior decorators—they’d send me a swatch of fabric or take pictures of a throw pillow and instruct me on what the homeowner wanted—those “little dot paintings” (Seurat, I assumed) or “swirly” (Van Gogh) or “messy” (Pollock) or “those weird stick figures where the person only has one eye” (Picasso). My favorite was “little bitty brushstrokes so up close you can’t tell what it is but from far away, you can, like those Magic Eye puzzles” (Monet. So sorry, Claude).

The only time I felt like my old self was when I was with my dad. He’d made some real progress from those terrifying first days in January. He wasn’t talking or otherwise communicating yet . . . I’d been trying some sign language with him, since I knew a little from St. Catherine’s, where it was taught one day a week. LeVon was trying that, too, but we’d yet to have an Anne Sullivan/Helen Keller breakthrough. Not yet. He was right on the cusp, it seemed. I could sense it.

He smelled different, my father. It was one of those things you didn’t know would affect you until you were crying in the bathroom.

Mom and Juliet were there, and I was sure they missed him, too, but they hid it well. I had the feeling Mom wished he had just died.

But he was getting better. “It’s tempting to read into every little thing,” LeVon had warned me. “If he’s having a breakthrough, we’ll know, but it’ll be harder if you attribute every reflex to meaningful interaction.” He put a big hand on my shoulder. “But I agree with you. He’s making progress.”

We all fricking loved LeVon.

Meanwhile, something was happening to me.

It was the view. My house might be a decrepit pile of mold and decaying wood, but damn, that view. Because my house was on a little hill, I could watch both the sunrise and the sunset. Every morning, I woke up to the sun streaming in my room at the literal crack of dawn. I’d take Pepper out and let her romp and chase the dead leaves, and we’d watch the sun come out from behind the clouds, beams of light stretching out their arms. I’d sit on the porch with my coffee, listening to the birds. Each week they got more vocal—the chickadees, red-winged blackbirds, blue jays, ducks and geese. A blue heron hung out at the bend of the river, just past the bridge.

At night, if I was home from my parents’ house in time, I’d watch the sun set over the water, and it was even more startling in its beauty than the sunrise. Sometimes, the sun would glitter over the ocean, not a cloud in the sky, and after it sank below the horizon, a band of yellow and gold would linger for an hour as the stars came out. Other times, the clouds would catch and throw the light in all the shades of color I knew and then some—dianthus pink, iridescent pale gold, French blue, Montserrat orange. This past week had been milder, and Pepper and I stayed out till the last bird sang, and the smell of earth was strong as the sky deepened bit by bit.

I’d sit there and watch and listen, and all the yoga classes in all the world didn’t make me feel this way. Still. Awed. I hadn’t come back to Stoningham for Noah—I couldn’t, not the way he’d demanded it of me, not under the weight of his expectations. But even though it was temporary, I was glad I was here now. The town was less insipid than I’d painted it as a teenager; the people were more layered than I’d imagined them to be. Maybe it had been a necessary exercise to prepare for the New York phase of my life. Maybe I’d had to minimize what home meant to me so I could leave it behind.

I loved my New York life. But I loved this, too. I was . . . happy.

Happy. Even though I was here for a terrible reason, the happiness, the peace, snuck in. Right now, there was nowhere else I should be, could be or wanted to be.



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The dinner party did not get off to a great start.