Lucy by the Sea (Amgash, #4)(7)

* * *



—

In Connecticut, Chrissy and her husband, Michael, were also working from home. Michael’s parents had said they would stay in Florida so the two of them could have the house. There was a small guesthouse on the property. “I’m glad we’re not stuck together in that, at least we have this whole place,” Chrissy said.





ix


After the two weeks of quarantine, Bob Burgess came over to check on us. Apparently he had texted William that he would stop by, but William had gone out to get his first five thousand steps anyway, so I was alone when Bob drove up the driveway. I went out and met him; he was standing on the small lawn area by the cliff, and he asked, Did I want to come out and sit with him? He had brought a fold-up lawn chair, and there were fold-up lawn chairs on the porch of the house we were in. So I put on my spring coat with William’s big cardigan over it and went and got one of the lawn chairs to go out and sit with Bob. He was wearing a mask that looked homemade, cloth with flowers in it, and I said, “Hold on,” and I went back inside and got a mask from William’s room—I found them in the clear plastic bag—and then we sat far apart from each other on the lawn chairs, I mean farther than we would have if not for the pandemic.

“Weird time,” Bob said, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and I said, “Yes, it is so weird.”

And it was so cold up there on top of that cliff, the wind was whipping around, but Bob did not seem cold; I put William’s sweater partly over my head.

Bob leaned back and looked around, and I understood that he was shy—this came to me then—so I said, “Bob, I can’t believe how good you’ve been to us. God. Thank you. And thank you for the wine too.”

He looked at me then, he had pale blue eyes, and there was, I saw, a kind of sweet sadness to him. He was a big man, though not fat, and he had a gentleness in his face that made him look younger than he probably was, though with the mask it was hard to tell. “No problem. Glad to help you out. You know, William’s been a friend of Pam’s for years, so I was glad to be able to help you folks.” I felt a sense of almost guilt—this was the woman, Bob’s ex-wife, who had been sleeping with William way back, but Bob gave no indication that he knew of this or, if he did, that it was still a problem in any way. He said, “My wife, Margaret, would be here, but to be honest she has a little prejudice against New Yorkers.” He said this without guile, and I liked him for it. I said, “You mean, just because we’re from New York?” And he waved a hand and said, “Oh yeah, a lot of people up here feel that way, that New Yorkers think they’re better than others,” and I said, “I get it.” Because I did.

He hesitated and then said, “But, Lucy, I just wanted to tell you your memoir really knocked me out.”

“You read it?” I asked.

“Oh yeah.” He nodded. “Knocked my socks off. Margaret read it and she liked it too. She thought it was about mother-daughter stuff, but I thought it was about being poor. I came from—” Bob hesitated, then said, “lesser means myself. Margaret didn’t, by the way, and I think maybe if you didn’t come from—well, from poverty—your mind just goes over it, and you think it’s about mothers and daughters, which it is, but it’s really, or it was to me, about trying to cross class lines in this country and—”

I stopped him. “You are exactly right,” I said, leaning forward a little bit. “Thank you for getting what that book was really about.”



* * *



—

I couldn’t stop thinking about Bob Burgess. Oh, he had made me feel so much less lonely! He had been worried about Becka and the refrigerator trucks outside her apartment; he had once lived in Brooklyn for many years and he had been so concerned about her. He told me how he had never had kids; he didn’t have a high enough sperm count; he just told me that like he was talking about the color of the sky, but then he said it was the only thing in his life that made him sad, that he had never had kids, and I said I understood.

And then we had spoken of New York City. “God, I miss it,” Bob said with a real shake of his head, and I said, Oh, I do too! I told him how the flowering trees were out when we left, that the city had looked so beautiful in the sunshine. Bob looked around. “Awful up here in March,” he said. “And April,” he added. “Just awful.”

Bob had grown up in Maine, in the town of Shirley Falls, less than an hour away, and when he came back to Maine after spending all those years in New York with his first wife, Pam, where he had been a public defender, he had lived again in Shirley Falls with his current wife, Margaret. They had come to Crosby only a few years ago. Then Bob told me about the Winterbournes, the old couple whose house we were in. He said that Greg Winterbourne had taught at the college in Shirley Falls for years, that he was really an asshole, and that his wife was okay, a little crisp but better than Greg. I told him how I had been asked to give a reading at that very college years earlier and not one person showed up. I said that I’d realized the chairman had never advertised the event.

Bob could not get over that. He said he didn’t know who the chairman of the English Department had been, but he shook his head. “Man,” he said. I felt I could have talked to Bob for hours, and I thought he felt that way too. I wished I had told him to please come back. When he left he said, “Call if you need anything,” folding up his lawn chair and walking away with it. And I only thanked him. I did not say: Please come back—!