Chapter Nineteen
“Let me know when you’re ready,” Becky called across the graves. “No rush.”
On her knees, she worked her way around the base of Mrs. Dodson’s headstone with a pair of hand gardening shears, cutting away weeks’ worth of grass.
The stone had been paid for by Mrs. Dodson’s brother, a banker who lived in Maine and didn’t get to Bonhomie very often—or ever—to tend to the grave.
Becky didn’t blame him; he had no other reason to make the trip.
She managed to get out once every couple of months to do the tending.
She never attempted to communicate with Mrs. Dodson or any other spirit while she was at the cemetery.
Mrs. Dodson, in a dream, had told her not to bother.
Spirits didn’t linger in graveyards, she’d said.
Why would they? There was nothing to do, nothing to observe.
And it was true: Becky never felt the presence of any spirits when she was here.
The place was like an abandoned motel. She understood why people talked to the graves of their loved ones, of course—it was the same reason they came to her parlor—but she lamented all those one-sided cemetery conversations.
Everett had decided to come with her and was down the row, near the vine-covered fence that ran along the cemetery’s north wall.
He sat on a bench across from the graves of his wife, daughter, and eldest son.
Head lowered, hat resting on his lap. Becky couldn’t tell if he’d heard her.
She couldn’t tell if he was speaking softly to the graves or just reposing.
Or napping. Then something shrieked in the sky and Everett tilted his head back and looked straight up, his beard sparkling in the pearly sun.
“Northern harrier,” he said, then resumed his slouch.
She gathered the cut grass in handfuls and tossed it aside.
She dropped the shears, picked up her whisk broom, and brushed the black train grit off the tops of the stones and out of the letters and numbers carved into their faces.
Family plots were practical, she supposed.
The ones she found unsettling were the double stones for spouses when one of them was still alive—the wife, usually, her birth date followed by a dash and then nothing, like an unfinished sentence.
The Wakefields had one of those, adjacent to the Dodsons; Mrs. Wakefield’s sentence was still a fragment.
What was it like to visit your husband’s grave and each time see your own waiting for you, and that unfinished sentence?
Would you feel like you were holding things up?
She wondered, too, how many of these married couples, all-in or half-dead, had been faithful, and how many of them had lovers buried nearby.
Some of the graves dated back to the previous century.
Had this one here slept with that one over there, while the spouse was clueless?
Were the duped spouses suddenly in the know once they got to the other side?
That might be preferable to finding out while you were still alive, she thought. It was October of 1955, one year and two months since she and Cal had separated.
She finished with the Dodsons, but Everett was still on his bench, so she moved with her shears and whisk broom over to the Picketts on the other side of the Amberlys.
There were no living Picketts left to tend to the graves; they were often shabby and in need of cleaning.
She entered their corral and got to work.
Activity had brought her back to herself.
For a while after Margaret Salt’s letter, everything became vaguely unfamiliar to Becky, slightly out of balance, in a way that made her wonder, at times, if she were sleepwalking.
Taft Street, where she’d lived for eleven years, and most every other street in Bonhomie, where she’d lived her entire life, felt unfamiliar.
The house felt unfamiliar. The creak of the stairs.
The feel of the bedroom carpet under her feet.
All of it rang a bell, but the bell was somewhere else.
As the months passed, her awareness righted itself, and the only thing unfamiliar to her was Cal.
She’d been over and over what had happened—so often, it had carved a groove in her brain.
She understood the what, but the why had never crystallized for her.
She and Cal hadn’t been an overtly romantic couple.
They hadn’t doted on each other, hadn’t given each other pet names or gone overboard on Valentine’s Day.
Maybe they should have, but she’d always assumed they were that way because it was how they wanted to be.
Their sex life had been staid, sure, but fine with her.
In fact, that would have been her temperature reading on their whole marriage: fine.
They’d been through some rough spots, had bitten some bullets (well, she’d bitten some bullets).
As half of a couple in their midthirties, she’d been content to think of them as being done weathering storms. But Cal, it turned out, had made a storm bigger than both of them. Cal had made his own weather system.
He’d broken down sobbing when she’d shown him Margaret’s letter.
He couldn’t explain himself, couldn’t defend himself.
He kept emphasizing that it had been nine years ago, as if each year that had passed since the affair warranted a dollop of forgiveness, when, in fact, all that time made everything worse.
The arguments, an awful string of them they managed to have with at least some walls between them and Skip and Everett, expanded in scope to be not just about what had happened, but about them.
Scrambling, he told her it wasn’t easy to live with “the angel of service,” making her think he’d been carrying that term around in his back pocket, at the ready.
She returned to the idea that he was insecure—to the point that it had ruined his judgment.
He was so bothered—to this day, she said—that he couldn’t go off to war and prove something, that he’d let it define who he was.
He wasn’t his leg! Did he know that he limped more when he pouted?
His insecurity and self-pity were holding him back.
From what? he’d asked, and she told him flat out: from being a better person.
—
The day after the letter had arrived, the day after that initial, awful conversation with Cal, she’d called Felix Salt to say they needed to talk.
He asked her over.
It was early evening. He’d changed out of his work clothes, was wearing a light-blue oxford shirt that looked carefully tucked into his khakis. The part in his hair was exact, but he needed a shave and looked tired. Tom was out, he said. They sat down in his living room.
When Becky asked how Tom was doing, Felix said as well as could be expected.
Hurt, confused, angry, and not very interested in being consoled—at least for the time being.
Felix acknowledged that he himself had been blindsided both by Margaret’s revelation and her departure, and suddenly they were tracing events backward, each wanting the other to know they’d been oblivious to what had gone on, back when they’d had their sessions together.
Each apologizing to the other for not knowing what had been hidden from them.
Margaret, Felix said, had probably gone to Columbus.
It’d been a week since she’d left, at that point, and he still hadn’t heard from her.
He didn’t know if she was coming home. Was he worried about her?
Becky asked, and he said, yes, of course, but also no; if there was one thing Margaret was good at, it was prioritizing herself.
He asked Becky how things were between her and Cal, and she shook her head: not good.
But this concern for the adults was nothing more than moving furniture around to keep making space for the little elephant in the room.
What were they going to do about Tom? She asked this outright, trying to read his face, his movements; she was in the wingback, he was across from her on the sofa, hunched forward, elbows resting on his knees and his hands dangling.
The letter, Becky said, had been short and to the point and didn’t seem to leave room for doubt.
She had it with her—sticking out of her purse—but Felix didn’t want to see it.
Time might make things more…apparent, she said, but for now, how did he wish to—
“I thought I saw myself in him,” he said, cutting her off. “Two weeks ago, I would have sworn to it. Now, I don’t know. It’s like I can’t trust my eyes, they see what they want to see. What about you—do you have any doubts?”
As much as anything, this question saddened her—for either he was in denial, or he didn’t know.
She hadn’t been around Tom since the letter arrived, and yet, ever since, the boy’s face had been superimposed over Cal’s in her mind.
Like Felix, she saw similarities one minute, none the next.
But it didn’t matter. She knew as a mother that Margaret knew: as a mother.
She didn’t want to say that to Felix, though, and could tell from his expression that she didn’t have to.
By not answering his question, she’d answered it.
“Christ,” he said.
No matter how long it took to sink in, there was still a decision to be made on how to proceed. “I think it’s up to you,” she said, “what happens next.”
Felix closed his hands over his face for a moment.
“Tom is eight years old. His mother just walked out on him. I want to table this whole thing until he’s older, that’s what I want.
Enough major upset for a while, you know?
I’ll tell him when he’s thirty. Or sixty.
Just kidding—thirty. If he wakes up one day looking like your husband in the meantime, we’ll have to talk. ”
“So, don’t tell them?”
“Them?”
“The boys. That they’re half brothers.”