Billy listened. He already knew the answer. He ended up turning down the coach who promised him he would be a starter. He turned down Yale University, too—he didn’t want to go to college in a city. Instead he chose Dartmouth College, the Ivy League school in the woods of Hanover, New Hampshire, a dot on a straight stretch of the Connecticut River.
The basketball court was still a place where Billy felt he belonged, and he made the varsity team his freshman year at Dartmouth. But right away, it felt different from Plainville High. Even at a small liberal-arts school like Dartmouth, everybody had been the captain of his high-school team. Bill could have hung in, but he didn’t want to give it less than his best, and between his schoolwork and the jobs he took to help pay his tuition, the commitment to basketball proved too much. He had also been granted a partial track scholarship, and the money helped. Bill Sr. did well for himself running his small businesses back in Plainville, but he hadn’t yet bought the big house on the hill, and for now the Petits were still like most families in the town: They had what they needed but not much more. To supplement the track scholarship, Billy landed a work-study job in the Dartmouth cafeteria. And every week he would stop into McNutt Hall, a three-story building of brick and New England granite on the edge of the college green that housed administrative offices, including student financial services. He’d ask the administrators whether they knew of any other scholarships or grants he had overlooked, or that no one had claimed. Any other jobs? Any more dollars? Bill popped in so frequently that the administrators who sat behind their desks in McNutt, away from the classrooms and the dorms, knew him by name. Once, his father recalls, Billy did unearth a scholarship no one knew much about, given by a graduate down in Texas or someplace. All Bill Sr. could do was shake his head and admire the way this kid figured out how to better himself. How to make it work.
“Some of us back then were accused of acting thirty when we were seventeen or eighteen,” Ron Bucchi says. “That’s kinda the way Billy was. Most of us were first-generation college boys. Big Pops [Bill Sr.] joined the Marines at seventeen or eighteen and came back and started working in the family business. They grew up on hard work. So for us I think there was a sense of maturity by senior year of high school.”
At Plainville High, each graduating senior wrote a quotation under his or her photo in the yearbook, The Beacon. Under his picture, Billy wrote this: “I never quit and I never lose and when the going gets tough I get going.”
Billy thought he wanted to be a teacher, and maybe a coach, too. He loved sports, and he had inherited from his parents an inclination to help people. Teachers helped a lot of people, he figured.
The courses offered by the undergraduate department of education at Dartmouth College in the 1974–75 academic year included freshman seminars, supervised field work in schools, and a class called Principles of Teaching that consisted of “a consideration of the several theories regarding the functions of the teacher and the art of teaching.” Students majoring in education would focus their studies not only on education itself but on attaining a “broad liberal arts background,” and were required to take several classes in other disciplines, like philosophy (Philosophy of Education), sociology (Sociology of Education), and psychology (a class simply called Learning). When you got to be an upperclassman, there was copious “independent study.”
To Bill, the course of study he would apparently have to follow to become a teacher seemed a little…soft. He revered teachers, but maybe his brain didn’t work that way after all. He had a computational mind, a tendency to tally and multiply and add and subtract and to note the exact date and time of things, almost by reflex. Since they were kids, Ron has suspected that Bill possesses a photographic memory, or something like it. You want to know what Bob McAdoo’s best season was during the three years he played for the Knicks in the mid-’70s? The final records of the University of Connecticut women’s basketball teams of the last ten years? Jim Rice’s batting average the year he took over for Yaz in left field for the Red Sox? Bill could tell you. Harmon Killebrew stats. The starting lineups for the Minnesota Twins, a team for some reason he once loved, from any era. All those courses about the art and theory of teaching didn’t match up with the empiricism his brain craved. Numbers were important. Statistics showed which team had hustled the most. Grades showed which students had studied hardest.
Numbers could prove things.
He fell easily into the sciences. Dartmouth didn’t have a premed program, so Bill joined the Nathan Smith Society, a group for students interested in medicine and health. After graduation he left New Hampshire for the medical school at the University of Pittsburgh, one of the most competitive in the country. He had chosen to be a doctor. And just as the ladies in McNutt Hall knew Billy by his first name because he used to drop by so often, in 1979 the ladies in the financial-aid office at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine came to know him, too, for the same reason. Once, during his first year there, Barbara was trying to reach her son on the phone. She eventually called the main office and said, “You probably don’t know my son, but I need to get a message to him: William Petit.” And the woman on the phone said, “Oh, Bill! We know Bill.”
JENNIFER
1981
ONE DAY in 1981, Bill met his wife.
He was a third-year medical student making his rounds at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, walking the halls with the same half-serious swagger he showed growing up as the leader of street games with the neighborhood kids. He zipped past the nurses’ station and into a corner room to check on a young girl named Becky. She had post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis, a rare, painful kidney disorder that can last for months. There, standing by Becky’s bed, was a pretty blond nurse.
Bill could feel his heart beat, and his head felt light.
Acting cool as could be, he walked up next to the nurse and saw that she was about to check Becky’s blood pressure. His nerves sent him into know-it-all med-student mode, and he proceeded to try to show the nurse the proper way to take a patient’s blood pressure. The nurse watched, smiled, and when the tall med student was finished, she proceeded to do it again, the correct way.
The nurse was Jennifer Hawke, a local Pennsylvania girl a couple of years younger than Bill. She was slight and a little shy, and he flirted with her—he could be goofy when he wanted to be. Eventually, he asked her out.
Jennifer’s father was a preacher, and the family had always lived in the parsonage of whatever church he was posted to. She didn’t go out much—her younger sister, Cindy, sometimes had to coax Jenny into having what most people think of as fun. Pittsburgh, where Jen lived during nursing school, was a workingman’s city, and people blew off steam at night. Neon-lit bars with pool tables, bowling alleys with beer by the pitcher, dance halls, hockey games. Even some nice places where you could get a glass of wine. But after flying around the hospital all day, Jen rarely had much energy for the bar scene. She worked twelve-hour shifts and usually all she had the energy to do was sleep. She had a good time when she went out, though, even if she wasn’t meeting any dreamboats. She was thin and sweet and still had the innocent, playful eyes of a young girl. Men would ask her to dance, and when she’d tell them she was a nurse, sometimes they’d try to turn it into a pickup line. She had told one guy she was a pediatric nurse, and the dope whispered in her ear that in that case, she could probably give him a great foot rub.
For their first date, Bill took Jennifer to a restaurant in Pittsburgh called Tramp’s. And the best part for Bill was, his parents had driven down from Plainville for a visit. Bill didn’t think twice about asking them to come along, too. Why wouldn’t this girl want to have dinner with his folks?
“It was a great night,” Bill Sr. said many years later. “Jennifer, as it turned out, became our daughter-in-law, but she could have been our daughter. That’s the way Bill is. ‘Mom and Dad, come along on our date.’ ”
Plus, Bill Sr. paid.
On their next dat
e, his parents weren’t there. There were more dates, and it wasn’t long before Bill Petit and Jen Hawke were a couple.
Jen had dated the same boy through most of high school back in Greenville, ninety minutes north of Pittsburgh. He had become like another member of the family, and Cindy thought of the guy as a kind of older brother. He and Jen had been broken up for years, and he’d gone off to Harvard and lived in Boston. One weekend, after Bill and Jen had been dating for a while, Bill was over at the Hawkes’ house. Cindy was about to leave on a trip to Boston to interview for jobs, and she was planning to crash at Jen’s old boyfriend’s place. Bill heard this and bristled. Cindy was sitting on the counter in the kitchen and remembers Bill putting his hands on the counter on either side of her, looking her in the eye, and asking her what exactly she was up to. Why was she staying at this guy’s apartment? Was Cindy trying to get Jen and him back together?
It wasn’t like that, Cindy told him. This guy was a pal. In that moment, she felt awkward. But to Bill, Jennifer Hawke wasn’t just any girl. He was falling in love with her, and he wasn’t taking any chances.
The little charge that lit him up in that moment—he could be like that sometimes. “He’s a tough one, no doubt about it,” Hanna says of her brother. “He demanded the best from himself, and he demanded the best from everybody around him. It’s hard.” Silly things could be hurtful. Once, he and Jen were on a long car trip and Cindy was in the backseat. They were chatting away, and Cindy couldn’t remember some innocuous piece of trivia—Marilyn Monroe’s real name or something. Bill snorted, said she must’ve been living under a rock.
It came out of nowhere and sounded meaner than he meant it. But it was an oddly derisive little swipe. Why did Bill bite someone’s head off sometimes if they said something he thought was wrong or that he disagreed with, or even some silly mistaken fact? It was as if, once in a while, he let his own intelligence get the best of him, wielding it like a weapon instead of keeping that old quiet confidence quiet. The fact was, according to his friends and family, that he was right a lot of the time. Most of the time, really. And sometimes he couldn’t help telling you how right he was.
Cindy knew Bill by this point, knew it was just a dumb thing and that he didn’t mean to hurt her feelings. But he had.
—
On April 13, 1985, two years into Bill’s internship at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York, Jennifer’s father, Rev. Richard Hawke, married Bill and Jen at Stone United Methodist Church in Meadville, the small Pennsylvania town where he was pastor. Old Stone Church, as it was known, sat on the edge of Diamond Park, a grassy oval in the center of Meadville. When the light hit the church’s towering stained-glass windows just right, it refracted down onto the south end of the park like a kaleidoscope.
Dick Hawke barely came up to about Bill’s chest, and he spoke softly, his voice smooth and pliable, like worn copper. But deep in his eyes lived staunch goodness, a firm command of right and wrong. People listened when he spoke. Bill liked him a lot, liked hearing him talk.
April 13 was not the sunniest day of the year, but other than that, everything was perfect. Bill had been raised Roman Catholic. Altar boy, catechism, Catholic school, guilt, fear, love, Easter dinner, heaven, hell, all of it. Jen was Methodist, and a preacher’s kid. All the same, for the wedding Jen agreed to have a Catholic priest join her father and bear witness.
—
Bill and Jen had each grown up in a version of small-town America, so they understood that part of each other. But there’s your hometown, and there’s your family. When Jen walked into her first Petit-family gathering back in Connecticut, she was like a freshman stepping into the college dining hall for the first time, seeing a thousand people but no place to sit.
“Oh, we’d have fifty, fifty-five people up at Grandpa’s house at holidays,” Bill Sr. says. “She would tell us privately, ‘I’m not used to this. I’ve never seen this, and I don’t really understand it—but it’s nice. It’s nice.’ She went with the flow. She had a way of fitting in.”
Hanna was probably more excited than anyone about the arrival of Jennifer in Plainville: finally, an older sister. “I had a lot of friends, but I never had a sister, and Jen was beautiful and she was sweet, and she very much came into our family,” Hanna says. “I think it was overwhelming at first. She comes from a much smaller family, and we all live right around the corner from each other’s business.”
—
As the relationship between Bill and Jennifer deepened, people noticed something different about Bill. He seemed mellower. Oh, he was still the same charge-ahead Billy Petit—when the going got tough, he got going. He still worked harder than anyone he knew, and he still liked things the way he liked them. He could still bite your head off if you didn’t agree with his way of doing something, Hanna says. A perfectionist. But Jennifer knew how to handle him when he got frustrated or was being perhaps a little narrow-minded about something. When she took his hand in hers, even without a word, it could settle his bones and calm his head. And she knew how to remind him, in the gentle way she learned from the preacher who raised her, that while something might be very, very important to him right this second—might seem worth losing his cool over—in the context of the whole wide world, it wasn’t important. People do the best they can, she would tell him. People are good, and you’re good, and this just isn’t worth getting upset over.
And he would look at her. Jennifer, right again.
But Jennifer Hawke-Petit—her new name—was not just the doctor’s wife. True, she was certainly quiet and always she tried not to say a bad word about anybody. (Hanna used to tease her that the worst thing she would ever say about a person was that they were a “baddie.” “Oh, he’s such a baddie!” And Hanna would say, “I can think of a few other words.”) It wasn’t that Jen saw only the goodness in people—she was not blind to the human capacity for cruelty—it was that she gave people the opportunity to show that they were capable of goodness. But she was canny and clever and funny and could debate her husband on any topic. “She was strong and intelligent in her own right,” Hanna says. “It wasn’t like Jen couldn’t figure stuff out.”
At first, the way Jen and Bill behaved toward each other seemed strange to Jen’s little sister, Cindy. “I used to tell her that sometimes it seemed like the way they got along was not to,” Cindy says. “Everything was always a debate.” But Jen would tell Cindy, No, you’ve got it all wrong—that’s just the way Billy’s mind works. Jen actually enjoyed tossing ideas back and forth, enjoyed the intellectual challenge of it. “And she was not one to back down,” Cindy says. “She was very good for him in that way, because a lot of women wouldn’t do that or weren’t intelligent enough to do that. But she would give him a run for his money in their little debates.”
After medical school Bill got the internship in internal medicine in Rochester. Frigid, remote Rochester, New York, a hard little city on the shore of Lake Ontario, farther north than Buffalo, average low temperature in January of 18 degrees Fahrenheit. And, as Bill and Jen would come to learn was true in a lot of cities, there weren’t many jobs for pediatric nurses. So, in support of her husband—whose specialty was endocrinology, a branch of internal medicine dealing with the glands that deliver hormones to the bloodstream (his particular expertise was treating diabetes and thyroid problems), and who had been accepted into a great American hospital—she took a job as a nurse for adults. She brought to it the same gentle, easy way she had with children. It wasn’t her plan, but she made herself part of Bill’s.
Jen dreamed of sunshine. A sun worshipper, Bill called her. Her need for warmth was almost a craving. If it were up to her, they would have moved to Florida. And here she was in this boreal tundra, across the lake from Canada, living in an apartment that looked like every other apartment around it (Cindy called their neighborhood “Clone Village”), scraping ice off the windshield before work. She was feeling tired a lot, more than she ever had. Jen had always had the busy
energy of a bird building a nest, the kind of person who couldn’t sit for long if there was work to be done. But she would call Cindy and tell her that’s all she felt the strength to do sometimes—just sink into the couch cushions like an old man on Thanksgiving.
The residency led to a fellowship for Bill at Yale’s endocrinology-metabolism and diabetes program at Yale–New Haven Hospital and the West Haven VA Medical Center. Yale. It was an achievement. First an Ivy League college, then a top medical school, now an elite fellowship. It was also Connecticut. New Haven’s winters were about as cold as Rochester’s, so Jen felt no closer to the sun. Plus, as in Rochester, there were no openings on Yale’s pediatric unit. Not at first, anyway. But not long after they moved, a position opened up on the pediatric/adolescent unit. Jennifer applied for and got the job, and she would not be just a nurse on the unit. She was hired to run it.
This is what Jen used to tell her sister Cindy about her husband: She said Bill made her the best person she could possibly be.
HOME
1987–2007
THE HOUSE was on a corner quarter-acre lot that gently sloped down to the sidewalk. The aesthetic was early-1980s American suburb: vaguely colonial design, cement foundation sticking up out of the dirt, too-small windows sometimes awkwardly placed. Some were close to the roof, or wedged against a corner. One whole face of the house had almost no windows at all. Aluminum siding in a shade of pearl sheathed the exterior. There was a patio in the backyard next to a sunroom that extended off the back of the house. Two-car garage. The building was angled on the lot such that the front door faced a short horseshoe of a street called Hotchkiss Ridge, but the driveway came in off Sorghum Mill Drive, so that’s where the house had been assigned a postal address: 300 Sorghum Mill Drive, Cheshire, Connecticut.
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