Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

“I see.”

  “He was a good man, mostly,” she said idly, almost to herself.

  Then Kat said, “I really don’t see how you could know that, Mother.” The self-satisfaction of the statement, the insensitivity and arrogance, was so bald that it was Trixie’s turn to be speechless now. It was not a comment that asked a reply.

  When Kat spoke again it was more hesitantly. “There will be a funeral Wednesday,” she said. “In Seattle. Janice is making the arrangements.”

  “Janice?”

  “Caitlin’s daughter.”

  “Caitlin, his second wife.”

  “Yes.”

  She reached for a pen from the cup on the counter. “Why don’t you give me directions?”

  “Well, Mother,” Kat said, very quietly, “I was thinking it might not be appropriate for you to go.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I needn’t repeat it for you. You heard what I said.” Her voice had gone uneven, it seemed, and Trixie realized with a start that her daughter was crying.

  “I suppose I did,” Trixie said. “And why not?”

  “Frankly, Mother, a funeral’s for the living. I’ve searched my heart for the strength to forgive you, I’ve begged God for it…” She was sobbing freely now, all control gone from her voice. “But this service is for my father, for Janice’s father. It is not…it is not for your husband.”

  “My God, Kat, you’re a grown woman,” she found herself saying. “This is—”

  “I’m sorry, Mother. I won’t take it back. You’re not encouraged to come.”

  Years from now, Trixie knew, Kat would remember the funeral, would remember that her awful mother hadn’t even bothered to come. She would recall her own strength in the matter, bearing up despite such a blatant and sinful affront. She would not remember this telephone call, that was certain.

  “If that’s the way it has to be,” Trixie said.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Well then,” she said. “I’m sorry about the death of your father.”

  Kat answered in a whisper. “Thank you,” she said, and after that they had nothing more to say.

  * * *

  Sundays were book group days. Trixie usually drove into town at eleven-thirty, parked at the public library, then sat quietly and went over the book for that day while she waited for the other ladies to arrive. There were four of them, besides Trixie: Diane Keeler, a divorcée ten years Trixie’s junior and probably her best friend; Bette Spraycar; Margaret Cheatham; and Iona Sandburg. She’d known Bette for ages, but Trixie still didn’t know her very well; none of them seemed to, though they had been meeting on Sundays for nearly four years. Bette was a barrel-shaped woman in her sixties and disliked anything out of the ordinary. When it was her turn to pick a book, she rarely suggested anything written after the turn of the century, and that suited Trixie fine. Margaret Cheatham seemed to exist only in reference to her husband, who waited outside in his truck while they talked. She always found a reason to leave early and suggested only romance novels with exhaustingly repetitive plots; Trixie and Diane had often talked about writing one of their own, they knew the rules so well by now. And Iona Sandburg was old, older than Trixie, well into her eighties. For the past two years they’d skipped her turn to choose, as she had begun to forget her obligations and often didn’t get around to reading that week’s book at all. But some weeks were better than others, and Trixie guessed she had once been a wry, energetic young woman, gone confused and aimless in widowhood.

  This week’s book was one of Margaret’s, and Trixie had stopped reading it about halfway through. She had promised herself she’d finish it yesterday, but after the crash, after talking to Kat, the ex-stable boy and his rippling muscles didn’t seem worth paying much mind. At eleven-thirty, she was sitting in the library, riffling the pages and trying to find something to say later, when Diane came in and took her place at the table.

  “You’re early,” Trixie told her. They met in a glassed-in room next to the history section, and it overlooked the parking lot through tall, thin windows flanked by bare brick.

  “I was going to do what you’re doing,” Diane said. “But I don’t think I’m going to bother.” She reached across the table and touched Trixie’s hand. “How are you getting on?”

  “Fine, fine.”

  Diane nodded. “We ought to get together this week to shoot the bull,” she said. “When was the last time we did that?”

  “Months.”

  “That long?”

  “That long.”

  Diane looked healthier than ever. When Trixie met her five years ago, she was still married. After her divorce a year later—the end of forty-five years, the worst ones of her life, Diane was fond of saying—she quit smoking and drinking and got a membership at a gym. “I should have divorced him forty years ago,” she told Trixie once. “Thank God I’m not old yet.”

  Now she watched Trixie, her eyebrows raised, waiting. This is one thing she was good at: getting Trixie to talk. “Well?” she said.

  “Kat called this morning.”

  “Kat did!”

  Trixie shook her head. “She was calling to tell me what I already knew. Then she asked me to stay away from the funeral.”

  Diane dismissed this with a wave of her hand. “Well, you should go anyway. Go ahead and crash it.”

  “Oh, there’s no point.” She let the book slap shut and tossed it onto the table. “She told me I didn’t really know him. What garbage! She barely spoke to that man when they lived in the same house. She was only a child.”

  “People will go to the greatest lengths to convince themselves of what they want to believe.”

  “I suppose.”

  Diane took a breath. “You expected to see him again, didn’t you.”

  “I suppose I did. It seemed inevitable. Even when he wrote, and I thought about keeping him away…” She remembered the panic she felt watching the mailman’s truck raising dust on the road.

  “You knew he’d come.”

  “Yes.”

  Diane grinned. “I spent most of my life waiting for Frank to turn into the sort of person I wanted to be married to.”

  Trixie smiled at her, and at that moment Margaret came in clutching her copy of Castle Hearts. Torn strips of paper stuck from the pages, each neatly written on in ink. “Hello! Hello!” she said. She sat down across the table, as far from Trixie as possible, leaned forward and whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

  “Speak up, Margaret!” Diane barked.

  “It’s all right, Margaret,” Trixie said.

  “If you need anything.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  “I was just saying to Edro, if Trixie needs anything…”

  “I’ll be sure to let you know.”

  Margaret set her bag down on the table, and the book next to it. “Well! I hope you both enjoyed this one.” She straightened the book, lining it up with the edge of the table, and patted its cover.

  “Oh, yes,” Trixie said.

  The door opened and Bette walked in, leading Iona by the arm. “Here, lona,” she said. “Sit here.” She pulled a chair out and Iona sat. “I passed her in the car. She was standing on the corner of Main and Weir. She looked awfully confused.”

  “I plumb forgot,” lona said.

  “Are you all right, dear?” Margaret said, reaching out to touch her arm.

  “Why, yes. I’m just fine.” She looked into her handbag and frowned. “Oh…”

  “What is it?” Bette asked her.

  “I’ve forgotten my book. I’m forgetting just everything today.”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” Margaret told her, “you don’t need it. You remember the gist, don’t you?”

  “I certainly do. I certainly do.”

  Bette sat down to Trixie’s right, and squeezed her forearm. “I’m sorry to hear about Hamish. We saw him a few months ago, in the city, first time in years.” She quieted to a whisper. “He had aged well, Trixie. A very h
andsome man. I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What happened?” Iona said. “What happened?”

  “I told you before, dear,” Bette said quietly. “Trixie’s husband passed away.”

  “Oh!” Her hands flew to her mouth, tiny and strange. “Her husband!”

  “It’s all right, Iona,” Trixie said. “We’d been apart for a long time.”

  Diane nodded. “Iona, they were divorced. Estranged, you know?”

  “It was the plague, wasn’t it,” Iona said.

  “No,” Diane said. “He died in that plane crash.”

  “Plane crash,” Iona repeated, her hands falling away from her face, her voice as flat and fragile as a sheet of glass. Trixie wondered briefly what it was like to forget yourself; if it was, at times, a relief not to have your past pacing hugely behind you like a restless giant, or if you never really forgot, if the past only turned shadowy and indistinct and mastered you with fear. But Margaret, obviously sensing that they were off to a poor start, began to talk about her book, and Trixie tried to listen.

  The discussion went badly. Trixie tried to offer a few nice comments about the book, mentioning parts she didn’t exactly like but thought rose above the general mess. Diane didn’t say anything at all, and Bette began, apropos of nothing, to talk about Jane Austen. Margaret was beginning to become visibly upset, even glancing out the window at the parking lot, where Edro was waiting, when Trixie noticed that Iona had begun to cry.

  “Iona?”

  Her chin was trembling and her eyes had gone hazy and wet. She had taken off her glasses and they lay upside down on the table. Trixie remembered that Iona had been a dancer once—a showgirl in the once thriving theaters of Great Falls, back when it was the fastest-growing city in the state. That she had once possessed grace, had been a living part of something grand and exciting, moved Trixie, and she reached across Bette and took Iona’s hand. “Iona, dear,” she said, “it’s all right.”

  “I miss my Eugene,” she said simply, and with her free hand rummaged around in her bag.

  “Let me,” Bette said. She reached into Iona’s bag and pulled out a little plastic travel pack of Kleenex. She broke the seal and handed several to Iona.

  “Thank you,” she said. Her voice was weak and mournful, like a distant train.

  “I think it might be time to stop for the day,” Diane said. Margaret’s face darkened, but she said nothing, only closed her book.

  “I don’t know what’s come over me,” Iona said.

  “Speak your mind, Iona,” Diane said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think there’s much point to that.” But then, after a moment, she did go on: she told them about the theater Eugene had helped build with his own hands, the famous men who came out on the train from the East. She told them about the local gangsters, who loved Eugene, who came to the theater for free, whenever they wanted, and the years when the labor unions began to break, when Anaconda Mining picked up and left for greener pastures, and attendance began to fall as people’s money ran out. And then there was Eugene’s heart attack, the day they knocked down the giant smokestack, and how she came out of the hospital after they lost him to find the stack gone from the horizon. Her voice took on renewed life for those minutes, and the other ladies were silent as she spoke.

  Trixie’s heart was breaking for Iona. She knew what it was like to watch life go bad for someone you loved. She recalled life in Marshall with Hamish as a series of relentless external pressures that changed the shape of their family, laying bare their weaknesses like an earthquake lays bare new and ragged earth.

  She remembered an evening during a long period of idleness for Hamish: it was late winter of a year when construction jobs had proven few and far between, and he had been reading and rereading the classifieds in the kitchen, circling ads with a pen and crossing them out again. After nearly an hour, he stopped reading abruptly, capped the pen and folded the paper neatly on the table. An expression of dark resolve came over his face and he pushed back his chair. Trixie had been reading a book across from him. She looked up.

  “Where are you going?”

  He didn’t answer. His eyes passed over her; they were focused on something else entirely, something beyond this house, their lives. She was used to his sudden decisiveness, but this look, its object unclear, frightened her.

  “Hamish?”

  “Be back,” he said, and he grabbed his coat from the hook by the door and vanished, his keys jingling.

  Kat and Edward were in the next room playing Monopoly. When she could no longer hear the truck’s engine, she went to the living room and watched them. Kat had all the money, and Edward looked stricken. He said, “Where’s Daddy?”

  “He’ll be right back.”

  This answer seemed to pain him. He turned back to the game warily, as if taking his eyes off Trixie meant he might doom Hamish never to return.

  “You’re in my hotel,” Kat said.

  “I’m out of money.”

  “You can give me your railroad.”

  “No!”

  “Either that or you lose.”

  In the end, Kat allowed him to borrow money from the bank, and they kept playing, Edward tentatively, flinching as he rolled the dice, Kat with naked and gleeful aggression, building additional hotels on already crowded properties and giving Edward breaks to prolong the game whenever it seemed he might quit.

  Trixie heard Hamish come in, and Edward sat up, relieved. When she went to the kitchen to see where he had gone, she found him sitting at the table behind a bottle and an empty glass.

  She met his eyes, coldly. “We can’t afford that.”

  “Priorities,” he said, and unscrewed the cap.

  “What on earth is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means we bought it anyway.”

  She turned to the children. “Time for bed.”

  “No, it’s not,” Kat said without looking up. “It’s only seven-thirty.”

  “It’s time when I tell you it’s time, Katerina.”

  “We’re playing.”

  “Oh, let ‘em play,” came Hamish’s voice.

  “See?” Kat said. Edward’s head swiveled between his mother and sister like a wind vane.

  She turned back to Hamish, who offered his full glass to her. She shook her head no, and he drank it all in one swallow, tipping his head back like an old pro. He squeezed his eyes shut. Then he set the empty glass on the table and refilled it.

  “That’s three days of food, Hamish,” she said. “Or a pair of boots for Edward. Or a hat.”

  “Nope,” he said. “It’s only this. No going back.” He swirled the glass, and the booze licked the sides. “You could use some, Trixie.”

  The children were staring at her, Edward in astonishment, Kat with what looked like irritation, or impatience. As far as she remembered, this night was the real birth of Hamish’s drinking, of Kat’s ill will toward her. Could it have been that simple? Maybe not; maybe she’d assembled the memory from several sources. But the incident was so clear in her mind—the expressions on the children’s faces, Hamish’s words, the uneasy impression that latent threats had come to pass all at once, and would soon gather the strength to rise up and crush them.

  * * *

  The book group broke up early, and Trixie gave Iona Sandburg a ride. She helped Iona up the steps to her house and sat in the car a moment before pulling away, watching Iona move behind the curtains, checking that she was all right.

  Driving home, Trixie thought that she was too old for everything to come back to her like this, that she didn’t want to spend her declining years grappling with the past, and she began to consider what she could do to snap out of it: a trip perhaps, or a new hobby? But where would she go, and with whom? What could she find to do?

  That night, while she was fixing her dinner, he came to her. She liked to make soup in the summer with the vegetables her neighbors brought her, and she always had some leftovers on ha
nd, divided into serving-size plastic containers in the fridge. She took one of these and dumped it into a pot, then sliced some bread off a loaf and buttered it. While she was stirring, she heard the glass doors of the china cabinet open up with a rattle, heard some plates clinking together, and the sound of one being placed on the wooden tabletop. She stopped stirring. She heard a chair being pulled out, then pushed in again.

  “Hamish?” she said, and turned.

  He looked bleached, like a book left too long out in the bright sun, and adult: his body was mature but his face blurred. And he was handsome, the way he might be in an overexposed photograph. He didn’t look up. Instead, he curled his left hand as if around a spoon or fork, and moved it across the plate and to his mouth, in a pantomime of eating. His face was absent with the repetitiveness of the task. The only sound in the room was the hiss of the burner, and without looking Trixie reached over the stove and turned off the gas.

  “Hamish.”

  And now he did look up: not at Trixie but to his side, as though someone were there at the table’s edge, eating with him. He tilted his head, listening, and her heart leaped to see it. She remembered him as a young man of twenty-five, listening to her questions about the cattle, the horses. How many times had she seen that gesture? As many times as there were things she didn’t know. It was he, she remembered now, whose knowledge of ranch life made her want to become expert in everything, made her already sharp thirst for knowledge into an imperative, as necessary as food. His lips bent into a smile now, and he laughed silently, nodding.

  Finally she said his name again, more loudly, and he looked up at where she stood. But he couldn’t see her. He half rose, the chair scraping the floor behind him, and walked around the table. No air moved as he passed. He went to the far window, in the living room, and looked out. Then he returned to his chair and began to eat again.

  He was like a sleepwalker, sure of himself in the motions and impulses of his dream, of which, in his presence, Trixie felt an invasive part. He dabbed his mouth with an invisible napkin, got up, and walked to the door, then stood in the doorway a moment, running his hand through his hair, another gesture of his as familiar as any of her own. And as she remembered, he srepped out into the dust and disappeared around the corner, toward the road. A breeze filled the house and threw shut one of the cupboard doors with a bang.