Did You Ever Have A Family

by Bill Clegg

  Nine months ago, this same hand forbid her to speak, but now, here, Lydia caresses it softly. There is so much I want to tell you, she says, and as she does, she remembers Winton, the only person she’s spoken to for more than a few moments all year. She describes that first phone call, how aware and yet how stupid she was, and how lonely. I am a weak woman, she whispers, and then repeats the words softly a few times. Always have been. As the words leave her, she can see out the window to the ocean. The last time she saw waves on a beach was when she and Earl went to Atlantic City for their honeymoon. These are taller, more majestic and powerful. She watches them rise and collapse in bursts of white foam, and as she does, she feels something leave her. She can’t name it, but it was with her always, and with the words she has just spoken, it has gone.

  Lydia remains still and matches her breathing to June’s. They sit side by side on the bed and Lydia can feel her hand, with June’s, dampen with sweat, but neither of them let go. Before she says anything about Silas, she remembers him at her apartment a week ago, speaking too fast, without inhaling, making no sense. It would take almost an hour before she truly understood what he was so desperately trying to say. When she finally did understand, she was furious—at him, for letting everyone blame Luke, for not going back in the house; at June, for not fixing that stove years before; and at herself for never insisting June do so even though Lydia had stood before the old thing herself many times shaking her head when it refused to light or to stop ticking. They were all to blame, she thought, trying to calm down. She and Silas sat on her couch for hours. She stood to go to bed several times, but each time he did not budge. So she sat with him in the bright living room, quiet. There was too much to make sense of, too much to say, so she said nothing. Eventually, she fell asleep, and when she woke and saw him curled against the sofa cushion, she could hear him sobbing. She pulled him toward her, shook his young shoulders gently, and told him it wasn’t his fault, that it wasn’t anybody’s. She remembers his terrified eyes searching her face. It was between midnight and dawn and the day before had been a doozy, but nothing surprised her more than what she felt in that moment: needed. It was the last thing she expected. Through a mess of tears and mucus and yawning, Silas mumbled, I’m sorry, over and over. After a while, he slouched into the sofa, tucked his chin against his chest, and slept. Lydia watched his body rise and fall with his breathing, the lightly pimpled skin of his face agitate and twitch in response to whatever he was dreaming. Here was someone she understood. Someone alive but destroyed. She knew she could do nothing to bring her own boy back, stop him from turning whatever knob he turned or flipping whatever switch he flipped that morning, nor could she undo the mistakes she’d made when he was alive, but she might be able to help this boy. And with what he had just told her, she might be able to do the same for June.

  And so she came here. There is someone I want to tell you about, she says. June does not move, nor does she signal in any way that she is listening. Still, Lydia continues. She tells her about Silas—who he is, who his parents are, that he worked for Luke, how he followed her, and what he said the night he turned up at her door. She tells this last part slowly, carefully, with as much detail as she can remember.

  June does not respond to anything Lydia says, but when she finishes speaking, she pulls Lydia’s hand slowly toward her face. June extends each finger and presses the palm against her cheek. She covers Lydia’s hand with both of hers and presses gently at first and then with more pressure. As she does, June’s torso and head glide downward, her feet curling behind her onto the bed, her head and shoulders resting in Lydia’s lap. Neither speaks. With her free hand, Lydia gently strokes the top of June’s head, brushes a few strands of hair from her face, one, then another, and then spreads her hand across her clear brow. June’s breathing slows, her body loosens, and soon she is asleep. A black plastic alarm clock ticks the seconds with a blue wand. Lydia hears every one.

  Cissy

  I said I’d marry them and I did. I’d done it twice before: once for my nephew and his nineteen-year-old girlfriend, and the other time for a couple my sister Pam sold a house to in Ocean Shores. Rebecca and Kelly had been together a long time, but now that it was legal in the eyes of the governor, they wanted the piece of paper. Fine with me.

  Compared to some weddings I’ve seen, Rebecca and Kelly’s was small. Just the two of them; Will’s family: Dale, Mimi, Pru, and Mike; Kelly’s brothers and nephews and a few cousins. June was there, too. She came with Lydia, who showed up a month before. She landed in Seattle and took a bus to Aberdeen and hired a taxi to take her from there. When I saw Kelly walking a busty, dark-haired woman rolling a carry-on suitcase behind her toward Room 6, I knew right away who she was. June didn’t tell me much about Luke’s mother, just that she’d had a rough road with men, including her son. She described her once as a small-town Elizabeth Taylor, which is exactly what the woman heading toward Room 6 looked like. I stayed away from June’s room for a couple days. Eventually, I came around to clean and bring a thermos of split pea, which is the only thing she eats besides those bags of peanuts she gets down at the gas station.

  When Ben died, I went to my sister’s kitchen and stayed there for months. I roasted everything I could find at Swanson’s Grocery—hams, chickens, turkeys, pork roasts, potatoes—you name it. I baked dinner rolls and popovers and ate my way through cakes and pies and cookies I’d bake in the morning and eat at night after dinner. When my clothes started to pinch and I couldn’t button my jeans anymore, I asked Ellie Hillworth for a job at the Moonstone. She and Bud were well into their seventies by then and had been trying to sell the place, so another hand on deck was welcome. Cleaning rooms and running trash to the Dumpster got me out of the kitchen, at least between the hours of nine and three, and after a while I settled into making pots of soup on the weekends and now and again a batch of orange drop cookies. That’s how it’s been for years.

  Not long after June showed up at the Moonstone, half-dead and ready to go all the way, I brought her a thermos of squash soup. Never asked if I could. Just left it on the dresser in her room with a spoon and a folded paper towel for a napkin. She didn’t touch it. She didn’t touch the split pea I left a few days later either. But I kept on leaving the thermos, and after a while I could tell a little bit was missing when I’d pick it up the next morning. It never came back empty, but I took what was gone as a sign; that even if she didn’t know it herself, she was choosing to live.

  Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part. Even if that part is coughing to death from cigarettes, or being blown up young in a house with your mother watching. And even if it’s to be that mother. Someone down the line might need to know you got through it. Or maybe someone you won’t see coming will need you. Like a kid who asks you to let him help clean motel rooms. Or some ghost who drifts your way, hungry. And good people might even ask you to marry them. And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day. Maybe someone or something is watching us all make our way. I don’t think we get to know why. It is, as Ben would say about most of what I used to worry about, none of my business.

  Some of the old-timers around here got worked up when Kelly and Rebecca came in and cleaned up the Moonstone. Even my sister Pam, who sold the place to them, wrinkled her nose. But like most things, what seemed important and wrong on one day could barely be remembered the next. Probably, there will always be wrinkled noses, folks who make jokes about the Moonstone dykes or the little boy on the rez who likes to wear his mom’s earrings, or me, the half-breed, bastard bitch who lives with her sisters. It stops when we die and goes on for those we leave behind. All we can do is play our parts and keep each other company.

  June and Lydia will stay here for as long as they need to. I will bring them soup and watch them come back to life, and at night I will lie in the room I grew up in and listen to my sisters open and close doors, flus
h toilets, and climb the stairs. In the morning I will hear their voices in the kitchen and smell the brewing coffee before I open my eyes.

  Rebecca and Kelly will wear the rings I watched them put on their fingers when they said their vows. And together they will get old. The Landises will come back every year. I will make up their rooms and bring them cookies for as long as I can, and when I can’t anymore, they will still come, with children and grandchildren, girlfriends and boyfriends and spouses. They will knock on our door and I will be there, crooked and old, and one day they will knock and I will be gone. And every time they come, they will tell those who don’t know the story of the young man who was a boy here, who went away and came home and went away, who cleaned rooms and carved a canoe and on its prow painted the faces of a family. And the stories will change and the canoe will become a headboard and the family will be mermaids and the rooms will be mansions. And no one will remember us, who we were or what happened here. Sand will blow across Pacific Avenue and against the windows of the Moonstone, and new people will arrive and walk down the beach to the great ocean. They will be in love, or they will be lost, and they will have no words. And the waves will sound to them as they did to us the first time we heard them.

  Acknowledgments

  For much more than can be described here, great thanks to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Raffaella De Angelis, Tracy Fisher, Cathryn Summerhayes, Karen Kosztolnyik, Jennifer Bergstrom, Louise Burke, Wendy Sheanin, Carolyn Reidy, Jennifer Robinson, Michael Selleck, Lisa Litwack, Paula Amendolara, Charlotte Gill, Becky Prager, Chris Clemans, Jillian Buckley, Kassie Evashevski, Martine Bellen, John Gall, Kim Nichols, Sean Clegg, Emma Sweeney, Adam McLaughlin, Cy O’Neal, Jill Bialosky, Susannah Meadows, Stacey D’Erasmo, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Heidi Pitlor, Pat Strachan, Isabel Gillies, Courtney Hodell, Jean Stein, Robin Robertson, Luiz Schwarcz, Kimberly Burns, and to Alan Shapiro for writing a great poem, and Haven Kimmel for singling out the six words that planted the seed all those years ago.

  BILL CLEGG is a literary agent in New York and the author of the bestselling memoirs Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and Ninety Days. He has written for The New York Times, Lapham’s Quarterly, New York magazine, The Guardian, and Harper’s Bazaar. Visit his website at www.BillCleggAuthor.com.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Bill Clegg

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  First Scout Press hardcover edition September 2015

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  Jacket design and photography by John Gall

  Author photograph by Christian Hansen

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Clegg, Bill

  Did you ever have a family / Bill Clegg. — First Scout Press

  hardcover edition.

  pages cm

  I. Title.

  PS3603.L455447D53 2015

  813’.6—dc23

  2014037087

  ISBN 978-1-4767-9817-2

  ISBN 978-1-4767-9819-6 (ebook)

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: Silas

  Chapter 2: June

  Chapter 3: Edith

  Chapter 4: Lydia

  Chapter 5: Rick

  Chapter 6: Rebecca

  Chapter 7: Lydia

  Chapter 8: June

  Chapter 9: Rebecca

  Chapter 10: George

  Chapter 11: Dale

  Chapter 12: Kelly

  Chapter 13: Lydia

  Chapter 14: Silas

  Chapter 15: June

  Chapter 16: George

  Chapter 17: June

  Chapter 18: Lydia

  Chapter 19: Lolly

  Chapter 20: Silas

  Chapter 21: June

  Chapter 22: Dale

  Chapter 23: Lydia

  Chapter 24: Silas

  Chapter 25: Cissy

  Chapter 26: Silas

  Chapter 27: June

  Chapter 28: Silas

  Chapter 29: Lydia

  Chapter 30: June

  Chapter 31: Lydia

  Chapter 32: Cissy

  Acknowledgments

  About Bill Clegg