and they said do it one more time. The eleventh time they hit me, they got a pulse, and I woke up two and a half weeks later.”
He reminisced a little about his college days at Loretto Heights—girls in the dorms, Frisbee in the hallways, all the hockey players he knew there. He remembered dropping out after a year and working at the bowling alley and having a newspaper route and living with his brother Joe for a while.
“When Joe died, me and Mark and Mike went out there and divided his stuff between the three of us,” he said somberly. “I got his TV.”
The subject of Joe propelled him into more difficult territory. “Donald just made my life a nightmare,” Matt said. “He took his anger out on the whole family. He smacked me across the floor.” The more he talked about his childhood, the more he descended into self-pity. It was never far from Lindsay’s mind that Matt—who had once been the coach of her soccer team; whom she once wrote an essay about, calling him her hero—really was a victim, just as she was.
“Donald, Brian, Jim all abused me,” Matt said—though, given this was Matt talking, there could be no way of knowing how true that was. “So I left the family for like eight or ten years. And I came back, and Jim had a heart attack, over there at Main Street. And Joe had a heart attack. And my dad died. And then my mom died. And I lost my family. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“I’m here,” Lindsay said.
Her brother glanced at her. “It’s good to see someone still here.”
* * *
That night, Mimi’s house on Hidden Valley Road received a host of Galvins who had come to town for her funeral. Michael drove in from Manitou Springs with his wife, Becky, and one of his daughters; he was still unpacking the experience of taking care of Mimi as she left this world. “I told Mary that taking care of somebody like that, it’s really a privilege,” Michael said. “Because if you had to do it, you would. But because there’s enough money, most of us don’t have to.”
“Hey, sunshine!” John said, spotting Michael.
John, the music teacher, now retired, had come down from Idaho with Nancy—their first time back at the house since his mother’s ninetieth birthday, three years earlier.
Michael brightened. “Hi, there he is!” The two brothers hugged. “I think you shrunk a couple inches, buddy.”
“Well, maybe a little bit,” John said.
“No, I’m sure you did,” Michael said. “You were always taller than me, weren’t you?”
“Well, yeah,” said John. He’d fallen off a ladder two years earlier and endured a long, painful recovery. “Three back surgeries, four knee surgeries, three ankle surgeries. I was one step above an invalid for the last two years.”
“Hey, I got some ladder work if you want to do it,” Michael said with a smile.
John and Nancy had come to town in their RV, a retirement splurge. Entering their golden years in Boise, they had some creature comforts now: an antique piano they meticulously restored themselves, a koi pond in the backyard, and a small arbor where they grew grapes for wine they made in small batches and labeled. They used the RV to travel the country, making trips to Colorado somewhat more feasible. But they had built a life apart from the Galvins, in part by design and in part, they said, by necessity. “Margaret and Mary have probably taken the brunt of all of it as far as taking care of those who are mentally ill and seeing to their needs,” John said. “And they have the money to do that.”
Now that he was here, John was already feeling a little put out. He had rehearsed a piano piece for his mother’s service, only to learn he would not be able to play it. Lindsay had planned a gathering outside, in a meadow. He’d wished they’d put together something more formal for his mother—even though rationally he understood that he had no real right to feel that way, given that the timing of the funeral was arranged around