My father, Barry, was an MIT graduate, and a computer programmer when most people didn’t know what a computer programmer was. He met Elaine Harris, my mother, at Lextronics, where she was a receptionist, and undoubtedly the prettiest woman he’d ever seen. I don’t know for a fact that my father had never dated anyone before meeting my mother in his thirtieth year, but it would shock me if he had. My mother, on the other hand, had spent her twenties in an on-again, off-again relationship with a fellow Boston University grad who played professional hockey for two years before a knee injury ended his career. She told me once that when their relationship ended—and she realized she had wasted eight years with a “playboy type”—she swore on the spot that she would find a husband who was plain and dull and reliable. And that turned out to be Barry Severson. They dated for six weeks, were engaged for another six, then were married in a small ceremony in West Hartford, Connecticut, my mom’s hometown.
The reason that Concord became an important place for me was that my mother dreamed of moving there. Early in the marriage, she had decided she hated the isolation of Middleham, and had become fixated on this particular wealthy suburb, with its gabled houses, its well-dressed housewives, its arty jewelry stores. My father got sick of hearing about it, so my mother would dress me up and take me, and sometimes my older sister as well, to lunch in Concord, often at the Concord River Inn, and afterward we would visit shops; she would buy new outfits, or jewelry, or Roquefort and pinot grigio at the Concord Cheese Shop. It was not a surprise to either my father or me when, during my senior year at Dartford-Middleham High School, Elaine left my father and moved into a rental apartment along Main Street in Concord Center. She lived there for a year, before moving to California with a divorced accountant.
My father, retired now, still lives in Middleham, where he spends his time creating Revolutionary War dioramas. I visit him on Thursday nights. If the weather is above sixty degrees, he cooks me a steak on his grill. If it’s below sixty, he makes a pot of chili. My sister visits every other year for Thanksgiving. It’s the only time we see her, since she lives in Hawaii with her second husband and his four children. She sees my mother far more often, partly because my mother still lives in California, and partly because my mother and my sister are so much alike. I sometimes think that when the divorce happened the family split along gender and geographical lines, my father and I staying east, my mother and sister going west.
Clattering up the steps at the Concord River Inn, it was impossible to not think of my mother and me sitting in the wallpapered dining room with our seafood Newburg lunches, my mother sipping a Pink Lady and me with a Pepsi with a slice of lemon. Lily and I had agreed to meet at the bar, and not the dining room. What I had forgotten was that there were two bars in the rabbit’s warren of the inn, a snug L-shaped one immediately opposite the dining room, and a larger one toward the back. I chose the smaller bar, since it was empty, and from my barstool I could watch the hallway that led toward the bar at the back. I ordered a Guinness, told myself to sip it slowly. I had no intention of getting drunk this afternoon.
I had spent a lot of time with my wife in the previous week since returning from my business trip to London. Miranda was filled with ideas for furnishing the house in Maine. We had a vintage card table in our library and she had covered it with clippings from catalogs and printouts from the Internet. I tried not to think of her and Brad Daggett as she showed me item after item of things the house absolutely needed to have. I agreed to everything: the heated tile floors in all the bathrooms; the twenty-thousand-dollar Viking range; the indoor lap pool. And while I was agreeing, what kept me going was the knowledge that she was going to die, and I was going to be the one who made that happen. I thought about it constantly, turning the idea around in my mind