good, kid,” Jim said to Bob, and Bob said, “You too,” even though Helen knew that Jim—always in good shape, and always a handsome man—had gained ten pounds during the last year, and she thought it made his eyes seem smallish. “Oh, Bobby,” Helen said, and after kissing him she touched her hand to his cheek. “Hello, Bobby,” she said. And Bob said, beaming, “Hello, Helen, welcome to Crosby, Maine.”
“It’s just lovely,” Helen said.
* * *
A number of years earlier, Bob Burgess had asked his wife—they had been married for five years at that time; Bob had moved up from New York City, where he had lived his entire adult life—if she would mind if they moved out of the town of Shirley Falls and went and lived in Crosby instead, an hour away, and as soon as he asked her this, he could see that she was crestfallen. He said immediately, “No, never mind,” but she asked him why he wanted to, and he answered her honestly: Shirley Falls just made him too sad. They were sitting in their living room at the time, and the ceiling was low, and the room received little natural light even in late June, which it was at the time of this conversation, and he looked around the room and said, “I’m sorry.”
Whenever he thought of that evening he felt a great love for this woman, his second wife, Margaret, the Unitarian minister, because she had continued to question him, and it turned out that what made him sad was not just that the place was so decimated as a town these days, all its Main Street shops closed for years now except for those that the Somalis had; it was not just this—the quiet sense of horror Bob felt at being in a city that had once been vibrant and filled with life—it was that it reminded him on some level all the time of his childhood there, and the car accident that had killed his father when Bob was only four years old. He had been surprised to realize that this was the source of his discomfort, but Margaret had not seemed surprised at all. “It makes sense, because you spent your whole life thinking you were the one who killed him,” she said, uncrossing her legs and crossing them again the other way. “And maybe I did,” said Bob. Margaret shrugged, and said almost hopefully, “And maybe you did.” This had always been the understanding in the family, that Bob had been responsible for the death of his father. But in fact Jim, four years older than Bob, had confessed to Bob a decade before that he—Jim—had been the one playing with the clutch when the car rolled down their driveway and struck their father, who had been checking the mailbox there. And, because Jim, Bob, and Susan—Bob’s twin sister—had grown up in northern New England, in a culture and during a time when no one mentioned these sorts of things, they had—accordingly—never spoken of the accident since it had happened. Until the day when Jim, in his fifties, had told Bob that he—Jim—had done it. And so Bob, as a result, had felt that he had lost something profound. His identity had been taken from him. This was Margaret’s idea, and he had seen immediately that she was right. In any case, she had agreed that day that they would move to the town of Crosby, about an hour away.
A coastal town, and pretty.
* * *
It was one o’clock, and the four of them decided they would go for a quick walk. The inn where Helen and Jim were staying that night was just two blocks away, so they all went to check them in; they would bring the bags later. The sidewalk was wide enough only for two people, and Jim walked with Margaret, Bob and Helen walking behind them. Helen said, “Bobby, the last time you came to New York, you were on your way to see Pam before you caught the train. I always meant to ask you, how did that go?” Pam was Bob’s first wife; they had remained friendly, much to Helen’s bafflement, and Bob said now, “Oh, she’s doing great. Yeah, it was great to see her.”
The inn had a large wraparound porch that a few people were sitting on in white rocking chairs, and Helen waved to them and they nodded back. The woman who checked them in was a