All the old original woodwork, the horsehair wallpaper, all of that was gone, and the house seemed as sleek as a palace. “What do you think?” Helen asked, eagerly, almost breathlessly, and Bob said it was amazing. “Really something,” he said.
“You don’t like it,” Helen answered, and Bob had said that wasn’t true at all, but it was true.
* * *
—
Susan got up to turn off the teakettle, and as she made tea—three mugs with a tea bag in each—Jim said, “I miss Maine.”
Bob said, “What?” And Jim repeated what he had said.
“Do you? I’ve been thinking about Mommy a lot,” Susan said, turning her head toward Jim.
“That’s funny,” Jim said, “because I have too.”
“What have you been thinking?” Susan asked. She brought two mugs to the table and turned back to get the third.
“I don’t know. What a hard life she had.” Jim said, “You know what else I’ve been thinking about recently? We were really poor growing up.”
Susan said, “You just now figured that out?” She laughed abruptly. “Jimmy, my goodness, of course we were poor.”
Jim looked at Bob. “Did you know that?”
Bob said, “Ah—yes. I did know that, Jim.”
“You know, I’ve been rich so long—I mean, I’ve lived like a rich person for so long—that I kind of forgot that when we grew up we were really pretty poor.”
“Well, we were, Jimmy,” Susan said. “I can’t believe you forgot that. We had newspapers stuffed into all the windows to keep the cold out.”
“I didn’t forget it. I’m just saying I haven’t thought about it.”
Susan sat down. “But we weren’t unhappy, really.” She looked from one brother to the other. “Were we?”
“Nah,” Bob said, just as Jim said, “Yes.”
“Jimmy, you were unhappy?” Susan, who had picked up her mug, now put it back down.
“Of course I was unhappy. I thought I had killed Dad, and every day I thought about that. And about how I let Bob take the blame. Every day I thought of that.”
Susan shook her head slowly. “Oh, Jimmy,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
Bob said, “Jim, just let that go. We were kids. We’ll never know what really happened.”
Jim looked at him. “Well,” Jim finally said, “it’s okay to tell me to let it go now, but it was with me every day of my life.” He looked around, crossed one leg over the other. “Every single day.”
“Look,” Bob said—and he was sort of quoting Margaret—“if it had happened today we probably would have all gone to therapy and talked about it. But it happened more than fifty years ago, and nobody ever mentioned anything back then, not up here in Shirley Falls—anything. And you got caught in the middle of it.” He added, “I’m really sorry, Jimmy.”
Jim looked at him with seriousness. “No, I’m the one who’s sorry, Bobby.”
Susan reached and put her hand over Jim’s hand that held his mug of tea. “Oh, Jimmy,” she said. “Well, we’re all here, we all made it through.”
A look of sadness came over Jim’s face, and Bob tried to think of something to say to dispel it, but Susan was asking Bob about Pam. “How’s she doing?” Susan asked. “You know, I think one of the funnest summers was when she lived with us in that house. She was pretty great. Not everyone would have wanted to spend their summer from college living with us in that tiny house, but she did. I guess she came from a small place too. Jim, you were gone…” And Jim nodded. “Anyway, I think of her. She’s okay?”
The last time Bob had been to New York, he had called his ex-wife, Pam, and they had met at a café near where she lived on the Upper East Side. “Bobby!” she said, and threw her arms around him. She looked the same, only older, and he told her this, and she laughed and said, “Well, you look great.”
“I’ve missed you,” he said, and this was true.
“Oh, Bobby, I’ve missed you so much,” she said, flicking her hair back; it was shoulder-length hair, dyed a nice reddish color. “I just keep thinking, are you okay up there in that awful state of Maine? Oh, I don’t mean to say it’s awful—it just seems so…”
“Awful,” he said, and they laughed. “I’m fine, Pam. It’s all just fine.”
As Bob remembered this now, he felt a surge of love for Pam; they had married right out of college, just kids. And they had stayed married for almost fifteen years. In Bob’s mind,