He looked up and over at them. “Yes?”
“We spoke on the phone yesterday. I’m Nick Cooper, and this is Dot’s great-niece, Laurie.”
“Oh yes, oh, come in, come in.” Laurie followed Nick into the apartment, which was compact but immaculate, with a TV in one corner and a raft of family pictures in another. There were two armchairs arranged across from where he was sitting, and he gestured at them as he carefully laid the paper down on a small table. “I asked them to pull up a couple of chairs so you wouldn’t have to stand.” As Laurie approached, he turned to her and his face filled with warmth. “Look at you. You do remind me of Dottie.”
Laurie smiled and reached out to shake his hand. “That’s nice to hear. I’m Laurie Sassalyn, Mr. Harlan, thank you so much for your help.”
“Oh, call me John, please, I feel like we’re almost old friends.”
She sat in one chair and Nick sat in the other, and she took out a photo of John and Dot that she had found in a box, labeled D & J. It wasn’t one of Dot’s Polaroids; it said 1962 on the back, and it predated Dot’s fascination with photos she could launch right out of her camera. In it, they were sitting on a bench under a tree, his arm slung around her, her hand—rather daringly, Laurie thought—resting possessively across his knee. “I found this, and I thought you might like to have it.” She handed it to him.
He held it close to his face. “Well, I’ll be damned. That’s us, all right. That’s the bench out front of F.C. Glass, where I was working. She used to come see me. One of my buddies probably took this for me. I sure could never have enough pictures of her.”
John told them that he and Dot met in the mid-1950s when they were both in their twenties. She was working at the elementary school in Calcasset, and he was doing research for a company in Bangor, and they met at a friend’s wedding, drinking champagne under a canopy. They started dating, and he asked her to marry him, but as he put it: “She told me she didn’t think she was a getting-married kind of woman. Which, you know, back then, you didn’t hear that so much.”
Nick and Laurie glanced at each other, and she remembered wanting to smash the crystal ball with her wedding date on it.
After that, John and Dot didn’t see each other for a couple of years, but then they ran into each other at a party, and they were both still single. They went back to dating, but only in secret, since his family knew she had turned him down and they would not have approved. They stayed together until John was thirty-five and beginning to think that if he wanted to settle down and have children, he needed to go ahead and do it. “We talked and we talked,” he said. “But there’s not a lot of common ground between getting married and not getting married. Or especially between children and no children.” So they broke up for good, and just six months later, John met his wife. John said he and Dot exchanged letters from time to time for another fifteen years or so. “So the one you found, I would have written after I was married,” he said. “It’s nice to know she kept it, that I rated so highly, even in my absence.” Laurie could see the man in the pictures in his face now; his eyes were the same, and his smile.
“I know this is a strange question,” Laurie said, “but I’m wondering if you know anything about her relationship with Carl Kittery.”
“The duck man!” John said brightly. “Don’t tell me you know the duck man.”
“I very much don’t,” Laurie said. “He died quite a while ago. But when I was cleaning the house, I found this very nice carved duck decoy.”
“The wood duck?” John said.
Laurie physically reared back a bit with surprise. “You have a good memory,” she said, handing him a picture of the decoy.
“For a guy who’s ninety-four, you mean,” he said with a smile.
“For anybody,” Laurie said. “I regularly don’t remember why I came into whatever room I’m in.”
“Well, she sent me some pictures of that particular piece, and I kept one on my piano at home, so I looked at it for a long time. I called him Woody. Not too creative, I know.”
“She…she made it, right? She made it herself.” Laurie didn’t breathe for a moment. She wasn’t ready to hear that she was wrong. She wasn’t ready to start again, and she certainly wasn’t ready to be disappointed when she was so close to the end of this.
“You bet she did,” he said. “The duck man taught her. She was with him probably…ten years? I don’t know, maybe ten years. And he taught her. I got a lot of pictures of what she was working on over the years, and I wish I still had them. Sometimes they worked together, but she loved that one because she did almost all of it herself. I’m surprised she never told you about it.” He paused. “I suppose that would have meant talking about the duck man. Maybe not a thing you tell family. But I’m glad you know she made it. That would make her happy, I think.”