* * *
—
Eventually the waitress came over and said she could box up the rest of the food for us to take away. William said, “Oh, that’s okay. I think we’re through.”
“You sure?” asked the waitress. She seemed surprised, and she pursed her red lipsticked lips.
“Yes,” William said, and she said she would bring us the check. “Maybe she’s a relative of mine,” William said. He did not say it jokingly.
“Maybe,” I said.
On the way out of the diner, William opened the door and made an exaggerated gesture of ushering me through it.
* * *
We drove through the town where the diner was, passing a sign that said Libby’s Color Boutique: Carpet, Laminate, Vinyl Flooring CLOSED. As we drove out of the town we saw American flags on many telephone poles, flag after flag, and interspersed with them was an occasional black flag for a POW. We could not find the turnpike entrance for a while. We kept driving through winding roads, and by the side of the road at one point were short little cat-o’-nine-tails, also goldenrod, and a grass that almost had a pinkish tinge to its top but was otherwise brown and dry-looking. There were no other cars, or even people seen, in the middle of a day, a Wednesday in late August. But there were lots of almost-falling-down houses, and lots of stars on the sides of these houses for veterans, gold stars for the ones who were dead.
We passed by signs that said Pray for America. And cabins for United Bible Camp.
A pile of rusted-out junk cars was next to an old building that hadn’t, it looked, been used in years and years, all of it standing back from the road.
* * *
—
I said, “If I were a man who wanted to kill a young girl and get rid of her body and get away with it, this is where I’d do it and dump her, Jesus.”
William glanced over at me. His mustache moved as he smiled, and he put his hand briefly on my knee. “Oh Lucy,” he said.
* * *
—
But as soon as I had said that—about if I were a man who wanted to get rid of a young girl’s body—I realized this:
That driving down this road and seeing the falling-down houses and the grass by the side of the road and no people around, I had an almost-memory of driving with my father in his truck and me in the passenger seat next to him as a very young child, the window open and my hair blowing in the wind, only the two of us—where would we have been going? But the memory was not one of the dismalness of my childhood. Instead, something in me moved deep, deep down and I felt almost—what can I say that I felt?—but it was almost a feeling of freedom as I rode alongside my father in his old red Chevy truck. As I rode now next to William I almost wanted to say, with a sweep of my hand: These are my people. But they were not. I have never had a feeling of belonging to any group of people. Yet here I was in rural Maine and what had just come to me was an understanding, I think that is the only way I can put it, of these people in their houses, these few houses we passed by. It was an odd thing, but it was real, for a few moments I felt this: that I understood where I was. And even, also, that I loved the people we did not see who inhabited the few houses and who had their trucks in the front of these houses. This is what I almost felt. This is what I felt.
But I did not tell that to William, who came from Newton, Massachusetts, and not the poor town of Amgash, Illinois, as I had, and who had lived in New York City for so many years. I had lived in New York City for years as well, but William inhabited it—his tailored suits—and I felt that I had never inhabited New York as he had. Because I never had.
* * *
I thought then of a woman I had met at a party. It was the first—and only—party I had gone to since David died, and I had expected it to be ghastly. But a woman was there, she was maybe ten years younger than I am, I would say around fifty-three or so, and she told me how she had gone online to a site called Ijustwanttotalk.com and it had changed her life. She told me this with open-eyed forthrightness—there was a tiny little piece of eye makeup that was caught in the corner of her eye, which I kept wanting to tell her—although I never would have—and then I stopped wanting to tell her that and I just listened, it was fascinating. She had recently come back from a trip to Chicago where she met a man at the Drake Hotel—she said it was their third meeting—and they just talked. That’s what they did.
I asked her if she was afraid—I meant meeting a man—her age, she had said—and she said she had been at first, but when she saw him （and she placed her hand on my arm） she thought, Oh he is just so lonely! “And so was I,” she said, and nodded. She said they took turns talking: She had needed, she said, to talk about her mother-in-law, who had died years earlier, but she felt “unfinished with her,” and this fellow, his name was Nick, wanted to talk about his son, who was just never right, and his wife was sick of talking about it, and so when it was his turn to talk this is what he talked about. “And we just listen to each other,” she said. She took a sip from her sparkling water—no wine, I noticed—and nodded, and she kept nodding. “I don’t even know if his name is really Nick,” she said.