* * *
—
After a few hours of these thoughts I took another tablet and fell asleep.
* * *
In the morning William looked exhausted, although he told me that he had slept very well. He was wearing his jeans and the same navy blue T-shirt, and he looked old to me. We went down to the small restaurant for breakfast and we were the only people there. But the waitress did not come over to us for quite a while. She was a middle-aged woman with dyed black hair, and she kept putting silverware into a tray and then straightening up near the coffeepots, and William looked at me and mouthed, What the fuck? And I shrugged.
When the waitress, pulling out her small pad and her pen, came over to us and said, “What do you want,” I said I would like a bowl of Cheerios and a banana and she said, “We don’t have any cold cereal.”
So I ordered a scrambled egg and William ordered oatmeal and we sat there, kind of depressed but feeling okay, I think, I mean the place was not friendly and it felt strange. After a while the waitress brought us our food, and then I said, “Pillie, did you ever have an affair with Estelle? I mean did you ever have an affair while you were married to her?” I was surprised that I asked this, that I even wondered this.
And he stopped chewing the toast he had just bitten into, and then he swallowed and said, “An affair? No, I might have messed around a few times, but I never had an affair.”
“You messed around?” I asked.
“With Pam Carlson. But only because I’d known her for years and years, and we’d had a stupid thing way back, so it didn’t feel like anything—because it wasn’t.”
“Pam Carlson?” I said. “You mean that woman at your party?”
He glanced at me, chewing. “Yeah. You know, not a lot or anything. I mean, I knew her from years ago, back when she was married to Bob Burgess.”
“You were doing her then?”
“Oh, a little.”
He must not have realized as he said this that he had been married to me at the time. And then I saw it arrive on his face, I felt I saw this. He said, “Oh Lucy, what can I say?”
“Did you do her when you were married to Joanne?”
“Lucy, let’s not talk about this. But yeah, when I was married to Joanne. But with you—I told you at the time that there was more than one woman. And I also told you at the time that I was not in love with any of them.”
“Forget it,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.” And it did no longer matter to me, I thought. Even though a small sense of water lapping inside me took place as I said this. But I thought: So it wasn’t me that made him do this, if he did this while married to Joanne and also to Estelle? Then it wasn’t because of me? I could not believe this. And I thought about what he had said the night before about choice. He may not have had any choice about this part of him. How do I know?
I do not know.
* * *
—
“Let’s go,” William said, wiping his mustache when he was done with his oatmeal. He took a final swig from his coffee cup, but we had to wait again for the waitress to bring over the check. I watched to see if William would tip her generously, and he did, rolling his eyes at me as he pulled out the cash.
* * *
As we drove back to Houlton there was a lot of Queen Anne’s lace half dried out by the side of the road. The sun was full and bright. We passed fallen-down barns where there were rocks in the fields, and we passed by a few white cows. William pointed out to me a field of unharvested potatoes: They were green on top, and he told me that they sprayed the tops to prevent the nutrients from going into the green part so the nutrients would go into the potatoes themselves. I was impressed that he knew that, and I told him so, and he said nothing. Across the road from the field of potatoes was a brown field of harvested barley.
And then we did pass some harvested potato fields, they were all brown soil and dug under. I saw how the potato barns were often built into a small hill. On the outskirts of Houlton was a motel called the Scottish Inn; it was closed down and had weeds coming up between its rooms.
“William, your mother had trouble sleeping,” I said. This had just come to me now as I was recalling my night.
“She did?” He turned his head to look at me. He was wearing sunglasses; so was I.
“Yeah,” I said. “You don’t remember?”
“Not really.”
“It’s why she was so often napping on that couch of hers. She would say, Oh I just could not get to sleep last night.”