“I guess maybe you’re right. On those trips to Grand Cayman I would hear her up in the night and I always wondered what she was doing.”
I looked out my window. We were passing by a field and also a line of trees that went along one side of the field. “I just remembered, that’s all. Oh, wait.” I turned to him and said, “When I was with her when she was sick, she would joke about not being able to sleep, and she said, It’s time for me to take some pills, and then when I went to get them at the pharmacy—or maybe it was her doctor who told me this, yes it was her doctor who told me that she’d been taking sleeping pills for years.”
“Great doctor-patient relationship,” William said sarcastically. “Was there no privacy?”
“No, there wasn’t. He liked me,” I said. And this had been true.
We drove along in silence for a while, and then I said, “Well, I just think it’s interesting. That she couldn’t sleep.”
“Lucy, you could never sleep,” William said, and I said, “I know that, you idiot, and I know why I couldn’t sleep—because of what I had come from—and I’m just saying maybe your mother couldn’t sleep because of what she had left behind her.”
“I get it,” William said, and he glanced at me, but with his sunglasses on I could not tell how he was looking at me.
After another few minutes of driving, William said, “Lucy, we still don’t know what we’re doing here.”
“Just keep going,” I said. “Let’s just drive by Lois Bubar’s house and then we can pull over and think about it.”
* * *
We drove into Houlton, and the brightness of the sun seemed to make the town sparkle—I mean the brick courthouse and the library, it all looked old-fashioned and very comfortable, as though the town had been comfortable with itself for many years, and the river sparkled too, and then we were on Pleasant Street.
* * *
—
And as we drove along Pleasant Street there was an older woman out in the front yard of the house we had seen the day before. She was bending over a low bush and she had a hat on and her hair was not short—I mean it was nice hair, sort of light brown, and it went to right above her shoulders—even though she was not young; but she had a youngish look to her as she bent over this bush; she was wearing a pair of brown pants that went above her ankles and she had a blue shirt on; she was thin but not skinny. I mean there was a litheness to her.
“William.” I almost yelled this. “That’s her.”
He slowed down slightly and she did not look up, and then he kept driving and pulled over on the next block. He took his sunglasses off and looked at me. “Oh God, Lucy.”
“That’s her!” I said, pointing back in the direction of her house.
William glanced back and then he looked forward again. He said, “We don’t know that’s her. Lois Bubar could be sitting in a wheelchair in that house getting beaten by her son.”
“Well, that’s true,” I said. And then I said, “William, let me go talk to her.”
William squinted at me. “What are you going to say?”
“I don’t know.” But I said, “Wait here, and let me just go talk to her.” I took my pocketbook with its long shoulder strap and started to get out of the car. Then I said, “Do you want to come with me?”
“No, you go,” William said. “I don’t know what to do.”
Neither did I.
* * *
As I walked up the sidewalk I saw that in the side yard of the house was a clothesline that had strings of small rope hooked up between four large wooden poles. And in the front yard was the hammock that looked new, strung up between two strong trees. As I said before, this house was the nicest one on the block, it had fresh paint of a dark blue color and red trim. The woman stayed bent over the bush—it was a rosebush, and there were some flattish yellow blossoms on it; she was intent on whatever she was doing—and then I saw that she had a small spray bottle in her hand. As I got closer I slowed down; I did not know what I was going to do.
And then she looked up at me and sort of smiled and went back to the bush. “Hello,” I said, stopping on the sidewalk. The bush was not far from the sidewalk. She looked at me again; she wore small glasses and I could see her eyes clearly, they were not big eyes but they seemed penetrating.
“Hello,” she said, and she stood up straight.
“That’s a pretty rosebush,” I said to her. I had stopped walking.