“Maybe nothing,” I said. “I told you we came here to investigate my husband’s—my former husband’s—well, his roots, I guess you would say.”
Lois smiled a tiny smile, I could not tell if it was friendly or not. She said, “Is he up here looking for relatives?”
I said, with a kind of small defeated sigh, “Yes.”
“So your former husband has come looking for me.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“And he’s out in the car right now.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Because he’s afraid,” she said.
I felt defensive of William then, and also a little afraid myself. “He’s not sure—”
“Listen, Lucy.” Lois Bubar picked up her water glass and sipped from it again and placed it again very carefully down on the table. “I know why you’re here. I even knew you were here in town yesterday, you and your husband were at the library. This is a small town, but you come from one, so you must know what that’s like. People talk.”
And I wanted to say No, because I lived in the middle of fields and hardly ever saw the town I lived in and no one in the town was ever nice to us, but I did not say this. So I said nothing.
* * *
—
And then Lois Bubar told me this:
* * *
—
“I have had a very good life.” She held up her index finger and pointed it at me almost laconically. “I have had a very, very good life. So you be sure to tell your former husband that.” She paused, looking around the room, and then she looked back at me. Her face seemed to me to be slightly guarded and even—just a little bit—bored. Behind her was wallpaper with flowers on it; there was a tiny water streak down it.
She said, “Let’s just go straight to the point.” Lois glanced up at the ceiling for a moment and then she spoke: “When I was eight years old my parents—together—they both sat me down and told me this, that my mother—well, they told me that day that I had had a different mother who had given birth to me. But they made it very clear that she was not my mother. My mother was the woman who raised me from the time I was a year old. That was my mother, she was brought up in this house”—Lois moved her hand slightly to include the living room—“and she was a wonderful woman. And my mother was so good as she told me this, and my father was too—he held me against him, I remember that. We were sitting on a couch and he had his arm all the way around me while they had this conversation with me. Looking back, I think they thought I was getting old enough to know this and that there were people in town who knew it, so they had better tell me before I found out from someone else. I was confused, the way any kid would be. But I didn’t think it mattered.
“Because it didn’t matter. I had two parents who loved me very much and I had three younger brothers and they were all loved as well. I couldn’t have had a better mother and father, I really couldn’t have.”
* * *
—
Watching her, I felt she was telling the truth. There was something about her that seemed deeply—almost fundamentally—comfortable inside herself, the way I think a person is when they have been loved by their parents.
* * *
—
Lois took another sip from her water glass.
“As time went by, as I got a little older, I started to ask some questions, and they told me about the woman, her maiden name was Catherine Cole, said she had run off with a prisoner from Germany. She walked out of the house one day, walked right out, it was November, and she took a train and she never came back. I was not yet a year old. My father knew about the German, but he thought it was over by then. Catherine was very young when she had married my father, just eighteen, he was ten years older, and he said, he always implied, that she had married him to get out of her house.” Lois paused and then she said, “My mother’s name was Marilyn Smith—” She tapped the table next to her with her finger. “She was raised in this house and everyone knew that she and my father belonged together. They had been going together, and then they had a little spat of some kind and in swooped Catherine Cole—” Lois made a small gesture of her arms swooping upward; the water in the glass sloshed gently. “And my father married her. But Marilyn was right there for my father when Catherine left me—and him. She came over every day starting right after Catherine left, then they married when I was two. I suspect they wanted to look respectable, so they waited that year to marry. And of course the divorce had to go through.”