Lois stopped talking. She put the glass of water back on the little table and then she placed her two hands together on her lap, and she kept looking at her hands. I kind of could not believe any of this was happening. In my pocketbook I heard my phone ping that I had received a text message and I pushed my elbow on it, as though to silence it, which was stupid. To the left of me I saw a photograph—not an old one, and it was larger than the others—of a young man at his graduation.
Lois looked back at me and she smiled that tiny smile again, which I could not tell was a friendly smile or not. A sliver of sunlight fell across her legs. She said, “Your mother-in-law introduced you to people by saying, This is Lucy, she comes from nothing. But do you know what she came from?”
I heard what Lois said, but it was like I had to run the sentence through my mind again. “Wait,” I said. “How—how do you know that? About my mother-in-law, that she would say that to people?”
Lois said simply, “You wrote it.”
“I wrote it?” I said.
“In your book—your memoir.” Lois pointed her finger to a bookshelf that was over to my right. Then she got up from her chair and walked over and brought out my memoir—it was a hardback—and as I watched her do this I saw that she had all my books lined up there; I was amazed.
“Do you know what Catherine Cole came from?” Lois asked again. She sat back in her chair; the book was balanced on the arm of the chair, and in a moment she placed it on the table near the glass of water.
I said, “Not really.”
“Well,” Lois said, with that tiny smile. “She came from less than nothing. She came from trash.” The word was like a slap across my face. That word is always like a slap across my face.
Lois swept a hand down across her leg and said, “The Coles were a troubled family from way back. They just weren’t much. Apparently Catherine’s mother was a drinker, and her father could never keep a job. There was talk that he was abusive as well—I mean to the kids and his wife. Who knows. Her brother died in prison at a rather young age, I don’t know what that was all about. But she was a pretty thing, young Catherine. I never saw a picture, of course, there were no pictures of her in the house. But they both told me that, my parents did. That she had been a pretty young thing. She went after my father.”
Lois looked around the room. “As you can see, my mother—Marilyn Smith—she did not come from trash.”
“No,” I said.
Then Lois said, “Go drive by the place, it’s been abandoned for years, but that’s where Catherine came from, out on Dixie Road.” She looked around and then got up and found a pen and she put her glasses back on and wrote down the address on a piece of paper. “It’s off the Haynesville Road.” She handed it to me and then she went back to her chair and sat down again, taking her glasses off. I thanked her. She said, as she seated herself again in the chair, “You should drive by the Trask farm, too, where I grew up. It’s on Drews Lake Road, right over the New Limerick line in Linneus.” She stood again and took back the piece of paper she had written on, and she put her glasses back on and wrote some more on it. “There you go,” she said, handing it back to me. “My brother ran the farm for years, and now his sons do. It’s all the same as it was. Nothing changes around here.” She sat down once more.
And I was glad she sat down again, it meant she did not want me to go yet.
* * *
—
When I asked her, Lois spoke of being Miss Potato Blossom Queen; she said it had been fun—“Oh, it was nice, you know…”—but she said it had not been the best part of her life. The best part of her life had been her husband, who came from Presque Isle and became a dentist. She herself had taught third grade for twenty-seven years, and she had raised four children. “Every one of them turned out right,” she said to me then. “Every single one of them. Not a drug problem with any of them, which is unusual these days.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said.
“Have you any grandchildren, Lucy?”
I said, “Not yet.”
Lois seemed to consider this. “No? Well, then you can’t know how amazing they are. There is nothing like a grandchild. Nothing in the world.”
A little bit, I didn’t care for that.
Lois said, “I have one grandchild who is autistic, and that is a challenge, I will say.”
“Oh, I’m sorry—” And I was.