It was Chrissy who said, wiping her mouth with her napkin, “It surprised you that he said that?”
“At the time it did. A little bit,” I answered.
Chrissy said, “She’s his half-sister who didn’t even want to meet him.” Then Chrissy added, “But Dad can be kind of juvenile. I mean I sort of understand why she wouldn’t want to meet him.”
“Well, she didn’t know that he can be—juvenile,” I said.
“Oh, I know, I know—” Chrissy nodded quickly. “That’s not really what I meant.”
Becka said, “But she’s his half-sister, that would be the main reason to meet him.”
Chrissy stared into space for a moment, and then she said to Becka, “Think how you would feel if Bridget came to us when we were seventy years old and said— Well, what if she showed up out of the blue and we had never met her and she said how wonderful Dad had been as a father?”
“I’m not following you,” Becka said.
But I felt I understood. There was something about the jealousy that children feel.
* * *
—
I wanted to text William to say: Stop being a dickwad to the girls.
But I did not.
* * *
—
There was, for me, a sense of sadness as I said goodbye to them; we hugged as we always do, and we told each other we loved each other.
* * *
—
As I walked home that day I thought how the girls had taken Bridget to tea in a hotel. Given who Bridget was, given who they all were, this was not especially surprising, but I thought of that tiny house I had come from—oh, I can’t really explain what I thought! But it was very strange to think that the children I had were already—in just one generation—so different, so very different, from me and what I had come from. And from what Catherine had come from as well. I don’t know why this came to me with such force at that moment, but it did.
* * *
—
And then for some reason I suddenly imagined Catherine at the age she would have been now. It made me gasp inside to think of her as that old; it made me deeply sad, the way we get sad to imagine our children very old, the idea of their vibrant powerful faces gone pale and papery, their limbs stiff, their time over, and our not being there to help them— （Unthinkable, but this will happen.）
* * *
I have wondered why it was that as soon as Catherine died, I wanted my own name back. In my memory, there is a sense of my rejecting her, a sense that she had been too much in our marriage. But it was a long time ago, and I do not really know. But thinking this, it came to me that William had a dream after she died that he was sitting in the front seat of a car with her and I was in the backseat, and she kept banging into the cars ahead of her.
Oh Catherine, I thought—
When I was taking care of her, I liked it. I mean I liked taking care of her. I felt there was an easy intimacy between us. I think there was.
But after she died, her best friend—who did not come to see her once ever during the last two months of her illness—said to me, “Catherine really liked you, Lucy.” Then she said, “I mean she knew…Well, you know, she understood there were…Well,” and the woman tossed a hand in the air, “she really liked you.” I did not ask her to explain what she meant, it was not my nature to do so. I just said, “I liked her too. I loved her.” But I felt—and I still feel—a tiny sting of betrayal by Catherine. She had said something （almost?） negative about me to her friend, and I was surprised and sort of hurt.
* * *
—
But here is an odd thing: After she died I remember thinking, At least now I can buy my own clothes, and soon after she died I went and bought myself a nightgown.
* * *
I called William after two weeks of being home. I called him to see how he was doing, and he said, “Oh Lucy. I’m just getting along.” It was clear to me he did not want to talk— Perhaps he was off to meet a new Pam Carlson? Or even the real Pam Carlson?— This was quite likely.
But I felt just awful. I felt as I had when David died, I had never stopped feeling that, but to be with William in Maine had been a distraction, I saw this now. A mere distraction from the pain of losing my dearly beloved husband.
Except he was dead and William was not.
And here is the truth: Every night as I rounded the corner to the place I lived in, after going to the store for groceries or after having seen a friend, I pictured William sitting in a chair in the lobby of the building I lived in, rising slowly, and saying, “Hi, Lucy.” I pictured this again and again, thinking, He will come back to me.