We are all sitting down to lunch as Sebastian explains it. I put out the good plates, the good napkins.
“I never knew how they did it,” Joe says. “How they came up with the money to get out of here.”
“So he’s going to be buried in our cemetery?” Emily is trying to find a place for this piece of information but there isn’t one.
Sebastian nods. “There weren’t many places he felt comfortable.”
Ken and Maisie are here now, their ashes together beneath a single stone. I miss them. I miss especially the summers when Maisie came when the girls were small, and how we would fill a bag with sandwiches and tramp up to the cemetery to sit and watch the clouds billow overhead. Sometimes we would go to sleep in sleeping bags and wake up in the middle of the night to see the stars. I try to imagine Duke up there with Maisie and Ken, and then I try to think if it matters at all. It doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It was always about the farm, and how he thought he knew what it would be like to stay here based on just that single day. We all wanted to stay, me and Pallace and Sebastian and Duke and Joe. The difference being that Joe was a Nelson, and he did the work to make sure that there would always be Nelsons, some Nelson or another, on this land. The difference being I had the good sense to marry him.
“Duke didn’t have any children?” Nell asks Sebastian. “I feel like movie stars always have children, you know, all those wives.”
Sebastian shakes his head. “He saw himself as a liability.”
“What do you mean?” Joe asks.
“He just thought it would be better not to extend the line.”
Emily is sitting next to Sebastian at the table. “Everybody’s got their reasons,” she says to him.
Then Sebastian puts his arm around my daughter’s shoulder like he’s known her forever. “I always thought so.”
“Were you ever in love with him?” Joe asks me that night when we’re in bed. We’ve put Sebastian in Emily’s room, in the twin bed beneath the sloping ceiling stickered with planets and stars. He had planned to stay in a hotel in town, he had booked a room, but the girls wore him down with their insistence. He was ours for now. They told him so.
“Duke?”
Joe snorts, shakes his head. “I know you were in love with Duke.”
“I was and then I very much was not.”
“Which doesn’t answer my question.”
“Was I in love with Sebastian?”
“The better brother.”
The better brother, indeed, but I was young, and it was years before I could see the merits of kindness. “No,” I say. “I wasn’t. I was in love with you.”
“You weren’t in love with me then.” But he pulls me to him and I put my head on his chest, I rest my head on the old blue T--shirt he wears to bed.
“But that’s how it feels now, looking back. Now I think that I was always in love with you.”
After Joe falls asleep I stay awake, thinking about Capri and the sea and the boat, about Duke, and the moon on the water. It’s a place I’ve never seen and still it comes to me so clearly, the light and the dark and the quiet sea, and how he jumps from the bow feet first, straight as a knife, and how the hundreds and thousands of tiny bubbles break across his skin, his hair floating up. He lets himself go deep before he starts kicking up towards the surface, and then he swims away, from the boat and from me and from Sebastian. I think how hard it must have been for him to not turn around but he kept swimming for as long as he could go. I let him go. Not that he was ever mine but still, I let him go.
Emily carries a shovel and Benny, that genius, brings a post--hole digger. Hazel follows along. Sebastian carries what is left of his brother. He picks a spot beneath the red oak and together we make a place for him. The daisies held on all summer, becoming a wild tangle over all the graves. Sebastian turns the canister into the hole and then packs in the dirt with his hands.
Joe says the lines about the earth straining away, and how every sixteen hours we all need to lie down and rest. After that we all sit down. Nell sits beside me, then stretches out, her head in my lap. We stay in the cemetery a long time, thinking of Duke, and then after a while we start talking about other things, mostly the wedding. Emily and Benny promise to choose a day, maybe the first of the month because that way they’ll always remember. “You’ll remember anyway,” Joe says to them and it’s true, at least as far as he’s concerned. He never forgets. We were married in the house that later became our home. Ken and Maisie were Unitarians and said that their minister could come the next day after lunch and they would stand up with us and we both said that would be fine, which was how we finally decided to get married. Joe, the greatest good fortune of my life, these three daughters, this farm, I see it all and hold it for as long as I can, my hand on Nell’s head. I think of Uncle Wallace holding my hand, and then of Duke again, his long hair gelled and pinned, waiting for me to walk off the stage so that we can change out of our costumes and swim in the dark. Like Uncle Wallace, Duke had three wives, and like Uncle Wallace, he wasn’t married to any of them in the end. For all his glory, he is left with us and the wide blue sky and the high white clouds and the straight lines of trees stretching out towards the dark woods and then, on the other side, the lake. We can see everything from here. I would say that there has never been such a beautiful day, but I say that all the time. I can see how right Duke was. He only needed such a little space. There is room up here for all of us, for me and for Joe and our daughters, for their partners and their children, because this is the thing about youth: You change your mind. Despite everything we know there may still be children living on this farm and someday they will be buried here with us. Sebastian can come, too. I will remember to tell him this later. Joe will tell him. Where would he be in the world except with his brother, here with us?
Author’s Note
I thank Thornton Wilder, who wrote the play that has been an enduring comfort, guide and inspiration throughout my life. If this novel has a goal, it is to turn the reader back to Our Town, and to all of Wilder’s work. Therein lies the joy.
A Note on the Author
ANN PATCHETT is the author of novels, works of nonfiction, and children’s books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women’s Prize in the U.K., and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. TIME magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. President Biden awarded her the National Humanities Medal in recognition of her contributions to American culture. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books.