I know I’m never going to have again what I had before, but I want a partner. I’m losing hope rapidly, I admit.”
“I understand—” Kate started to sympathize with Corinne, which was pretty much what she always did. Their friendship had started out with her offering Corinne sympathy and support, and it had never changed.
Corinne said, “What do you understand?” She looked at Kate long enough for Kate to point to the windshield, reminding her that she was driving a car.
“I understand about wanting a partner,” Kate said, “but you’ve got to consider . . .” She hesitated a second and looked out the side window at the sidewalk streaming by, at rows of weathered and beaten-up houses. “It’s only been a few weeks,” she went on, “and what if he gets back together with Lucille? Then you’ll be this thing between them. You might even be the thing that pushes them to break up when they otherwise might have gotten back together.”
“And this is my responsibility?” Corinne said. “I’m responsible not just for what Dave does but for how what he does might affect his relationship with Lucille? Are you serious?”
“Oh, Corinne . . .”
“Oh, Corinne what?”
“Look,” Kate said, surprised by the snap of anger in her voice, “you’re being glib.”
“I am?”
“Yes.” Kate folded her hands in her lap and sat up straight, as if good posture and a ladylike demeanor might be useful in an argument. “I suppose ultimately we’re all responsible for our own behavior and for the consequences, but please—That’s not an excuse to do anything you want. It’s not.”
Corinne pulled the car to the side of the road and cut the engine. She looked as if she might be trying to keep herself from exploding.
Kate put her hand on Corinne’s knee. “Corinne,” she said, “I don’t mean to be judgmental. Honestly.”
They were parked in front of a row of tawdry-looking shops, one of which was a bookstore of some kind, with piles of old paperbacks stacked high behind a storefront window, the bright colors on the spines faded by sunlight. Two girls walked past and glanced into the car, then looked at each other as if to say, What’s that about?
Corinne said, “If I waited around in this town for the right man—” She looked hard at Kate, as if she were holding herself back from what she had intended to say.
Kate said, “Go ahead. If you waited around, what?”
“I’d have to live the kind of life you’ve been living for the past four years, which, I have to tell you, Kate, looks emptier and lonelier and just plain sadder than I could bear. I’d rather drown myself, I swear. I’m sorry, but Jesus—”
“You think it’s that bad?” Kate looked away and laughed quietly to herself.
“It’s not?” Corinne said. “I’m your only friend, and I’m away half the year. The only thing you ever talk about with any real interest is Avery. Avery this, Avery that. Plus you’re only forty-five, and you haven’t had sex in years.”
“I hardly miss it,” Kate said.
“Bullshit.”
“Not everyone has the same—”
“Bullshit.”
Kate said evenly, “You don’t know as much about me as you think you do.”
“I’ll tell you what I do know,” Corinne said. Then she stopped again, her lips pressed together.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Just say it, please. What do you think you know?”
Angrily, as if she needed the anger to get it out, Corinne said, “I know you’re in love with your brother-in-law. When I’ve seen you two together alone, it’s as obvious as daylight.”
Kate said, “You’re just wrong about that, Corinne.” When Corinne was quiet, she added, “The thing I have with Hank is about Tim. It’s not about us. It’s not like what you’re thinking.”
“You’re lying.” Corinne shook her head, as if to say she were disappointed that they couldn’t talk about this. “I’ll tell you what else,” she said softly, “as long as we’ve gone this far: if he left that bitch of a wife of his, and if you both had the nerve to face all the shit you’d have to face to do it, you two could be happy together.”
Kate pointed to the ignition. “Please take me home,” she said. “You’re out of your mind. This is my brother-in-law you’re talking about.”
“Sure,” Corinne said, and started the car. “Whatever.”
For the remainder of the ride, Corinne kept her eyes on the road. Kate watched houses pass by for a while before closing her eyes and laying her head back against the headrest. When they finally arrived at her house, a tire scraping against the curb as Corinne pulled over, Kate took her time draping her handbag over her shoulder. “Corinne,” she said, “you’re all wrong about this, and I just hope to God it’s not something you’re repeating to others.”
“The thing with Dave Price,” Corinne said, “I’m not letting that pass because of what people might say. You make your choices. I’ll make mine.”
Kate looked up the driveway at her house, at the sea-blue aluminum siding that Tim and Hank had put up together, sweating through one of the hottest days of that summer. She wanted to say something more to Corinne, to make her promise she wouldn’t go around talking about her and Hank, but she couldn’t find the words, and she was angry enough that she could feel her heart bumping against her chest and a tight anxious knot in her throat. Finally she just got out of the car without even looking back at Corinne.
Near the house, she stopped to pull some weeds from a flower box at the foot of the three steps to the front door. The neighborhood was quiet, as usual, and when she looked up, there wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere on the street or a sound to be heard other than the occasional chirping of crickets or the intermittent call of a bird.
Tim’s funeral had been a grim, miserable, weekday-morning affair, and the memory of it, even now, four years later, with his wife and son in the car as he drove to the cemetery—even now there were moments so vivid that Hank’s eyes might well up with one thought and his cheeks might burn with another. He had been a pallbearer, with all his brothers, and he had fainted carrying the casket down the church steps on the way to a black hearse. He still had a scar where he’d gashed his head on the stone steps. He’d been told that he fell over suddenly, smacked his head hard on the edge of a step, and rolled all the way to the street with half his family scurrying after him.
But he didn’t remember any of that. What he remembered was the heavy weight of the casket, the way the hardwood carrying pole felt in the tight grip of his hand, the way, at the top of the church steps, his knees got watery and the corners of his vision went green and red and fluttery as he looked down at the black hearse and the long line of cars and the milling crowd of family dressed in black—and the realization that Timmy was dead and they were about to put him in the ground came over him along with something like shock, as if he’d just been told. That moment when a fully formed sentence emerged, Timmy is dead—that moment he remembered. He had been at his mother’s house, in the kitchen having a cup of coffee with her, when the phone rang and she answered, and his father, sensitive as always, gave her the news over the phone. She leaned back against the wall and slid down it and landed with her legs at a right angle to her body, the phone clutched to her chest, her face half dazed, half anguished. That instant on the church steps was like that, like he had just been given the news bluntly, and it brought him down.
Keith bolted out the rear door once they arrived. They were supposed to park in the lot and walk to the grave, but Sherwood Memorial was a quiet country cemetery in the shadow