4
And so winter was here once again in Maine, the short days. Darker and darker it got, and even if the sun shone—many days it did not—the sun still did not climb high in the sky, and there was sometimes a sense of compression for Bob Burgess, of being squeezed. It was cold when you woke up in the morning, even colder when you stepped outside. In these past fifteen years Bob had gotten used again to the Maine winters after moving back from New York City and marrying Margaret. But he felt his heart flicker at times with a kind of anxiety now, and he thought it was the aftereffect of the pandemic—which was not entirely over—and also the state of the world.
Bob had been a criminal defense lawyer, as we have said, and every now and then he did still take a case in Shirley Falls, where he had grown up, forty-five minutes away from Crosby, and he did still like sitting in his office there, then going to the jail to speak to his defendants who needed him, although he found a disquiet to the heroin addicts who were facing prison instead of getting the help they needed. When Bob thought about the state of the country these days, he sometimes had the image of a huge tractor trailer rumbling down the highway and the wheels, one by one, falling off.
—
One day as Bob sat in his office—the old radiator in the corner was making knocking sounds—he received a phone call from Olive Kitteridge. “I just thought you should know, in case you take that case, that I knew a person who knew that family back when I was square dancing.”
“What family? What case?” Bob asked.
“That Matthew Beach case. If he did it, and I’m sure he did, I don’t know that I entirely blame him.”
Bob sat back in his chair. “I’m not taking the case. There is no case, as far as I know. But my sister Susan said the same thing, that she wouldn’t blame him. Why do you say that?”
“Crazy, crazy, crazy things in that family. But if there’s no case, fine. Bye now.” And Olive Kitteridge hung up.
Bob looked out the window at the street below. There was very little sun today, and the street had only the slight flickering of snow that had come the night before. Bob saw a man, also a lawyer, walking out of the courthouse. And then Bob leaned back in his chair and called his older brother, Jim, in New York City. Jim had been a very successful criminal defense attorney, had once been known all around the country. This was way back in the day. “Oh, Matthew’s guilty,” Jim said now, after Bob mentioned the situation, and Bob said, “I know, I know. I honestly don’t even care.”
“You don’t care? When did little Bobby Burgess ever not care?” Jim asked.
Bob closed his eyes briefly; he understood that nothing would change this attitude of Jim’s that Jim had tossed upon him all their lives, and Bob accepted that.
“What’s the motive, though?” Bob asked, sitting up straight. Only on some tiny conscious level did Bob understand that he was talking about a child killing a parent, what he had always thought he had done. Although Jim, years ago now, had confessed that he, Jim, had been the one who had played with the gearshift and caused the car to roll down the hill and over their father. But they had never spoken of it since; they were both from Maine, and all their years of living in New York City would not change that; people from Maine did not always like to talk of these things.
“Because he was driven crazy by her? Batshit crazy? She was awful,” Jim said.
“Oh, I know.” Bob looked out his window again. He was on the eighth floor of this building in Shirley Falls, and he saw a couple walking by; they appeared to be drunk. “But what exactly was so awful about her? I know she scared us to death, but how exactly? I’ve tried and I can’t remember.” Bob turned his chair away from the window.
Jim said, “Just the nastiest woman in the world. When I was in elementary school, we called her Beach Ball because she was round, and then in junior high school she became Bitch Ball because she was so mean. But don’t you remember how she’d be standing there in the cafeteria, slopping out those mashed potatoes onto those pale green plastic plates, and she would just glare at some kid who was sort of recalcitrant about taking them and she’d say, ‘You just be goddamn glad you have this food!’ One time she asked that girl, I can’t remember her name, ‘Where’d you get that pig face of yours?’ ”
Bob said, “Oh yeah. I just remembered when she stopped the whole line because some guy wouldn’t say thank you to her. Everyone had to wait, and she looked so furious at this kid, she held out this huge spoon like she was going to smack him with it, and she said, almost spitting, ‘Say thank you,’ and the kid wouldn’t, and God it got really scary. Finally the kid murmured thank you, and she threw a spoonful of hot broccoli at him.”
Jim said, “Tommy—remember the older brother, Tommy?”
“No,” said Bob.
“Well, he was in my class, and he was really a prick. Very, very serious, and a prick.”
“He’s a psychiatrist now,” Bob said, and Jim said he knew that, he had seen it in the paper, and Bob said, “You’re still reading the Shirley Falls Journal?”
“Oh sure, online, every day,” Jim said, and for Bob—well, a real sense of warmth moved through him, that his brother, who lived so differently in New York City, was still reading the daily paper from their hometown.
“Diana was always kind of touching to me,” Jim said. And Bob said, “How did you know her? She was in Susie’s and my class.”
And Jim said, “Yeah, I know. But sometimes I’d see her walking home and there was always something sort of sweetly sad about her. Look, I have to run. Come down here and see us soon, we miss you. Helen misses you.”
And oh, that made Bob so happy, he just adored his older brother; this had been true Bob’s whole life no matter the things Jim said to him. And he loved his sister-in-law, Helen.
Bob said, “I’ll come in two weeks when Lucy Barton goes to New York. She’s taken a little studio apartment there in the city and she visits her daughters in New Haven, she has that little grandson now.”
“You’re going to stay with Lucy Barton?” Jim asked, and Bob said, “No, knucklehead, I’m going to stay with you guys.” “Great,” Jim said. “We’ll be glad to see you.” So Bob had that to look forward to.
—
But in a way, these days were (sometimes) still a little bit hard for Bob. He could read books—and he did. But he did not read with the enthusiasm he had read with before the pandemic, and sometimes he wondered if his mind was going. He noticed that he did not shower as often as he used to. But his wife said nothing about that, she did not seem to notice. Margaret had many things going on with her church now that the pandemic— Well, it was not over, but it was maybe as over as it was ever going to be.
Margaret often went to her study at the church first thing in the morning and did not come home until five o’clock. Or she might go to Shirley Falls to help with the immigrant community there, which is what she had been doing when she first met Bob. But Bob, except for his walks with Lucy Barton, was (sometimes) just a little bit struggling. Although there were people in Crosby he did chores for, and he volunteered at the food pantry in town two afternoons a week and was also on the board of the Hatfield Homeless Shelter, though that did not require as much time as the food pantry did.
And then Jim called a week later and asked Bob not to come to New York after all. When Bob asked why, his brother paused and said, “Helen and I are going on a trip. Not sure where.”
Bob felt his insides drop in a way that was familiar to him. “Why?” he asked again.
Jim said, “Why? Because we are. That’s why.”
5
Christmas began even before Thanksgiving, the stores were suddenly filled with carols playing, large plastic Santa Clauses appeared on the front lawns of many houses, the town itself lit the big spruce tree in the middle of the park, and there were lights strung along Main Street from one lamppost to another, although there had been only sprinklings of snow. But the week before Christmas there was a huge snowstorm, and the plows went out all through the night and school was canceled and people seemed happy to have the mounds of clean white puffy snow everywhere. But the season was still hard on certain folks: those who had no family, those who had family they did not like and had to see, those with very little money and then the stress of running around at the last minute making sure there were enough things under the tree.
Bob Burgess had a quiet reaction to the holiday season: It made him sad. And this, he had come to (privately) realize, was because as a young boy he had said to his mother one day, with innocence, “I don’t really like Christmas,” and his mother had looked at him with abrupt anger, and then she had started to cry. The child-Bob was puzzled by this, and worried, and he had walked away. But he never forgot it, and as he got older he realized that Christmases, quite naturally, would have been hard for his mother: She had very little money and also her husband was gone. That Bob had spoken those words to her remained a thumbprint pressed deeply into his soul of real sorrow and regret.
He had told this story to Margaret when they first met, he had also told his first wife, Pam Carlson, and they were both kind about it, but it was one of Bob’s adult understandings: People did not care, except for maybe one minute. It was not their fault, most just could not really care past their own experiences.
—
But Margaret enjoyed Christmas: She had her various services, and people were glad to come to them in person after so many months of Zoom services, though even now a few showed up with masks. Margaret wore a mask except when she took it off to give the homily. Bob sat in the third-row pew and his stomach grumbled. Lucy Barton and her ex-husband, William, showed up at the Christmas Eve service and they came back to Bob and Margaret’s house afterward for a late drink.
Margaret’s sermon had been on charity. “Never in the history of Crosby, Maine, have so many people lined up at the food pantry for food. And never in the history of Crosby have we had so many people without homes,” she had said.
