“What about Matt’s paintings?”
Her face changed; it became excited. “Aren’t they good? Did you see them? I think they’ve kept him going all these years. It’s all he would talk about when I saw him, I mean he would tell me which artist he had just been studying and—”
Bob said, “Did you ever meet any of his models?”
And her face changed again. She held up a finger, as though to indicate that she needed a moment to compose herself. And then she said, “Only once or twice, they would usually be leaving as I got there, just a very few times over the years would I see one. And my mother would scream at them, she hated them.”
“She would scream at them? Actually scream?”
“Yes. She called them terrible names, things I’m not even comfortable repeating to you. I think she hated the fact—I know she hated the fact—that they were posing for Matt in the nude. My mother hated anything to do with sex.”
“And how did the models respond to this?”
“They just ducked out of the house. I think they all just really needed the money.”
“Did you ever meet Ashley Munroe?”
And something in Diana’s face changed again, he could not say what, but she became very cold-looking, and she said, “No, I never did.”
—
Bob waited, his fingertips pressed together while his elbows rested on the arms of his chair, and he turned his chair to look out the window. Silence was in the room. Then Bob turned back and said, “I understand you’re a high school guidance counselor?”
Diana said, “Yes. Yes, I am. It’s been a great job for me.” She paused and then said, “I had a guidance counselor in high school. Do you remember Miss Donnelly?” Bob shook his head. “She was the first person in my life that I trusted. I asked her—before I told her—I asked her to keep the things I was going to tell her private. And she did. She changed my life, that woman, and so I became a guidance counselor as well.”
“What were the things you told her?” Bob asked, and Diana said quickly, “Private things.”
“Have you worked in the same school your whole career?”
She looked at him with a certain squint in her eyes and said, “Well, no, after my marriage ended—my first marriage—I moved and took a job elsewhere in Connecticut. I was there almost twenty years and retired recently. You know, Bob”—and her voice changed slightly to one of almost confusion—“it used to be that my work was aspirational, I mean my job was to inspire these kids, but in the last few years I began to realize that people, young people, see themselves as victims, and this was discouraging for me. They get stuck in that victim mode, and it became harder for me to help them. But still, I think I was a very good guidance counselor. There were times when I’d have one of my memory lapses, but people were very good to me.”
“Memory lapses?”
Diana gave a brief laugh and said, “It’s a condition I’ve had from childhood, but no big deal.”
Later Bob understood that he should have asked more about this condition, but he did not. Instead, he said, “Do you have any children, Diana?”
Without looking at him, shaking her head furiously at the floor, she said, “I would never, ever, ever have children.”
“Got it.” Bob said this without expression. And then he said, “Did your mother leave a will?”
Diana seemed surprised by this question. “I have no idea.” Her face changed just slightly again; again, she held up her finger as though to ask for a moment to collect herself, and then she said, “She had our father’s life insurance policy. But surely Matt told you this.”
“I’m asking you right now. What Matt tells me remains confidential at the moment.” He was surprised at the authority in his voice.
Diana nodded quickly. “Yes. Right. Well, she had that life insurance policy from my father. And since he died—oh, it must have been thirty-five years ago—I always assumed that’s what she and Matt were living on, because, you know, Matt quit his job at the ironworks some years ago.”
Bob sat quietly for a few moments. “When did your father leave the family?”
“When I was fifteen years old,” Diana said. “He simply walked out of the house one day and we never heard from him again until he showed up dead in North Carolina, where he had set up another accounting firm. I mean, I suppose my mother must have heard something, because he divorced her once he left. She never contested it.”
Bob said, “Was it hard for you, when he left?”
Again, her face seemed to twitch, and her voice got very low as she said, “I loathed him. But I was off to college two years later—scholarship, mind you, I went to Brown—and I seldom came home again.” She looked around, as though slightly frightened. And then she looked back at Bob and said, “So Matt was stuck with her his whole life.” She added, “Honestly, it was a prison sentence for him.”
“Are you married now, Diana?”
She glanced down, and her mouth moved before she spoke. It was evident to Bob that she was once more trying to compose herself, and it took her a few moments. “My second husband and I are divorced. We had been married almost twenty years.” Again, her face moved, her mouth turned down. She added, “My first husband was the friend of a psychiatrist I went to when I first lived outside of Hartford. I went to him for help. And— Well, anyway, I met this friend of his and we ended up getting married. I met my second husband when I was still married to my first, and meeting him, my second husband, felt like the greatest gift I had ever been given. I finally felt safe.”
“When was the divorce?” Bob asked.
She looked up at him. “Last August he announced that he was seeing another woman. She was a friend of mine—my best friend, if you can believe that. And the divorce went through last week.” Diana’s face was moving with great emotion as she spoke these words.
Bob felt very sorry for her then; he recalled Jim saying that she had seemed poignantly sad as she walked home from school so long ago, and he could see this now.
—
“We’ll stay in touch,” he told Diana. As she was leaving, she took his hand in both of hers and said, “Thank you, Bob. Thank you so, so much.”
*
As he left his office that day—he had waited to be sure that Diana Beach was out of the building—Bob bumped into Katherine Caskey on the street. “Bob!” she said, and he said, “Hello, Katherine.” She was holding a package and she set it down on the pavement to give him a hug, and Bob thought that this dear Katherine Caskey was the only person in Maine who hugged him every time she saw him. He had known her for years—she was a social worker in Shirley Falls, though, like Bob, she lived in Crosby—and yet it was not until the pandemic that they had discovered this really amazing coincidence: that right after Bob’s father had died, his mother had gone to a minister in West Annett, about an hour away, to see if he would officiate at the funeral; Bob’s mother, for whatever reasons, had been on the outs with the Congregational minister in Shirley Falls, and she had driven to the house of the minister in West Annett and asked him to do the funeral—and he had. But here was the thing: That day, as a small child, Bob had stared out the window of the car, he was in the backseat with Susie, and he had stared at the little girl who was standing on the porch of this Reverend Caskey’s house next to her father. He had stared and stared at her, and she had stared at him. And he had never, ever forgotten her.
It was Katherine Caskey. And it was during the pandemic, as they were eating outside one evening in Crosby with Katherine’s husband and William and Lucy, and also with Margaret, that Bob and Katherine put this together. She had never forgotten him either! Her mother had died the year before, and these two children had been locked in a stare that neither ever forgot. And that day, more than two years ago now, Katherine had said to Bob, “When this pandemic is over, I’m going to hug you so hard, I can’t tell you how hard I am going to hug you!” And so there was now this bond between them.
“How are you?” Katherine asked him now, picking the package up, and Bob said, unexpectedly, “I am so weary.”
And she looked at him. She was an attractive woman with auburn hair (it would have to be dyed, Bob understood this, she was a year older than Bob), and she said, “Tell me.”
