But his sister’s car was suddenly blinking its light, slowing down, and Vicky pulled the car over into the breakdown lane. Pete had to step on the brakes quickly, and even then he went past his sister, but he pulled the car over in front of her.
As he stepped out of the car a truck went by him so quickly that a storm of air blasted over him. Lucy was getting out of the passenger side of Vicky’s car, and she ran up to him. “I’m okay, Pete,” she said; her eyes seemed smaller to him. She threw her arms around him briefly, and her head bumped his chin. “Thank you with all my heart,” she said. “Now you go, I can drive myself into the city.”
“You sure?” He felt confusion and some terror as another truck went by so fast, so close. “Lucy, be careful.”
Lucy said, “I love you, Pete,” and then she was gone, getting into her white rental car, and he waited while he saw her adjust the seat up. She stuck her head out of the open window. “Go, go,” she shouted, waving her arm. Then she shouted something else, and Pete walked partway back to her. “Tell Vicky to remember about Anna-Marie, tell her, Pete!”
So he waved at her, and then turned back and got into Vicky’s car, the seat slightly warm from where Lucy had been sitting. On the floor were empty soda cans, and he had to move his feet around them. Pete and Vicky followed Lucy until they came to the next exit, then they turned off to head back. In Pete’s mind was the image of Lucy’s white car going down the highway into the city. He felt stunned.
In a few minutes, when they were headed back on the right road, Vicky said, “Okay. Well, here’s the story.” She glanced over at Pete as she drove. “Lucy is coo-coo.”
“Seriously?”
“She’s completely coo-coo. She kept crying and saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and I finally said, Lucy, stop being sorry, it’s okay. And she kept saying, No, it was wrong of me to come, it was wrong of me to leave, it was all wrong of me, and I said, Lucy, stop this right now. You got the hell out, and you’ve made a life, stay out, it’s okay. She wouldn’t stop crying, Pete. It was a little scary. I said, Why don’t you give your husband a call? And she said he was at rehearsal or something and she’d speak to him later, and I said, Well, try one of your girls, and she said, Oh no, she couldn’t let her girls hear her like this.”
Pete stared at the glove compartment; there were streaks down it, like coffee had been spilled there long ago. “Wow,” he said. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Nothing.” Vicky passed a car, pulled back in to the lane. “Anyway, she took a pill, and then said how panic attacks were— I can’t remember what she said, but she calmed down and made me pull over so we wouldn’t have to drive into the city. But, Pete, that was sad. She’s so small, and she’s— You see her online and—” Vicky fell silent. She sat up straighter and drove with one hand; the other hand was touching her chin; her elbow was on the armrest next to her. They drove along for quite a while.
Finally Vicky said, looking straight ahead at the road, “She’s not coo-coo, Pete. She just couldn’t stand being back here. It was too hard for her.”
On his trips to the soup kitchen in Carlisle with the Guptills, Pete had noticed how they were affectionate toward each other; Shirley would often put her hand on Tommy’s arm as he drove the car. Pete wondered about this, what it would be like to be that free, to touch people so freely. He would have liked—only not really—to put his own hand on his sister’s arm right now, this sister who had put on lipstick to see the famous Lucy. Instead he sat quietly next to her.
Eventually Vicky said, “I never should have mentioned that stuff from the past.”
“No, Vicky. How would you know? And I said the stuff about the clothes.”
As they drove, the sun was glaring to their side. They passed once again the barns with the American flags painted on them, only they were on the other side of them now, and Pete saw once again, from across the road, the huge John Deere place with all its green and yellow machines. He felt awfully safe sitting next to Vicky. He kept wondering how he could tell her this, and he finally said, “Vicky, you’re great.”
She made a sound of disgust and glanced at him, and he said, “No, really, you are. Lucy said to remind you of the Anne-Marie woman.”
“Anna-Marie.” Then Vicky said, “What did she mean by that?”
“I think she meant that you were great too, that’s what I think she was saying.” Pete moved his feet around the cans that were on the floor there.
They drove in silence for many miles. From the corner of his eye, he watched his sister; he thought she was a good driver. He liked her bulkiness, the way she filled her seat and drove with such authority. He wished he could tell her this; he wished he could say something more than that she was great. He finally said, “Vicky, we didn’t turn out so bad, you know.”
She glanced at him and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right,” she said. Then she said, “Well, we’re not out there murdering people, if that’s what you mean.” She gave a brief laugh that seemed to rise up from the deepest part of herself.
Pete wished the ride could go on forever. He wished he could sit there next to his sister while they drove and drove.
But he recognized where they were now; the roads were narrowing. He saw the top of a maple tree that had started to turn pink; he saw the fields that surrounded the Pedersons’ barn. And then finally they were back; Vicky pulled in to the road, and then the driveway, and there in front of them was the tired little house with its blinds open. Vicky turned the car off. After a moment, Pete said, “Hey, Vicky, do you want that rug?”
Vicky pushed her glasses up her nose with a finger placed in the middle of them. “Sure, why not?” she said. But she made no move to get out of the car, and so they gazed at the house, in silence, and sat.
Dottie’s Bed & Breakfast
They were from the East, and their name was Small.
This Dottie always remembered, because the husband was so big, and he wore a look of fixed irritation that must have come, at least partly, Dottie imagined, from a lifetime of responding to comments regarding his name. Which of course Dottie took no part in—not one bit!—at all. Mrs. Small had made the reservation over the telephone, so Dottie knew they weren’t young. Not only Mrs. Small’s voice told her this, but most people did things online now. Dottie was, in fact, a bit older than Mrs. Small, but Dottie had taken to the Internet like a paddlefish waiting for water; she was sorry it hadn’t arrived when she was a younger woman, she was certain she could have been successful at something that made use of her mind more than the renting out of rooms for these past many years. She could have been rich! But Dottie was not a woman to complain, having been taught by her decent Aunt Edna one summer—it seemed like a hundred years ago, and practically was—that a complaining woman was like pushing dirt beneath the fingernails of God, and this was an image Dottie had never been able to fully dislodge. Dottie was a tiny woman, prim, with the good skin of her Midwestern ancestors, and all things considered—and there were many things to consider—she appeared—to herself and to others—to do just fine. In the event, the reservation was made for Mr. and Mrs. Small, and two weeks later a tall—big—white-haired man stepped through the door and said, “We have a reservation for Dr. Richard Small.” Dr. Small’s announcement was apparently large enough to include his wife, who came in right behind him, without any mention of her at all.
Standing at the front desk, he did the registering with terrible penmanship, irritation oozing out of him, while Mrs. Small—who was very thin and had a look of general nervousness about her—glanced politely around the lounge, and then became interested in the old photographs of the theater that were on the wall, and she seemed to especially like a photograph of the library that was hanging near them. The photo showed the library back in 1940 looking brick-and-ivy old-fashioned, so Dottie had a sense about this woman—and her husband!—right away. Of course, in Dottie’s business she would have a sense about people right away. Sometimes of course Dottie had been very wrong.
With the Smalls she was not wrong: Dr. Small complained immediately about the room having no luggage rack for him to place his suitcase on, and naturally Dottie did not say that’s what happens when you have your wife call and ask for the cheapest room. Instead she said she had another room at the end of the hall that might serve them better; it was the Bunny Rabbit Room—that’s what she called it due to the fact that in the past she’d had a habit of collecting stuffed toy bunnies. Her husband had given her one each holiday, and friends had too, so later Dottie put them all in one room, and, really, people went crazy for them sometimes. Women did. And gay men. They got quite imaginative with all those bunnies around, having them talking in different voices and so forth. Dottie used to have a Comment Book until people wrote things about seeing ghosts in the Bunny Rabbit Room and other foolishness. But the Bunny Rabbit Room had two beds and a low chest on which Dr. Small could place his suitcase, and that evening Dottie heard through the walls a constant thin-voiced monologue coming from Mrs. Small, with only once or twice a short answer from her husband. Dottie could not make out many words, but she understood that he was here for the cardiology convention and was not staying in the large hotel in town where the meeting was taking place, most likely, Dottie thought, because he was getting old and was no longer really respected. And he could not stand that, could not put up with seeing younger colleagues laughing together in the evenings, and so he had come here, to Dottie’s Bed & Breakfast, where he could be not noticeably unimportant. “A physician,” she imagined him saying at breakfast, because this is what all male doctors said when they didn’t want you to think they were academics, to whom, Dottie had come to understand, physicians seemed to feel very superior. Dottie didn’t care one way or another, anymore, whom anyone felt superior to, but in this business you did notice things; even if you kept your eyes squeezed shut, you would still notice things in this business. And the time of Dr. Small, Dottie thought, his own personal history in time, his own career, had passed, and he couldn’t stand it. She was sure he made huge fusses about computerized records, the cost of the practice, the fact that he no longer made as much money. Well, she did not feel sorry for him.
But his wife surprised her.
When Dottie saw couples like Mr. and Mrs. Small, she was sometimes comforted that her painful divorce years earlier had at least prevented her from becoming a Mrs. Small—in other words, a nervous, slightly whiny woman whose husband ignored her and so naturally made her more anxious. This you saw all the time. And when Dottie saw it, she was reminded that almost always—oddly, she thought it was odd—she seemed a stronger person without her husband, even though she missed him every day.
But in fact, Mrs. Small, during breakfast—her husband was not talking to her but instead looking through a binder that perhaps contained his materials for the day—broke into song. She had been glancing through a stack of old theater programs Dottie kept in a basket, and while she was waiting for her toast she called out, “Oh, I love that Gilbert and Sullivan,” and she started singing a chorus from H.M.S. Pinafore—with two other guests sitting a table away. Dottie thought Dr. Small would stop her, but he sang a few bars with her and that warmed Dottie’s heart. It did, though she was always nervous, naturally, about the comfort of other guests, but the others didn’t seem to mind, or even really to notice, people being, as Dottie knew, mostly very involved with themselves.
Oatmeal for Dr. Small and whole wheat toast for his wife—who Dottie noticed was wearing all black—and in a few minutes his wife said, “Richard, look. Annie Appleby! Look, it says right here, she was Martha Cratchit in A Christmas Carol, eight years ago. Look.” She gave the program a little punch with her finger, then he took the program from her.
“Everything all right then?” Dottie asked, placing the food on the table. Almost in a British way, she liked to say that, though Dottie had never been to England in her life.
Mrs. Small’s eyes were shiny as she turned to Dottie. “Annie Appleby used to be a friend of ours. Well, she was someone we knew. She was someone we—” Her husband cut her off with a subtle gesture of the sort that long-married couples can use with each other, and they finished their breakfast in silence.
Midmorning they left the house together. They left the house, which is what everyone who came there did: leave. Dottie was always reminded that people were there to visit others, or—as in the case of the Smalls—to be part of their business world, or, frequently, to see their children at the college. Whatever it was, they were connected to something in the little city of Jennisberg, Illinois; they stepped out into the street with a purpose. The big oak door closing, accentuating this, the muffling of voices the moment they were on the front porch, the inescapable whisper of abandonment—well, that was part of the business too.
Mrs. Small came back alone right after lunch. She undid the scarf from around her neck and dallied a bit in the lounge, looking at the old photos on the wall, while Dottie worked behind the desk. “I’m Shelly,” said Mrs. Small. “I don’t know if I properly introduced myself before.” Dottie said it was lovely having her stay, and continued with her business. People sometimes got confused in a B&B, not knowing how friendly they should be, and Dottie understood this; she tried to give allowances. In Dottie’s youth she had been extremely poor, and for many years afterward—more than needed to be—whenever she went into a store, whether a dress shop or the butcher’s or a pastry shop or a department store, she expected to be watched and then asked to leave. Dottie held this indignity dear; anyone who came into her B&B was never to feel that way. And Shelly Small, who gave no indication of having suffered poverty of any kind—though of course one never knew—was really very nervous; Dottie was aware of that. In a few minutes Shelly brought up the actress Annie Appleby again. As she stood looking at the photo of the theater, Shelly said to Dottie, but without looking at Dottie, “I think about Annie a lot. Much more than I need to, let’s just say that.” She gave Dottie a quick smile then, and what passed over her face was a look that caused Dottie to feel for a moment as if a small fish had swum through her stomach, a feeling she recognized as a symptom of—well, almost pity, though pity was a confusing thing, and Dottie would hate for people to pity her, as she knew had been done in the past.
Dottie suddenly asked the woman if she would like a cup of tea, and Shelly said, “Oh, wouldn’t that be nice,” and so they sat in the living room, which was really the lounge. Shelly Small didn’t take more than one sip of the tea; that was just a prop, as they would say in the world of theater, just a piece of furniture, so to speak, allowing her to sit in Dottie’s house on that autumn day while the light shifted through the room. That cup of tea, Dottie saw, gave her permission to talk.
And to the best of Dottie’s ability, as she recalled it later, this was the gist of what Shelly said:
—
Dr. Small had served in Vietnam years ago with another physician, a man named David Sewall. They were never in danger in Vietnam, Shelly claimed; it was quite dull, really. They worked in a hospital in a safe area toward the end of the war, with plenty of notice to leave the country in time, they were not hanging from helicopters during the fall of Saigon, nothing like that, nor did they, in the hospital, even see a lot of “awful stuff,” really—Shelly didn’t want Dottie to get the impression that these men were traumatized the way so many people were…Well, you know, those who served— Okay. Slapping her hands gently down onto her black-slacked thighs. So. When Richard came home from the war he met Shelly on a train that was heading to Boston, and after a year they got married and David was their best man. David later became a psychiatrist and married a very pretty woman named Isa. They had three sons. The Small family and the Sewall family were friends—they lived in the same town outside of Boston, and were both involved with fundraising for the orchestra and, oh, you know how things are, you get a set of friends and the Sewalls were their friends. The wife, Isa, was always a little odd, unknowable, very restrained, but a nice woman. David drank too much, e
veryone knew that, but he managed not to show up at the office with drink on his breath, being a doctor or a minister, those were the two professions where you could never have drink on your breath—and the sons, oh, it didn’t matter, they were how sons are, two turned out fine, one not so fine. Isa was always worried, David was often strict, and the point is that after thirty years of marriage David and Isa divorced. It shocked everyone. There were other couples you’d have placed money on way before you’d have placed any money on the Sewalls splitting up, but there you are. Shelly Small raised her thin wrists, palms upward, and gave a tiny shrug that was somehow very serious. “We had our own troubles, you know,” she said. “For years I kept the name of a divorce lawyer in my desk drawer. Right up until we renovated the cottage on the lake for what will be our retirement home,” she said. Dottie nodded her head just once.