On the afternoon after Ethan was arrested, Mark had a fight in the hardware store with that harebrained Steve Messenger, wha’d started mouthing off about burning the Fords’ house to the ground. They’d had to pull Mark off Steve in the paint-and-fixtures aisle, but now Mark feels confused about his loyalty. Sitting in the courtroom, hearing Ethan referred to as Bryon Bell, Mark can’t quite believe what is happening. Perhaps it’s all a joke, a scene filmed for a TV show; perhaps at the end of the afternoon, the actors—Ethan and the judge and the lawyers included—will rise to their feet and take their bows, thanking the clutch of reporters and the Fords’ neighbors and friends for being in attendance.
For haven’t these two men, friends for the past thirteen years, been there for each other no matter what the circumstances? Haven’t they cried together over the death of Mark’s father and rejoiced at Collie’s birth, making themselves queasy with scotch and cigars? Ethan coached Mark’s son Brendan, back when Brendan was in Little League, and is the godfather to Mark and Trisha’s daughter, April. These things are real; they happened, there’s no denying that. But are they as real as the moment when Ethan stands up to enter his plea, announcing his guilt with an open, untroubled expression? Mark Derry feels a shudder pass through him as he sits there in the courthouse. He is reminded of a magician he had once seen as a child who had terrified him by bringing forth scarves and birds out of the most unexpected places, shirt-sleeves and tabletops and the upswept hair of the birthday girl’s mother. After that illusion, he’d gone home and hid beneath his bed and refused to come out for supper; for months following the party, he had half-expected to find doves on his bureau or trip over silk scarves snaking through the floorboards of his room.
Now Mark looks over at Jorie, seated beside Barney Stark. She’s motionless, wearing a dark blue dress that makes her seem plainer and older. Mark is flooded by a memory of working with Ethan on one of those big new houses that went up on the far side of the high school a few years back; they had gone into the field at lunchtime, and after sharing the picnic Jorie had carefully packed, stuffing themselves with hard-boiled eggs and ham sandwiches. with apples and chocolate cupcakes and cold bottles of beer, they had stretched out to gaze at the sky.
I’m the luckiest man on earth, Mark remembers Ethan saying. That is a fact.
Mark slips out the back door immediately after Ethan states his plea, and goes directly to the Safehouse, where he orders a draft, which he drinks alone at a rear table. It’s always dark in the Safehouse, but with the rain falling so hard, it’s even gloomier than usual, thick with the damp smell of failure and alcohol. One night when they sat here, Ethan had said something that, looking back. Mark thinks, should have given him a clue. Nobody ever really knows another person, Ethan had declared as the wind rattled around the roof of the Safehouse and a sprinkling of snow began to fall. They’d had a few, and Mark remembers saying something on the order of, Bullshit. If you think I don’t know you, you’re wrong, buddy. Hell, I’d trust you with my life. Ethan had clapped Mark on the back, and as he thanked him hed gotten kind of emotional. Now Mark feels cheated; he wonders if he’s been conned. He has another beer; then he goes home, and before Trisha can stop him he takes out the piles of photograph albums she’s worked so hard to put together and begins to rip up the pages.
“Stop that right now,” Trisha demands when she comes in from the kitchen to see the shredded paper on the floor and her husband down on his knees, searching for a pair of scissors in the bottom drawer of the bureau they inherited from his grandmother. Trisha grabs the album away. For a second she has a shivery feeling. Who is this man she’s married to, who has already torn up a dozen or more photographs? And then Mark does the most unexpected thing of all—he starts to cry. Trisha sits beside him on the floor. Her face is mottled and red; she has the sense that some things will never be the same, that just knowing Ethan has somehow placed them in jeopardy.
“He had everybody fooled,” Trisha says, “including his own wife. There’s nothing for you to feel bad about.”
Still Mark Derry knows that a man may have good reason to mislead his wife, but never his best friend. Mark decides he needs to think over what has happened, he needs to sort things out, and all the rest of that week he takes to staying late at the Safehouse. Most nights, he closes the place down, getting a ride home from Warren Peck, let out on the corner to stumble the rest of the way down his own driveway. Mark no longer shows up for his jobs, and the three Derry boys, Sam, Christopher, and Brendan, hardly see their father these days. Even April, the Derrys’ eight-year-old daughter, notices the change, and she’s started to mouth off to her mother, refusing to bathe or to go to bed on time, when in the past she’s always been an angelic child.
It isn’t as if Mark Derry had never had a drink in his life -he likes a good time as much as the next man—but now he’s settled into drinking, as though he were falling into a soft netting that was swallowing him whole. Every time he thinks about Ethan, he has another drink, meant to clear his mind, but managing to do the opposite instead, leaving him fuzzy and far more confused. By the end of July, when Mark has lost ten pounds off his already thin frame and hasn’t been home before midnight for eight nights straight. Trisha Derry goes to see Kat Williams’s grandmother to ask what Katya might suggest to bring a wayward husband home. Katya is an unlikely friend for a woman as young as Trisha, but Trisha lost her own mother at a tender age and she’d always felt she needed some maternal counsel. When Brendan and Rosarie first started dating, Rosarie’s mother didn’t seem the least bit interested in the children’s future, but Katya always welcomed Trisha to stop in for coffee whenever she was trying to track Brendan down.
Now Trisha goes to Katya in need of good advice, the sort her mother might have given if only she’d lived longer. She lets April play in the Williamses’ yard, where nothing much grows aside from the feathery black mimosas, and she watches through the window as her daughter makes pies out of handfuls of weeds. In a surprisingly calm voice, Trisha tells Katya how her marriage has gone wrong. She has not been here since Rosarie broke Brendan’s heart. and perhaps she would feel uncomfortable returning if Katya were not so understanding. A man who drinks is a man who’s afraid of the truth in some way, and in Katya’s opinion, it is Trisha’s task to figure out what her husband is afraid of, then help him face whatever it might be straight on, with no alcohol inside him.
But how can Trisha help Mark when he barely spoke to her anymore? When he fell into bed beside her at the first light of morning, stinking of alcohol and shrinking from her touch?
“Wherever he goes, you go,” Katya says as they stand beside the window, watching April search for butterflies in the desolate yard. “Then you’ll know what he’s running from.”
Trisha decides to follow Mark the very next day, to take the same path he is now on, and in so doing, understand why he’s running so fast. It’s a splendid morning when she sets out after him in her Honda. It’s already eight o‘clock, two hours later than the time Mark used to leave the house, back when their lives were normal. Trisha knows he has a job to finish at Barney Stark’s, and Josh Howard had tentatively phoned that morning to report that the handyman, Swift, had recently disappeared, leaving the Howards’ kitchen in ruins. But work is clearly not on Mark’s mind, for he heads to Kite’s Bakery on Front Street.
Trisha sits in her parked car. engine running, watching her husband get a black coffee, which he certainly could have had at home. She can see through the window that Charlotte Kite is back to work after the surgery people said she’d had over in Hamilton. Charlotte’s parents had built the place up from nothing into a chain that crisscrossed the Commonwealth, and the bakery must have felt like home to Charlotte, because another woman might not have returned to work so fast.
Trisha had heard through the grapevine that there was some sort of cancer involved, and she’d brought over flowers earlier in the week, even though she and Charlotte had never been friends. Charlotte had ac
cepted the zinnias and lilies, cut from the Derrys’ own garden, but she hadn’t invited Trisha in. She’d insisted she was doing just fine, the same cheerful speech she gave to everyone, including Jorie, who still didn’t know the extent of her friend’s illness. But Trisha Derry was not so easy to fool. She saw how gaunt Charlotte was as she stood in the doorway of her huge house, dressed in her bathrobe with some sort of bulky pump attached under her arm. They had been a year apart in high school, and Trisha had always thought Charlotte was too sophisticated for her, as her family was among the wealthiest in town. Trisha had often whispered that Charlotte was stuck-up and full of herself, a real ice princess. Shed made jokes at Charlotte’s expense, but as she peered at Charlotte through the meshing of the screen door, Trisha thought maybe she’d been the cold one, and that’s why they’d never been friends. Perhaps she'd been the one to reject Charlotte, because Charlotte lived over in Hillcrest, just as she’d avoided Jorie because of her beauty, a singular gift that had always seemed so unfair. She’d been jealous, and jealousy always curdles. Trisha can’t help but wonder if she wasn’t paying a price for her lack of understanding and if that wasn’t the reason her loyal, dependable husband was drifting away from her.
When Mark leaves the bakery on the morning he’s being followed, he gets into his truck and drives around town in what seems to be an aimless pattern. Trailing at a safe distance behind, Trisha quickly finds herself confused, although she grew up in Monroe and knows every turn. It takes a while before she realizes that he’s heading for Maple Street. Mark stops across from the Fords’ house and sits there for so long Trisha grows concerned that he’s fallen asleep or become suddenly ill. She herself has pulled over beside a hedge of lilacs on the corner of Maple and Sherwood, a spot where the rangy shrubs protect her from sight. but after close to half an hour has passed, Trisha is growing restless. She’s wondering how long she can wait here like this, when at last Mark opens the door of his truck. Trisha gets out of her Honda as well; she edges along the lilacs, hidden by their dusty heart-shaped leaves. Her breathing is ragged, and it’s such a hot day she’s begun to sweat. In order to keep out of sight, she has no choice but to go through Mrs. Gage’s yard, even though Betty Gage, always so fanatical about her perennial beds, has been known to scare people off her property from the time Trisha herself was a little girl.
From the rear of Mrs. Gage’s yard, Trisha can see through the fence. Jorie is out in her garden, trying to make the place more presentable, as Liz Howard, who runs Monroe Realty, suggested when she came by to appraise the property. Two months without Ethan working and it will be hard for Jorie to make the mortgage payments. Three, and it will be impossible. So there she is, attacking tall bunches of Queen Anne’s lace, pulling out the heads of lettuce that have gone to sced. Jorie is wearing shorts and one of her son’s tee-shirts, and from a distance she looks as beautiful as she did in high school, when Trisha had thought her too high and mighty to ever approach.
Though she’s not one to trespass, Trisha continues on through Mrs. Gage’s yard to where her husband is standing, gazing into the Fords’ garden. He has such a puzzled look on his face, and yet he doesn’t seem surprised to see Trisha step out from Mrs. Gage’s carefully weeded flower bed where the phlox are doing so well, banks of purple and fuchsia and white.
“I keep thinking that I’ll figure it out,” Mark says. “If I just keep at it, it’s got to make some sense.”
All that morning, at the bakery, as he drove through town, and now again as he stands here observing Jorie, he’s been counting the times he and Ethan had gone fishing together, the number of beers they’d enjoyed, the nights they’d spent at the Safehouse playing pool, the times they’d rushed from the fire station on emergency calls together, hoping that the blaze they hurried to didn’t affect anyone they loved. More than once, Mark had told Ethan he didn’t know if he’d done the right thing in marrying Trish. Theyd been dating since they were fifteen, and she was the one and only woman he’d ever been with. and Mark had the feeling he’d missed out on something most other men had experienced.
True love comes once in a lifetinie, Ethan had told him. And that’s if you’re lucky.
They had been over at the fire station the last time they talked about this. The other guys had been in the front room, watching baseball on the big-screen TV Warren Peck had donated. The day had been hot, but when Ethan started talking about love. Mark had been aware of an icy sensation across his chest. He wished he could be as sure of himself as Ethan was, and now here he stood, watching Ethan’s house nearly every day, trying to understand what had happened and thinking about his own life and the course it had taken.
He doesn’t step away when Trisha comes through Mrs. Gage’s yard to stand beside him. “Not everything makes sense,” she says, thinking about Charlotte Kite, the girl she’d always been so jealous of, how pitiful she’d looked in her bathrobe, leaning her weight against the screen door. Who would have guessed that out of all the girls at school. Trisha would be the one to find true happiness? She gets on tiptoe and leans close to her husband. The acrid smell of the soil in Jorie’s yard is in the air. “I’m so glad I have you,” Trisha whispers to Mark.
On the day when Ethan and Mark talked about love, Mark had begun to cry. He told Ethan that he had a wife and three boys and a beautiful little daughter, and still he hadn’t a clue as to what real love was.
Don’t think about what you don’t have, Ethan had told him. Enjoy what you have right now.
There has not been a day since when that thought hasn’t run across Mark Derry’s mind. These words have brought him comfort on the days when he’s felt like getting in his truck and driving north along the highway to look for another life, one where he didn’t have to be as responsible, one in which he loved his wife the way Ethan loved Jorie. It is only on this hot summer afternoon that Mark figures it out as he follows Trisha home. He’s started smoking again, and the cab of his truck smells like sulfur. A man could change, that’s what he decides as they drive down Sherwood Street, and Miller Avenue, and Front Street. He thinks of himself at fifteen, how he’d pledged his love to Trisha, how he’d made a life plan when he knew absolutely nothing about life. If he’d had the boy he’d once been in the truck with him right now, he’d tell him a thing or two. I led advise him to go on the road, to live out in the world before he made commitments that would tie him up until he was an old man. People make mistakes, that’s what he thinks as he pulls up behind his wife’s car in the driveway, that’s what he decides.
That evening, Mark Derry phones Kip Louis, president of the town council, as well as Hal Jordan, the county commissioner of Little League, and Warren Peck, the most senior member of the volunteer fire department. In this way the defense fund for Ethan is begun, and why shouldn’t these good people rally around him? He is their neighbor, the same man he’d been last month when they’d trusted him with their children, when he’d carried the keys to their houses in his pocket and was considered by one and all to be the most honest man in town. Mark sits in the dining room for hours on the night the defense fund is born, with the Monroe phone book open before him, and a growing list of donations. Trisha gives the children dinner, and hushes them when they’re too rowdy, sending them out to play in the fading blue dusk.
As the light grows dim, Trisha stands in the kitchen doorway, in order to watch her husband. Katya was right, and Trisha has been wise to heed her counsel. Following Mark has helped her understand the road he’s been on. In fact, she is truly impressed. As well as she knows him, she had no idea that he could string so many words together; she’s never heard him talk as much or be as passionate about anything. Already, there are plans for a rally and talk about approaching town businesses for pledges. Mark has come up with every bit of this strategy on his own. While he works, Trisha fixes him a sandwich, roast beef on rye, and places it on the table. It’s done the way he likes it, with horseradish sauce and sour pickles. Mark smiles up at her and nods his thanks as he s
peaks to their minister. Dr. Hardwick, about a particular Bible passage that might be the source of a suitable sermon for their congregation on the Sunday to come, given the circumstances and the fact that Ethan never walked away from a man in need.
“You see what a person can do when he sets his mind to it,” Trisha says to Brendan, who is mooning around the kitchen, in a bad humor ever since Rosarie Williams dumped him. “You get on your computer right now and make up a flier for your father’s rally. Get your mind on something important.”
Startled by his mother’s harsh assessment of his lovesick ways, Brendan goes up to his room. The rest of the Derry children are playing kickball in the street with the Howard kids from over on the next block, and Trisha can hear them through the open window. The sky outside is tinted pink and a breeze trickles in, ruffling the curtains. Everything seems different to her on this evening, hopeful somehow. Trisha tells herself she will have to remember to bring dear Katya the lemon-poppyseed coffee cake that is her favorite, in gratitude for what is certainly some excellent advice.
At the end of this long day, when the children have all bathed and gone to bed, Trisha pecks her head into the dining room. The house is quiet, aside from the click of Brendan working at his computer upstairs and the low rumble of Mark’s voice as he calls neighbor after neighbor.
“How about some coffee?” Trisha suggests to her husband between phone calls. She is proud of the fact that instead of sprawling on the couch or taking up space at the Safehouse, wallowing in the sorrow of the situation, Mark has the character to do something to rectify the mess Ethan Ford is in. Her heart is full of love. “It won’t take me a minute,” she says, and looking up at her, nodding as he dials the next number on his list, Mark Derry wonders if contrary to what he’s thought all along, perhaps he is indeed a lucky man.
Those fliers Brendan Derry printed up can be found everywhere in the next few days; black print on orange paper, they flutter around town like orange lilies, planted on lampposts and shop owners’ bulletin boards, stuck in mailboxes and on car windshields. This is the week when Jorie and Collie move over to her mother’s home on Smithfield Lane, driven off by the reporters stationed in the driveway of the Gleasons’ house across the street. The same week when Charlotte’s doctor informs her that her course of treatment will take ten full months of radiation and chemotherapy. On this day, Charlotte finds a stack of fliers left outside the bakery door and, disturbed by Ethan’s confession, she tosses them in the trash. But when Rosarie Williams sees the orange paper tucked into the mailbox, she sits on the porch and studies it carefully. She calls Kelly Stark, and the girls head to the firehouse on the night of the first rally. At least it’s something to do, and there will probably be reporters there, interested in taking their photograph. The girls stand at the edge of the surprisingly large gathering and listen to Mark Derry speak about forgiveness and compassion and before long they find themselves cheering with the rest of the crowd.