Did You Ever Have A Family

Silas

He ditches his bike behind a garbage shed on Low Road and cuts back through the field behind the elementary school to Herrick Road. At first, she is out of sight, seven or eight driveways ahead, but soon he is close enough to see her arms swing at her sides, her jeans pockets ride the wild movement of her ass. It’s been like this for months. She walks, he follows, closer and closer, narrowing the gap between them each time. Lately, he’s been close enough to see the faint outline of panties and bra straps behind her clothes. He’d heard from someone that Luke’s mom was in her fifties, but as he watches her ass rock back and forth and jiggle up and down in her tight jeans, he thinks, No fucking way. He’s seen it in shorts, sweatpants, tight skirts, loose skirts, and many times and most often in jeans that look like these. Lydia Morey walks a lot. Mostly to the coffee shop, the bank, and the grocery store, and she walks as if she’s stoned or in a trance of some kind. She never turns around, hardly ever looks to either side. He’s pretty sure she has not seen him, even once, in the weeks and months that have passed since he started following her.

He rushes his pace to get closer. That ass! He’s spellbound by the metronomic perfection of its movement — up-down, down-up — and thinks, This is no mom’s ass. He winces, ashamed by his racing mind, regretting this particular thought. His gaze pulls back to take in the rest of her. He sees her hands, her ringless fingers, her wrists, her worn sneakers, the dark brown hair piled on her head tumbling in loose strands down around her shoulders. For the first time, he sees a few gray hairs. With these she becomes again a whole person, not just a few thrilling body parts. She returns to being the reason he parks his bike four doors down from her apartment on Upper Main Street in the mornings before work in the summer and on Saturdays now that school has started up again. She becomes, again, his dead boss’s mom. Lydia Morey. The woman people in town talk about. The woman he’s heard described as the mother of the crackhead whose negligence blew up a house and killed three people and himself; the sex-mad slut who cheated on Earl Morey with a migrant worker, a drug dealer, a hitchhiker, a Zulu tribesman; the mother of the hustler who conned June Reid into being his sugar mama until she threw him out and he came back on a suicide mission; the monster who gave birth to a bad seed who finally got what was coming to him. He’s heard it all and has kept quiet every time. The only remotely nice thing he’s ever heard said about Lydia Morey was that she had the best rack in Litchfield County. His father made the comment this summer as they waited at a stop sign in town and she crossed in front of them wearing a tan halter top. Not even the young girls at the Tap can compete with that, he added. Silas’s mother, who never liked Lydia Morey, was not in the car. When her name was mentioned in their house, she was always quick to comment that Lydia was someone for whom she had no use. She also said, after getting off the phone with one of her friends a few days after everything happened, I suppose no one ever told Lydia that when you lie down with dogs, you not only get fleas, you get pregnant with more dogs. How June Reid ever got mixed up with that mutt son of hers I’ll never know. Even through this Silas stayed silent.

The only time he ever spoke about any of it was when he was questioned by the police and the fire marshal about working at June Reid’s the day before the wedding. They came to the door of his house that night and he sat in the kitchen and told them the same thing Ethan and Charlie told them. That Luke had them do what he usually had them do for New Yorkers like June Reid: pick up twigs and sticks, pull weeds from the sidewalk, and edge the flower beds. The only difference was that Luke paid everyone in advance that day and double their regular twelve bucks an hour. As he was handing out their cash, he asked them to do twice as good a job as usual. You guys are good, but today I need great. Silas told the police officers that Luke had said this, but they didn’t seem interested. They kept asking about Luke’s mood, whether he seemed drunk or high or upset when they saw him last. Silas said he seemed like he always seemed. A little stressed-out, busy, but fine. He told them that he and the other guys showed up at June Reid’s place around two that day, and Luke worked alongside them for the first couple hours. He rode the John Deere, mowing the front and back lawns, while Ethan, Charlie, and Silas did everything else. Around four o’clock, Luke said he had errands to run, so he left them to finish working until six thirty, after which Charlie and Ethan piled into Ethan’s old Saab and Silas rode his bike down Indian Pond Road to his house, which was less than a mile away.

What none of them told the cops was that not long after Luke left, the three of them booked across the field behind the house to the trails that led to the Unification Church property, what kids in town called the Moon because, as everyone knew, the Unification Church was just another name for the Moonies. They did not say that they had sprinted to the Moon and took turns pulling from Silas’s bong. They also did not say that it turned out all three had a stash, so they mixed a little from each into the bowl and smoked what Charlie called, sarcastically, a wedding salad. They lost track of time on the Moon, and when they got back it was almost six. After Silas ditched his yellow knapsack inside the stone shed outside the kitchen, the three of them rushed through the rest of the work and left before dark. By then, the driveway was packed with cars and the house was full for the rehearsal dinner, so they took off without saying anything to Luke, who they assumed was pissed that they were nowhere to be seen when he returned. They also didn’t want him to clock that they were high. Before leaving, Silas remembers, he saw Lydia inside the screened porch. She was sitting with June on the wicker sofa, laughing, small candles all around them flickering on tables holding flowers and food. He cannot remember anything more about seeing these two women, but he remembers clearly the sweet smell of freshly cut lawn, the sound of tent fabric slapping the air, and the first streaks of sunset painting the sky pink. These were the seconds before he left for home, and he has replayed each one a million times.

It is hard to believe the woman on the porch that night in May is the same one walking with grim purpose ahead of him now, bundled in a purple fleece, trudging across Herrick Road to Upper Main Street. Not once since that night has he seen her smile or heard her laugh.

Silas slows down to let a gap expand between them. He wonders if Lydia even knows who he is. He’d worked for Luke on and off for three summers and on weekends in the fall and spring. He wonders if she saw him that day at June Reid’s. He remembers standing by the stone shed and rushing away when he heard Luke’s voice coming from the kitchen. He remembers running toward the driveway and flying on his bike along the green cornfields that stretch from the edge of June Reid’s property past the church where June’s daughter was getting married the next day. He slowed down when he came upon Indian Pond, reflecting the red-and-purple sunset stretching above him. He remembers fireflies blinking from the brush and woods on both sides of the road as he pedaled. He remembers stopping to crawl down the rocky slope to the water’s edge to take a leak, the wild sky and the surface of the pond still as glass until his piss sent it rippling. The effect was trippy and especially so since he was still high. At one point the clouds shifted and above him spread what looked like a great dragon with wings as wide as the world. Silas stumbled back from the lake as the creature came into view: jaws jagged with teeth and blasting fire, smoke curling from its snout, magnificent wings expanding in scales of cloud, its gigantic tail twisting past the horizon. It was a spectacular beast, its eyes the only visible blue, long slits that appeared to widen as its head turned slowly toward Silas where he sat against the bank, dazzled and afraid.

All these months later, he had forgotten about the dragon and how, for a few terrifying seconds, he believed it was real. He’d forgotten that it was dark by the time he found his way up the bank to the road, and how at first he could not find his bike. He thinks about those moments when he stumbled in the dark before finding his bike, which had fallen down next to the tree he’d leaned it against earlier. He wishes he could return to that stumbling. To that perfectly blind minute before he knew anything. Not where his bike was. Not what would happen later that night, or the next morning. Not that a full moon would soon rise and light the whole valley. Or that later, after everyone in his family had gone to sleep, he’d scramble back onto his bike to pedal furiously down this same road, counting on the light of the moon to guide his way to June Reid’s house.

Without noticing, he has quickened his pace and closed the gap between him and Lydia. After crossing Herrick onto the sidewalk that runs the length of Upper Main Street, he forgets he’s supposed to remain hidden. What had only minutes before been at least three or four car lengths has now collapsed to only a few yards. When he realizes how close he is, he knows he should slow his pace to a quiet halt and bank left down one of the driveways out of sight. But he’s never been this close before. He thinks he can hear her breathing. The air is cold, but he can see perspiration beading on the back of her neck. She has taken off her fleece and he can see patches of skin through the sweat-soaked cloth of her white T-shirt. His eyes move from one patch of almost exposed skin to another. He leans closer. His shoe scuffs the pavement, scrapes loudly against the loose sand, and for the first time he can see her register his presence. His other foot accidently kicks a twig that hits the back of her ankle and she stops abruptly, turns around. He freezes. She is inches away.