As soon as she opened the bill with the charge from the café in West Hall, Katherine got in the car and started driving north. She found West Hall, Vermont, about fifty miles north of where Gary had had his accident.
It was the quintessential New England small town: a downtown with three church steeples, a granite library, a town green with a gazebo in the middle. Beyond the town green, she passed by the West Hall Union School, where small children in winter coats and hats were out on the playground tossing balls and climbing on an elaborate, brightly colored play structure. She thought of Austin—how much he loved to climb and showed no fear, going up to the top of any structure and hollering, “I’m King of the Mountain!” For half a second, she almost believed she could see him there, the wiry boy with the curly hair perched on top. Then she blinked, and it was someone else’s child.
She followed the road, which took her past the Cranberry Meadow Cemetery—full of old, leaning stones and enclosed with a rusted wrought-iron fence. She looped back around toward the downtown area and found Lou Lou’s Café on Main Street, tucked between a bookstore and a bank, all of them sharing the same big brick building. She went in, ordered a coffee, and looked out the large plate-glass window at the street, thinking,This was what Gary looked at while he ate his last meal.
She had a clear view of the town green. It was a bright, cloudlessNovember day. The trees that lined the green were bare now, but back when Gary was here, they might have been glowing red and orange, leaves falling as storm clouds gathered.
“But what were you doing here?” she asked out loud.
Glancing at the prices on the menu, she decided he must have met someone. The entrées were no higher than twelve dollars—even if he’d ordered a beer, he couldn’t have eaten a thirty-one-dollar meal here by himself.
“Excuse me,” Katherine called as the waitress passed by. “I’m wondering if you can help.” She pulled out the little photo of Gary she kept in her wallet. “I wonder if you might recognize him. He was in here last month.”
The waitress, a young woman with dyed-blue bangs and a yin-yang tattoo on the back of her hand, shook her head. “You should ask Lou Lou,” she said, nodding in the direction of the woman behind the counter. “She remembers customers real well.”
Katherine thanked her, got up, and approached the owner—Lou Lou herself, who was dripping with silver-and-turquoise jewelry and had short bright-red hair.
Lou Lou recognized Gary immediately. “Yeah, he was here, can’t say when, but not all that long ago.”
“Did he meet someone?”
Lou Lou gave her a quizzical look, and Katherine thought of breaking down, explaining everything:He was my husband, he was killed in an accident only hours after he sat in here eating a sandwich and soup or whatever, I’ve never even heard of this place, why was he here, please, I need to know.
Instead, she stood up straight, said only, “Please. It’s important.”
Lou Lou nodded. “He was with a woman. I don’t know her name, but she’s local. I’ve seen her around, but can’t place where.”
“What did she look like?”
Was she pretty? Prettier than me?
Lou Lou thought a minute. “Older. Long salt-and-pepper hair in a braid. Like I said, I’ve seen her around. I know her from somewhere. I don’t forget faces.”
Katherine spent nearly two hours in Lou Lou’s, having coffee, then soup and a sandwich, then a slice of red-velvet cake. All thewhile, she wondered what Gary had eaten, which table he’d sat at. She felt close to him, like he was right there beside her, sharing a secret in between bites of cake.
Who was she, Gary? Who was the woman with the braid?
She watched the people coming and going along the sidewalk: people in fleece jackets and wool sweaters, a couple of men in red plaid hunting jackets, two kids with hoodies on skateboards. She didn’t see one person in a suit, or even a tie or high heels. So different from Boston. People actually smiled and said hello to each other on the street. Gary must have loved it.
They used to talk about leaving the city, moving to a small town like this, how it would be so much better for Austin. Gary had grown up in a small town in Idaho and said it was kid heaven—there was room to breathe, to explore, you knew your neighbors, and your parents didn’t mind if you were out late because bad things never happened there. You were safe.
Katherine stopped at a bulletin board in the hall on the way out of Lou Lou’s Café. She glanced at the notices on it: Trek mountain bike for sale, Bikram yoga classes, a flyer announcing that the farmers’ market would be in the high-school gymnasium during the winter months, a poster looking for fellow believers to join a UFO-hunting group. And there, right in the middle, a no-nonsense sign:Apartment for rent. Downtown in renovated Victorian. One bedroom. No pets. $700 includes heat. There were little tabs at the bottom with the phone number to call.
Then she felt it again: Gary standing beside her, putting his arm around her, whispering,Go ahead and take one. Without thinking, she tore off one of the phone numbers and tucked it in the pocket of her jeans.
Good girl, Gary whispered, a gentle hiss in her right ear.
Isn’t it about time to get to work?Gary asked her now, voice teasing, soothingly familiar, as she sat at the kitchen table in her new apartment. Katherine stood up, went over to the counter to refill her coffee cup, then made her way into the living room, between its stacks of boxes, and over to the art table. It was an old farmhouse kitchentable that she’d had since graduating from college, three feet wide and five feet long, made from thick pine planks. It was scarred with saw, knife, and drill marks, splattered with years’ worth of paint drops and smudges. There was a vise set up on the right side, which was also where she kept her tools: hammer, saws, Dremel, soldering iron, tin snips, drill and bits, along with a plastic toolbox full of various nails, screws, and hinges. In the middle, at the back, was a coffee can full of paintbrushes, X-Acto knives, pens, and markers. In a carefully labeled wooden cabinet to the left of the table were all her paints and finishes.
There, in the center of the table, was the latest box, the one she’d stayed up late into the night working on. A four-by-six-inch wooden box, it was titledThe Wedding Vows. On the front were two double doors, styled like church windows with stained-glass designs. When you opened these, there was the wooden altar with a tiny photo of Katherine and Gary on their wedding day, both looking impossibly young and happy, not noticing the shadowy crow that peeked out at them from behind the curtain.Until Death Do Us Partwas written in neat calligraphy, a promise held in the air like a sweet cloud above their heads. But down in the shadows below their feet were miniature skid marks on a narrow winding road, and over at stage left, half of a ruined matchbox car poked its way through the side of the box, its front end smashed. At the very bottom, two simple lines in quotation marks: “I’ve got a wedding to shoot in Cambridge. I should be home in time for dinner.”
This morning, she’d put the finishing touches on this box—a bit of silver trim around the windows, gold paint for the cross on top—then coat the whole thing with matte varnish. After that, she’d start work on the next in the series:His Final Meal. She didn’t have the details for this one worked out at all, only that the door would open onto a scene in Lou Lou’s Café: Gary and the mystery woman. She was counting on Gary to help out, to lead her along and show her what details to add. Gary as Muse.
Sometimes, only sometimes, when she was good and lost in her art, if she closed her eyes, Gary was right beside her again, whispering his secrets in her ear. She could almost see him: his dark-brownhair with the funny cowlicks, the freckles across his nose and cheeks that multiplied when he was out in the sun too long.
Gary, who loved a good ghost story. Gary, who once teased her by saying, “You better hope you’re the one to die first, babe, ’cause if I do I’m gonna come back here and haunt your ass.”
She smiled now, thinking of it. She picked up the blue pack of American Spirits—the last of the carton she’d found in Gary’s studio. She hadn’t smoked since college, and was always hounding Gary to quit, always complaining of the smell on his clothes and hair. Now she found the smell of cigarette smoke comforting, and allowed herself one cigarette a day. Sometimes two. She shook one out of the pack and lit up, knowing it was a little early, not caring.
