Plus, Denny didn’t want to go. Running into the people of Hamilton at the Block Party, once appealing, now was anything but. Who wanted to stand in the rain, eating a burger from A&B’s,chatting with people who looked at him with sympathy while he was impotent, unable to do a thing about the death of his own wife? He would have stayed home if it weren’t for Louisa, who, bounding down the stairs and looking out at the mist settling on the front lawn, sank a few inches lower, like a deflated balloon.
“Rain again!” she said.
“Bad summer weather,” he agreed.
“Does this mean no Block Party?”
“I wasn’t completely sold on it to begin with, to be honest with you,” he told her. And then he watched her turn into a puddle, right there in front of him, his daughter with the corn-silk hair who, in the right light, looked a little like Anna. Louisa lay down like a snow angel, arms extended on the floor beside the stairs, wailing like her life was ending.
“There will be other events, I promise you,” he said.
“That’s what Mom said aboutthe Ziti Dance!” she said. And that just about settled it. They were going to the Block Party, even if they had to put on waders and sailor caps.
But it wasn’t exactlyrainingin the afternoon, more likemisting,the way it had been since late May, ruining everything from the cherries to the tomatoes. There were no decent crops, not many decent beach days, and not enough time to dry out. Louisa went upstairs to change into pants and a yellow slicker that Anna had bought her a few years earlier. It was two sizes too small; her wrists came out well beyond the sleeves, tiny little flashes of white that reminded Denny of a porcelain doll.
In the months since Anna had been gone, he had neglected many things, and a big one was the way in which his children had grown. Here was Louisa, right before him, now taller than she had been, outgrowing her clothing. Soon he would have to pack away the last of the things that Anna had bought. He would be forced to walk the aisles of some department store with his daughter, without his wife, making choices on his own, and he hated to think about allthe mistakes he would inevitably make, about how he would buy clothing that would be uncool, about how he would mess up, again and again, about how he was unsuited to do this, and about how this was his reality now.
It all felt incredibly unfair, that he was doing this without his wife, that you could lose the person you were meant to share the most fundamental of experiences with, and that you were meant, still, to soldier on after that. How was he supposed to go on living? No one had told him about that, and as the months wore on, the reality had grown only worse. In the first months after Anna’s death, Denny had preoccupied himself with the bare essentials of existence, but now he had started to feel again. It was as if his whole body was defrosting, and the parts of him that had been beneath ice were just learning about temperature and pressure and pain once more. Oh, how it hurt. Oh, the terrible ache of seeing all the things that Anna would never see: the first experiences of his children, the pulsing house that would still hold their memories, except now without her. He hadn’t known that he would need to make space for his own grief in all of this, but grief had made space for itself.
Patton Park was a strange political and military artifact in Hamilton. It had a nice little playground for kids, of course, with a boat-shaped climbing apparatus that Ben loved to commandeer with friends. But it was also home to a World War II–era tank, which had once been open to the public (after a vandalism event dating back to the 1960s, the tank was sealed, but it remained on display for anyone to see, a reminder of the state’s military history). No one ever called the park by its full name, General Patton Park, but because the park possessed a layer of political formality—of Republicanism, even—Anna had always avoided it.
“It’s an army park,” she always said, even though it was really just a park—okay, yes, a park with a large green tank as a curio, but a park nonetheless.
“It’s just a place for kids to play,” he always pushed back, but she usually won in the end.
Today, though, Denny felt sufficiently unnerved by the tank. Something about the misting rain, the gray skies, bleak August coming to an end. The tank looked particularly green, like it had recently been repainted (it had not). The park, at just past four in the afternoon, was surprisingly full, given the weather. Vendors had set up on the perimeter, and the Hamilton-Wenham High School Band, all in uniform, were milling around, holding instruments and preparing to play something to the wandering crowd.
“Where to first?” Denny asked, grabbing each kid by a hand, but Louisa shook him off.
“Daddy! My friends!” she said. He had never considered that there would be a time when she would be too embarrassed to be seen with him, but here they were, at a Hamilton event, and here she was, the reluctant next generation, slipping ever so quickly into a phase of life that would exclude him.
“I’m so sorry to offend!” he said. He watched as she waved, demurely, at a few girls she knew from school. “Did you want to go see them?” he asked.
She nodded so fiercely he worried her head might pop off. “I know where to go,” she said. “Mom always said if I got lost to come back where I was at the beginning.”
“So that’s right here, right?” he said. “The car. We meet at the car if we get lost. Understand?”
Louisa nodded. Ben nodded. Denny nodded. A pact. A Block Party in the rain.
Ben wanted to do the moon bounce and the axe throw and he wanted to get his face painted. Circling the park, they ran into Louisa twice, who had looped in with a group of second graders who were as delicate and lovely as she was: soft, tiny girls with pinkand yellow and blue rain boots, dancing around and telling secrets and no doubt accepting that this day was the very best day of their young lives. The man operating the moon bounce made each child leave after three minutes, but Ben didn’t want to go.
“Time’s up, buddy,” Denny told him, and he crumpled to the ground like he had never known such disappointment. He wanted to go again, he said, and so they walked to the back of what was now a very long line, a line lacing all the way into the middle of other lines, where the Hamilton moms and dads were making conversation.
By now, most of the town had given up on the idea that Denny killed his wife. If he had, well, he probably would have been caught. That was what the rumor mill had been spilling out, at least. Still, Denny preferred not to see their faces—a little pinched up, a little too tight—when he walked past. He stared at his feet, mostly, when he had to be around too many of them. It was easier than having to talk about the cloud that had settled over them since January, the grief and the chipping away at whatever or whoever had disrupted their lives.
“Why do we have towait?” Ben wailed. He was on the verge of throwing a tantrum, and Denny could see, looking at the line, that another turn on the moon bounce was still quite a long way off.
He was about to console his son—to come up with some lie about how waiting builds character—when a woman holding a child’s hand turned around and looked at him with a smile.
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” she said. “Waiting? We don’t like it, either, right, Kate?” The woman lifted the little girl’s hand and her head swung along with it. She had dark curly hair and pink cheeks and a navy shirt with a picture of the Hamilton-Wenham Generals on it and for a second his heart stopped, a panic reaction to grief, he realized. A mother and her daughter, standing in line for the moon bounce, the way Anna would have been if she were here. The woman looked nothing like his wife, the little girl looked nothinglike Louisa, and yet the scene brought Denny back to a place that never existed, but could have in a parallel universe, if only The Terrible Thing had never happened.
She was Ellen Wilson, he quickly realized, snapping back from grief into reality, a woman Anna had known from the PTO. They had been friends, or friendly, or maybe not-quite-friendly at the end. He couldn’t remember. Something had happened, but he could not identify what.
“Ellen, right?” Denny said. “I think you may have known my wife.”
“Oh, yes,” Ellen said. “Anna. We were all so sorry to hear about that.”
Denny could feel that same feeling, rising up like bile, that he experienced when he saw Karen at Market Basket all those months earlier. “Funny,” he said. “I don’t remember getting a card.”
