There was more substantial work to be done, of course, and plenty of it. Nobody had lived in the house year-round for more than fifty years, so she hired a crew to blow in insulation and install a new oil burner and water heater, new windows, new floorboards to replace the ones that were giving way. An electrician upgraded the wiring and an outdated fuse box. It turned out the septic system was failing. Until she’d bought the farm, Eleanor hadn’t known what a septic system was.
What she loved most was furnishing the place, adding to what was already there: quilts and pillows, tablecloths from the fifties, an old electric mixer, a picnic basket outfitted with tin plates and silverware with Bakelite handles—all the stuff to make a life, except the characters to populate it.
All summer, Eleanor went alone to auctions in search of treasures: an old sleigh bed for upstairs, a set of wicker furniture for the porch. At a yard sale she found an old worktable that she set up in the barn. She laid out her colored pencils and India inks then, and her drawing paper, to get to work on the new Bodie book.
Every afternoon around four o’clock she walked down to the swimming hole below the waterfall and jumped in. Sometimes there’d be a couple of teenagers sharing a beer or making out on the rocks.
(Making out.These kids were only a few years younger than she was. Still, for Eleanor now, the idea of kissing someone, feeling a pair of arms around her, hands on her body, felt as remote as the memory of her childhood home. In her mind’s eye she saw herself and Matt, that Rhode Island summer—his big sweaty hand on her breast, his other hand on her stomach and moving down. She could remember how it was, her work uniform pulled up around her waist, her thighs sticking to the vinyl seat under her, his fingers digging into her flesh.)
One time down at the waterfall she brought her sketchbook. She was drawing a group of boys fishing for trout. One of them had come over. He hung back, but he seemed to want to see what she was doing. He stood a little ways off, watching. “You can take a look if you want,” she told him.
From the looks of him, she figured he was probably twelve or thirteen years old. But the voice in which he spoke to her was deep, and there was something strangely mature, almost manly, about him.
“You must be an artist, huh?” he said.
“I just like to make pictures. You can do it, too, if you want.” She pointed to her extra sketchbook, lying next to her on the rocks.
“I’m no good at art,” he said. “I just like looking at it.”
His name was Timmy. His family used to run Pouliot’s Garage out by the dump, only they closed it last year on account of his dad died. She’d probably seen the place.
She didn’t ask, but he volunteered the next part. “He shot himself,” Timmy said. “I was the one that found him.”
His teacher had a poster up on the wall in his classroom, by this artist named Vincent van Gogh. Some people said he must havebeen a weirdo because he cut off his ear, but Timmy had memorized that picture. He thought it was the best artwork he ever saw. Then he found out this artist, van Gogh, had killed himself, just like his dad.
“My dad died, too,” she told him. “I know it’s hard.”
Though in Eleanor’s case, anyway, it hadn’t been that great when he was alive. Not in Timmy’s, either, most likely.
“Why don’t you give it a try?” Eleanor said. She held out a piece of charcoal.
He shook his head. “If I was an artist I’d make a picture of you.”
A voice called out. His older brother, probably. “Hey, Romeo. We’re leaving.”
“I have to go,” he told her. “See you around.”
Timmy was a few yards away when he turned around one more time. She’d never known a person to have bluer eyes. “Do you have a boyfriend or anything?” he said.
She laughed.
“I think I’m a little old for you,” she told him. Seeing his face when she said that, she wished she hadn’t. He had meant what he told her and she had acted like it was the most ridiculous thing ever and flicked him off like a deerfly.
She was going to say something else, like “Come back again and I’ll let you try my watercolors.” But he was gone.
That July she’d gone to the ASPCA and adopted a dog—a mutt she named Charlie who loved chasing squirrels and chewed up a box of oil pastels one time when she’d left the barn door open and her work out.
“You better watch that pup of yours come hunting season,” Walt told her. “You don’t want him to go chasing deer.”
What Charlie seemed to love best were squirrels and butterflies. He had no chance of ever catching any, of course, but that didn’t stop him. Sometimes, at the end of the day, she’d sit out under the tree and watch him. One minute he’d be stretched out with his head in her lap, but suddenly he’d sit up and a look of total concentrationwould come over him. Then he was off like a shot on his joyful, futile pursuit. There was a dog’s life for you: no memory of losses, no expectation of future reward. No heartbreak when the squirrel disappeared up the tree. All Charlie appeared to care about was the feeling of the sun on his belly and the racing of his heart, no doubt, when some small animal or fluttering creature came into view. The endless, uncrushable hope that one day he would actually catch that squirrel.
His devotion to Eleanor was absolute. Wherever he was in the house, whatever he was doing—including sleeping—she had only to walk past him and he’d slap his tail against the floor. When she came home to that empty house—and it was always empty when she came home, empty of human companionship, anyway—he’d be there at the door, waiting for her.
No family. No man, only a dog. No man, though Walt stopped by in his truck to check up on her and put on the storm windows when the cold weather came. A man of few words, though it occurred to her at some point that if he didn’t stop by, as he did nearly every afternoon, she’d miss him.
In the warm weather, he brought her vegetables from his garden. (Zucchinis above all else. More zucchinis than a person could eat in a year.) In the fall, he came with a basket of apples. After a snowstorm, she could count on Walt to show up with his plow, and after he finished with the plow he climbed down from the cab of his vehicle and cut her a path to the driveway with his shovel.
She knew from Edith that she and Walt had been married thirty-two years by this point, and when Edith was around, she did all the talking. But when he came by on his own he’d linger longer than was necessary and never said no to the coffee she offered. Once he showed up when she was still in her nightgown, and she could feel the heat of his gaze. She guessed that Edith, though she saw none of this, disliked her.
