animal instead of a girl. Part of the reason I kept bringing her back on Friday nights was because all of those women made everything seem okay. Since we’d left Hanna’s, the absence of a mother in Shelly’s life seemed even more pronounced.
If I had been like most of Two Rivers’s other widowers I would have simply found myself someone new, someone to fill the empty spaces Betsy left behind. But most of the widowers in this town were well into their seventies when their wives passed away. Remarrying was what kept them alive for another ten, fifteen years. I was twenty-two years old when Betsy died. I wasn’t even sure then that I wanted to survive.
I suppose I could have found someone if I’d really wanted to. It was almost alarming how many women came out of the woodwork after Betsy passed away. Almost right away, girls we knew from high school, ones who never talked to me, were suddenly very concerned about my grief. Their casseroles arrived at Hanna’s doorstep, with perfumed notes expressing their most sincere condolences. As time went on the casseroles stopped, and they started to bring things by for the baby. Tiny clothes and handmade blankets. I would have thought these gestures to be only our community’s genuine efforts to take care of its wounded. But Hanna, who was always wiser than I, noticed that the gifts often came along with invitations—to go catch a movie at the Star Theatre, to join one of them or another at the Two Rivers Inn for supper, to attend the Christmas party at the Paper Company. “Those women are despicable,” Hanna snorted. “Betsy’s barely even cold yet.” So I accepted their casseroles and baby sweaters but not their invitations, and after a while most of them gave up.
Of course, after a while I did start to date again. Over the years, there were probably a half dozen or so women I spent time with. But as nice as they were, as smart as they were, as pretty as some of them were (and some of them were very, very pretty), nothing ever got too serious. They probably knew that as hard as I tried not to, I was always comparing them to Betsy, holding them up against her. A few years ago when I met Lucy, an English teacher from Bennington whose brother lived in Two Rivers, I thought maybe I’d found someone I could share my life with. Lucy was beautiful, quiet. She loved books. But when I asked her to move to Two Rivers, told her I loved her, she just shook her head.
“You’re in love with a shadow,” she said. “A shadow that covers your whole world. I can’t live in that kind of darkness, Harper. I’m sorry.”
After Lucy, I figured it was likely I’d have to finish raising Shelly by myself. Lucy was right. Betsy’s shadow loomed large. And as far as finding a new mom for Shelly, it wasn’t like she didn’t have women in her life. Hanna was like a mother to her. And now that we were on our own, we had Mrs. Marigold and the bowling league ladies.
At the bowling alley, Shelly played “Ladies Night” on the jukebox until a couple of guys groaned audibly, and I stopped giving her quarters. Marguerite was quite good. She said she and her girlfriends liked to bowl too. We bowled until Shelly slumped over in a booth, exhausted, and Marguerite said her feet hurt.
When we turned in the rental shoes, Kip Kilroy, the counter manager, said, “Hey, Harper, I saw you on the news. Man, what a disaster.”
I was worried he would ask about Marguerite, but he only said, “Those size sixes work out for you okay, miss?”
She winked and said, “A five and a half woulda been better, but I still rolled a two-twenty.”
Back upstairs in the apartment, I offered Marguerite my room for the night, put some clean sheets on the bed. I told her I’d sleep on the couch, though I doubted sleep would likely come tonight either.
“Tomorrow we need to get in touch with your family,” I said as I handed her a clean towel and washcloth. She didn’t say anything, but she accepted the towels.
“Thanks again,” she said. “This is really nice of y’all.”
In the morning I would call over to the train station, talk to the weekend crew, have them check their roster for a girl named Marguerite, for her mother. But for tonight, I let her rest. The kitchen still smelled like jambalaya, and when I opened the window it seemed the heat had finally broken. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, the air smelled like rain.
The Road Less Traveled
W hen Betsy said she was running away, I knew I had no choice but to go with her. She needed me. Besides which, I would have followed Betsy Parker anywhere.
On the last day of eighth grade, as Miss Bean said her tearful farewells to us, Betsy leaned over across the aisle that separated us and whispered, “Today.” I ignored her, staring straight ahead as Miss Bean wiped at her nose with a tissue she plucked from a box on her desk. Truth be told, I was moved by Miss Bean’s heartfelt speech. I even felt a small lump swell in my throat as she spoke. She was the youngest teacher that Two Rivers Graded School had ever had—fresh out of college and still in love with the idea of teaching. Miss Bean, unlike our other teachers, believed in us; she believed that we would not only go on to graduate from Two Rivers High, but that we might even eventually find a way to change the world in some significant way. And perhaps it was Miss Bean’s enthusiasm, her thrilling naiveté that got into my gut that early June afternoon as flies slapped sluggishly at the windowpanes in our basement classroom. It was Miss Bean, wearing a soft pink sweater and a matching scarf knotted at her throat, and her promises that the road less traveled would, indeed, make all the difference that made me consent to Betsy’s wildest scheme yet.
Betsy and I had had endless conversations about leaving Two Rivers. I participated in these discussions mainly because I loved Betsy Parker. It had everything to do with the way she smelled like lilacs, even in the winter, and nothing to do with actually wanting to leave our hometown. I loved Two Rivers. The way I figured it, I was probably about the only person who wasn’t trying to get away. But I cherished this nothing place. I treasured it: the way the woods smelled after rain, the thunderous sound of the train, that still place where the two rivers meet. Betsy’s machinations to flee contradicted every instinct I had. But Betsy Parker, like the giant maples that grew inexplicably in a perfect circle around the town’s library, had also grown out of Two Rivers. And I loved her more than water, so I listened as she devised her plan. And agreed when she asked me to go. I didn’t expect it to happen so soon. But now, Miss Bean was hugging me so hard I could feel the gentle cage of her ribs pressing into my cheeks, her breasts pressing into my cheeks, and Betsy Parker was giving me the signal that the time had come. Suddenly, I was thirteen years old, a graded school graduate, and the whole wide world lay before me like some sort of open road. That’s the way I saw it; I pictured the dirt road that led from the river eastward, the one that would wind and twist and branch onto other dirt roads, leading, finally, to Maine, where Betsy had deigned we might finally settle.
Most other girls at thirteen might have pointed their starry eyes westward, fueled by too many winter nights spent curled up under covers reading about all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s frontier adventures. Not Betsy though. Betsy Parker was an adventurer of the truest sort. She knew her limitations, could differentiate between fantasy and potentiality. When she set out to do something, she did it. This was what made me both adore Betsy and fear her. She never made idle threats, and she never made idle plans.
Betsy chose Maine as a destination because of a photo of her mother that she had found in a box in her basement. In the picture, Mrs. Parker was perched on top of a large rock, the wind blowing her hair across her face, the ocean crashing against the shore below. It was taken on the coast of Maine, back when Mrs. Parker was an aspiring model, long before she married Mr. Parker. Betsy told me that one time her mother grabbed her arm tightly and said, “I died the day I met your father. You are looking at a corpse.” She said her mother’s fingernails left four bloody half moons in the soft skin of her upper arm; she even showed me the four faint scars, which I wanted, but didn’t
