Read Online Did You Ever Have A Family by Bill Clegg - Free Book Online

at the time—and even though you’d never hear them say much to each other, there was a spark between them, always, a kind of animal energy. Cissy used to say I have my sisters for talking and Ben for everything else. They never had kids. Neither of them ever went to a doctor to find out why. They just accepted it and went about their lives. They lived in the house three doors down from ours for almost twenty years, and Cissy asked me to find a buyer the day Ben died, which was also the day she moved back in with us. I found a buyer a little while later, a couple from Portland who came with their kids to teach at the elementary school. They moved away after the last one went off to college . I think Pam regretted spilling so many beans about Cissy that night because she’s turned down the few invitations we’ve made since. She’s perfectly friendly when we run into her at the grocery store or gas station in Aberdeen, but she keeps her distance.
    It’s hard to believe it’s been more than half a year since that morning Cissy pounded on the door of Room 6, sounding like some cop on TV . Ma’am, I have a key so my knocking is just a formality. Ma’am, I’m reaching for my key and this door will open whether you want it to or not . And just as she went for the key, the door opened andJane stepped out. Thank you, she said, her hand waving a kind of apology as she pulled her tan coat on. She hurried away, down the steps toward the beach, where she stayed most of the rest of the day. Since then we’ve seen her wander down the beach for hours, barefoot, with her lace-up tennis shoes in one hand, the other arm usually wrapped around her waist. One morning at the end of the summer we thought she might have spent the night out there, because there was no light coming from her room, no clanking of water pipes or flushing toilet as there usually is. Her lights came on that evening and we saw the usual shadow passing across her curtains, so wherever she’d been the night before she made it back in one piece. I think she mainly lives on Cissy’s cookies, because I’ve only twice seen her carrying bags from Laird’s General Store into the room. Maybe she squirrels packets of nuts or candy bars in her jacket pockets when she goes down to the gas station ATM for cash each month, but if that’s what she’s doing, I’ve never seen any of it. What I have seen is Cissy lugging around a large thermos, the kind you carry soup or hot chocolate in. What’s inside I don’t know, but neither Kelly nor I ever saw that thermos before Jane came along. We’ve seen it out on the front stoop of Jane’s room in the mornings, too. Cissy isn’t one to gossip in general, but when we’ve tried to talk to her about Jane, she won’t say more than that she keeps a tidy room. Even though it’s well within our rights to want to know about the only long-term residentof the Moonstone—especially one who checked in under an alias and without ID—we always feel ashamed when we mention her in front of Cissy, and so we don’t anymore. We just accept her as part of our lives, a quiet woman named Jane from somewhere east of here.

Lydia
    The first call from Winton came in December. There are a few things to remember about that day, and she’s tried, but the one thing she doesn’t struggle to recollect was that the phone hadn’t rung for weeks. It’s an old, beige thing with thick buttons that make loud beeps when you press them, mounted on the wall by the door in the kitchen. It came with the rental she’s living in, and carved into the doorframe next to it are phone numbers. She recognized a few when she moved in a little more than six years ago. Gary Beck’s, for one; he had a funny relationship with her mother and would come by every once in a while with schnapps they’d drink in the kitchen. They both loved country music and listened to a station out of Hartford that played Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty songs. When Lydia was a teenager,