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

and even later, she thought their nights in the kitchen were the grimmest she could imagine. Smoking cigarettes, drinking peppermint schnapps, and turning up the radio when some sad song came on. Funny, she thinks now, remembering those nights, how things change when you look at them with older eyes.
    She wonders if Gary Beck is even still alive. As far as she can remember, he never had a wife or kids or any relations. He wasn’t involved in the volunteer fire department or church or any of the organizations that host spaghetti-and-meatball dinners at the elementary school to raise money. She never saw him outside of her mother’s kitchen. He ran the post office in town until he had a stroke and was put in a state home for the elderly in Torrington. That all happened sixteen years ago, the year before her mother died. She’d told Lydia about Gary one morning on the phone but didn’t convey any emotion, just enough interest to relay the facts. She doubts her mother ever went to visit him in Torrington. She never could quite figure out what their relationship was, but as attractive as her mother had been, and as much as she always dolled herself up each morning for work at the bank, she was pretty sure she’d shut the door on men after Lydia’s father died. Still, she and her mother had never been what anyone would consider close, and so she wondered if anything more than companionship had gone on with Gary. He was harmless and he brought booze and always had a flattering thing to say when her mother opened the door to let him in. Looking good tonight, Natalie was as specific and flirtatious as he ever got. He was still coming around when Lydia and Luke moved in with her mother the year he was born, but after that she never saw him. It was hard for her to imagine who might have needed Gary Beck’s number often enoughto carve it into this wall. Maybe someone who worked at the post office. Maybe some other old gal he’d bring schnapps to and listen to country songs with. When she looked at the numbers gouged into the pine doorframe, she hoped so. She hoped he had a different one every night.
    The other names could be anyone’s— Lisa , Matthew , Evelyn . Only Gary Beck had the honor of his last name carved into the wood. And then there’s the one number she can never forget. Her former mother-in-law’s, Connie Morey. The Moreys must have had that same number since telephones were first installed in Litchfield County. The family had been in their old, broken-down house off Main Street since the late 1800s. They built it themselves, as they were all quick to tell you, and were still there. On the wall it just says Connie and those same digits Lydia used to dial when she was in high school, when Earl Morey was, for a short time, the only person she wanted to speak to or see. He was jumpy and mischievous, a soccer player with a big bush of red hair on his head. He loved the Grateful Dead and ice fishing and smoking pot and could mimic anyone he laid eyes and ears on for more than a minute. His favorite target was his older brother, Mike, who had a lisp and was not very bright. He also did a blistering impersonation of Lydia’s mother, which it took her only one time to overhear from her bedroom to run him out of the apartment. Still, she loved him, but more than him she loved the idea of his family, whichwas not by any stretch of imagination wealthy—most of them electricians and housepainters and groundskeepers at Harkness, the boarding school just over the town line in Bishop. It was and is their size and longevity that made them formidable. There is safety in numbers, Lydia’s mother would say as she blew clouds of menthol smoke through the kitchen from behind the Formica table where she sat each night with her schnapps, like a general at her battle station making speeches to the troops. I know because I’ve been out on my own for so long. Even before your father died a hundred years ago, it was just us. Just him