No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [15]
Her sister, Tess, certainly wasn’t won over. She didn’t think much of the way Clayton’s work took him on the road more than half the time, leaving Patricia to raise her children alone for so many long stretches. But he provided for them, he was decent enough, and his love for Patricia seemed deep and genuine.
Patricia Bigge had a job in a drugstore in Milford, on North Broad Street, looking out on the town green, just down from the old library, where she would take out classical records from the library’s extensive music collection. She stocked shelves, worked the cash register, helped the pharmacist, but only with the most basic things. She didn’t have the proper training, and knew she should have taken more school, learned some sort of trade, something, but mostly she had to get out there and support herself. Same for her sister, Tess, who worked in a factory in Bridgeport that made parts for radios.
Clayton walked into the drugstore one day, looking for a Mars bar.
Patricia liked to say, if her husband hadn’t been hit by a Mars bar craving that day in July 1967, as he passed through Milford on a sales trip, well, things would have turned out very differently.
As far as Patricia was concerned, they turned out fine. It was a speedy courtship, and within a few weeks of getting married she was pregnant with Todd. Clayton found them an affordable house on Hickory, just off Pumpkin Delight Road, a stone’s throw from the beach and Long Island Sound. He wanted his wife and child to have a decent home to live in while he was on the road. He had responsibility for a corridor that ran roughly between New York and Chicago and up to Buffalo, selling industrial lubricants and other supplies to machine shops all along the way. Lots of regulars. Kept him busy.
A couple of years after Todd was born, Cynthia arrived.
I was thinking about all this as I drove to Old Fairfield High School. Whenever I daydreamed, I found it was often about my wife’s past, her upbringing, about the members of her family I never knew, would in all likelihood never be able to know.
Maybe if I could have had the chance to spend any time with them, I’d have more insights into what made Cynthia tick. But the reality was, the woman I knew and loved had been shaped more by what had happened since she’d lost her family—or since her family had lost her—than by what had happened before.
I popped into the doughnut shop for a coffee, resisted the urge to buy a lemon-filled while there, and was carrying my takeout cup with me into the school, a satchel full of student essays slung over my shoulder, when I saw Roland Carruthers, the principal, and probably my best friend here at this institution, in the hall.
“Rolly,” I said.
“Where’s mine?” he said, nodding at the paper cup in my hand.
“If you’ll take my period one class, I’ll go back and get you one.”
“If I take your period one class, I’m going to need something stronger than coffee.”
“They’re not that bad.”
“They’re savages,” Rolly said, not even cracking a smile.
“You don’t even know what my period one class is or who’s in it,” I said.
“If it’s made up of students from this school, then they’re savages,” Rolly said, staying in deadpan.
“What’s happening with Jane Scavullo?” I asked. She was a student in my creative writing class, a troubled kid with a messed-up family background that was vague at best as far as the office was concerned, who spent nearly as much time down there as the secretaries. She also happened to write like an angel. An angel who’d happily punch your lights out, maybe, but an angel just the same.
“I told her she’s this close to a suspension,” Rolly said, holding his thumb and forefinger a quarter inch apart. Jane and another girl had gotten into an all-out, hair-pulling, cheek-scratching brawl out in front of the school a couple of days earlier. A