Ruckelbar was a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts when his father had a heart attack in the station that March and died sitting up against the wall in the single-bay garage. Ruckelbar was twenty and when he came home it would stick. Clare was back from Sarah Lawrence that summer, and it was all right for a while, even good, the way anything can be good when you’re young. It was fun having a service station, and after closing they’d go to the pubs beyond the blue-collar town of Garse, roadhouses that are all gone now. It was thrilling for Clare to sit in his pickup, the station truck, the same truck in which she arched herself against him at Upper Quarry and the same truck he drives now, as he rocked the huge set of keys in the latch of Bluestone and then extracted them and turned to her for a night. But she didn’t think he was serious about it. He was to be an engineer; his father had said as much, and then another year passed, his mother now ill, while he ran the place all winter, plowing the snow from around the station with a blade on the old truck that his father had welded himself. When spring came it was a done deal. The wild iris and the dogwoods burst from every seam in the earth and the world changed for Ruckelbar, his sense of autonomy and worth, and he knew he was here for life. Even by the time they married, Clare had had enough. When she saw that the little baby girl she had the next year gave her no leverage with him, she stopped coming out with box lunches and avoided driving by the place even when she had to drive to Garse going by way of Tipton, which added four miles to the trip. She let him know that she didn’t want to hear about Bluestone in her house and that he was to leave his overalls at the station, his boots in the garage, and he was to shower in the basement.
He’d gone along with this somehow, gone along without an angry word, without many words at all, the separate bedroom in the nice house in Corbett, and now after nearly twenty years, it was their way. After the loss of Clare and then the loss of the memory of her in his truck and in his bed came the loss of his daughter, which he also just allowed. Clare had her at home and Clare was determined that Marjorie should understand the essential elements of disappointment, and the lessons started with his name. Now, at seventeen, Marjorie was a day student at Woodbine, the prep school in Corbett, and her name was Marjorie Bar, shortened Clare said for convenience and for her career, whatever it would be. And Ruckelbar had let that happen too. He could fix any feature of any automobile, truck, or element of farm equipment, but he could not fix this.
AT HOME AFTER a silent dinner with Clare, he broke the rule about talking about the station and told her that DiPaulo had picked up the car, the one the boy had been sitting in every day for weeks. She didn’t like DiPaulo—he’d always been part of the way her life had betrayed her—and she let her eyes lift in disgust and then asked about the boy, “What did he do?” They were clearing the supper dishes. Marjorie ate dinner at school and arrived home after the evening study hall. It was queer that Clare should ask a question, and Ruckelbar, who hadn’t intended his comment to begin a conversation, was surprised and not sure of how he should answer.
“He sat in the car. In the driver’s seat.”
This stopped Clare midstep and she held her dishes still. “All day?”
“He came after school and walked home after dark.” It was the most Ruckelbar had spoken about the station in his kitchen for five or six years. Clare resumed sorting out the silverware and wiping up. Ruckelbar realized he wanted to ask Clare what to do about the camera. “Do you remember the accident?” he asked. “The girl?”
“If it’s the same girl. The three young people from Garse. She was a tramp. They were killed on Labor Day or just before. They went off the quarry road.”
Ruckelbar, who hadn’t seen the papers, had known about the accident, of course. The police tow truck driver had told him about the three students, and the vehicle was crushed in so radical a fashion anyone could see it had fallen some distance onto the rock. Clare seemed to know more about it, something she’d read or heard, but Ruckelbar didn’t know how to ask, and in a moment the chance was lost.
“Who’s a tramp?” Marjorie entered the kitchen, putting her bookbag on a chair.
“Your father has some lowlife living in a car.”
Ruckelbar looked at her.
“Any pie?” Marjorie asked her mother. Clare extracted a pumpkin pie from the fridge. Under the plastic wrap, it was uncut, one of Clare’s fresh pumpkin pies. Ruckelbar looked at it, just a pie, and he stopped slipping. He’d already exited the room in his head, and he came back. “I’d like a piece of that pie, too, Clare. If I could please.”