“Right,” he said, exhaling frustration. “Of course.
“Don't go out before the sun rises,” he said.
I said I wouldn't, and he went back to bed then, and I peeked in a minute later—he was sleeping again—and I took my coffee mug and my toast and I walked out the front door, into the moonlit park.
As I sat at the picnic table in the moon shadow of the dilapidated mansion, watching for the sun to rise, I thought of Kath. Kath and Lee. I imagined Lee arriving at her house—their house? I imagined Kath going to the grocery store after our gathering, Lee helping her unload the bags when she got home, the whole Montgomery clan going off to church as a family, which they planned to do. Lee staying for supper and going back to his apartment only after the children went to bed. I wondered what the other Kathy thought of this arrangement. I wondered if he was still seeing her. Even Jeff, who worked with him, wasn't quite sure. He never saw Lee and the other Kathy together at the hospital.
Not long before sunrise, a slim shadow of darker darkness moved toward me from across the park, but I wasn't scared. Even in the darkness I knew it was Linda. She sat next to me and looked at the mansion too.
“Her daughter died of typhoid,” she said, and when I turned slightly toward her, she said, “The woman who built that house. She was from a big political family; her stepson was governor, I think. Her husband died when she was in her early forties, and three months later her fifteen-year-old daughter died of typhoid. Her only child. Like the Stanfords' son. Fifteen. Typhoid. Only child.”
We sat silently for a moment, watching the shambles of the house begin to emerge from the darkness as the sky lightened in the east.
“This park always makes me think of my mom,” she whispered. “It's what she would have done if any of us had died, I think. She would have made a park for children to enjoy, and named it after us.”
She sat beside me, straight-backed and square-shouldered as always. “Even when she was really sick, she used to make herself get out of bed to take us to the park.”
I set my hand gently over hers, and she intertwined her fingers with mine.
Across the park, the shadows of Ally and Brett and Kath appeared, approaching us together, side by side by side.
“Someday I'm going to do something like this for my mom,” Linda said. “I'm going to make something permanent. Something forever. A park in her honor. A college. A library.”
“A book,” I whispered, as Ally and Brett and Kath reached us, as they slipped onto the picnic table benches as quietly as latecomers slipping into Mass.
“Yes,” Linda said just as the first sharp ray of the sun sparked at the horizon. “A book.”
“A book,” Ally echoed, as if it were right there in a missalette in front of her, her response.
And Kath and Brett repeated after her, “A book.” And the dawn broke, the sun cresting the horizon, bringing to life the detail around us: the two brick chimneys rising proudly from either end of the long mansion roof, the sturdy trunks and bright red and orange and gold leaves of the trees all around us, our five faces smiling at each other, not sleepy despite the hour. Kath brushed a dried leaf from the table, then, and Brett pulled the worst of the splinters and tossed them onto the ground, and we set our pages in front of us, and we began again.
KATH HARDLY WROTE those next months, not even in her journal. She was emotionally exhausted, all her energy sapped by the demands of motherhood—taking care of Anna Page, Lee-Lee, and Lacy with no real help from Lee—and the drudgery of her work for the accountant. She needed to change jobs, Linda kept saying. “Why don't you find something you enjoy doing, Kath? You could be . . . I don't know. A journalist or an editor or a buyer for a bookstore. You could probably run a bookstore.” Then one Sunday in November, Linda arrived at the park looking like the canary that ate the cat. She'd met a woman at an AAUW meeting who knew an editor who would be looking to hire someone that spring. She wasn't quite sure of the details, but it was in publishing. Wouldn't Kath love to work in publishing?
“In the spring?” Kath said doubtfully.
“The person she needs to replace is getting married in the spring. I think she's accepting résumés, although she won't interview until after the New Year.”
Despite the long lead time, Kath got all in a twist right then. She'd never interviewed for anything, she said. And when we pointed out that she'd interviewed for all those jobs before she started working for the accountant, she said, “Anything that matters. Any job I might actually want.”
MY OWN LIFE wasn't as complicated as Kath's that winter, but it was complicated enough. For one thing, being a lector at my church was turning out to be more time-consuming than I'd expected. Just a few minutes reading aloud during a Mass I would have attended anyway, I'd thought when I volunteered, and I was thrilled to do it, in part because only men had been allowed to read when I was growing up. I hadn't counted on the psychological energy it took to stand up in front of a whole church full of college graduates, though, their squirming children letting me know just how tedious my version of a Letter from Paul to the Corinthians was.