“Lois,” he said, giving his eyebrow what he hoped was that that special Bill McGovern lift, you’re babbling.”
“I am?”
“You am. It’s something you do when you’re nervous, but you can stop being nervous right now. I’m crazy ’bout dis lady.” Nor was that an exaggeration; he fell in love with the black-and-tan beagle bitch almost at once.
“What will you name her?” Lois asked. “Any idea?”
“Sure,” Ralph said. “Rosalie.”
The next four years were happy ones for Helen and Nat Deepneau, as well.
They lived frugally in an apartment on the east side of town for awhile, getting along on Helen’s librarian’s salary but not doing much more than that. The little Cape Cod up the street from Ralph’s place had sold, but that money had gone to pay outstanding bills. Then, in June of 1994, Helen received an insurance windfall… only the wind that blew it her way was fohn Leydecker.
The Great Eastern Insurance Company had originally refused to pay off on Ed Deepneau’s life insurance policy, claiming he had taken his own life. Then, after a great deal of harrumphing and muttering under their corporate breath, they had offered a substantial settlement.
They were persuaded to do this by a poker-buddy of John Leydecker’s named Howard Hayman. When he wasn’t playing lowball, five-card stud, and three-card draw, Hayman was a laxvyer who employed lunching on insurance companies.
Leydecker had re-met Helen at Ralph and Lois’s in February of 1994, had fallen head over heels in fascination with her (“It was never quite love,” he told Ralph and Lois later, “which was probably just as well, considering how things turned out”), and had introduced her to Hayman because he thought the insurance company was trying to screw her. “He was not suicidal,” Leydecker said, and stuck to that long after Helen had handed him his hat and shown him the door.
After being faced with a suit in which Howard Hayman threatened to make Great Eastern look like Snidely Whiplash tying Little a Nell to the railroad tracks, Helen had received a check for seventy thousand dollars. In the late fall of 1994 she had used most of this money to build a house on Harris Avenue, just three doors up from her old place and right across from Harriet Bennigan’s.
“I was never really happy on the east side,” she told Lois one day in November of that year. They were on their way back from the park, and Natalie had been sitting slumped and fast asleep in her stroller, her presence little more than a p k os 1 in n e-tip and a fog of cold breath below a large ski-hat which Lois had knitted herself. “I used to dream about Harris Avenue. Isn’t that crazy?”
“I don’t think dreams are ever crazy,” Lois replied.
Helen and John Leydecker dated for most of that summer, but neither Ralph nor Lois was particularly surprised when the courtship abruptly ended after Labor Day, or when Helen began to wear a discreet pink triangle pin on her prim, high-necked librarian’s blouses.
Perhaps they were not surprised because they were old enough to have seen everything at least once, or perhaps on some deep level they were still glimpsing the auras which surround thinls.
I creating a bright gateway opening on a secret city of hidden meanings, concealed motives, and camouflaged agendas.
Ralph and Lois babysat Natalie frequently after Helen moved back to Harris Avenue, and they enjoyed these stints tremendously. Nat was the child their marriage might have produced if it had happened thirty years sooner, and the coldest, most overcast winter day warmed and brightened when Natalie came toddling in, looking like a midget version of the Goodyear blimp in her pink quilted snowsuit with the mittens hanging from the cuffs, and yelled exuberantly: “Hi, I miss! I come to bizzit you!”
In June of 1995, Helen bought a reconditioned Volvo. On the back she put a sticker which read A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE. This sentiment did not particularly surprise Ralph, either, but glimpsing that sticker always made him feel unhappy. He sometimes thought Ed’s meanest legacy to his widow was summed up in its brittle, not-quite-funny sentiment, aind when he saw it, Ralph often remembered how Ed had looked on that summer afternoon when he had walked up from the Red Apple Store to confront him. How Ed had been sitting, shirtless, in the spray thrown by the sprinkler. How there had been a drop of blood on one lens of his glasses. How he had leaned forward, looking at Ralph with his earnest, intelligent eyes, and said that once stupidity reached a certain level, it became hard to live with.
And after that, stuff started to ha sometimes think. just what stuff was something he could no longer remember, though, and probably that was just as well. But his lapse of memory (if that was what it was) did not change his belief that Helen had been cheated in some obscure fashion… that some bad-tempered fate had tied a can to her tail, and she didn’t even know it.
A month after Helen bought her Volvo, Faye Chapin suffered a heart-attack while drafting a preliminary list of seeds for that fall’s Runway 3 Classic. He was taken to Derry Home Hospital, where he died seven hours later. Ralph visited him shortly before the end, and when he saw the numbers on the door-315-a fierce sense of deja vu washed over him. At first he thought it was because Carolyn had finished her last illness jus up the hall, and then he remembered that jimmy V. had died in this very room. He and Lois had visited jimmy just before the end, and Ralph thought jimmy had recognized them both, although he couldn’t be sure; his memories of the time when he had first begun to really notice Lois were mixed up and hazy in his mind. He supposed some of that was love, and probably some of it had to do with getting on in years, but probably most of it had been the insomnia-he’d gone through a really bad patch of that in the months after Carolyn’s death, although it had eventually cured itself, as such things sometimes did.
Still, it seemed to him that something ([hello woman hello man we’ve been waiting for you]) far out of the ordinary had happened in this room, and as he took Faye’s dry, strengthless hand and smiled into Faye’s frightened, confused eyes, a strange thought came to him: They’re standing right over there in the corner and watching us.
He looked over. There was no one at all in the corner, of course, but for a moment… for just a moment…
Life in the years between 1993 and 1998 went on as life in places like Derry always does: the buds of April became the brittle, blowing leaves of October; Christmas trees were brought into homes in midDecember and hauled off in the backs of Dumpsters with strands of tinsel still hanging sadly from their boughs during the first week of January; babies came in through the in door and old folks went out through the out door. Sometimes people in the prime of their lives went out through the out door, too.
In Derry there were five years of haircuts and permanents, storms and senior proms, coffee and cigarettes, steak dinners at Parker’s Cove and hotdogs at the Little League field. Girls and boys fell in love, drunks fell out of cars, short skirts fell out of favor. People reshingled their roofs and repaved their driveways. Old bums were voted out of office; new bums were voted in. It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in awhile exhilarating. The fundamental things continued to apply as time went by.
In the early fall of 1996, Ralph became convinced he had colon cancer, He had begun to see more than trace amounts of blood in his stool, and when he finally went to see Dr. Pickard or. Litchfield’s cheerful, rumpled replacement), he did so with visions of hospital beds and chemotherapy IV-drips dancing bleakly in his head.
Instead of cancer, the problem turned out to be a hemorrhoid which had, in Dr. Pickard’s memorable phrase, “popped its top.” He wrote Ralph a prescription for suppositories, which Ralph took to the Rite Aid down the street. Joe Wyzer read it, then grinned cheerfully at Ralph. “Lousy,” he said, “but it beats the hell out of colon cancer, don’t you think?”