Kitabı oku: «Freedom», sayfa 2

“Well, why didn’t you warn me?”

“I did warn you.”

“You just warned me I could lose money.”

“Well, and you didn’t even lose money. You just didn’t make as much as you hoped.”

“It’s still money I should have had.”

“Joey, making money is not a right. You’re selling junk those girls don’t really need and some of them probably can’t even afford. That’s why Connie’s school has a dress code—to be fair to everybody.”

“Right—everybody but me.”

From the way Patty reported this conversation, laughing at Joey’s innocent indignation, it was clear to Merrie Paulsen that Patty still had no inkling of what her son was doing with Connie Monaghan. To be sure of it, Merrie probed a little. What did Patty suppose Connie had been getting for her trouble? Was she working on commission?

“Oh, yeah, we told him he had to give her half his profits,” Patty said. “But he would’ve done that anyway. He’s always been protective of her, even though he’s younger.”

“He’s like a brother to her …”

“No, actually,” Patty joked, “he’s a lot nicer to her than that. You can ask Jessica what it’s like to be his sibling.”

“Ha, right, ha ha,” Merrie said.

To Seth, later that day, Merrie reported, “It’s amazing, she truly has no idea.”

“I think it’s a mistake,” Seth said, “to take pleasure in a fellow parent’s ignorance. It’s tempting fate, don’t you think?”

“I’m sorry, it’s just too funny and delicious. You’ll have to do the non-gloating for the two of us and keep our fate at bay.”

“I feel bad for her.”

“Well, forgive me, but I’m finding it hilarious.”

Toward the end of that winter, in Grand Rapids, Walter’s mother collapsed with a pulmonary embolism on the floor of the ladies’ dress shop where she worked. Barrier Street knew Mrs. Berglund from her visits at Christmastime, on the children’s birthdays, and on her own birthday, for which Patty always took her to a local masseuse and plied her with licorice and macadamia nuts and white chocolate, her favorite treats. Merrie Paulsen referred to her, not unkindly, as “Miss Bianca,” after the bespectacled mouse matron in the children’s books by Margery Sharp. She had a crepey, once-pretty face and tremors in her jaw and her hands, one of which had been badly withered by childhood arthritis. She’d been worn out, physically wrecked, Walter said bitterly, by a lifetime of hard labor for his drunk of a dad, at the roadside motel they’d operated near Hibbing, but she was determined to remain independent and look elegant in her widowed years, and so she kept driving her old Chevy Cavalier to the dress shop. At the news of her collapse, Patty and Walter hurried up north, leaving Joey to be supervised by his disdainful older sister. It was soon after the ensuing teen fuckfestival, which Joey conducted in his bedroom in open defiance of Jessica, and which ended only with the sudden death and funeral of Mrs. Berglund, that Patty became a very different kind of neighbor, a much more sarcastic neighbor.

“Oh, Connie, yes,” her tune went now, “such a nice little girl, such a quiet little harmless girl, with such a sterling mom. You know, I hear Carol has a new boyfriend, a real studly man, he’s like half her age. Wouldn’t it be terrible if they moved away now, with everything Carol’s done to brighten our lives? And Connie, wow, I’d sure miss her too. Ha ha. So quiet and nice and grateful.”

Patty was looking a mess, gray-faced, poorly slept, underfed. It had taken her an awfully long time to start looking her age, but now at last Merrie Paulsen had been rewarded in her wait for it to happen.

“Safe to say she’s figured it out,” Merrie said to Seth.

“Theft of her cub—the ultimate crime,” Seth said.

“Theft, exactly,” Merrie said. “Poor innocent blameless Joey, stolen away by that little intellectual powerhouse next door.”

“Well, she is a year and a half older.”

“Calendrically.”

“Say what you will,” Seth said, “but Patty really loved Walter’s mom. She’s got to be hurting.”

“Oh, I know, I know. Seth, I know. And now I can honestly be sad for her.”

Neighbors who were closer to the Berglunds than the Paulsens reported that Miss Bianca had left her little mouse house, on a minor lake near Grand Rapids, exclusively to Walter and not to his two brothers. There was said to be disagreement between Walter and Patty about how to handle this, Walter wanting to sell the house and share the proceeds with his brothers, Patty insisting that he honor his mother’s wish to reward him for being the good son. The younger brother was career military and lived in the Mojave, at the Air Force base there, while the older brother had spent his adult life advancing their father’s program of drinking immoderately, exploiting their mother financially, and otherwise neglecting her. Walter and Patty had always taken the kids to his mother’s for a week or two in the summer, often bringing along one or two of Jessica’s neighborhood friends, who described the property as rustic and woodsy and not too terrible bugwise. As a kindness, perhaps, to Patty, who appeared to be doing some immoderate drinking of her own—her complexion in the morning, when she came out to collect the blue-wrappered New York Times and the green-wrappered Star-Tribune from her front walk, was all Chardonnay Splotch—Walter eventually agreed to keep the house as a vacation place, and in June, as soon as school let out, Patty took Joey up north to help her empty drawers and clean and repaint while Jessica stayed home with Walter and took an enrichment class in poetry.

Several neighbors, the Paulsens not among them, brought their boys for visits to the lakeside house that summer. They found Patty in much better spirits. One father privately invited Seth Paulsen to imagine her suntanned and barefoot, in a black one-piece bathing suit and beltless jeans, a look very much to Seth’s taste. Publicly, everyone remarked on how attentive and unsullen Joey was, and what a good time he and Patty seemed to be having. The two of them made all visitors join them in a complicated parlor game they called Associations. Patty stayed up late in front of her mother-in-law’s TV console, amusing Joey with her intricate knowledge of syndicated sixties and seventies sitcoms. Joey, having discovered that their lake was unidentified on local maps—it was really just a large pond, with one other house on it—had christened it Nameless, and Patty pronounced the name tenderly, sentimentally, “our Nameless Lake.” When Seth Paulsen learned from one of the returning fathers that Joey was working long hours up there, cleaning gutters and cutting brush and scraping paint, he wondered whether Patty might be paying Joey a solid wage for his services, whether this might be part of the deal. But nobody could say.

As for Connie, the Paulsens could hardly look out a Monaghan-side window without seeing her waiting. She really was a very patient girl, she had the metabolism of a fish in winter. She worked evenings busing tables at W. A. Frost, but all afternoon on weekdays she sat waiting on her front stoop while ice-cream trucks went by and younger children played, and on weekends she sat in a lawn chair behind the house, glancing occasionally at the loud, violent, haphazard tree-removal and construction work that her mother’s new boyfriend, Blake, had undertaken with his non-unionized buddies from the building trades, but mostly just waiting.

“So, Connie, what’s interesting in your life these days?” Seth asked her from the alley.

“You mean, apart from Blake?”

“Yes, apart from Blake.”

Connie considered briefly and then shook her head. “Nothing,” she said.

“Are you bored?”

“Not really.”

“Going to movies? Reading books?”

Connie fixed Seth with her steady, we-have-nothing-in-common gaze. “I saw Batman.”

“What about Joey? You guys have been pretty tight, I bet you’re missing him.”

“He’ll be back,” she said.

Once the old cigarette-butt issue had been resolved—Seth and Merrie admitted to having possibly exaggerated the summerlong tally of butts in the wading pool; to having possibly overreacted—they’d discovered in Carol Monaghan a rich source of lore about local Democratic politics, which Merrie was getting more involved with. Carol matter-of-factly told hair-raising stories of the unclean machine, of buried pipelines of slush, of rigged bids, of permeable firewalls, of interesting math, and got a kick out of Merrie’s horror. Merrie came to cherish Carol as a fleshly exemplum of the civic corruption Merrie intended to combat. The great thing about Carol was that she never seemed to change—kept tarting up on Thursday evenings for whoever, year after year after year, keeping alive the patriarchal tradition in urban politics.

And then, one day, she did change. There was already quite a bit of this going around. The city’s mayor, Norm Coleman, had morphed into a Republican, and a former pro wrestler was headed toward the governor’s mansion. The catalyst in Carol’s case was the new boyfriend, Blake, a goateed young backhoe operator she’d met across the counter at the license bureau, and for whom she dramatically changed her look. Out went the complicated hair and escort-service dresses, in came snug pants, a simple shag cut, and less makeup. A Carol nobody had ever seen, an actually happy Carol, hopped buoyantly from Blake’s F-250 pickup, letting anthem rock throb up and down the street, and slammed the passenger-side door with a mighty push. Soon Blake began spending nights at her house, shuffling around in a Vikings jersey with his work boots unlaced and a beer can in his fist, and before long he was chainsawing every tree in her back yard and running wild with a rented backhoe. On the bumper of his truck were the words I’M WHITE AND I VOTE.

The Paulsens, having recently completed a protracted renovation of their own, were reluctant to complain about the noise and mess, and Walter, on the other side, was too nice or too busy, but when Patty finally came home, late in August, after her months in the country with Joey, she was practically unhinged in her dismay, going up and down the street, door to door, wild-eyed, to vilify Carol Monaghan. “Excuse me,” she said, “what happened here? Can somebody tell me what happened? Did somebody declare war on trees without telling me? Who is this Paul Bunyan with the truck? What’s the story? Is she not renting anymore? Are you allowed to annihilate the trees if you’re just renting? How can you tear the back wall off a house you don’t even own? Did she somehow buy the place without our knowing it? How could she do that? She can’t even change a lightbulb without calling up my husband! ‘Sorry to bother you at the dinner hour, Walter, but when I flip this light switch nothing happens. Do you mind coming over right away? And while you’re here, hon, can you help me with my taxes? They’re due tomorrow and my nails are wet.’ How could this person get a mortgage? Doesn’t she have Victoria’s Secret bills to pay? How is she even allowed to have a boyfriend? Isn’t there some fat guy over in Minneapolis? Shouldn’t somebody maybe get the word out to the fat guy?”

Not until Patty reached the door of the Paulsens, far down on her list of go-to neighbors, did she get some answers. Merrie explained that Carol Monaghan was, in fact, no longer renting. Carol’s house had been one of several hundred that the city housing authority had come to own during the blight years and was now selling off at bargain prices.

“How did I not know this?” Patty said.

“You never asked,” Merrie said. And couldn’t resist adding: “You never seemed particularly interested in government.”

“And you say she got it cheap.”

“Very cheap. It helps to know the right people.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“I think it sucks, both fiscally and philosophically,” Merrie said. “That’s one reason I’m working with Jim Schiebel.”

“You know, I always loved this neighborhood,” Patty said. “I loved living here, even at the beginning. And now suddenly everything looks so dirty and ugly to me.”

“Don’t get depressed, get involved,” Merrie said, and gave her some literature.

“I wouldn’t want to be Walter right now,” Seth remarked as soon as Patty was gone.

“I’m frankly glad to hear that,” Merrie said.

“Was it just me, or did you hear an undertone of marital discontent? I mean, helping Carol with her taxes? You know anything about that? I thought that was very interesting. I hadn’t heard about that. And now he’s failed to protect their pretty view of Carol’s trees.”

“The whole thing is so Reaganite-regressive,” Merrie said. “She thought she could live in her own little bubble, make her own little world. Her own little dollhouse.”

The add-on structure that rose out of Carol’s back-yard mud pit, weekend by weekend over the next nine months, was like a giant utilitarian boat shed with three plain windows punctuating its expanses of vinyl siding. Carol and Blake referred to it as a “great-room,” a concept hitherto foreign to Ramsey Hill. Following the cigarette-butt controversy, the Paulsens had installed a high fence and planted a line of ornamental spruces that had since grown up enough to screen them from the spectacle. Only the Berglunds’ sight lines were unobstructed, and before long the other neighbors were avoiding conversation with Patty, as they never had before, because of her fixation on what she called “the hangar.” They waved from the street and called out hellos but were careful not to slow down and get sucked in. The consensus among the working mothers was that Patty had too much time on her hands. In the old days, she’d been great with the little kids, teaching them sports and domestic arts, but now most of the kids on the street were teenagers. No matter how she tried to fill her days, she was always within sight or earshot of the work next door. Every few hours, she emerged from her house and paced up and down her back yard, peering over at the great-room like an animal whose nest had been disturbed, and sometimes in the evening she went knocking on the great-room’s temporary plywood door.

“Hey, Blake, how’s it going?”

“Going just fine.”

“Sounds like it! Hey, you know what, that Skilsaw’s pretty loud for eight-thirty at night. How would you feel about knocking off for the day?”

“Not too good, actually.”

“Well, how about if I just ask you to stop, then?”

“I don’t know. How about you letting me get my work done?”

“I’d actually feel pretty bad about that, because the noise is really bothering us.”

“Yeah, well, you know what? Too bad.”

Patty had a loud, involuntary, whinnylike laugh. “Ha-ha-ha! Too bad?”

“Yeah, listen, I’m sorry about the noise. But Carol says there was about five years of noise coming out of your place when you were fixing it up.”

“Ha-ha-ha. I don’t remember her complaining.”

“You were doing what you had to do. Now I’m doing what I have to do.”

“What you’re doing is really ugly, though. I’m sorry, but it’s kind of hideous. Just—horrible and hideous. Honestly. As a matter of pure fact. Not that that’s really the issue. The issue is the Skilsaw.”

“You’re on private property and you need to leave now.”

“OK, so I guess I’ll be calling the cops.”

“That’s fine, go ahead.”

You could see her pacing in the alley then, trembling with frustration. She did repeatedly call the police about the noise, and a few times they actually came and had a word with Blake, but they soon got tired of hearing from her and did not come back until the following February, when somebody slashed all four of the beautiful new snow tires on Blake’s F-250 and Blake and Carol directed officers to the next-door neighbor who’d been phoning in so many complaints. This resulted in Patty again going up and down the street, knocking on doors, ranting. “The obvious suspect, right? The mom next door with a couple of teenage kids. Hard-core criminal me, right? Lunatic me! He’s got the biggest, ugliest vehicle on the street, he’s got bumper stickers that offend pretty much anybody who’s not a white supremacist, but, God, what a mystery, who else but me could want to slash his tires?”

Merrie Paulsen was convinced that Patty was, in fact, the slasher.

“I don’t see it,” Seth said. “I mean, she’s obviously suffering, but she’s not a liar.”

“Right, except I didn’t actually notice her saying she didn’t do it. You have to hope she’s getting good therapy somewhere. She sure could use it. That and a full-time job.”

“My question is, where is Walter?”

“Walter is killing himself earning his salary so she can stay home all day and be a mad housewife. He’s being a good dad to Jessica and some sort of reality principle to Joey. I’d say he has his hands full.”

Walter’s most salient quality, besides his love of Patty, was his niceness. He was the sort of good listener who seemed to find everybody else more interesting and impressive than himself. He was preposterously fair-skinned, weak in the chin, cherubically curly up top, and had worn the same round wireframes forever. He’d begun his career at 3M as an attorney in the counsel’s office, but he’d failed to thrive there and was shunted into outreach and philanthropy, a corporate cul-de-sac where niceness was an asset. On Barrier Street he was always handing out great free tickets to the Guthrie and the Chamber Orchestra and telling neighbors about encounters he’d had with famous locals such as Garrison Keillor and Kirby Puckett and, once, Prince. More recently, and surprisingly, he’d left 3M altogether and become a development officer for the Nature Conservancy. Nobody except the Paulsens had suspected him of harboring such reserves of discontent, but Walter was no less enthusiastic about nature than he was about culture, and the only outward change in his life was his new scarcity at home on weekends.

This scarcity may have been one reason he didn’t intervene, as he might have been expected to, in Patty’s battle with Carol Monaghan. His response, if you asked him point-blank about it, was to giggle nervously. “I’m kind of a neutral bystander on that one,” he said. And a neutral bystander he remained all through the spring and summer of Joey’s sophomore year and into the following fall, when Jessica went off to college in the East and Joey moved out of his parents’ house and in with Carol, Blake, and Connie.

The move was a stunning act of sedition and a dagger to Patty’s heart—the beginning of the end of her life in Ramsey Hill. Joey had spent July and August in Montana, working on the high-country ranch of one of Walter’s major Nature Conservancy donors, and had returned with broad, manly shoulders and two new inches of height. Walter, who didn’t ordinarily brag, had vouchsafed to the Paulsens, at a picnic in August, that the donor had called him up to say how “blown away” he was by Joey’s fearlessness and tirelessness in throwing calves and dipping sheep. Patty, however, at the same picnic, was already vacant-eyed with pain. In June, before Joey went to Montana, she’d again taken him up to Nameless Lake to help her improve the property, and the only neighbor who’d seen them there described a terrible afternoon of watching mother and son lacerate each other over and over, airing it all in plain sight, Joey mocking Patty’s mannerisms and finally calling her “stupid” to her face, at which Patty had cried out, “Ha-ha-ha! Stupid! God, Joey! Your maturity just never ceases to amaze me! Calling your mother stupid in front of other people! That’s just so attractive in a person! What a big, tough, independent man you are!”

By summer’s end, Blake had nearly finished work on the great-room and was outfitting it with such Blakean gear as PlayStation, Foosball, a refrigerated beer keg, a large-screen TV, an air-hockey table, a stained-glass Vikings chandelier, and mechanized recliners. Neighbors were left to imagine Patty’s dinner-table sarcasm regarding these amenities, and Joey’s declarations that she was being stupid and unfair, and Walter’s angry demands that Joey apologize to Patty, but the night when Joey defected to the house next door didn’t need to be imagined, because Carol Monaghan was happy to describe it, in a loud and somewhat gloating voice, to any neighbor sufficiently disloyal to the Berglunds to listen to her.

“Joey was so calm, so calm,” Carol said. “I swear to God, you couldn’t melt butter in his mouth. I went over there with Connie to support him and let everybody know I’m totally in favor of the arrangement, because, you know Walter, he’s so considerate, he’s going to worry it’s an imposition on me. And Joey was totally responsible like always. He just wanted to be on the same page and make sure all the cards are on the table. He explained how he and Connie had discussed things with me, and I told Walter—because I knew he’d be concerned about this—I told him groceries were not a problem. Blake and I are a family now and we’re happy to feed one more, and Joey’s also very good about the dishes and garbage and being neat, and plus, I told Walter, he and Patty used to be so generous to Connie and give her meals and all. I wanted to acknowledge that, because they really were generous when I didn’t have my life together, and I’ve never been anything but grateful for that. And Joey’s just so responsible and calm. He explains how, since Patty won’t even let Connie in the house, he really doesn’t have any other choice if he wants to spend time with her, and I chime in and say how totally in support of the relationship I am—if only all the other young people in this world were as responsible as those two, the world would be a much better place—and how much more preferable it is for them to be in my house, safe and responsible, instead of sneaking around and getting in trouble. I’m so grateful to Joey, he’ll always be welcome in my house. I said that to them. And I know Patty doesn’t like me, she’s always looked down her nose at me and been snooty about Connie. I know that. I know a thing or two about the things Patty’s capable of. I knew she was going to throw some kind of fit. And so her face gets all twisted, and she’s like, ‘You think he loves your daughter? You think he’s in love with her?’ In this high little voice. Like it’s impossible for somebody like Joey to be in love with Connie, because I didn’t go to college or whatever, or I don’t have as big a house or come from New York City or whatever, or I have to work an honest-to-Christ forty-hour full-time job, unlike her. Patty’s so full of disrespect for me, you can’t believe it. But Walter I thought I could talk to. He really is a sweetie. His face is beet red, I think because he’s embarrassed, and he says, ‘Carol, you and Connie need to leave so we can talk to Joey privately.’ Which I’m fine with. I’m not there to make trouble, I’m not a troublemaking person. Except then Joey says no. He says he’s not asking permission, he’s just informing them about what he’s going to do, and there’s nothing to discuss. And that’s when Walter loses it. Just loses it. He’s got tears running down his face he’s so upset—and I can understand that, because Joey’s his youngest, and it’s not Walter’s fault Patty is so unreasonable and mean to Connie that Joey can’t stand to live with them anymore. But he starts yelling at the top of his lungs, like, YOU ARE SIXTEEN YEARS OLD AND YOU ARE NOT GOING ANYWHERE UNTIL YOU FINISH HIGH SCHOOL. And Joey’s just smiling at him, you couldn’t melt butter in his mouth. Joey says it’s not against the law for him to leave, and anyway he’s only moving next door. Totally reasonable. I wish I’d been one percent as smart and cool when I was sixteen. I mean, he’s just a great kid. It made me feel kind of bad for Walter, because he starts yelling all this stuff about how he’s not going to pay for Joey’s college, and Joey’s not going to get to go back to Montana next summer, and all he’s asking is that Joey come to dinner and sleep in his own bed and be a part of the family. And Joey’s like, ‘I’m still part of the family,’ which, by the way, he never said he wasn’t. But Walter’s stomping around the kitchen, for a couple of seconds I think he’s actually going to hit him, but he’s just totally lost it, he’s yelling, GET OUT, GET OUT, I’M SICK OF IT, GET OUT, and then he’s gone and you can hear him upstairs in Joey’s room, opening up Joey’s drawers or whatever, and Patty runs upstairs and they start screaming at each other, and Connie and I are hugging Joey, because he’s the one reasonable person in the family and we feel so sorry for him, and that’s when I know for sure it’s the right thing for him to move in with us. Walter comes stomping downstairs again and we can hear Patty screaming like a maniac—she’s totally lost it—and Walter starts yelling again, DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU’RE DOING TO YOUR MOTHER? Because it’s all about Patty, see, she’s always got to be the victim. And Joey’s just standing there shaking his head, because it’s so obvious. Why would he want to live in a place like this?”

Although some neighbors did undoubtedly take satisfaction in Patty’s reaping the whirlwind of her son’s extraordinariness, the fact remained that Carol Monaghan had never been well liked on Barrier Street, Blake was widely deplored, Connie was thought spooky, and nobody had ever really trusted Joey. As word of his insurrection spread, the emotions prevailing among the Ramsey Hill gentry were pity for Walter, anxiety about Patty’s psychological health, and an overwhelming sense of relief and gratitude at how normal their own children were—how happy to accept parental largesse, how innocently demanding of help with their homework or their college applications, how compliant in phoning in their afterschool whereabouts, how divulging of their little day-to-day bruisings, how reassuringly predictable in their run-ins with sex and pot and alcohol. The ache emanating from the Berglunds’ house was sui generis. Walter—unaware, you had to hope, of Carol’s blabbing about his night of “losing it”—acknowledged awkwardly to various neighbors that he and Patty had been “fired” as parents and were doing their best not to take it too personally. “He comes over to study sometimes,” Walter said, “but right now he seems more comfortable spending his nights at Carol’s. We’ll see how long that lasts.”

“How’s Patty taking all this?” Seth Paulsen asked him.

“Not well.”

“We’d love to get you guys over for dinner some night soon.”

“That would be great,” Walter said, “but I think Patty’s going up to my mom’s old house for a while. She’s been fixing it up, you know.”

“I’m worried about her,” Seth said with a catch in his voice.

“So am I, a little bit. I’ve seen her play in pain, though. She tore up her knee in her junior year and tried to play another two games on it.”

“But then didn’t she have, um, career-ending surgery?”

“It was more a point about her toughness, Seth. About her playing through pain.”

“Right.”

Walter and Patty never did get over to the Paulsens for dinner. Patty was absent from Barrier Street, hiding out at Nameless Lake, for long stretches of the winter and spring that followed, and even when her car was in the driveway—for example, at Christmastime, when Jessica returned from college and, according to her friends, had a “blow-out fight” with Joey which resulted in his spending more than a week in his old bedroom, giving his formidable sister the proper holiday she wanted—Patty eschewed the neighborhood get-togethers at which her baked goods and affability had once been such welcome fixtures. She was sometimes seen receiving visits from fortyish women who, based on their hairstyles and the bumper stickers on their Subarus, were thought to be old basketball teammates of hers, and there was talk about her drinking again, but this was mostly just a guess, since, for all her friendliness, she had never made an actual close friend in Ramsey Hill.

By New Year’s, Joey was back at Carol and Blake’s. A large part of that house’s allure was presumed to be the bed he shared with Connie. He was known by his friends to be bizarrely and militantly opposed to masturbation, the mere mention of which never failed to elicit a condescending smile from him; he claimed it was an ambition of his to go through life without resorting to it. More perspicacious neighbors, the Paulsens among them, suspected that Joey also enjoyed being the smartest person in the house. He became the prince of the great-room, opening its pleasures to everyone he favored with his friendship (and making the unsupervised beer keg a bone of contention at family dinners all over the neighborhood). His manner with Carol verged unsettlingly close to flirtation, and Blake he charmed by loving all the things that Blake himself loved, especially Blake’s power tools and Blake’s truck, at the wheel of which he learned how to drive. From the annoying way he smiled at his schoolmates’ enthusiasm for Al Gore and Senator Wellstone, as if liberalism were a weakness on a par with self-abuse, it seemed he’d even embraced some of Blake’s politics. He worked construction the next summer instead of returning to Montana.

And everybody had the sense, fairly or not, that Walter—his niceness—was somehow to blame. Instead of dragging Joey home by the hair and making him behave himself, instead of knocking Patty over the head with a rock and making her behave herself, he disappeared into his work with the Nature Conservancy, where he’d rather quickly become the state chapter’s executive director, and let the house stand empty evening after evening, let the flower beds go to seed and the hedges go unclipped and the windows go unwashed, let the dirty urban snow engulf the warped GORE LIEBERMAN sign still stuck in the front yard. Even the Paulsens lost interest in the Berglunds, now that Merrie was running for city council. Patty spent all of the following summer away at Nameless Lake, and soon after her return—a month after Joey went off to the University of Virginia under financial circumstances that were unknown on Ramsey Hill, and two weeks after the great national tragedy—a FOR SALE sign went up in front of the Victorian into which she and Walter had poured fully half their lives. Walter had already begun commuting to a new job in Washington. Though housing prices would soon be rebounding to unprecedented heights, the local market was still near the bottom of its post-9/11 slump. Patty oversaw the sale of the house, at an unhappy price, to an earnest black professional couple with twin three-year-olds. In February, the two Berglunds went door to door along the street one final time, taking leave with polite formality, Walter asking after everybody’s children and conveying his very best wishes for each of them, Patty saying little but looking strangely youthful again, like the girl who’d pushed her stroller down the street before the neighborhood was even a neighborhood.