One time down at the waterfall she brought her sketchbook. She was drawing a group of boys fishing for trout. One of them had come over. He hung back, but he seemed to want to see what she was doing. He stood a little ways off, watching. “You can take a look if you want,” she told him.
From the looks of him, she figured he was probably twelve or thirteen years old. But the voice in which he spoke to her was deep, and there was something strangely mature, almost manly, about him.
“You must be an artist, huh?” he said.
“I just like to make pictures. You can do it, too, if you want.” She pointed to her extra sketchbook, lying next to her on the rocks.
“I’m no good at art,” he said. “I just like looking at it.”
His name was Timmy. His family used to run Pouliot’s Garage out by the dump, only they closed it last year on account of his dad died. She’d probably seen the place.
She didn’t ask, but he volunteered the next part. “He shot himself,” Timmy said. “I was the one that found him.”
His teacher had a poster up on the wall in his classroom, by this artist named Vincent van Gogh. Some people said he must have been a weirdo because he cut off his ear, but Timmy had memorized that picture. He thought it was the best artwork he ever saw. Then he found out this artist, van Gogh, had killed himself, just like his dad.
“My dad died, too,” she told him. “I know it’s hard.”
Though in Eleanor’s case, anyway, it hadn’t been that great when he was alive. Not in Timmy’s, either, most likely.
“Why don’t you give it a try?” Eleanor said. She held out a piece of charcoal.
He shook his head. “If I was an artist I’d make a picture of you.”
A voice called out. His older brother, probably. “Hey, Romeo. We’re leaving.”
“I have to go,” he told her. “See you around.”
Timmy was a few yards away when he turned around one more time. She’d never known a person to have bluer eyes. “Do you have a boyfriend or anything?” he said.
She laughed.
“I think I’m a little old for you,” she told him. Seeing his face when she said that, she wished she hadn’t. He had meant what he told her and she had acted like it was the most ridiculous thing ever and flicked him off like a deerfly.
She was going to say something else, like “Come back again and I’ll let you try my watercolors.” But he was gone.
That July she’d gone to the ASPCA and adopted a dog—a mutt she named Charlie who loved chasing squirrels and chewed up a box of oil pastels one time when she’d left the barn door open and her work out.
“You better watch that pup of yours come hunting season,” Walt told her. “You don’t want him to go chasing deer.”
What Charlie seemed to love best were squirrels and butterflies. He had no chance of ever catching any, of course, but that didn’t stop him. Sometimes, at the end of the day, she’d sit out under the tree and watch him. One minute he’d be stretched out with his head in her lap, but suddenly he’d sit up and a look of total concentration would come over him. Then he was off like a shot on his joyful, futile pursuit. There was a dog’s life for you: no memory of losses, no expectation of future reward. No heartbreak when the squirrel disappeared up the tree. All Charlie appeared to care about was the feeling of the sun on his belly and the racing of his heart, no doubt, when some small animal or fluttering creature came into view. The endless, uncrushable hope that one day he would actually catch that squirrel.
His devotion to Eleanor was absolute. Wherever he was in the house, whatever he was doing—including sleeping—she had only to walk past him and he’d slap his tail against the floor. When she came home to that empty house—and it was always empty when she came home, empty of human companionship, anyway—he’d be there at the door, waiting for her.
No family. No man, only a dog. No man, though Walt stopped by in his truck to check up on her and put on the storm windows when the cold weather came. A man of few words, though it occurred to her at some point that if he didn’t stop by, as he did nearly every afternoon, she’d miss him.
In the warm weather, he brought her vegetables from his garden. (Zucchinis above all else. More zucchinis than a person could eat in a year.) In the fall, he came with a basket of apples. After a snowstorm, she could count on Walt to show up with his plow, and after he finished with the plow he climbed down from the cab of his vehicle and cut her a path to the driveway with his shovel.
She knew from Edith that she and Walt had been married thirty-two years by this point, and when Edith was around, she did all the talking. But when he came by on his own he’d linger longer than was necessary and never said no to the coffee she offered. Once he showed up when she was still in her nightgown, and she could feel the heat of his gaze. She guessed that Edith, though she saw none of this, disliked her.
“Don’t you get lonely, out here by yourself?” he said to her once.
“I was an only child,” she said. “I’m used to it.” The loneliest she’d ever been, probably, was in the front seat of Matt Hallinan’s car, though nights with her parents back at their house, in Crazyland, came close. There was more than one way of feeling lonely.
Fall came. Her tomato plants were hit with frost. The ash tree’s leaves turned red and for a week every time she stepped out the door of the house she just stood there, taking in the color and the way the light illuminated them, the brilliance of that red against the sky. The leaves fell, and the branches were bare against the sky—brown leaves swirling in the wind. By three thirty she had to turn the lights on over her desk. There was an album of very sad Irish ballads she loved, and one by Leonard Cohen, with “Suzanne” on it, that she played so much it was all scratched up. She lit candles and sketched images of the new Bodie adventure, as distant from anything going on in her own life as Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. Sometimes she made popcorn for dinner. More often than not she was in bed by nine.
Driving into town at the end of the day—Charlie in the seat beside her, with the window cracked even though it was cold, so he could take in all the smells—she could see into the houses of the families along the road, fixing dinner and watching TV. Maybe things weren’t really all that great in those houses, but through the windows, it looked pretty nice.
The first time Eleanor built a fire in the woodstove the house filled up so swiftly with smoke that she opened all the windows. The next day she called Walt, who told her she’d left the dampers shut. After he cleaned the chimney he told her she was lucky to have avoided a fire. “That thing was so full of creosote, it’s a wonder any smoke got out at all,” he said.
“You can always call me. Not easy, a girl like you living by herself way out here like this without a family. Without a man.”
She heard from Patty now and then. Her old roommate was finishing college a year early, engaged to a Yale guy she’d met at a mixer, pre-med. “My mom always asks about you,” she said. “You should come for Christmas this year. My brother asks about you, too.”
Patty wrote again six months later. Engagement off. Her ex-fiancé had wanted to settle down and start having babies right away and she wanted a career. She had moved into an apartment in New York City, the Upper East Side. Just a studio, but it had a balcony where she could set up a fondue pot. She’d gone out with her brother and his girlfriend to some club where she saw Liza Minnelli. At least she thought it was Liza Minnelli. It could have been some guy dressed up like her.