“I’m worried about you,” she told March after she’d been served a mug of tea. The house was cold and dim; March was wearing a heavy gray sweater that looked like one of Hollis’s castoffs.
“You’re always worried about me.” March laughed. She explained that she would have been over to see Susie, but her Toyota had suddenly died. As soon as Hollis finished working on it, she’d come for a visit. “You don’t have to worry,” she’d insisted.
But sitting in the Lyon with her mother, Susie is still worried. “To tell you the truth, I wish March had never come back here,” Susie admits as she and Louise sip cider in the crowded tavern. “What does she see in him?”
“Ah, love,” Louise says with a surprising amount of bitterness.
Susie tilts her head and studies her mother.
“Didn’t you think I knew?” Louise says. “How could I not?”
“Are you talking about Dad?”
“I didn’t think it was a suitable topic for discussion. I still don’t.”
Louise checks the buttons on her sweater, as if something was undone. Clearly, even talking around the edges of the Judge’s relationship with Mrs. Dale is tremendously difficult. Watching her mother, Susie feels extreme tenderness.
“Then we won’t discuss it,” Susie says.
“Fine.” Louise takes her daughter’s hand in her own. “That’s settled.”
“Unless you ever want to,” Susie can’t help adding.
“Susie,” Louise warns.
“Fine. Next topic.”
“Did you call Richard Cooper back and let him know you went to see March?”
“I did. He’s all broken up about March leaving, but his main concern is that Gwen’s living out there. I can’t say that I blame him.”
“I saw her down in the Marshes,” Louise says. “That girl, Gwen.”
“Are you serious?”
“I brought out some groceries and warm clothes sent by the library committee—there was a wonderful sweater, a hundred percent wool—and I put everything on the porch, the way I always do because Alan doesn’t like it if you knock on the door. That’s when I saw her.”
“Inside the house?” Susie can hardly believe it. “I thought he didn’t speak to anyone.”
“Well,” Louise says, “he’s obviously talking to her.”
In fact, Gwen has been going out to the Marshes most afternoons. Hank has so many chores to do, along with any after-school jobs he can find, as well as working on his senior thesis, that Gwen has too much time on her hands. She sometimes rides Tarot out to the Marshes, but usually she leads him, so he’ll get a little exercise without having to carry her weight. Despite the cold, Tarot is content to accompany her; there are still some withered apples on the ground in the Coward’s yard, and the grass is high and salty. The Coward has begun to tell Gwen about her family: How beloved her grandfather Henry was. How her other grandparents, the Coopers, were said to think so well of themselves they had to deflate their heads every morning or else they’d sail away on the strength of their own vanity. He has recounted a few small details about the fire, when his wife died, if only to suggest the reasons he has plunged into this life he now leads. The weirdest thing is, when he speaks about himself he uses the third person: Alan Murray couldn’t go into that house. He stood there and stood there, but he couldn’t move.
“So who are you now if you’re not him?” Gwen has asked.
“I’m someone else,” the Coward has told her, as if that information was as plain as the nose on his face.
That someone is often so far gone when Gwen comes to visit that he can’t stand up. Once, she found him shivering on the floor. Another time, he was inches away from the smoldering ashes of his stove. Gwen knows where he keeps his liquor—the bottles are stored beneath the floorboards near his bed. On those occasions when he’s not completely smashed, the Coward tells her what the village used to be like when he was a boy. Olive Tree Lake was so clear you could drink the water in a cup. Foxes trotted along back roads. Blue herons nested in the Marshes.
Gwen tries to bring the Coward treats, usually bread and butter, his favorite, but she doesn’t chide him about his drinking. She knows how it feels to have somebody on your case, the way her mother used to be; it never does any good. It’s cold in the Coward’s house, and filthy as well, yet Gwen looks forward to coming here. Or perhaps it’s the act of getting away from Guardian Farm she savors. Strange, but the Marshes seem real to her; it’s the Farm that seems like a dream.