The Probable Future (15 page)

In the end, Matt had told Will,
It’s all right if you don’t drive out. She understands
.

And perhaps she did. Kindness had come easily to Catherine, after all. And kindness, Matt grew to understand during the course of his mother’s illness, came in many forms. The neighbors, for instance, many of whose names he couldn’t recall, who brought over so many casseroles that the food lasted for months, long after the funeral. The single women in town still laughed about how full the freezer at the Avery house was; each and every one of them had thought they might have a chance with Matt once he was left on his own. Matt had dated a girl from Monroe for a while, and he had a girlfriend in New York that he visited on weekends, but that all stopped when his mother fell ill. Even when she had passed on, Matt was distracted; not that he was heartless, but his heart was taken up with something and had no more room for anyone else. He was big, and handsome, and half a dozen women in town would have taken him home, even if it was just for the night, but there was no way to win over a man like Matt Avery. Not with love that lasted a few hours, not with home-cooked meals; he liked things simple, a can of soup, some beans and toast, a bowl of noodles, lukewarm and covered with cheese. He preferred staying away from whatever could hurt him most. He’d become a bachelor, set in his ways, interested in
his studies. If he wasn’t pleased with his solitude, he was comfortable with it all the same. If he hadn’t settled for his lot, then he’d come to accept a life that was nothing like the one he once wished to have.

Whether or not he was living in accordance with his true nature, he had no idea. He had simply followed fate to this place: meals taken alone, nights at the library, mornings in a house where the only voice he heard was his own as he chatted with the birds outside his window. He was supposed to go to NYU, but that was years ago, when his mother first took ill, and his plans hadn’t worked out. Instead, he attended the state college in Hamilton, taking night classes, eventually earning his bachelor’s degree. Soon, he would have his master’s in history, if he ever finished his thesis, a study of Colonial life in Unity. Matt was well aware that the state college wasn’t Harvard, but he’d be willing to wager that he knew a hell of a lot more about their hometown than his brother ever would, despite Will’s high-priced education. He knew, for instance, that those peach trees which had naturalized all through the county had initially been shipped to Farmer Hathaway, along with two bolts of silk and a silver-plated mirror. All of it had been carried on an ill-fated ship called
The Good Duck
, which went down fast after hitting a stretch of rocks in the marshes in the days when there was still deep water and sturdy docks as far as a man could see. There were plum trees from China onboard as well, and rosebushes bound in twine; there were bales of green tea left drifting over the mallows and pickerelweed. One thing Matt knew for certain: his brother wouldn’t know a peach tree from a plum, black tea from green, truth from self-serving dishonesty.

Matt had gone up to Harvard once, to visit Will and Jenny after they’d married and moved into an apartment in Central Square. He was a junior in high school, and Will and Jenny had seemed so much older, so sophisticated, cut off from their families and living on their own. Most college students, even when married, lived in the dormitories, but not Will. Will, who’d been accepted despite his laziness,
due to phenomenal SAT scores, was a spoiled brat in Matt’s opinion. He needed his space; his lifestyle demanded better. He had a grand piano he’d finagled from Lord knows where, and such a thing would never fit in student housing. Even back then, Will’s neighbors complained about him, whether he was practicing Brahms or letting go with some boogie-woogie at 2:00 A.M.

What Matt remembered most about his visit to Cambridge were the hours he spent in Bailey’s Ice Cream Parlor, where Jenny was working. He’d gone back, years later, but the place was gone, and he couldn’t quite recall exactly where on Brattle Street it had been. What Matt did remember was that even though Jenny had only been a year and a half older, she had seemed like a woman, while he was still a boy. She’d already been promoted and was the manager at Bailey’s, and was therefore free to fix Matt complimentary ice cream sundaes all day long. He had them for breakfast, for lunch, and for dinner. Butterscotch, hot fudge, strawberry, marshmallow swirl. He couldn’t get enough. After two days of this diet, he was shaking from the sugar, yet he couldn’t seem to stay away from Bailey’s. He’d set out for the Fogg Art Museum or Blodgett Pool, but he’d always wind up walking back to Brattle Street. He had usually followed Will and Jenny around back in Unity, but it wasn’t until the visit to Cambridge that he realized why this was so.

“I think you’re addicted,” Jenny had teased him, and of course she was right, although ice cream wasn’t his problem. These days, he never touched the stuff, not even a plain dish of vanilla bean. At the tea house, Liza Hull always swore he was her only customer who preferred bread and butter to cake and pie. Matt grinned whenever Liza kidded around, but he kept quiet, and he continued to order bread and butter for dessert, for the truth was, that trip to Cambridge had cured him of the urge for sweets.

Matt liked to lose himself in hard work, but lately he found himself thinking about history the whole time he was landscaping, wondering if Farmer Hathaway or one of the other founding fathers of
the town, Morris Hapgood or Simon Elliot, perhaps, had walked exactly where he now stood, or if Rebecca Sparrow had sat in the woods he was clearing of brambles and poison ivy, there to watch the light as it filtered through the trees on the Elliots’ hillside, where the air was by turns green and gold. In the evenings, Matt always stopped at the library on Main Street on his way home. Beatrice Gibson and Marlena Elliot-White, the librarians, most likely would have put in a call to the police if he ever failed to show up, that’s how regular his visits were, that’s how dependable Matt Avery was.

By now, Matt had read through all of the journals in the historical research room under the stairs. He had grown so used to twists and turns of the founding fathers’ script he could read what to any other man might look like chicken scratch or loop-de-loops. Each time he walked along Main Street, or reseeded the grass on the village green, or thinned the ivy that was choking the linden trees near Town Hall, or relocated a hive the honeybees had set up in the roof of the courthouse, Matt had the distinct feeling that he was walking through time. He thought of those who had lived their lives in Unity and died there, too, every time he went out his own front door and saw the grove of wild peach trees which thrived in an empty lot across the way. Matt Avery believed that history was made of the smallest details, the letter written, the list dictated on a deathbed, the ingredients of the dinner cooked with care, the variety of trees that had been chopped down, and those which had multiplied.

On the town green there were several memorials, testaments to the men from Unity who had died in war. Matt always stopped by the stone erected in honor of the four boys lost in the Revolutionary War on his way home from the library. Michael Foster, Seth Wright, Miller Elliot, George Hapgood. Not one of them had been more than twenty. Each had worn a bounty coat, one of the more than ten thousand woven by New England women, each tagged with the maker’s name inside, the mark of hope for those boys who were brothers and husbands and sons. An angel had been carved into
their memorial stone, tears pouring from her eyes. Matt might be the only man in town who knew that a local stone carver named Fred Bean, who had lost his own young son to diphtheria, had spent six months working on the black stone, a hard slab of granite brought down from the north country. There wasn’t a day that went by when Matt didn’t think about that angel’s tears. That was history, in his opinion: that sorrow was unalterable and ever present. That tears could be preserved in the hardest granite.

Sometimes, the ink from the journals of those who’d recorded their daily existence in Unity rubbed off on Matt’s fingers. Sitting there with these personal accounts written so long ago, he always felt as though he held a life in his hands. Perhaps this was the reason the thesis he was writing had grown to three hundred pages. The dissertation had come to focus on the Sparrow women, as if the thesis had a mind of its own and had chosen the topic despite what Matt might prefer. Whenever the Sparrows were mentioned in one of the old record books, the scent of lake water arose off the paper, green and sweet and unbelievably potent. Perhaps this was what had led Matt to them. Perhaps this was why he couldn’t seem to stay away from the facts of their lives. Deep down, Matt had an addictive personality. He had begun to understand that he was not as unlike Will as he would have liked to have thought. He was loyal and dependable, true, but there was something more that drove him, an intensity he liked to deny because it made him uncomfortable. Whatever he desired most inched under his skin and it stayed there, like a bothersome pebble he did his best to ignore.

People in town used to wonder when Matt was going to get married, but they’d given up on that notion. Now, they asked when he was going to finish his thesis and get his degree from the state college instead, just as unlikely a proposition it seemed. Some folks had gone so far as to have taken bets, with
Never
being the resounding favorite, not that anyone wished him ill. Matt’s neighbors liked and respected him as much as they distrusted his high-and-mighty
brother. It was well known that Will Avery never did a favor for any man in town. He never made a move that benefited anyone other than himself. But blood is blood, and trouble is trouble, and early one Monday morning Matt drove into Boston to join Henry Elliot—whom he’d known all his life, but who was still charging him big-time for his legal fees—for a meeting with Will, whom Matt hadn’t seen since that New Year’s Eve so many years ago, when they’d tried to kill each other out on the street.

It was difficult to find parking in downtown Boston, especially with Matt’s huge old pickup truck, dented, rusted through with salt, too big a vehicle to parallel park on narrow streets that long ago had been cow paths. Still, he made it to the courthouse on time. He greeted Henry Elliot, whom he worked for occasionally, and whose own son, Jimmy, was known to be a hellion. It was only then, after he and Henry had discussed the fact that Jimmy had been picked up on possession of marijuana charges over Christmas vacation, then released pending community service, some of which was to be spent as Matt’s assistant during the big spring cleanup of the village green, that Matt realized the man standing next to Henry was his brother.

Last time they’d met, Matt’s fury had been unleashed by too many boilermakers mixed with champagne. He had walked into the kitchen at exactly the wrong time during a sloppy, crowded New Year’s Eve party. Because of this, he’d caught Will making out with one of his students, a beautiful young girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty. Will had her up against the wall, hand down her pants, right next to the high chair where Jenny gave their daughter her breakfast every morning. He didn’t seem to give a damn if people went in and out of the kitchen, looking for ice or another cold beer, as long as Jenny had no idea of what was going on. And she didn’t, not a clue. The topper was, he had grinned at Matt when he caught sight of him, always the show-off, the liar, the big brother with a huge appetite for whatever he could beg, borrow, or steal.

Now, Will didn’t even look like the same man. He seemed rung
out, his complexion sallow, and he’d lost a good deal of weight. There was a tremor in his hands, the sign of a man who needs a drink badly and hasn’t had one in days. He’d aged, that was it, and he’d done so badly.

“Hey, Will.” Matt gave a noncommittal but not unfriendly greeting. He was wondering if Will had looked this wasted at their mother’s funeral. Matt couldn’t quite remember that day. All he knew was that after the service, Will and Jenny hadn’t come back to the house, leaving straightaway from the cemetery, despite the casseroles arranged on the dining room table and all of Catherine’s many friends who were bound to stop by. Will backed away, insisting he and Jenny had to get home to Stella, left at the last minute with a baby-sitter they didn’t know well.

Go on
, Matt had called after him. There were neighbors watching, but he didn’t care.
Run away, you cheap bastard
, he’d shouted as Will walked to his car, another one that he’d manage to wreck before too long.

Today Matt had brought along a check made out to the Commonwealth, as Henry Elliot had instructed; all they would need to do was add the amount at which bail was set.

“Hey, brother,” Will said, clearly amused at Matt’s discomfort in the courthouse. Not that Will fared much better in his appearance; he had a terrible haircut and was wearing the same clothes he’d been arrested in, his usually pressed slacks and white shirt now wrinkled and sour-smelling, but a surefire step up from the uniform of the Boston city jail.

Matt moved to the left, to get a little breathing room. This was his brother, but Will was a stranger as well. He’d been gone since Matt was in high school, and even before that, he’d always been slippery. Someone who can’t trust his own brother is naturally self-contained, cautious to a fault, suspicious if pushed. Matt turned to Henry Elliot, grateful that there was someone other than Will to talk to. “Parking was hell,” he told Henry.

“Get used to it, bud.” Henry was distracted, looking through his notes before they came in front of the judge. “You’re in the city now.”

True enough, Matt felt hulking and out of place in the courtroom, even though he’d thought to put on his one good suit. He was wearing his work boots and a tie that he’d had since high school. The courthouse certainly hadn’t been made for people over six feet tall; Matt guessed it had been built in about 1790, perhaps even earlier, when most people were still fairly short. At that time, the accused would walk through the side door across from the judge’s chambers, unwashed and underfed, shackled at the hands and the feet, possibly repenting, no matter if he was guilty or innocent, in the hopes of a less harsh sentence, or perhaps saying nothing at all, as Rebecca Sparrow had done at her trial. Matt had memorized the reportage of her final words in Hathaway’s kitchen, uttered to the judge brought down from Boston.
There is nothing left for me to say
, Rebecca had told them.
You have taken my voice from me
.