Free Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz Page A

swear (but then, she reminds herself, so does she), and a few paces behind him stands a woman about her own age, not especially pretty, her face burdened with a look of anxious pedantry, as if in her life she’s witnessed more than she thinks it proper to discuss in polite society, leaving her permanently betwixt and between. Next to the woman is a young girl in thick horn-rimmed glasses, her expression mirroring to an alarming degree her mother’s.
    “Can I have a word, Ruth?” Norris asks in a low voice.
    Lucinda, suddenly all ears, places the bills in Ruth’s distracted, outstretched hand but doesn’t step away.
    “I’ve got a lesson starting soon,” Ruth lies, stuffing the loose money into her shoulder bag. “I need to be getting home.”
    “It’ll only take a minute.”
    He seems to need her to follow him and, caught in an ebbing tide of passivity, hefting the turkey pie in its clear plastic wrap, she allows herself to be led.
    Approaching the woman and her daughter, Norris stops and intones stiffly, “Ruth, I’d like you to meet Wanda Shoemaker and her daughter Celine.”
    There’s no further information, but Ruth instantly calculates that the woman must be the widow of Ralph Shoemaker from Salisbury, who died falling through thin ice on the Housatonic last winter. (She further recalls that it’s never been satisfactorily explained what the man was doing trying to walk across a frozen river in the middle of the night.) So, she thinks, Norris has found a widow to keep him company, and the widow has found him. Which is perfectly all right, though why the daughter should be named Celine when she clearly isn’t the least bit French is beyond her. Ruth doesn’t for a minute feel jealous, only shoved a level or two deeper into her isolation.
    She and the woman nod to each other—with the turkey pie bobbing between them like a docking buoy, shaking hands would be too hazardous—and then Norris walks on and she follows.
    It’s all rather awkwardly handled, but that’s Norris for you. He has an idea of things, but the idea never quite jibes with reality, and whatever he does or says usually ends up falling somewhere in no-man’s-land, neither one thing nor the other, satisfying nobody. (Other than in the selling of insurance, for which he really does seem to have a knack.) They weave through clumps of people eating blueberry muffins and drinking cider and coffee out of paper cups and children playing tag, and recognitions are made, mostly silently, and various glances exchanged among the assembled adults, and Ruth sees it all and understands the range of implications and messages surrounding her and this man she once married but can no longer conceive of wanting.
    Under the huge sugar maple at the east end of the green, Norris stops again and turns to wait for her. The heavy-limbed shade is akind of privacy and seems to afford him some much-needed confidence, which in turn seems to infuse him with a dose of courage, and after a few false casts with his long, skinny arms his hands settle on his hips in a badly borrowed cowboy pose that throws into inadvertent relief the pink golf shirt and those socks with the little putters on them. Standing before him now, she doesn’t come close to laughing at him. Wouldn’t do such a thing in the first place, mockery being in her eyes the favored artillery of losers and cowards; and in the second place, though she can see what might be comical about the scene, it will never be funny to her. That’s why she’s divorcing him. There isn’t a thing Norris can do or say that will ever be funny to her again, if it ever was, and for that she is truly sorry.
    The surprising weight of the pie is making her arms hurt. She decides to dive in and get the conversation over with, whatever it’s going to be.
    “I guess you received the papers?”
    “They’ll be at your lawyer’s by the end of the week,” Norris responds, his words clipped.
    “Thank you.” She pauses,