As Good As Gone (9781616206000) by Larry Watson

Gladstone’s businessmen, preoccupied with making deals during the week and cutting grass and scolding his children on the weekend. His wife was another story. Gladstone had its share of residents who had come from another country—Beverly’s own grandmother had emigrated from Germany as a teenager—but none who spoke with a French accent or who possessed Pauline Sidey’s exotic beauty. Beverly remembers her as a cheerful if somewhat bewildered woman who seemed more comfortable in the company of the town’s children than with other housewives.
    Then, sometime in the 1930s, Pauline returned to France to visit her own family. She hadn’t been home since she and Calvin were married, and though another war seemed imminent and more people were leaving Europe than visiting, Pauline’s mother was ill, and Pauline worried that she might not see her mother again. Her father had already died during her absence. So she traveled to France for what was to be a visit of no more than a week, the longest period of time she could bear to be away from her husband and children, Bill and Jeanette. Yet back in the village in which she was born, Pauline Sidey was killed in an automobile accident, dead before her dying mother. It was one of those ironies about which people talked for years.
    Calvin Sidey was inconsolable, and his grief, its intensity and its dimension, was frightening to behold. His drinking was soon out of control and his moods turned darker and his temper hotter. Beverly remembered being in Soward’s Butcher Shop when Calvin stormed in and began to berate and threaten Mr. Soward for selling an inferior cut of meat. Beverly had her son, Adam, with her, and since she couldn’t cover Adam’s ears in time to keep him from hearing Calvin Sidey’s curses, she turned to leave the store.
    Even in his drunken rage, Calvin Sidey must have realized how inappropriate his actions were, and he fell suddenly silent and stumbled backward as if he had been blocking Beverly and Adam’s path to the door. But oddly, Mr. Soward suddenly stopped defending his product and told Calvin Sidey that perhaps he was right; perhaps that meat had been unusually gristly. He offered to replace the roast free of charge, a bit of charity as remarkable as Calvin Sidey’s outburst.
    Beverly had often wondered about that day and the alteration of both men’s behavior. What had caused it? The presence of a woman? A child? Those were plausible explanations, yet she couldn’t shake the thought that the change that transpired in that room with its raw reek of butchered flesh and fresh blood had more to do with Calvin Sidey than her, that he had somehow been able to inspire — simultaneously?—courtesy and terror in others and himself. And then she mocked herself for such thoughts, telling herself that she was letting her image of a grief-­stricken drunk be affected by her recollection of Aunt Doris’s moony talk about the man.
    Within a year or two of the incident in the butcher shop, Beverly had moved into the house next to Calvin Sidey’s. Her husband, Burt, through a willingness to work eighty-­hour weeks and to accept the case of any client who walked through his door, was finally able to afford a home on Fourth Street, though by then those residences no longer had the prestige of Burt’s boyhood. They were simply nice houses, which suited Beverly just fine; she never expected to live in a home finer than her mother and father’s. And poor Burt. He got so little enjoyment out of the house that meant so much to him. His hard-­charging years caught up to him, and he was dead of a heart attack before he turned fifty.
    And that meant neither of the houses at the top of Fourth Street had a man as the head of the household. Around the time of Burt’s death, Calvin Sidey left Gladstone. Beverly still remembered the day Calvin’s mother and sister came to the house, two