Certain American States by Catherine Lacey

Author:Catherine Lacey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Touching People

She took them to see her husband’s grave, why not, the newlywed couple, still sort of on their honeymoon, part of it, anyway. Honeymoons used to be drastic—plane tickets, passports, hotels—but now it seemed a road trip would do. It was all so casual. And maybe it should be, maybe everyone in the world could stand to be a little more casual about all these drastic things. Or maybe the newlyweds had it all wrong. Time would tell, or it wouldn’t. Either way—she was taking them to see her husband’s grave.

She had known the groom since he was a child, so she’d asked the groom’s mother to ask the groom if he wouldn’t mind stopping to see her on this road trip for a visit, so the mother had asked her son, who asked his new wife, who knew she wasn’t really being asked.

Okay, so it was actually her ex-husband’s grave. They had divorced several years before he caught and had quickly been ended by pancreatic cancer, but they had remained close despite the separation—that’s how much they loved each other, that they could be divorced and still, you know, care.

Anyway the graveyard was a beautiful place, worth visiting even if you didn’t know anyone in the dirt. You could see the whole town from there. And a mountain. Never figured out what mountain that is, but there, you can see it for yourself. It is certainly a mountain. Or maybe just a big hill.

Her ex-husband’s gravestone had a trumpet and musical notes etched into it. They had always loved jazz, the two of them; it was one of their things, and she still loved it, but he wasn’t anything about anything anymore.

I can’t believe how long he’s been gone, she said. He was a good man. He was a very good man. She thought his goodness made his goneness more tragic.

The newlywed couple stood near and the wife squeezed silent messages into her husband’s hand, though he could not understand what she was trying to say, just wondered if perhaps she could please stop with the hand squeezing. She was trying to tell him that this was a waste of their life, that the hours this woman had taken from them were below the par of a walk through a forest or a drive along a mountain road or a ghost town or a nap. This couldn’t be life. It couldn’t be here.

The new husband gave the wife one of his Looks—his Please Stop Look. Basically they had gotten married because they could communicate, however unsuccessfully, in these Looks. She had a Let’s Please Get Out of Here Look and he had a Just Please Be Patient Look and she had a Please Please Please Look and he had a Patience, Dear, Just a Little Patience Look. Anyway they had created a sloppy language of Looks and that seemed reason enough to get ceremonial about themselves.

The new wife felt the long afternoon they’d spent with this not-widow was

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