This story attempts to use character development to tell a story. The main character recalls happy memories after the death of a life-long friend and lost love. It reflects that life has both joys and disappointments. It contains explicit descriptions of sex between consenting adults, but sex is not the main thrust of the story. If your interests are primarily prurient, you could be disappointed. If you prefer to read a story that happens to include a sexual component, you might enjoy it.
I went through the receiving line for my 'cousin' Lacey like all the other mourners. In a strange coincidence, I'd met Lacey's second ex-husband once, while still in high school. He got a red card for a nasty foul. I hobbled off the field. Our captain scored on the penalty kick. He didn't remember. I didn't remind him. I met her children and teen-aged grandchildren for the first time that day. I introduced myself to all, but my name didn't spark. They shook my hand. Her daughter held my hand in hers while I expressed my condolences. After just a brief exchange with each, they turned their attention to the next person in line. It saddened me to realize that two families that had once been so close, had drifted so far apart in a generation that they no longer knew each other.
I spoke to Lacey a few days before I heard she'd passed away on the radio, but I hadn't seen her in a couple of months. I sat in the back row while I waited for services to begin, reminiscing. With a small smile some might have found a little disconcerting.
After not seeing or hearing from Lacey for years, we reconnected almost five years earlier when I moved back to Vermont. I'd grown tired of petty university politics and endless pressure to publish boring treatises in academic journals almost no one read. I retired from my career as a professor of literature to focus on my more lucrative side-gig writing fiction. My books aren't best sellers. But they sell well enough that I no longer need a job. A quiet place far from the noise, harried pace, bus exhaust, anonymous masses, and aggravation of New York City life beckoned. As a life-long Red Sox fan, another bonus was escaping the surfeit of Yankee fans.
My wife, Judith, stayed in New York City during the week. She was one of more than eighty partners at a busy mid-sized law firm. Despite growing up as a city girl. she quickly loved the Vermont lifestyle. But she ran the environmental law group at her firm and didn't want to retire yet. She flew to Burlington most weekends, returning to New York on an early Monday morning flight. When she couldn't get away, I usually flew down to spend the weekend. There were things in the city I still enjoyed. Plus, I sometimes had to meet with my publisher or agent.
Lacey returned to Vermont twenty years before me, after she divorced her second husband. I blithely wandered into her shop, the Black Squirrel Gallery on the Church Street Marketplace. In a fortuitous coincidence Lacey was helping set up new displays the day I wandered in. Otherwise, I might never have known Lacey was back in Vermont. The two women that ran the gallery for her were nearly bowled over as she rushed to greet me. The years evaporated in tears and a hug that afternoon.
Our parent's generation grew up in rural northern Vermont not far from the Canadian border. My father was county prosecutor and maintained a law practice out of an office attached to our home. He was the sole outsider, Boston-born, educated at Yale and George Washington. He met a girl when he clerked for the chief judge at the US District Courthouse in Burlington. He decided he loved her, and the place she'd never leave. He ditched his plan to conquer the DC legal firmament and proposed. Mom, like her parents, was a teacher. She taught English at the high school Lacey and I attended. I had a brother and a sister, nine and eleven years younger than me, respectively. My siblings and I are close. But the difference in our ages meant we shared no friends as kids, only family, home, and holidays.
Referring to Lacey as my cousin isn't entirely accurate. She wasn't a blood relative. But we were raised as cousins and usually introduced each other to people that way. Lacey's dad, Uncle Charlie, was a seventh-generation farmer with a business degree from Boston College. He turned a struggling family farm successful and profitable, vastly improving the lot of his extended family. The family farm consisted of a half dozen large parcels of land scattered across two counties. There were several rustic farm stores that catered to the tourist trade. Apples and cider from his orchard, vegetables, herbs, flowers, pumpkins and gourds from a market garden, bee products from the large apiary. Employees trucked bees to orchards across New England and upstate New York, clover and hay to dairy and horse farms in Vermont, New Hampshire, and upstate New York. Lacey's mom, Aunt Mabel, taught grammar school. Uncle Charlie, Aunt Mabel, and Lacey lived modestly in a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse. His siblings lived in houses located on the various farms that belonged to the family.
Mom and Aunt Mabel were life-long best friends. Dad and Uncle Charlie shared a love of the Red Sox and Boston in general. Our families were close, which is how Lacey became my 'cousin'. I started working summers at Uncle Charlie's farm when I was in junior high. Lacey was eleven days short of a year older than me. We spent our summers playing together as children, working together as adolescents. We were responsible for weeding and harvesting the market garden. Lacey taught me the ropes of beekeeping, our other job on the farm. Beekeeping became my hobby when I moved back to Vermont. Once I was in high school, I got drafted to the haying crew for the first cut.
Lacey was whip-smart but lackadaisical about academic subjects in high school. She did well enough in her college prep courses to make the honor roll once or twice each year. But her artwork distinguished her and made her one of the school stars. Oil paintings, watercolors, pencil, charcoal or pastel drawings, sculpture, photography, pottery, anything she tried her hand at won state-wide scholastic awards and blue ribbons at innumerable country fairs. I almost never saw her without her 35mm camera and lens case. Lacey was probably the most popular, and in my opinion the prettiest, girl in school.
I was nerdy and shy, but focused, in high school. I exceled at nearly everything at school including sports. I edited the school newspaper and graduated first in my class at our little high school. Art, however, was not my forte. I can barely draw a recognizable stick figure. My handwriting is atrocious. I might have been just another face in the crowd were it not for my friendship with Lacey.
Lacey and I were best friends during high school. We ran with the same crowd year-round. But after she graduated, my stock at school fell. Because I missed her so much, I withdrew a little from the social scene. I felt somewhat lost without her. I wasn't a recluse. I still spent time with friends. I dated. But even before Lacey graduated, I was more popular with the faculty than the student body. Partly because Mom taught there.
Mom's reputation was as a tough and demanding teacher. I heard more than one student use harsh language when unhappy about a grade. I can't attest to what it was like in Mom's English classes. Mom was fun to be around most of the time and had a wicked sense of humor with a talent for double entendres. But she was also a mother. A stern taskmaster who brooked no nonsense when she laid down the law or assigned a task.
I only saw Lacey a couple times in the month before my high school graduation. She'd already been home from art school for several weeks but was busy on the farm. I wasn't allowed to work until school was out.
Lacey was freshly scrubbed and casually clad when I caught up with my family after the ceremony. She looked great. Lacey turned heads when dressed up. But I had far less appropriate thoughts about her when she dressed like the farmer's daughter she was. A low-key family celebration ended early. The next day was Friday. Though school was out for the graduating class, Mom still had more than a week of school left. Dad, and everyone else, had to work, too.
