Characters in Two Talented Bastids

… There actually is a senior living facility in Harlow, and there Ruth interviewed a fellow named Alden Toothaker, who went to school with my pop and his friend. It was Alden who told her how Dave got his nickname. He always carried a tube of Lucky …

I hadn’t, and told her so. “I found out Dave LaVerdiere liked the bars in Lewiston, and had a crush on a local singer who called herself Little Jonna Jaye.

Nor was it a mere break, the orthopedist told me. It had exploded. “I’m not sure how to proceed,” Dr. Patel said. “If he was your age, I would of course recommend a hip replacement, but Mr. Carmody is suffering from advanced osteoporosis.

“There are other hunters in the woods. I saw Freddy Skillins and you saw three guys who were probably flatlanders. They could have seen it.” “Maybe they did, but I doubt it.

At the reception following the funeral, Doc Goodwin told me that Pop might have suffered a series of mini-strokes leading up to the big one.

I turned to the first page and read this: A storm was on the way. Jack Elway stood on the porch, hands in his pockets, watching as black clouds rose in the west like smoke, blotting out the stars as they came.

My mother planted those and tended them until she died. Now Jimmy Griggs, our handyman, keeps them watered and pruned. Except for the daylilies growing along the picket fence out front, that is.

Not just because I knew the people and the Harlow landscape, either. Laird Carmody could always tell a story, even his harshest critics admitted that, and this was a good one. But true? I called bullshit on that.

… Dave LaVerdiere liked the bars in Lewiston, and had a crush on a local singer who called herself Little Jonna Jaye. I found out he bolted the Republican Party after the Watergate thing, but your father never did.” “No, Pop will vote Republican until the …

I daydreamed of critics saying, “The depth of Mark Carmody’s novel makes his father’s work look shabby. The pupil has truly outshone the teacher.”

I hurried down to Mrs. Hathaway’s little suite, afraid of what I might hear. “Mom? Everything okay?” “Yes. No. I don’t know.

I can play the piano, but not well. I am asked to accompany the hymns at the Congo church only if Mrs. Stanhope is out of town or under the weather. I’m a plodder and a thumper of keys. My ability to read music is on the third-grade level.

1946 or so, wasn’t it?” I remembered. Old Man Spier came back from Okinawa missing an eye and blew his head off in his parlor with a shotgun. It was the talk of the town.

They’re dump pickers, I thought. Not much different from Rennie Lacasse. “We take these things to remember your world, which will be gone soon. We do the same on other worlds, but there aren’t many.

No violins. Until there was a whole orchestra. I knew a lot of this. I learned more from Ruth Crawford herself at the Korner Koffee Kup, across the street from the Gateway Motel and just about a block down from the post office.

My mother—Sheila Wise Carmody, Our Lady of the Daylilies—died in 2016, at the age of seventy-eight. It came as a shock to everyone who knew her.

I wasn’t a child any longer, but I was alone. In 1988 I married Susan Wiggins, a lawyer in the county attorney’s office. She said she wanted kids but kept putting it off.

“Which means you can’t use it.” “That’s what it means.” The waitress came—Suzie McDonald. I asked her if she was keeping up with her night classes. She smiled behind her own mask and said she was.

Vicky paused there, Ruth told me later, and then added, “I know what you might be thinking, Miz Crawford, most everyone does these days when a …

… do with talent—was it in us, or was it something given to us like a box of candy, because we saved Ylla’s life? Could we be proud of what we accomplished, kind of a lifting-up-by-the-bootstraps deal, or were we just a pair of poseurs, taking …