I loved to watch him work, so focused on the small details of his project that he didn’t notice anything going on around him, blue eyes intent on what he was creating, his long fingers sketching or painting or molding.
Bryan made his own Halloween costumes. Once they were done, he was completely unrecognizable. He made a latex face piece so closely resembling The Joker in Batman that it was startling. Another year he was Penguin from the DC comics, with a wide padded belly, webbed feet, and beak. OK, so he was also a bit of a comic book geek.
We loved to go out the weekend before Halloween to bars in Ashton because he always won the contest for the most original costume. It wasn’t enough for me to wear Halloween-themed clothes one day a year, so I’d developed a somewhat obsessive habit of buying leggings online with Halloween themes and wearing them throughout the year. I scoured internet consignment and secondhand sites and amassed an impressive collection of leggings with mummies, dueling pirates, skulls and roses, witches stirring cauldrons, and dancing skeletons. My favorites were black with goth green Frankenstein faces. Or maybe the vampires with fanged teeth. Or the Day of the Dead sugar skulls. It depended on my mood.
Bryan was patient, while I always felt rushed. He took his time with everything.
We got married, partly on a whim, eight months after we met, in a small ceremony with a few friends and my kids, followed by pasta and meatballs at our favorite Italian place.
Time flew while we were having fun.
Bryan and I accumulated layers of memories during our three years together. We loved all the holidays and celebrated every single one to the hilt. In March there was a big St. Patrick’s Day parade in downtown Ashton, something we looked forward to all year. We scoured the internet for Irish apparel, choosing a green fedora and stick-on orange eyebrows, moustache, and sideburns for Bry. I wore a green beanie with an orange pom-pom and long fake orange braids hanging down my back. We wore every green thing we had in our wardrobes, right down to green socks. Bryan told me I should buy a green bra; it would be festive, and also sexy to him, but when I was too busy and never got around to it, he ordered one online—a push-up bra with shamrocks over the nipples. He asked me to wear it other times of the year because he liked it so much.
We’d lined up early on State Street, joining enormous crowds of people toasting the holiday, many of them already slurring their words at noon. We sang along to “Irish Eyes are Smiling,” hooted for the dancing leprechauns, felt the thunder of bagpipes in our chests as rows of musicians marched by. Street vendors sold Irish flags, long green horns that made strange moose call noises, streamers, balloons, and huge blow-up shamrocks. The parade marchers threw out chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil to the kids, who scurried into the street to scoop them up and stash them in their pockets.
The weather on St. Patrick’s Day in upstate New York was always unpredictable. One year it was so balmy we were sweaty in green hoodies. Another year the wind chill was so bad we had to leave halfway through because Bryan couldn’t stand the cold. As we drove away, we could still hear the sound of bagpipes from the Interstate.
We walked Penny, who pulled at her leash to greet strangers, on a familiar route that wound past the ice cream stand, down to the antique shop, and through a church parking lot. Penny was the perfect companion dog, tail wagging furiously when she saw something interesting.
Penny was my first dog. My parents didn’t allow pets outside of cages or glass bowls. My sister and I had our share of neon tetras, guinea pigs, and hamsters. I waited until my kids were old enough to help with a pet, but from the moment I got her, she was mine in the way a third child might have been. Despite her small, compact, eight-pound body, Penny bravely took on winter, trying to climb snowbanks, standing on three legs to warm up one paw, then switching. There was a small wooden table on the back porch she liked to stand on to keep all her paws from freezing. I had a dozen brightly colored fleece jackets for Pen that zipped her up snugly and kept her warm as she sat outside and watched me shovel.
Shoveling is hard work. Especially after the snowplow piles icy clumps at the end of the driveway. When I was young and had to help shovel, I used to push the heavy snow out into the middle of the road and leave it there, until our neighbor complained because it all ended up in his driveway. But shoveling is a hell of a good workout, and right where I needed it, twisting at the waist and throwing a shovelful up to a rapidly rising snowbank. Besides, Ian took care of the deep white stuff with a snow blower, so all I had to do was clear the sidewalk.
But as the seasons progressed, winter increasingly took its toll on Bryan, sapping his energy and making him miserable to the point where he answered questions with grunts and head-shaking. He was thin and never seemed to put on weight, a fact that always irked me because I put on a pound when I ate an Oreo, but his lanky build gave him less insulation.
He abandoned his art projects; the chess pieces collected dust and he put his painted canvases in the back of a closet. One of the garden gnomes lost its little clay hat and Bry told me to just throw it away because he didn’t have the energy or desire to make a new one.
Bryan worked
