When We Were the Kennedys Read Online Free

pipefitter in the mill, where he gets the news in a similarly convoluted way. “You’re wanted at home,” somebody says. So Barry drives heart-thumpingly home—to
his
home, a little house in Dixfield, the next town downriver.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” he asks Nila, who’s buttoning Stevie into a little shirt after walking Mike to his kindergarten.
    His wife looks up, alarmed. “Nothing. What are you doing here?”
    â€œYou didn’t call for me?”
    She shakes her head, eyes darkening. “No. Someone called for you?”
    So Barry calls the mill back, confused. “You must have another John Wood,” he tells the front office. In paperwork he goes by “John”—John Barry. Anne is Mary Anne; on Prince Edward Island you call children by their hidden names. In this year of 1963, the mill at its booming peak, there might well be another John Wood somewhere among three thousand employees scattered over three shifts, someone from Byron or Roxbury or West Peru or any one of our surrounding towns, another John Wood wanted at home for a reason nobody has the nerve to explain.
    â€œAre you John?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYou work in the pipers?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYour father died this morning.”
    He sprints back to his car, drives too fast to Mexico, and thunders up those three flights.
    We do not see my brother often, but when we do, he brings his wife and boys and his beloved May Belle acoustic guitar and takes over the parlor, where we beg for melodramatic rockabilly songs about heartbreak and missed chances in a velvety timbre that Dad called “fearful-grand singing.” But he brings nothing with him today but a powerful sense of dread as he bursts through the door and looks into the drained face of our mother and asks, “Is it true?”
    Our apartment harbors few places to grieve in private: four rooms and only two with a door. Barry drags a chair from the kitchen and slips into the bedroom, where after a few minutes I crack the door open to the astonishing sight of my adult brother, facing away from me, sitting astride the spindly chair, his head down, his arms cradling the chair back, a pose not unlike the one he sometimes takes with his guitar. His shoulders heaving up and down, he forms soft, strangulated notes that stir me much the way those lyrics about heart-broke lovers often do. I’ve never seen him, or any man, cry. For a brief, melting moment I believe I’m hearing the sound of my brother singing.
    Â 
    Before Anne came home—thirty stopped minutes, a grotesque, ongoing
now
in which our mother shed her former self like a wind-shook tree—we children aged with fear. Our mother was both overly present—all that gasping and keening—and also eerily far away. We stood at the edge of the kitchen, knotted together, edging first toward and then away from those awful sounds, but because we, too, were yowling and keening there was nowhere safe. “I’ve lost my best friend,” Mum cried, to no one, to God, to the ceiling. “I’ve lost my best friend.” When she hid her face in her hands we mobbed her, petting her hair, her arms, then backed away again as her up-gushing grief took another vocal turn.
    â€œWhat do we do?” Cathy whispered. She was standing so close that the heat of her breath moistened my neck. She and Betty looked at me; I was the one in fourth grade.
    â€œI don’t know,” I whispered back. “I don’t know I don’t know.”
    More hot breath on my neck. “You have to get Anne.”
    But how would I get the number? And who would answer? And how would I tell them what was happening, Mum bent at the waist, Mr. Cray thumping back down the stairs, everybody crying? But then the phone rang and Mum said,
Come home, I need you,
and for a second I thought,
That’s Dad on the other end, maybe that’s Dad on the other end,
until Mum squeezed