1It was the middle of June and the sun all day had kept right on shining with sweet mightiness. “Stay jovial, please, Artie! Just promise me that. Please stay your old jovial self!” Flossie MacDonald had wiped her napkin across her weeping eyes and told this to Artie Dam the last time she had seen him, which had been on this spectacular evening in June. And he assured her that he would.
They had gone to Spud’s Bar and Grille, the place near Artie’s house that was right there on the water on the coast of Massachusetts; the bay, seen through the windows, was calm, and many boats sat there quietly, sailboats and fishing boats and boats large enough to sleep eight people. The sun, which was not yet fully headed down, shone against the water with a golden brilliance, and when Artie looked at Flossie her large black-rimmed glasses had sun reflecting off them.
He and Flossie had come here every other Tuesday night since Flossie’s husband died last year; her husband had been a retired math professor, and—to Artie’s way of thinking—a regal-looking, thin, hypercritical man. “He was such an asshole,” Flossie would say each time she and Artie were together, wiping her eyes, mascara dripping down her cheeks. “And I miss him so much!” But this was their last time in the place; Flossie was moving to Ohio to be near her daughter, Sophie. “Oh Artie,” Flossie had said, wrapping her arms around him outside by the door as they said goodbye, “I love you.” And he had told her the same.
As they left the place together, Artie saw the masts of sailboats in the bay, standing tall, motionless. He did not remember ever seeing the water so calm. “Amazing,” he had said to Flossie, and she had said, “What’s amazing is you.”
Artie’s wife, Evie, had never cared for Flossie, saying that she was “too much.” And Artie understood, but he loved Flossie for it; he loved her overly made-up face, her too-yellow hair piled on top of her head, the scent of perfume that followed her everywhere, the delicate way she would sit her large body down after waving to him enthusiastically when she came through the heavy wooden door at Spud’s. He loved her, but he was not remotely in love with her.
It was that he could be himself with her; he realized this only later.
“How was poor old Flossie?” Evie had asked Artie that night; she was sitting in the living room with a newspaper on her lap, and she looked up at him as he walked into the room. Evie was one of the few people Artie knew who still read a real newspaper.
“She misses Reginald,” Artie said, sitting down in a chair across from her. “She says it every time. Understandable, I guess. They were married forty-two years.” He added, “The water’s beautiful tonight. Flat, flat, flat.”
Evie said nothing. She folded the paper and put it on the coffee table in front of her.
“But she did say—she says it every time—that he was an asshole.” Artie chuckled, sticking his legs out in front of him.
Still, Evie made no comment.
“Well, he was lucky to go fast, only two months.” Artie said this looking around the room. Through the windows he could see the light on the end of the small wharf down past their lawn. The room they sat in had a high ceiling with rafters far up; theirs was a spacious house, with a newly renovated kitchen that also looked out over the water. In the living room was the grand piano that had been there for years (and which Artie, with no piano lessons to his name, would sit and compose little pieces on). There were different upholstered chairs, and a few small tables on which sat various framed photographs beside many small—tiny—boxes that had been in Evie’s family.
Artie, even having been here for almost thirty years, still could not believe that this was the house he lived in. The house was on a private road right there on the ocean, with two other houses that shared the road, and although Artie had said many times that he did not like the sign declaring it private, he had lost that battle years earlier. The house had belonged to his in-laws, and Evie had inherited it long ago when her parents moved to Florida. Both had since died, more than ten years ago now, and Evie’s one sister lived in Colorado, where she had gone, years before, to college.
“Reginald MacDonald,” Artie said, shaking his head slowly. “Poor brilliant man.” He added, “He drank too much, though.”
“He had to, living with Flossie,” Evie said, and Artie let it go.
“She drinks too much herself,” Evie added, and Artie let that go as well; it was true.
* * *
This was now the first week of September, a Friday, and the weather was staying warm. The leaves had not yet really started to change, and from his classroom windows on the second floor Artie could see the soccer field and the trees behind it, with only one tree turning red at its very top. It was the last class of the day, and he understood that the students were restless. He leaned back against his desk and said, “Would you folks like to know about venereal disease during the Civil War?”
The students looked up at him, they were interested.
“Whoa, Damn-dam,” said one fellow who had shaggy brown hair; his name was Willoughby.
“Topic for Monday,” Artie said. “Now get together in your groups.” And they shuffled their chairs around until they were sitting in the four separate sections Artie had assigned earlier.
Artie taught history to eleventh graders at the local high school. For years he had also been the assistant coach to the boys’ soccer team; he was not a tall man, and he was thick, and while he had always been fit, he had begun to gain weight in his stomach, so he’d had to stop running down the field a few years ago and he became the assistant coach to the baseball team instead. But Coach Clark liked him, as did the soccer and the baseball teams, as did his students and the other faculty.
“Damn-dam, the greatest man,” his students would sometimes say to him, their faces shining with affection, and he would laugh, his big chest moving. “Damn-dam,” they said, and he would tell them, “Go on, go on, get out of here now,” waving his hand and chuckling. He was fifty-seven years old, and he did still love his students.
But the pandemic had been hard on them, he had noticed this in the more than three years since: The students had changed. They were anxious, and not argumentative—with him or with one another—as he had known them to be in the past, when there had been lively discussions. It was often difficult now to get them even to talk.
On the first day of every school year Artie would hand out sheets of white lined paper, saying to his students, “Write anything you want. But I need at least two pages. Write about who you can’t stand, what you like, write anything. But write.”
“Why?” a student sometimes asked, and Artie told the truth: “So I get to know you. And so I get to see how you put sentences together.” He was always surprised at the students’ willingness to do this. Some would sit for many minutes and then start to write quickly, others began to write immediately; over the years he had noted that their handwriting had become increasingly bad. He was often very moved at what they wrote. Many lately had written about the pandemic. Two students had started this year with the sentence “I’m scared.” And yet neither of these two had been able to really articulate what it was they were scared about.
Today Artie had put the students in the groups he had assigned on the first day of the school year, only a few days earlier. Each student was to take on the role of a Civil War soldier or a nurse from Massachusetts and discuss this soldier or nurse with the group. They were talking quietly among themselves now, and he heard one of them—a young woman named Tamera, with long red hair—say, “No, he wrote his girlfriend that he enlisted because of slavery. He wrote that in his letter home to her. That he didn’t think people should buy other people.”
“Good for you.” Artie nodded at Tamera as he walked among the groups; he stopped and rapped on a desk. “That’s exactly what you should be doing, using their letters home.”
He walked over to the window and saw again the soccer field and the trees behind it, the top of that one tree turning red. Something moved deep inside him, a memory perhaps of his childhood in Revere, where his father had been the super of the three-story wooden apartment building they lived in as well as the two similar buildings right next to it. Artie and his sister and their parents had lived in the basement apartment; today it would be called the garden apartment, but back then it looked like, and pretty much was, a basement apartment. Where was this memory of a red-topped tree coming from? Artie turned back to the class as a memory clicked into place: the state hospital his mother had been sent to two times in his youth, going there with his father and his sister on a weekend to visit her, seeing her slumped on a thin mattress on a metal bed. There might have been such a tree outside her window.
He went and sat down at his desk.
Copyright © 2026 by Elizabeth Strout. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
