Overheard in Stanfordville

Seven maps, two husbands, one piece of chocolate

Drive to Stanfordville, ten miles south of the house. Want to stop at the post office and, what the hell, the old antique and everything store we rarely if ever see the inside of. Its front porch is our usual destination, a place where people leave things they no longer want or use, ice cream makers and encyclopedias, VCRs and Tupperware, all free for the taking. We almost never do take, our drop-off to acquisition ratio must be 400:1, the only items I recall getting are a white stuffed bear and a Stanford Fire 65 Rescue coffee mug.

But today I am looking for old maps showing various waterways, Cold Spring Creek and Little Wappingers Creek, where they join and where they go. The young man working inside says he might have a few in a locker out back; that he’ll send someone to look.

A man comes back holding seven big old paper maps. We clear off a credenza, on the corner of which stands a nice old wood lighthouse. The man spreads out a map and traces a finger down Cold Spring, and am I interested in a particular location? Lafayetteville, I tell, which makes him laugh.

“Well that’s Milan,” he says, and asks where exactly my house is. I tell him the address.

“Wait, Kat?” he says, using a pet name my mother started going by after my childhood.

Yes, I tell him, I’m her daughter.

“I’m sorry you have to deal with _____,” he says.

Oh man, does he know ____?

“I’ve met him six or seven times,” he says. “He’s a dick.”

Yes, well…

“But your mother…” he says; that they’ve known each other thirty years; that he knew the man who built the house I now stay in, and do I want to hear a story he’s never told anyone?

I do. I won’t repeat it here, beyond saying it involved a piece of chocolate and my mother saying, “That’s how Greek girls do it.”

My mother is Greek, or half-Greek. Her mother came from Cyprus around 1930. She had Sophia Loren-cheekbones, had my mother at 17 and died in her sleep at age 41. My mother now sees people who are not there, but so far as I know, not yet her mother.

I don’t tell the man that I hope my mother can see her mother again. I do mention Kat was pretty sly back in the day; that she essentially had two husbands at the same time for twenty years. The man tells me he knew; that he knew her second husband. I don’t tell him it was actually her third, or that the previous night, as a nurse fed my mother, she had not recognized the photos of any of the husbands that hang by the dining table.

The man hands me all the maps. He tells me to take them home. We can decide, he says, which ones we want, if any, and bring back the rest. He does not ask for money and I don’t offer any.

I take the maps home. We spread them on the big worktable. We locate the waterways that lead to and through and away from the property, coming from and leading back to the Hudson, a river that flows both ways.