We were sitting on the porch now, all three of us, lined up on the edge with our legs hanging off, me in the middle. I was a human book and they were human bookends. The fairy lights glimmered on in their silent way, and the air was cold and crisp and tinged with smoke from the embers glowing in the fire pit. Brown and Sunshine were no strangers to good questions. Long ago they had asked themselves what was within their power to do about Sunshine’s cancer and their lives in the face of it, and they had decided to think of it as a chronic illness. Like diabetes. Something to be neither encouraged nor denied, but managed.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Not good enough,” Sunshine said. “The phrase ‘I don’t know’ is a filler phrase, used as an excuse when someone wants to avoid answering.”
“A ‘filler phrase’? What are you, the urban dictionary? I mean the rural dictionary?”
She would not be distracted. She butted up against me, and so did Brown on the other side. The human book was being mushed between its human bookends.
“Come on,” she said. “Talk to us.”
“What I want is not within my power,” I said. “What I want is her, the way she was.”
Her, the simple fact of her. Her in her lumber jacket chopping up firewood and tossing it onto the porch in that haphazard way. Her leaning up against the counter eating her goddamn artichoke hearts. Her walking me down the aisle at my wedding. Her as a grandmother. Jesus! Did I want a wedding? Did I want a baby? Neither of those things did I think about—my one and only boyfriend had been dead for seven years now—but there they were, images as fully formed as photos, hanging right there inside my head. Everything I didn’t know, everything I now wanted, came crushing down inside me and squeezed my heart.
“But I can’t go back in time, even though I wish I could,” I said. “Get some answers, maybe. Figure things out.”
“Dissolve the wedge between you?” Sunshine said, she who had been there for all the impatient phone calls, all the rolling eyes, all the brushing-off of my mother.
“We messed up,” I said. “And now I’m losing her and she’s losing me. I feel as if I don’t know anything that went on inside her, back then.”
“All the more reason to try,” Sunshine said.
“You used to be a reporter,” Brown said. “Put those reportorial skills back in action. Talk to her. Ask her questions. Interview her friends.”
“Annabelle Lee is her only real friend.”
“We are too,” Sunshine said. “Brown and me.”
“That doesn’t mean you know her,” I said. “Any more than I know her.”
“Then get going,” Sunshine said. “If Tamar is a locked trunk, your job is to pick the lock. Tick-tock. Hop to.”
* * *
We ringed ourselves on the floor around the books-as-coffee-table. Where to begin? A list of people to talk to, which boiled down to “Annabelle.” Brown got up to get Jack and in the getting stopped to peer at the photo propped on the shelf.
“Whoa. Is this The Fearsome? When was this taken?”
“No clue.”
“She looks so”—he shook his head.
“Unfearsome?” I said.
“Exactly. She also looks, I hate to say it, but kind of hot. Is that weird?”
“For you to say or for Tamar to be?” Sunshine said. “In either case, the answer is no.”
She got up to study the photo too. The two of them hovered before it, murmuring in their obnoxious merged-self way. Look at that cute shirt, Sunshine said, and She looks so—what’s the word—soft? Brown said, and Yes, that’s the word, Sunshine said, so unlike the way I always think of her, which when you think about it is kind of unfair, isn’t it?
“Who took this photo?” Brown said to me. “And what’s she looking at?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It was stuck to the back of a photo of me as a baby.”
“It’s well-worn,” he said, which was his kind of phrase. The alliteration. “Clearly been carried about, maybe in a wallet? Maybe in a back pocket?”
Brown put the photo back on the shelf, smoothing it into place with the tips of his fingers as if it were precious. As if it were valuable. An heirloom. Which maybe it was, the mystery photo, Tamar with the soft eyes and soft smile. He lowered himself back to the floor and thunked the bottle of Jack down on the books-as-coffee-table.
“Think of it like this,” he said. He picked up his phone, ready to take notes. “If she’s at Stage Six-b, we’re halfway through the game. We’re already starting the Daily Double. All the bets are twice what they started out as, and you are the losing contestant. Every category, every clue, you’ve got to slam the buzzer fast and hard. Even if you don’t know the answer.”
Sunshine began crocheting a scallion hat. Crocheting, even the pretend crocheting she sometimes did when she’d forgotten her bag of wool, helped her focus.
“Let’s think categories,” she said. “What do you most want or need to know about your mother?”
“Why she only ate out of cans and jars,” I said. “Why she moved herself into that place without telling me. What she and Asa were talking about the night before he broke up with me. Why she practiced with the church choir for thirty years but never went to church. Why she got a long-term-care policy. Why she made me go to college two states away. Shit, I don’t know. Everything. Anything.”
“Whoa,” Brown said. “My thumbs can’t type that fast.”
“You must know the answers to some of these questions already,” Sunshine said. “Right?”
“No! I told you! She wouldn’t tell me anything! And now we’ve run out of time!”
Exclamation marks, scrolling along. Sunshine was not intimidated by them. Sunshine was not intimidated by much of anything. She had been earlier in her life, though, hadn’t she? Before she got cancer? Had there been a moment in there, a moment in the chemo room, maybe, or in the middle of an unsleeping night, that Sunshine had turned a corner in her mind, grown instantly out of being intimidated by anything ever again? Decided there was no more time in her life for things like intimidation, and, poof, zapped it right out of herself? Look at her, shaking her head. Look how fast the crochet hook moved between her fingers, flashing in and out of the pale green and white wool.
“There is no time,” she said. “There’s never time. People just think there is. They plod along as if it’s an endless resource. As if it’ll never run out.”
Brown looked up from his typing. “Wait, did you say long-term-care policy?” he said. “That’s kind of weird. Wasn’t—isn’t—she young to have one of those things?”
I had not even known what such a thing was until that first conversation with the doctor, when my mind first began to spin with what-ifs and wheres and hows.
“Early-onset often seems to progress quite fast,” the doctor said. “This perception may actually result from the fact that most early-onset patients have already been living with the disease for quite a long time, but because they are so young, it’s not recognized.”
That would be my mother. Check.
“But Tamar is lucky in one way,” the doctor said, “which is that she’s got a very good long-term-care policy.”
The idea of my mother with a long-term-care policy, or a policy of any kind—she was not a woman of words, nor was she a woman of insurance forms and legal documents, not to mention money, of which she had little—almost made me laugh. A long-term-care policy? The doctor had nodded, his lips pursed, as if this were excellent news.
“Exactly how is that luck?” I said.
My mother had never had a job of any kind that gave her anything but a biweekly paycheck, which was docked if she was sick or snowed in or spent a summer day taking her daughter to Old Forge. So if in fact there was a long-term-care policy, she must have gone out and gotten it on her own. I pictured her sitting in a chair on the opposite side of a desk in an insurance agency somewhere in Utica, no one in the spouse chair next to her, looking at brochures that the per
son opposite kept pushing at her.
“I hate the thought of that almost more than anything,” I said to Sunshine and Brown. “That she went out and got that thing.”
“Do you know when she got it?” Brown said.
“Years ago. Six or seven.”
“Too early, then, to know about the”—when he hesitated, Sunshine filled in the rest of the sentence—“situation.”
“Way too early. Her mother died young of cancer and her father died of emphysema. So why’d she get one? Those things are so expensive. She never had any money to spare.”
One of the gene mutation what-ifs that tormented me was a long-term-care policy for myself. Should I get one? Now, just in case? The image of me in a nursing home sometimes rose up in my mind: me with a walker, me watching a blank television, me not knowing who Sunshine and Brown were when they came to visit. Shhh, Clara. Sunshine and Brown were nodding. That Tamar never had any money to spare was a known fact. Not that she ever talked about money worries. Not her style.
“It’s a mystery,” I said, and Sunshine laughed.
“How is it possibly a mystery?” she said. “Your mother got that policy for your sake. She didn’t want to be a burden to her only child, for any indeterminate reason, in some indeterminate future.”
The second she spoke, in that duh tone of voice, I knew she was right. It must have shown on my face, because they didn’t say anything. They just sat there on the floor, elbows resting on the coffee table made of books, waiting.
“Goddammit,” I said. “What else am I too stupid to figure out?”
“Lots, probably,” Brown said, and that made Sunshine laugh, and then I was laughing too. We couldn’t stop laughing, the same way we had laughed the night they told me Sunshine had cancer. By then, they had known for a week. They hadn’t told anyone, not even their parents. We were all still living in Boston then. Cancer? I said, you mean, like, cancer-cancer? and they had nodded, both of them. Cancer-cancer. But we’re only twenty-four! I said, and I could hear the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence. Because we were. We were twenty-four, and twenty-four-year-olds didn’t get cancer. Except that some of them did, apparently, because here was Sunshine, looking healthy as always, but there it was, cancer. I had laughed—out of the sheer disbelief of it? Shock?—and then they started laughing too, and we all laughed and laughed. We choked on it, our laughter, and then we drank two bottles of wine and talked about cancer and chemo and wigs versus hats and all that stuff we had never imagined we’d be talking about, at our age—twenty-four! Twenty-four!—or ever, maybe, but there it was.
We didn’t laugh the second and third time. We didn’t feel so young anymore. Or maybe we did, and it felt so unfair.
“Remember the night you guys told me Sunshine had cancer and we couldn’t stop laughing?”
They nodded, because they were my best friends and they knew exactly what I meant, which was that this situation with my mother and me felt as strange and weird as the fact of Sunshine’s cancer had felt, so long ago.
“No one knows me like you guys,” I said. “No one in the world.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Brown said. “Fearsome, we’re coming for you.”
Double Jeopardy
The next day, I saw the bartender in Adirondack Hardware. I was signing copies of The Old Man at a table next to a display of Dutch ovens, near the pickles and jams. The hardware ladies had brought me a cup of coffee and a blueberry scone for sustenance. The scone was dry, and every time I took a bite, crumbs were strewn over the table, my lap and the stack of books. People kept wandering up and examining the book while I brushed away crumbs and answered questions and inscribed the book if they wanted a copy.
If x = taking a bite and y = someone talking to me then x + y = crumb strewage. But at that particular moment no one was talking to me. No one was even in sight. Quick, Clara. One big bite. Then I looked up and there was the bartender, standing in front of the table. Smiling. He tilted his head to read my name on the cover of The Old Man stack.
“It’s you,” he said. “Clara Winter, the gimlet girl.”
The scone had the best of me. All I could do was nod. He kept on smiling.
“That right there is the problem with scones,” he said. “Can’t stand the things.”
That made me laugh, which made me open my mouth, which caused a crumb explosion. The bartender was one of those people who didn’t look away. Didn’t pretend he hadn’t just seen something embarrassing. Was willing to acknowledge a scone disaster and by acknowledging it ally himself with the scone victim. He laughed too.
“Why didn’t you go for a muffin? So much easier.”
“I know. But a scone is what the ladies”—I nodded at the Adirondack Hardware owners—“brought me.”
“And you couldn’t look a gift scone in the mouth—is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
A father and his two daughters were now waiting behind the bartender. The smaller daughter snatched a copy of The Old Man out of the older daughter’s hands. The older daughter snatched it back. It was a grim and silent battle. The bartender moved aside to make room, but first he put his hand on the stack of books.
“When are you coming back to the bar?”
It was a question, not a statement, but it didn’t feel like one. The bartender’s hand was quiet on the stack of books. He waited for me to say something and he would keep waiting. The battling sisters sensed his power and stopped battling. They and their father waited for my answer.
“When’s a good time?”
“Anytime’s a good time.”
“Sometime, then. Sometime I will return to the bar.”
“Time” words kept coming out of our mouths, words emerging from the word assembly line within. Part of me liked talking like that because it was fun, and fun was in short supply. And part of me felt guilty talking like that because of the heavy curtain behind the light words, the heavy velvet curtain of My mother is disappearing. The bartender smiled. He couldn’t see the curtain, moth-eaten and dusty, hanging limply on the dark stage. His hand lifted off the stack of books and he was gone, past the pickles and jams, past the vintage Adirondack posters, past the hardware ladies, both of whom smiled at him.
“Is that your boyfriend?” the smaller sister said.
“That’s my bartender,” I said.
She nodded gravely, as if I had just told her a secret. Then she pushed the book toward me, her finger pointing at the title page. “Can you write my name in here?”
“Mine too,” the bigger sister said. “My name too. It’s not just your book, you know. It belongs to both of us.”
“Tell you what,” I said, and I lifted a new copy off the stack. “I’m going to give you girls another one. My treat. Then you’ll each have your own.”
The father opened his mouth, invisible waves of protest beginning to ripple outward from him, but I didn’t look at him and he stayed quiet. Sometimes you need something that’s only yours, was the thought that I telegraphed back to him, something that belongs to you and you alone.
The small sister clapped her book shut and clutched it to her chest and jumped up and down, as if she had just won a contest. The older sister took the copy I gave her and frowned, as if something serious had just happened.
* * *
That night, Sunshine and Brown and I sat across from each other at their table, the giant table that would never fit in the tiny cabin. I had brought us each a Tree Hugger sandwich from the deli at DiOrio’s.
“What’s going on with you?” Brown said to me. “There’s something weird about you. Even for a self-admitted weirdo.”
“Excuse me? Semi-weirdo.”
“You’re right, Brown,” Sunshine said, as if I weren’t sitting there. “The word isn’t weird, though. It’s happy. Or happy-ish.”
I looked down at the table, searching for the scorch mark, intent on finding the scorch mark and focusing on it instead
of feeling happy, even happy-ish, given the situation with my mother.
There it was. Down the table. Hello, scorch mark. Give me the strength not to feel happy.
This table had been with them ever since they moved in together, back in Boston. Neither of them had any furniture and we were driving around on garbage night to furnish their new apartment. Curbside. That was our term for everything we found set out in alleys and in front of houses and apartment buildings the night before garbage pickup. We knew all the different garbage days for all the different neighborhoods. We preferred wealthy neighborhoods for the quality of their castoffs.
The day we found the table it was I who spotted it, one corner and one leg poking out from behind a Dumpster in Back Bay. “Pay dirt!” I shouted. “Hold up, driver!” All the windows were open and I stuck my head out for a better look as Sunshine backed the borrowed pickup down the alley.
“Now this, my friends, is what we call a table,” Brown said, once we were all out of the truck and standing by the Dumpster.
“This is a table for the ages,” Sunshine said.
“This is a table that I am personally responsible for spotting,” I said, because once someone has started a chain of rhythmically italicized words you shouldn’t break it, “and because of that I am the winner, and you guys are going to have to have me over for dinner for the rest of our lives.”
“No problem,” Sunshine said, and “Sounds good to me,” Brown said.
The table wouldn’t fit in the bed of the pickup. We angled it so that most of it fit, and Sunshine puttered along Commonwealth Avenue while Brown and I crouched on opposite sides of the behemoth.
“Hold on, Clara!” Brown kept calling. “Hold on for dear life! Dear God, Clara, hold on! Are you holding on, Clara?” and after a while I was laughing so hard that all the holding-on was up to him.
Now I kept my eyes on the scorch mark, focusing on it in order to keep the bartender from appearing in my mind, but he kept appearing anyway. There he was, standing onstage, in front of a ragged velvet curtain, smiling.
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