* * *
Genetic counseling was recommended if you had a family history and you were considering getting the test. Genetic counseling was strongly, strongly advised if you had a family history and you were a) considering getting the test, and b) considering having children, or c) falling in love with a bartender and projecting into the future by imagining him getting in his car and driving an hour south to visit you in the place you would end up living in sooner than you wanted, sooner than you ever could have imagined, unless a cure was found and found soon.
I made that last one up. It was fake.
But it was the one on my mind.
Because how could I put him through that? Over and over I imagined it: a winter night in January and the phone rang and he recognized the number and his shoulders sagged and before he even answered the call he was mentally preparing for the drive and for what awaited him once he got there. Clara’s agitated, the voice said. We’re having trouble calming her down. The usual tricks aren’t working. And he hung up and put on his winter coat and zipped it up and pulled on his boots and headed out to the frozen car and backed it down the frozen driveway and drove the dark, frozen roads all the way to Utica. Or Rome. Or Syracuse. Wherever I was living, in that faraway far-too-soon imaginary future.
He and Sunshine and Brown would come up with tricks for me. I could hear them now, brainstorming:
“Read to her,” Sunshine would say. “For sure read to her.”
“Read her what, though?” Brown would say. “The word ‘read’ is a very broad category when it comes to Winter.”
“Anything.”
“Not anything! For God’s sake, Sunshine, she is not a ‘read anything’ kind of person.”
“She is now, Brown. Unless you haven’t noticed.”
That was where I stopped with that particular fantasy. So far down the road that any words would do? No. That was a world where I wasn’t. Where I didn’t want to be, because I could see it all too clearly. The bartender would walk beside me wheresoever I went in the hallways of wheresoever I had ended up, and he would talk me out onto that sugar-sand beach, or onto that Vermont peak, or down that desert trail, and then he would talk me back in. At some point he would probably take my hand, and I would probably let him. But I wouldn’t be me at that point, and he wouldn’t be the man he had been with the me I was now.
I needed to know if I carried the mutation, and I needed not to know. It was too hard to contemplate the knowing, and the not knowing, and the not knowing what I would do if I had it.
“Talk to him,” Sunshine said. “He’s your boyfriend.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Why not? For that reason? Because you’re scared of the future?”
I said nothing.
“What would your mother say to that?” Brown said. “What would your mother think of you, being a chickenshit?”
I’m not a chickenshit. But I kept the words inside me, where they burned and turned sour in my gut.
“Don’t you want to know, though?” Brown said. “It’s, what, a twenty-five-percent chance or something?”
“Fifty,” I said. “Fifty percent. Five-oh. And I don’t know if I want to know. They don’t let anyone young into the trials, so what’s the point?”
He looked at me with what in his eyes? Surprise, maybe, because it was clear that I was ahead of him, that I had thought about it already.
“And if there’s no cure yet and no trials they’d let me into, then how would knowing change anything?”
“It would give you the chance to make plans.”
“Plans for what?”
“The future.”
“How so?”
He looked to Sunshine, silent next to him, for help. She was most of the way through another scallion hat. She had been making a lot of scallions lately. The fade of dark green to pale green to near white was her favorite color combination of all the hats she made, which was too bad, because parents loved the strawberries. There was always a sizable backlog of scallion hats.
“What if we had known?” he said to her.
“Known what? That I would get cancer when we were so young?”
“Yes. Would it have changed things? Have you ever thought about that, like, gone back in the past and thought about what, if anything, you would have done differently? Thought about what we would have done differently?”
Her fingers didn’t stop. “Yes.”
“And?”
“I would have said to you, ‘Fuck it, Brown, let’s have a kid. Let’s have a kid now.’”
Her fingers didn’t stop crocheting and she didn’t look up from the scallion and her words hung there, each one a punch at a punching bag hanging in the cinder-blocked windowless gym of the past. Fuck it, Brown, let’s have a kid. Let’s. Have. A. Kid. Now. Each one a realization to me, that of all the variables that genetic testing would mean, this was the one that mattered most to me. My possible, future, undreamt-of, unknowable, maybe-not-possible child. Where was the bartender right at this minute? I pictured him bent over a table whittling, a bucket of wood next to him on the floor, shavings spiraling out from his knife.
“Do you guys think things can sometimes be, like”—they waited for me patiently while I waited for the words, the words that wouldn’t come—“not complicated?”
“Things like what?” Sunshine said. “Bartenders?”
“Maybe.”
“So you have been seeing him?”
“Kind of. At his bar a couple times. And in town.”
They sat across the table, studying me. They were talking to each other in that way they did, with no words. I felt the conversation taking place and I closed my hand around my silver earring. If the old man and Asa had once been in the world, weren’t they still? In some way, something of them must still be here.
“Can it be just . . . simple, sometimes?”
They nodded. Brown cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said. No exclamation marks in his voice. “It can.”
“Do you guys want to come to the bar?” I said.
They were still nodding. They weren’t laughing at me. They weren’t making remarks about my boyfriend, or about free drinks, or about the nunlike existence they had witnessed over the years. Yes, we’ll come to the bar, was what their nods were saying.
* * *
“Listen to me,” I said. It was the next night and we were driving up to the bar. They were going to meet the bartender. Free drinks! Free drinks! That had been their rallying cry the first couple miles, but the closer we got, the quieter they were. “If I someday get that heart procedure, and if something happens to me during that heart procedure —”
“Which it won’t,” Brown said, but “Brown,” Sunshine said. “Stop.”
“Will you promise me that you’ll keep visiting Ma? That you’ll take care of her?”
“Nothing’s going to happen,” Brown began again. “Didn’t that one guy describe it as the slam dunk of the —”
But Sunshine stepped in again. “Yes,” she said. “We promise. And if something happens to me —”
Brown began to protest again, his voice beginning its climb into exclamation marks.
“Brown.”
That single word, one syllable, and the exclamation marks disappeared. “If something happens to me,” Sunshine said, “promise me that you two will take care of each other. Promise me that you won’t let Brown sell the house or do anything major for a year, Clara.”
“I promise,” I said.
“And Brown, promise me that you will go over to Clara’s cabin and sit on the porch with her whenever the monkeys start scrambling. Take the place of that goddamn bottle of whiskey and that dead dog.”
“I promise,” Brown said.
“Then it’s settled,” Sunshine said. “We’re all taken care of.”
“You’re forgetting yourself,” Brown said. “What if something happens to me? What about you?”
“I’ll have Clara,” Suns
hine said. There was a duh sound in her voice. “She’ll take care of me.”
I put that away in the back of my mind, Sunshine’s surprise at Brown’s question, as if he should know that of course Clara would take care of her, and my own surprise at her confidence in me. We were at the bar then, the bar where lights were strung up around the roofline and windows twinkled in the dark November night. Then we were pushing open the door, and a couple sitting next to it gasped and shivered from the freezing air, and then the bartender was looking at us and smiling from behind the bar, and he turned to Gayle, who was ringing something up on the cash register next to him, and said something, and she nodded and turned around and flashed me a smile.
The bartender came around the end of the bar and pointed toward the back booth where we had waited hours for my heart to stop racing. He held out his hand to Sunshine, then Brown, and “Chris,” he said, and “Sunshine” and “Brown” and “Heard a lot about you,” Brown said, “a lot for Winter anyway,” and he nodded in my direction as if the bartender knew exactly what he was talking about—that Winter was chary with information in general, and surely he, the bartender, would already have learned that about her—which wasn’t true, because I wasn’t that way around the bartender. Did he look surprised? Did he look puzzled? Did he look as if he were about to debate Brown’s words? He did not. What the bartender did was take my hand in his and hold it.
“Gimlets for the table?” he said. “Clara likes them.”
Behind the bar Gayle lifted the bottle with a flourish and upended it so that the gin streamed steadily into first one shaker and then another. She lifted them high too and shook them back and forth, pirouetting them in an air ballet that she made up as she went. The words on her inner arm were dark and indecipherable from across the room, but I knew what they said. Sunshine and Brown and the bartender were talking about crocheting and whittling and code-writing.
Gayle brought us another round of gimlets without asking and slid a bowl of popcorn between us, popcorn that must have been made by someone back in the kitchen, because it was too fresh and hot and salty and buttery to come from a machine. She handled the bar alone, even after it got busy, so that we could keep talking.
And we kept talking. About Dog, and how he watched over me from his blue urn in the cabin. About fireflies, which might or might not live on air alone. About one-person cabins. About furniture, including furniture made entirely of books. About Sunshine and Brown’s heavy wooden slab of a table found curbside in Boston. About Sunshine’s former breasts. About the pros and cons of working from home, the way Sunshine and Brown and I did, as opposed to working in a bar, the way the bartender did. About the bartender’s grandmother, the one who had raised him, the one laughing, with her arms around him, at his high school graduation in the photo taped to the cash register. About the blankets and stuffed animals we had carried with us as toddlers. Brown still had the blanket he had been found in, a white flannel blanket printed with stars that had been swaddled around him on the steps of the courthouse in Jefferson City, Missouri, which was something I had never known until just then. We talked about my heart and about John Stein’s latest book of poems, More Real Poems About Real People with Real Problems. We, meaning Brown and Sunshine, talked about my tattoo. Sunshine wrapped her arms around her chest and rocked back and forth, mimicking me.
“She holds herself together with wire,” Brown said. “Wire and words.”
“That was how we knew something was up when she first moved back,” Sunshine said, “even if we didn’t know it was about Tamar. She kept doing the hold-herself-together thing. Like, all the time.”
“Did you freak out when you saw the entire tattoo?” Brown said. “The way it winds around her?”
He looked to the bartender for confirmation, but the bartender was shaking his head and smiling, as if he didn’t know what Brown meant, because he didn’t. He had never seen me without clothes. We had kissed only the once, on that frigid day in Adirondack Hardware. I watched as comprehension dawned on first Brown’s and then Sunshine’s face. They didn’t look at each other but I could feel them communicating in their silent way. They haven’t slept together? they were saying to each other. Whoa.
* * *
“Has he met Tamar?” Brown said to me, as if the bartender weren’t right there. We were all standing outside the bar. My Subaru and the bartender’s big white boat of a car were the only ones left, and it was freezing, and our breath puffed out in clouds. Soon the snow would begin to fall, and the mountains would be blanketed in white, or blue, or pink, or dark green, depending on the light and the time of day.
“I have not,” the bartender said. “But I’d like to.”
“Come with us, then,” Brown said.
Hello, hello, I’m standing right here. Hello, is she not my mother? Is this not an invitation that I should be the one to make, Brown, not you? Who says I want to have the bartender meet my mother, anyway? Those were all the thoughts that on another day would have run through my head, and which I would have turned from thoughts into sentences. But that day must have been past, must already have been in the rearview mirror, because I didn’t even think them, let alone say them.
“What should I expect?” the bartender said, but he wasn’t asking Brown or Sunshine. He had turned to me and he was asking me, not them. “What should I know?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nada. Zip. Zilch.”
“It’s better to have no expectations,” Sunshine said.
Maybe it would be an evening when Tamar was there. Maybe it would be an evening when she was gone, walking the endless hallways in search of her daughter. Maybe she would recognize Sunshine and Brown and not me, or me and not them. Maybe she would recognize the bartender even though she had never met him.
“Nothing it is, then,” the bartender said.
He shook hands again with Sunshine and Brown, put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed, then got in his car and drove off north.
“Okay,” Brown said, and “Okay,” Sunshine said, when we were in the car.
“Okay,” I said too. Because we all knew what we were saying. The conversation that was happening among us, the miles back to their house, was happening below the surface. Wordless Conversations for $400. He’s a good guy, Clara, he’s a good, good guy. That feeling went around and around the car, from me in the driver’s seat to Brown riding shotgun, his arm stretched back to hold hands with Sunshine in the backseat. And this, too, the feeling that Sometimes it’s simple. Sometimes it’s not complicated at all.
* * *
It was the bartender’s first visit. We walked in to find her at the juice station, turned sideways, her walker leaning against the wall. She held a Dixie cup beneath the apple juice spigot, then moved it mid-splash to the cranberry juice spigot. Drops of juice splashed onto the tray beneath.
“Hey, Ma,” I said.
She turned, again mid-splash, and examined me. Brown-red juice sloshed in the tiny cup in her hand.
“Orange juice,” she said.
“You want some?”
She nodded. I moved to help her but the bartender was quicker. He slid another paper cup off the upside-down stack and then moved around her to the orange juice dispenser, which was separate and next to the ice chest.
“Here you go,” he said.
She took the cup and drank it down in one go and held it out to him again.
“More?”
She nodded. He filled it, she drank it, while Sunshine and Brown and I watched.
“It’s like community theater,” Brown whispered.
“More like improv,” Sunshine said.
My mother handed the empty cup back to the bartender and shook her head when he held it up inquiringly.
“How do I know you?” she said.
“I’m a friend of your daughter’s.”
“He’s my bartender,” I said.
She nodded and flapped her arm in the direction of the Green Room. “The knothole?”
“Sure,” he said. “Let’s go.”
He held out his arm and she took it as if he were her square-dance partner and they were about to do-si-do. Down the hall we went, with them leading the way.
“How do I know you?”
“I’m your daughter’s bartender.”
No answer. Maybe it was one of the nights she didn’t remember she had a daughter. Then she spoke.
“My daughter hates beer.”
“She does!” Brown said, exclamation marks in his voice because she was there, she was tracking the conversation. “Who in their right mind hates beer?”
“She’s always hated it,” Sunshine said. “Remember when we used to make her drink it, freshman year?”
“It was good for her. She needed loosening up.”
“We used to make her play pool too.”
“Also good for her. Even if she could never remember the rules. Who forgets how to play pool one week to the next?”
“The same kind of person who plays piano every single night of her life for four years and then leaves it behind,” Brown said. “That’s who.”
The bartender turned around. Tamar still had hold of his arm and they were inching toward the Green Room. “She didn’t leave it behind,” he said.
Brown opened his mouth as if he were about to argue, then closed it. Sunshine, pushing the walker down the hall so that Tamar would have it nearby when she needed it, smiled. Maybe they said nothing because the bartender was still new-ish and they wanted to be polite. Maybe they said nothing because it would be too confusing for Tamar. Maybe they said nothing because they heard something true in the bartender’s words and thought, He’s right.
* * *
Lumber Days had come upon Old Forge, and Sunshine and Brown and the bartender and I were wandering the streets. Early December, pre-Christmas in the northland, and all the shops and bars and restaurants were lumber-themed. Birdhouses that looked like Lincoln Log cabins, bird feeders carved out of a single length of birch, Christmas tree ornaments in the shape of pine trees, rough-hewn bears chainsawed out of oak for two hundred dollars, extra if you wanted your name burned onto their bellies.
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