by Sara Lewis
“A guy said your name! He said, ‘This song was written by our old friend Tom Good.’ I was watching with my mom, and they told your name! It was the best song on the show! It was about a boy who wasn’t home yet. Can you sing that for me? Tomorrow, because I promised my mom I’d go to bed right away if she let me watch the whole show.”
“Of course,” I said. “Tomorrow. Night, Mike.”
“Oh, wait. Mom liked it too, Good. She said to tell you. Night, Good.”
And for that, it was all worth it—all the pain, the hiding, the bad choices and false moves I’d ever made in my life seemed OK to me, because I had started to move forward. I had turned some of my life into a song. A real song that people liked.
forty-two
George Harrison died.
I got a guitar in fourth grade because I wanted to learn to play like George. I learned to write songs by learning every Beatles song by heart. Since eighth grade, I had been a vegetarian because I read that George was.
I felt my heart tearing out again as I had so often during the last few months. But then a new feeling came. It came in the form of a little guitar riff that I heard in my heart and then in my head. The riff was saying, Thank you! And I wrote a song to George based around that riff. If I could have put a grateful celebration of every Beatles teaching—about songwriting, guitar playing, humanitarianism, grace, love, and peace—into one song, I would have. As it was, I managed a simple, worldless melody called “Thank You!” And that became the song I played first every morning to get myself grounded, my mantra, so to speak. (I first learned the word mantra because of George. You see? George had been with me all this time.)
Gratitude can take you a long way.
forty-three
I was at Corona Vista Elementary, sitting on a folding chair, I was twenty minutes early. I watched the end of a movie about sharks that some kids about Elise’s age were watching. Then the movie ended, and those kids left the room. Parents came in and sat down. They all knew one another and talked and laughed. I saw Diana come in. I stood up, ready to go to her, to talk, to ask questions. But she gave me a perfunctory wave and sat near the front. Some kids came in and sat on the floor. A guy sat next to Diana, a nice-looking guy, who was all dressed up. The financé. He looked about as different from me as a person could: short, neat haircut; suit; polished shoes. I stayed where I was, three rows behind them. They leaned toward each other to talk, Diana talked to a lot of the other parents. The place filled up. People had to stand. I gave my seat to a grandmother and stood over on the side near some bookshelves.
Kids started filing in, sitting on the floor in front of the parents. These were little kids, though, kindergartners maybe. Then a group of older ones came, second-graders, first-graders? It was hard to tell. Anyway, there were hundreds of them. They kept filing in until it looked as though there was no way the floor could contain them all. A teacher stood up. “Boys and girls on this side, I want you to move over this way Just a little bit more,” She made a sweeping motion with her hand, as she took a few giant steps to the left, “And boys and girls on this side, please move this way.” She swept with the other hand, did a giant side step the other way. There was a lot of wiggling. “That’s right. We have another class coming in to see the program. Good. Great. Thank you.” A new group of kids paraded in.
Next, a platoon of kids Jack’s size marched in behind a large gray-haired teacher. They were all holding plastic recorders. “Good morning!” said the teacher as the students found their places behind her.
I was scanning the faces. I found him! He was searching too, looking all over the room, unsystematically darting his head around, from the right to the left and then back again. His eyes finally locked onto mine. He blushed and smiled at me. I waved like crazy before I considered how embarrassing this might be for him. I put my hand down and smiled. He smiled back. Then he found his mom.
“We’ve been practicing,” the teacher went on, “as you must have heard at home.” There was a ripple of chuckles. “I think you might even recognize the songs we’re going to play.” More chuckles.
The teacher turned around and knelt on the floor in front of the students. She lifted her hands. They all put their recorders to their lips. They played “Kumbaya.” Right away, I choked up. Again. Almost anything could do this to me now, especially the words “moment of silence” and “loved ones” and lots of different kinds of music.
I had to sniff, and it was kind of loud. The woman next to me opened her big bag and handed me a pack of tissues. “Thanks.”
She sniffed. I handed the tissues back. “Thanks,” she said. “I usually only fall apart when they sing, but ever since this fall I—”
“Oh, God,” I whispered. “They’re not going to sing, are they?”
“I don’t think so.”
Next they played “You Are My Sunshine,” followed by “This Land Is Your Land.” I saw Jack looking over at me, and I managed to make my mouth turn upward in a smile. Good job, I was telling him. I like it.
They were finished. “Thank you all for coming!” said the big teacher. “You’ve been a wonderful audience. We hope you’ve enjoyed the program.” She turned and led the kids outside. The parents were starting to leave in the opposite direction, out the front door. I saw Diana and her finacé heading out.
“Wait!” I wanted to call after the class. But they weren’t stopping. I couldn’t just let Jack go back to class without speaking to him.
I pushed through the crowd to follow the kids. They were going outside and branching off to go into different classrooms in portable buildings that occupied one end of the playground. I’d lost track of Jack, and now I didn’t know which room he was going to be in. I stood in the middle of the blacktop, looking at the sea of kids. But he’d disappeared.
“Uh, Good?” the voice was at my shoulder.
I turned, and there he was. “Hi!” I said to Jack. “You were fantastic! That was outstanding!”
“It was?”
“Yeah, it was! Three songs! Whoa! How long did it take to learn those?”
“I don’t know. It seemed like a really long time. Could you hear my recorder? Could you tell which one was me?”
“Loud and clear! Are you kidding? It was the best one! You sounded great. Right on tempo! I loved it.”
“OK, I’ve got to go, or I’ll get in trouble.”
“Oh,” I said, “Don’t get in trouble! Can’t have that.”
“Good? Can I tell you something? I was kind of scared to play in front of you.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “God, that’s—sorry I—”
“But I’m glad you came. It worked out. Mom said it would. See ya,” he said, and he walked off.
Another kid, a boy I hadn’t noticed at first, had hung back waiting for him. “Was that your dad?” I heard him ask.
“Yeah,” said Jack. “One of them.” He turned back and waved to me.
I waved back.
I was one of his dads! How about that? I got choked up all over again and hurried out to the street and my bike.
forty-four
Kmart was bankrupt. “Well, now, what the—” I said out loud the first time I heard the news on the radio. That must be wrong. Kmart couldn’t just— Then I kept hearing it over and over again. How could they have let that happen? On the news that night when I sat down to watch CNN, Kmart was the big story. People were talking about it in line at the grocery store. Every day, there was another story about it on the radio. “Will Bluelight go out forever? Increasing competition from retailers like Wal-Mart and Target…”
Panic surged through me. What about my T-shirts? What about my socks? I was thinking. A lot had changed recently. Surely there was this one thing, just one small thing, that could stay the same.
I drove to the Big Kmart on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard, the one I always went to. I went straight to the T-shirts. There were only three packages in my size, all white. I don’t usually buy white. I didn’t think I had since
I was eleven. I looked at them for some time, pulling the packages forward in the rack as if they might be hiding something. An old man shuffled over. I worried that he was after medium pocket Ts! I had no choice! I grabbed all three packages off the rack. I would have bought more. I would have bought hundreds, if I could have. But there were only three, which I held tightly all the way to the checkout stand, as if someone might want to take them from me.
As soon as I’d paid, I drove over to the mall, to Millers Outpost. As long as I was doing my shopping, I might as well get some more things, a couple pairs of jeans and maybe a sweatshirt. At least there was Millers Outpost. I could count on that anyway. Millers Outpost was where I had been buying my jeans for, well, forever. OK, it wasn’t called Miller’s Outpost anymore. Last time I was here, the store name had changed to Anchor Blue, for some reason. Marketing, probably. Maybe the name sounded better to teenagers or something. Who cared what it was called? The important thing was that the jeans were the same. I parked where I always parked, walked past Macy’s and the toy store, and then came to Millers Outpost or whatever it was called.
I should say that I came to where it used to be. There was white paper on the inside of the windows so I couldn’t see inside. There was a sign saying that it had moved from this location. Gone!
My heart was thumping like crazy and I had to take some deep breaths, slowly. Something gripped me around the neck and threatened to choke me. I just had to sit down there by the dolphin fountain and think for a minute. What the hell was happening here anyway?
On the other side of the fountain, a boy who was about five was throwing coins into the water. He would pinch a penny between his thumb and his forefinger, squeeze his eyes shut tight, and then open them for a second before he hurled the coin into the water. He did this five times, then turned to his mother, a redhead in a T-shirt that said CLICK OK, and asked her something. She put some shopping bags on the ground and dug around in her purse for her wallet. Then she handed the boy some more change. He made his wish ten more times. Or maybe he made ten more wishes.
When the mother was out of pennies, they walked away. “I hope it works out for you,” I wanted to call after him. Of course I didn’t, as I didn’t want to alarm them.
What had the boy been wishing for? A toy he wanted. No, it had to be something bigger.
I know what I would wish for him, I thought. I would wish for nothing unexpected to happen in his life. Ever. That would be a good wish. If the kid could get that wish, life on a smooth course with no surprises, he’d be doing pretty well. That’s what I’d want for myself. I’d want to eliminate store closings; sudden, loud noises; price increases that I hadn’t planned for; and of course, surprise deaths and other life-changing disasters.
Wouldn’t I?
Of course, without surprises, I never would have felt the jolt of joy at hearing my own song on the car radio for the first time, way back when. I never would have felt that clutch of love at seeing Robins neck bent as she folded a Goofy towel. And once you felt those things, there was no going back. I was forever trying to feel those things again, to re-create the feeling of those surprises. No matter how much my head tried to keep things the same, my heart would go on looking for more doses of happy coincidences and lucky accidents. You just couldn’t stop your heart—it was addicted to surprise—no matter how much your head tried to avoid it.
And you couldn’t just wish to avoid the bad surprises and have lots of the good ones, because who knew which disasters were going to turn out to be miracles? For years it had seemed to be a bad one that a family with small kids had moved in next door. Now, another surprise, that turned out to be good. Surprises were tricky. You just never knew what you were getting.
I stood up. I stayed there a minute, looking at the money on the bottom of the fountain. What did they do with it all, and whose job was it to fish it out? I reached into my pocket and took out a dime. I looked around to see if anyone was watching. No one was. “Good surprises,” I whispered to myself and threw the dime into the water.
Then I walked into the Macy’s men’s department and bought seven shirts. They were all different. There was a maroon polo; a green one; a tan button-down long-sleeve; a denim one; a plaid short-sleeve; a dark blue long-sleeve T-shirt with a yellow number 28 on it, for some reason; a purple turtleneck that was on sale. I paid and went into the dressing room to put one on, the number 28, which I wore home. 28, I thought. Why not?
forty-five
Sometimes I think that writing “A Minute or Two from Now” was what caused my life to finally move forward, but I guess it wasn’t. It was everything that led up to it too.
The song took on a life of its own, earning lots of money for the children who lost parents in the disaster.
It’s not as if I was never sad again or anything. Being sad only really started with the song. Before that I had just been kind of a zombie. And the good thing about being sad is that, afterward, you appreciate feeling happy a lot more. Emotion is a relative thing. That’s all I’ve got figured out so far.
It wasn’t long after the dinner that Robin and Ellen signed up for a quilt class together. If I had been able to sew, I could have been with Robin in a heartbeat. They’d work over at Robin’s, cutting pieces of fabric apart and sewing them back together in geometrical combinations, blocks. Ellen would come over and get me to ask my opinion. Then they’d lay the blocks out on the floor in Robins living room and squint at them, deciding which arrangement they liked best. Sometimes they had to stand on the coffee table for an aerial view. “Oh!” Mike said once, watching them rearrange the pieces. “It’s like a puzzle.”
“Exactly!” said Robin, and she hugged and kissed him. I wished I’d said that.
The quilts seemed to occupy more and more time. Ellen quit her job. “What?!” I said. “You quit! Why?”
“I’m going to take quilt classes for a year and then start my own business.”
“Selling quilts?” I said. “You’re a well-trained, experienced lawyer!”
“So?”
“So… so that’s what you do for your job! You can’t quit! You’re only fifty-two!”
“Am I allowed to change my job, if I feel like it? I believe I am. I don’t like being a lawyer. You have to argue all day, and I don’t like to argue.”
“Kind of late to be reaching that conclusion, don’t you think?”
“Personally,” she said, “I think the timing is perfect. If there’s one thing I’ve learned lately it’s that people should be doing what they enjoy with people they like.”
When she said that, I just stood there for a minute, staring at her like an idiot. She was right, of course. It was just a little hard to adjust to the idea of my stable, lawyer sister with the big-time, serious job becoming some kind of seamstress, doing crafts projects all day. No fair! I was supposed to be the unstable one with the offbeat job!
“I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it with working for a purpose that’s at odds with my personality. I’ve always wanted to do this. When I started sewing on that little black machine, that was it for me. I just don’t want to do anything else.” I stared at her without saying anything. “It’s just a change, Tom. And—”
“Don’t tell me! Change is good. OK, OK.”
• • •
A few days later, someone knocked on the door. I thought at first that it was one of the kids, but you get to know the knocks. This was someone who didn’t knock on my door every day.
It was Robin, holding a bright multicolored lump of fabric.
I was so surprised I could barely choke out, “Hi.”
“I finished my quilt.” She said it so quietly, it almost sounded like a secret.
“You—and you wanted to show me?” I never felt so honored. “Lets see.” I was speaking quietly too, as if there were a sleeping baby in the room.
She handed me a corner, and she took a corner. We stepped apart and the quilt opened.
There were lots of hearts o
n it. They were made of different colored pieces of purple, blue, and red fabric cut up and sewn back together. In between there were pieces of dark blue fabric with a darker blue, flowery pattern.
“Wow,” I said. And then I said it again, more softly, “Wow.”
“It’s—it’s just a quilt,” she said, her cheeks reddening.
“No, it’s not. It’s beautiful. It’s got hearts on it, and it’s fuzzy on the back here.”
“You think so?” she said.
“That it’s fuzzy? Yeah, nice and soft. What’s that on the back? Like pajamas, right?”
“Yeah, the backing is flannel. But no, I mean, beautiful. You think it’s beautiful?”
“Beautiful it is. Oh, yeah,” I said without a doubt.
“This didn’t come out right.” She picked up a corner and explained how the points were supposed to—I don’t know, something—and didn’t. And then she proceeded to show me all the mistakes in the quilt. This took some time. She said there were twisted seams and mismatched points and quilting stitches that veered off course. There were parts that weren’t symmetrical, parts that she had taken out and redone so many times that they got stretched and couldn’t go back to the right shape, and parts that weren’t the right distance apart. It was all invisible to me, but I listened to all of it and nodded, as if I could see it. Then I said I wouldn’t have noticed it if she hadn’t shown it to me. I said, “If you look at it one way, it’s hearts in a square, but if you look at it from another, the background is the main thing and it looks like diamonds.” I held it up and looked at the patterns, and then I tilted my head the other way.
“Oh!” she said. “You can see that? I mean, that’s the way it’s supposed to look, but I wasn’t sure that the fabrics I picked were the right—”
“And the colors. Wow! How did you have time to make this?”
“I have a whole lot of vacation days,” she said. “And a little while after the disaster happened, and you know, Jeanette, I started thinking that I couldn’t face going in there and stocking dairy and working the register the way I normally did. I didn’t want to stay home and watch TV or not do anything at all. I wanted to focus on something that would take all my attention. I wanted to do something that would last, that would make me feel good, that would be, I don’t know, pretty. So this was it. This was what I decided to do. I worked on it all day when the kids were at school and then again at night too. It helped. It really did.”