All That's Left to Tell(15)

He stopped there, and knew the woman probably couldn’t see him wincing because he still recognized the source of the kiss while for another moment he held off the memory of its consequence.

“And then what happened?” the woman asked, a thickness in her voice.

“Her eyes snapped open, of course. She said, ‘Dad!’ My face must have seemed larger than the moon. I pulled away instantly, and she sat bolt upright. The book that had been on her chest fell to the floor. I said something like, ‘I’m sorry, Claire. I can’t believe I just did that.’ And she said, ‘It’s okay.’ And then, as if this would explain it, I said, ‘I’m just so proud of how beautiful you’ve become,’ which made it only worse, of course. Her eyes looked glassy, and then I sort of backed into my armchair, and she stood up and walked toward the stairs to go up to her room. I felt a moment of panic and said, ‘Your mother shouldn’t—’ but Claire stopped almost midstride and glared at me, and I didn’t finish my sentence, and then she went upstairs without looking back.”

He had never been a great storyteller, and now, telling this story, he wondered at how memory worked, his eyes closed, capturing images of Claire on the couch, on the stairs, but never in continuous motion, not like a film, but more like a flipbook where, when possible, someone paused while thumbing through to see how the illusion of motion was created. But it wasn’t always possible to linger like that, and the storytelling was fluid even if the memory was not, as if it had collected evidence and assembled its case.

They sat without speaking for a while, long enough that when the dog barked again, and roused him, he was sure minutes had passed.

“It’s getting late. I’ll have to go soon,” she said.

For the first time he had an unexpected impulse to ask her to stay.

“Okay,” he said weakly.

She shuffled her feet on the dirt floor, and then stood up and quietly opened the door. He thought she was gone, but then she said a few words to Azhar, and came back in and closed it, and he listened to her sweep away the image of the cow that Azhar had drawn earlier. She set the broom against the wall, and then he heard her walk back to the window, and when she spoke he was sure she was turned away from him.

“Claire,” she said, and then stopped to clear her throat. “Claire is driving east. She’s left her husband to attend to the motel while she’s gone, and their daughter is three years old now, old enough to be without her mother for a few weeks, though Claire worries about this, and she comforts herself by knowing that her husband’s mother—the kind of grandmother that children dream of living in a gingerbread house—will be there to help.”

“Despite everything,” he interrupted, “the thing about the run-down motel and cleaning other people’s sheets. And hanging diapers on the clothesline. I would have hoped for more for Claire.”

She walked back from the window then, and pulled the chair closer than it had been and sat back down.

“Don’t be a fool,” she said. “Why would you think this has anything to do with what you had hoped?”





5

A truck roared past her, the first she’d seen in a while, and pushed her closer to a sign along the highway that read, Fire Danger Today. Extreme. The dry air that blew in through the open windows felt like someone lightly sanding her lips. She could travel these endless Western roads for a long time and see few other cars, a half hour, an hour on the same stretch, her mind swept elsewhere, away, absent, a dream of a mind. But then a tractor-trailer approached, or she’d see a dead animal in the road, and she’d have to steer around it, and once she was alert again it seemed as if an invisible hand had lowered her from the enormous sky onto this highway while a mouth whispered to her through the hum of the tires, “Your father is dying.”

She was entering a national forest, it hadn’t rained in weeks, though it was still only late June—an intermittent years-long drought—and they were worried any careless spark might set everything ablaze. She realized she was hungry. Hadn’t eaten before she’d left. She and Jack had made the quick decision for her to drive rather than pay for a last-minute airfare that they would be months paying off, since her father, hospitalized with heart problems, though gravely ill, would likely live a few more weeks. A three-day drive like she hadn’t taken in years, since she and Jack had come west, in fact, and it had been many more years since she had seen her father.

She pulled off the highway into a town that had been carved out of the forest; it had a couple of streets with run-down homes set back from the main road where there was a small grocery store, and next door, for some reason, what looked to be a onetime antiques shop with a small trailer out front and a sign that read Ed’s Deli. Three picnic tables were set out in the dirt parking lot, and an older man and woman were sitting at one of them under a canopy that shielded them from the heavy sun. When she pulled into the lot in the tiny used pickup truck she and Jack had purchased to move supplies to and from the motel, she raised a cloud of dust, and was grateful that the slight breeze carried it away from the man and woman.

When she stepped out of the truck, the couple looked her over, smiling. They were sitting at the table with no food, but just outside the front stoop of the trailer was a gas grill where burgers were cooking. Inside she could see the shadow of someone moving back and forth in front of the window. There were signs in marker on whiteboards that listed the sandwiches and beverages, and in quotation marks below the phrase “All ingredients fresh from next door,” and then a red-markered arrow pointing to the small grocery store.