Never Coming Back(24)

“I know he died. He died after. After”—she cast her hand out into the air, searching for the word or words that escaped her. “After.”

“After we broke up.”

“Broke up.”

“Yes, Ma. It happened after that night I came home and the two of you were sitting at the kitchen table talking.”

The image rose up in my mind again. In the wake of the breakup I had thought about that night, the sight of them across from each other at the table, each leaning forward. The intent look on Asa’s face, the look on hers of—what? Surprise? No, something more. They must have been there for a while without me—I was out babysitting—because the air in the kitchen, when I walked up on the porch and opened the door and breathed it in, was stale. Stale and charged and full of invisible words that had been spoken without me there to hear them.

The next day he returned to the house and ended it between us.

“Do you know why he ended things, Ma?”

A calm detachment, the Buddhist way of regarding the things that make you suffer. I made my voice sound quiet and mild. There was a difference between fake quiet and mild and actual calm detachment, though. I could hear Brown in my head—Why does that still eat away at you?—and in my head I looked at him with fake calm detachment and said, I wish it didn’t, but it does.

“Asa,” she said again, and then, “Eli.”

“Yes, Ma. Eli used to come over sometimes too. We used to play cards together, all four of us.” Just in time, I stopped myself from saying the word Remember?, which you were not supposed to do. “Eli was Asa’s father,” I said. “Is Asa’s father.”

Which he was, wasn’t he? You didn’t stop being someone’s father when the someone died, did you?

“Maybe Asa was planning to enlist and he was afraid to tell me,” I said. “Maybe he figured I would want to leave Sterns and he didn’t want to keep me stuck there. Maybe he didn’t love me anymore.”

All things I had tried out in my head, then and in the years that followed our breakup and my leaving Sterns. I heard my own voice, a thin ghost filled with question marks, strutting and fretting their time on the stage, signifying nothing, and my mother was frowning and shaking her head.

“No,” she said. “No.”

“Why then, Ma?”

The category was Breaking Up for $400. The contestants stood at their podiums staring into space, ghost question marks floating in the air around them.





* * *





My mother was right about Josh Gibson. He was a Hall of Famer who never played in the major leagues due to a “gentleman’s agreement” that black baseball players wouldn’t play in the major leagues. He had a baby face. Soft eyes, soft lips. 1911–1947, which meant he died when he was barely older than me, the same year they brought Jackie Robinson up from the minors.

Did I even know that my mother liked baseball, let alone knew enough about it to know about Josh Gibson and the gentleman’s agreement? No.

“Ma?” I said. “You were right about that Josh Gibson question.”

She gave me a withering look, an Of course I’m right, and what kind of idiot are you? I soldiered on.

“I never knew you were such a baseball fan. Do you have a favorite team?”

“Of course.”

“Who is it, then?”

But she waved her hand at me and turned away. Fool, was what that shooing motion meant, and my mother suffered no fools, then or now. If the fool sitting next to her was dumb enough not to know what her team was, why should my mother tell her?

When Sunshine and Brown and I played Jeopardy! we suffered no fools either. We played it for real. We made bets, we kept score, we slammed our hands down on the table. Six categories and five clues each, just the way it was done on the real show. Our only variation was that each category had to have something to do with our actual lives. Snap out a clue and one of us would slam a hand on the table and snap back an answer.

Upstate New York Mountains We Have Climbed.

Books We Most Loved as Children.

Best Diners in the Adirondacks.

Cocktails We Got Sick on in College.

Best Drugs to Counteract the Side Effects of Chemotherapy.

Names No Child Should Be Given.

“Baseball for sixteen hundred,” Brown said. Baseball was one of his favorite categories. I slammed my hand down so fast and hard that the tiny bowl of salt, with its matching tiny spoon, jumped on the table.

“Name of Tamar Winter’s favorite baseball team,” I said.

“What is the Yankees?” Brown said, and he looked at me for verification, but I made a your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine face and shrugged.

“It’s a yes-or-no question. Are the Yankees or are they not your mother’s team?”

“It’s upstate New York. So they’d have to be, right?”

“You tell me. She’s your mother.” His eyes narrowed. “Winter,” he said, which was what he called me when he was annoyed at me. “There are no maybes in Jeopardy! You know the rules. Don’t pose a clue without knowing the answer.”

“You’re right. Sorry.”

“Is she really a baseball fan?”

“Apparently.”

Brown made a shooing motion with his hand, exactly the way my mother had when I asked her which team she liked.