Never Coming Back(47)

She shook her head and turned around and walked the three steps from the table to the stove. Lifted the pot lid and stirred whatever was inside. Spaghetti sauce? Marinara? Something that involved tomatoes.

“You do what you can,” she said, with her back turned to me. “And that’s what she did.”

There was a tone in her voice as if she were trying to figure out why I was so upset.

“She thought it would be easier on you, Clara,” she added, enunciating each word as if she were talking to a preschooler. “She didn’t want you to suffer the way she did.”

“Suffer?”

“With her mother. It was long and hard, the way her mother died. And then when it was over, it was Tamar and all her mother’s things, all the things Tamar had to figure out what to do with, her clothes and her dishes and her canceled checks and the Christmas presents she’d already bought ahead of time. Tamar had to handle it all herself. Her father was no help, believe me.”

I had never heard Annabelle Lee say so much at one time. Nor had I heard her use my mother’s name in that way, as if my mother were not my mother. As if she were a girl, a friend, someone I didn’t know. Someone who had suffered.

“She did the best she could, Clara. She did what she thought would save you pain.”

“It didn’t,” I said.

Annabelle Lee turned to me, wooden spoon dripping red, and nodded, her eyes shadowed.

“Welcome to the world,” she said. She was a middle-aged woman now, lines around her mouth and eyes. Even heavier now than when she was young, if such a thing were possible, and I remembered when she was young.





* * *





It took me hours and hours to get through three Words by Winters next day:

1. A wedding toast from the best man to his brother, the groom, and the brother’s fiancée, who was deeply disliked by the best man, which meant that “my secret hope is that the marriage doesn’t last very long but you can’t really say that in a wedding toast, can you, so barring that, I just want to keep it light and positive but generic, you know? Super generic. And I don’t trust myself to keep it that way because I seriously dislike her, which is why I’m writing to you”; and

2. An invitation to the fiftieth-anniversary party of parents who had been married and divorced and married and divorced and married, so “maybe it should really be sixtieth anniversary but we’re only counting the years they were actually married, and they’re actually really funny together, but we, their children, are not very funny, so could you help us out? Please make it really, really funny. Funny is key. Here are photos of them from each of their weddings”; and

3. An obituary for a ninety-three-year-old mother by her seventy-year-old daughter, who was “not good with words, but my mother was, and she especially loved long, complicated words, and I would like this obituary to live up to her wonderfulness with that kind of words. Words that very few people would even have heard of before, let alone understand. Maybe some long foreign words too? Words that you think she would’ve loved.”

See? Not easy. Exhausting, in fact. But: #1, done; #2, done; #3, done.

Three hundred dollars, please.

Afterward I went to DiOrio’s and ordered a Tree Hugger sandwich and walked back to the rotisserie chickens to wait for it and there was the bartender, coming around the bread display.

“One McCauley Mountain for Chris,” the deli girl called, holding a wax-paper-wrapped sandwich in his direction.

Chris. Chris, not Christopher, was his name. Chris-not-Christopher didn’t know I was there, standing over by the rotisserie with its revolving chickens, waiting for my Tree Hugger. He walked up and the deli girl pulled the sandwich back and laughed as he reached for it. He held his arm steady in the air until she handed it over. “Thanks, Jaynie,” he said, and she smiled.

Why did I see her name as Jaynie instead of Janie? Or Janey. Jaynee, even. Chris-not-Christopher turned, sandwich in hand, and there I was, the many permutations of Jaynie scrolling through my mind.

“One Tree Hugger for Clara,” the deli girl said. She didn’t dangle my sandwich in the air, though. She just set it on top of the deli case and picked up her order pad for the next customer in line. Chris-not-Christopher retrieved the Tree Hugger and brought it to me and the rack of revolving chickens.

“Here you go, tree hugger,” he said. “Do you want to do something sometime?”

“Sure.”

“Good. Give me your phone.”

I pulled it up out of my pocket, the tiny silver hammer almost falling out but not. He tapped something into it. From the back pocket of his jeans came a ding-dong sound.

“That’s you,” he said. “You’re calling me.”

He held my phone out to me and I took it. The chickens revolved on their spits, and somewhere behind me a cash register kept beeping, and the deli girl, whose name was Jaynie or more likely Janie, watched from across the way and winked at me.





* * *





2:47 a.m., the familiar waking time. Monkey mind. Was this how it began? Was this a sign that the plaque was forming deep inside my head, beginning to break off and clot the pathways, blocking memory, spinning me sideways and backward, setting me off down that road my mother was already far down?