Never Coming Back(57)

I took my fingers off my pulse and pulled the phone out and handed it to him. A tiny sound chimed on the floor. My earring. My hammer earring was down there. “And can you”—but he had already picked it up, and he was putting it in my held-out palm and closing my fingers over it.

“There you go,” he said, and then, “Hello? I’m calling on behalf of Clara Winter. She’s having car trouble, and??—”

—–—–

—–—–

“Okay, great. I’m glad. Who knew that seagulls were so calming?”

He slid the phone back into my pocket. “Crisis averted,” he said.

“How so?”

“They started reading to her,” he said. “A book about a seagull named Jonathan, they said.”





* * *





Two hours. That was how long it took my heart to stop the crazy.

Two hours, hours in which all the remaining noise of the bar gradually drained away. In which the front door, with its scraping sound of wood on wood, opened and shut, letting out the last few customers and letting in a blast of cold air each time. In which the sounds of rubber on asphalt and the humming engines of passing cars and trucks faded as they curved away from the curve of the road where the bar was perched. In which Gayle the server came over to check on us, saying, “You guys okay back here?” with genuine concern in her voice, and when the bartender said, “Yeah. Just waiting for her heart to slow down,” she said, “Got it,” as if it were a normal thing to happen in the bar, as if it happened all the time, and then her footsteps retreated across the wooden floor.

Then came the scrape, scrape, scrape of barstools and chairs being upturned on tables, and the swish, swish, swish of broom on floor, followed by the softer swish of wet mop, and finally the swift jingle of keys being swiped from a hook or from inside a pocketbook. Gayle’s footsteps, the sound of which was now familiar, came closer again.

“Bye, guys.” And she was gone.

It was me and the bartender then, waiting on my heart. The overhead hanging lamps, like Gayle’s footsteps, had become familiar, and so had the shadows in the big-beamed ceiling they illuminated. A small constellation of frilled toothpicks clustered in a pool of soft light near an overhang, almost directly above my head. Someone—someones—must have taken straws, stuck the frilled ends inside, tilted their heads back and filled their lungs. Toothpicks, rocketing ceilingward.

The bartender was whittling, there on the chair next to the bench where I lay flat, heart still hammering. A slender limb, drawn from a bucket of them, lay across his lap and he shaved off slivers. The clean smell of new wood filled the air around us.

“What’re you making?” I said.

He turned the limb over, examining it. “Nothing that I know of. Yet anyway.”

“What kind of wood is that?” Woods of the North for $200, even though I, as the daughter of a woodswoman, already knew the answer.

“Red pine.”

Correct. I pointed at the bucket. “And the rest of them?”

“That one’s scrub oak, that one’s maple, that one’s white birch, that one’s white pine.”

He barely looked as he rattled them off.

“Do you have a favorite?”

“Plywood.” He looked up at me, gauging to see if I was dumb enough to think plywood was a kind of tree.

“What a coincidence,” I said. “Me too.”

“Liar. Plywood is no one’s favorite wood.”

“I beg to differ. Plywood’s what my kitchen table’s made from. Partly, anyhow.”

I pictured the stacks of books underneath my table, and the books-as-coffee-table, and the books-as-bed in the tiny cabin. The guys at Foley Lumber had sliced a sheet of plywood in half for me and I had lugged it home in the Subaru and muscled it up on top of the books to make the table. One of the bartender’s hands braced the piece of red pine in his lap and the other held his pocketknife as he shaved off paper-thin shims. He was good with his jackknife the way my mother was good with an ax. I watched and I didn’t say anything.

The bar was quiet around us, and the sound of a single cricket who had made his way inside from the cold drifted through the room. My heart trembled and shook inside me, a rebel, unwilling or unable to stop its frantic beating. I pulled my phone out to look at my favorite photo of Sunshine and Brown, to call up their presence beside me. There they were, their arms spread wide against a backdrop of the Rockies, a cross of snow on the side of a mountain in the distance. Brown’s hair and the scarf Sunshine was wearing to cover her chemo-bald skull blowing wild in the wind. Both of them laughing. I sent them a telepathic message: Hello, my darlings. It’s happening again. Yes, I know I have to get it fixed.

I held the phone straight up in the air above my head. “Want to see my friends? That’s Sunshine. And that’s Brown.”

The bartender leaned forward and craned his neck so that he could see. Then he put down his whittling, pulled three chairs together in a row and lay down on them. Me on the cushioned bench, him next to me on hard wooden chairs. Now we could both look up at the phone above our heads without straining.

“And where was this photo taken?”

“In Colorado. They hiked up and took the gondola down.”