Never Coming Back(58)

I scrolled past to the next. I had a whole album of Sunshine and Brown photos.

“And where’s this one?”

“Here. At my place. In the living room slash kitchen slash dining room slash everything room of my house slash one-room cabin.”

He pointed. “Am I looking at a coffee table slash pile of books?”

“Nay, sir, you are looking at a books-as-coffee-table. That photo was taken months ago, though. The books-as-coffee-table has mostly disappeared now.”

He took the phone and brought it close to his face, enlarging the photo to study the disappearing table. Then he swiped to the next photo.

“Who’s this?” he said. “She’s pretty.”

It was the mystery photo of Tamar, propped up next to Jack on the little kitchen shelf. Why I had taken it—a photo of a photo of a mystery—I did not know. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t look at it every night when I got home. But here she was, with me in my phone.

“That’s my mother.”

“I figured. There’s a resemblance.”

Was there? I took a long breath and beat, my heart was back to normal. I counted to thirty-two, randomly and because it was my age, then sat up. Blood spun away south, down through my body.

“Back to normal?” the bartender said, and I nodded.

The bar was dark except for the lights in the back, where we had been waiting so long. It was past midnight. The bartender put his arm around me outside, by my car. He smelled like soap and leather and lime and denim and wood shavings. Then we went our separate ways, whittled-down piece of red pine in his hand, tiny silver earring in mine.





* * *





Asa died when I was living on the Florida Panhandle, during a stretch of time right after I quit being a small-town reporter. If you went to college and majored in piano but didn’t intend to make your life about music, and if you had always loved words, it would be logical to accept a job as a reporter, wouldn’t it?

Wrong. The job of reporting, like most jobs that used words, was about not the love of words themselves but the usefulness of words. The everydayness of words. Ways to convey information via the alphabet. When I chose reporting, I didn’t know yet that it had nothing to do with loving words. It took me a long time to figure that out.

Thursday nights back then were when I used to call my mother. Thursdays with Tamar, a routine that began when I was living in Lake Placid and working for the Adirondack Times and continued on to the Panhandle years. She would pick up on the third ring, the way I watched her do all my life. Ring, ring, ring, then snatch it up halfway through. Even if she was standing right next to it when it rang, even though it was a Thursday night at eight o’clock and it could be no one but me, she would wait until it had rung exactly two and a half times.

“Tamar Winter speaking. How may I direct your call?”

“Ma. It’s me.”

“You’re looking for Ma? One moment, please. MAAAAAAA!”

Right in my ear. Full-blast.

“Jesus, Ma! Stop it.”

“Certainly, caller. Ma will be right with you.” Pause. Then, in her normal voice, “Hello? Clara?”

“Can you please stop doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“MA.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. How was your week?”

“It was okay,” I would say, already tired of the phone call. Of the ritual. Of the way it never changed. “My week was okay.”

“Anything interesting happen?”

Her use of that word used to infuriate me. “Everything’s interesting, Ma, if you look at it the right way.”

Sometimes now I thought back on those calls. Listen to yourself, Clara. Listen to how you used to talk to your mother. You knew so much more than she did, didn’t you? You were so much more sophisticated, so much more world-weary, so much more advanced.

Had I been a child and still living with her, my mother would never have put up with the way I spoke to her in those phone calls. And I would never have spoken to her that way. That changed when I was seventeen, though, after Asa and I broke up. Words and scorn and distance became my weapons, and did I use them? I did. The young boxer danced around her middle-aged opponent, throwing words and phrases with precision. Lightning blows rained down upon the older woman and she retreated, thin and silent, to her corner.





* * *





The Life Care people and the AD and eFAD forum people were united in their advice on nearly all fronts. If you decided to get the genetic testing done, you had to confer with a genetic counselor pre-test. If you were the primary caregiver for someone with eFAD or AD, you had to take care of yourself as well as your loved one. It was called “self-care” and it was critical to the stability and health of all parties.

And they were right about everything, I supposed, the way that Sylvia was right when she warned me not to use the word remember. None of the advice went far enough, though. The word remember was a two-edged sword. There were things I wished I didn’t remember. Like the way I felt when I saw that look in my mother’s eyes, the night I machine-gunned those words at her in the darkness and she turned the lamp on. Like the feeling in me when Eli Chamberlain guided his son into his truck the day we broke up and then drove him away from me. Like the way my mother had spoken to me one winter break when I was home from college and she came upon me looking through Asa’s high school yearbook, turning by heart to all the pages where there was a photo of him.