Never Coming Back(64)

I’m not a chickenshit. But I kept the words inside me, where they burned and turned sour in my gut.

“Don’t you want to know, though?” Brown said. “It’s, what, a twenty-five-percent chance or something?”

“Fifty,” I said. “Fifty percent. Five-oh. And I don’t know if I want to know. They don’t let anyone young into the trials, so what’s the point?”

He looked at me with what in his eyes? Surprise, maybe, because it was clear that I was ahead of him, that I had thought about it already.

“And if there’s no cure yet and no trials they’d let me into, then how would knowing change anything?”

“It would give you the chance to make plans.”

“Plans for what?”

“The future.”

“How so?”

He looked to Sunshine, silent next to him, for help. She was most of the way through another scallion hat. She had been making a lot of scallions lately. The fade of dark green to pale green to near white was her favorite color combination of all the hats she made, which was too bad, because parents loved the strawberries. There was always a sizable backlog of scallion hats.

“What if we had known?” he said to her.

“Known what? That I would get cancer when we were so young?”

“Yes. Would it have changed things? Have you ever thought about that, like, gone back in the past and thought about what, if anything, you would have done differently? Thought about what we would have done differently?”

Her fingers didn’t stop. “Yes.”

“And?”

“I would have said to you, ‘Fuck it, Brown, let’s have a kid. Let’s have a kid now.’”

Her fingers didn’t stop crocheting and she didn’t look up from the scallion and her words hung there, each one a punch at a punching bag hanging in the cinder-blocked windowless gym of the past. Fuck it, Brown, let’s have a kid. Let’s. Have. A. Kid. Now. Each one a realization to me, that of all the variables that genetic testing would mean, this was the one that mattered most to me. My possible, future, undreamt-of, unknowable, maybe-not-possible child. Where was the bartender right at this minute? I pictured him bent over a table whittling, a bucket of wood next to him on the floor, shavings spiraling out from his knife.

“Do you guys think things can sometimes be, like”—they waited for me patiently while I waited for the words, the words that wouldn’t come—“not complicated?”

“Things like what?” Sunshine said. “Bartenders?”

“Maybe.”

“So you have been seeing him?”

“Kind of. At his bar a couple times. And in town.”

They sat across the table, studying me. They were talking to each other in that way they did, with no words. I felt the conversation taking place and I closed my hand around my silver earring. If the old man and Asa had once been in the world, weren’t they still? In some way, something of them must still be here.

“Can it be just . . . simple, sometimes?”

They nodded. Brown cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said. No exclamation marks in his voice. “It can.”

“Do you guys want to come to the bar?” I said.

They were still nodding. They weren’t laughing at me. They weren’t making remarks about my boyfriend, or about free drinks, or about the nunlike existence they had witnessed over the years. Yes, we’ll come to the bar, was what their nods were saying.





* * *





“Listen to me,” I said. It was the next night and we were driving up to the bar. They were going to meet the bartender. Free drinks! Free drinks! That had been their rallying cry the first couple miles, but the closer we got, the quieter they were. “If I someday get that heart procedure, and if something happens to me during that heart procedure??—”

“Which it won’t,” Brown said, but “Brown,” Sunshine said. “Stop.”

“Will you promise me that you’ll keep visiting Ma? That you’ll take care of her?”

“Nothing’s going to happen,” Brown began again. “Didn’t that one guy describe it as the slam dunk of the??—”

But Sunshine stepped in again. “Yes,” she said. “We promise. And if something happens to me??—”

Brown began to protest again, his voice beginning its climb into exclamation marks.

“Brown.”

That single word, one syllable, and the exclamation marks disappeared. “If something happens to me,” Sunshine said, “promise me that you two will take care of each other. Promise me that you won’t let Brown sell the house or do anything major for a year, Clara.”

“I promise,” I said.

“And Brown, promise me that you will go over to Clara’s cabin and sit on the porch with her whenever the monkeys start scrambling. Take the place of that goddamn bottle of whiskey and that dead dog.”

“I promise,” Brown said.

“Then it’s settled,” Sunshine said. “We’re all taken care of.”

“You’re forgetting yourself,” Brown said. “What if something happens to me? What about you?”

“I’ll have Clara,” Sunshine said. There was a duh sound in her voice. “She’ll take care of me.”