Never Coming Back(75)

“Frank Dutton.”

“Hi, Frank. This is Clara Winter. I’m Tamar’s daughter.”

“You don’t say!” His voice transformed from business to warmth and welcome, words full of exclamation marks. “Tamar’s daughter! How is that mother of yours!”

“Doing okay,” I said, which was what I said every time someone asked me that question. “Hanging in there.”

“Where’s she living now? With you? Or with the boyfriend?”

The boyfriend? The boyfriend. The boyfriend? I pulled the phone away from my ear, then pressed it close again. The boyfriend. The boyfriend. The boyfriend the boyfriend the boyfriend the boyfriend the boyfriend, scrolling along the bottom of my brain. Out the window the sky was turning itself to navy; the light was gone by four-thirty these days. The boyfriend.

“What’s his name again?” Frank said. “I always called him Woodsman, for that Woodsmen’s Field Days cap he always wore, but I’ll be damned if I can remember his real name.”

When you weren’t looking for answers, not thinking about answers, answers appeared. Like now. There was only one man who wore a Woodsmen’s Field Days cap, and to my knowledge he had never taken it off.

“Eli,” I said. “Eli is his name.”

I listened to my voice saying his name and I listened as Frank Dutton kept talking in exclamation marks—Of course that was his name! How the hell is Eli, anyway! Is he coping with the whole thing okay? I’ll admit to you I was worried about Tamar when she drove up with him because, you know, she’s a hell of a woman, which of course YOU know because she’s your mother! But hell if she didn’t end up with a hell of a guy even if I only saw him just those few times all those years ago! Sorry for all these hells but you’re Tamar’s daughter, you can probably handle them!—but my brain hadn’t caught up to the information yet. Yes, it’d be great if you sent me the sneakers and her Dairylea jacket, and no, she isn’t with me or Eli at this point, she’s living in a care facility, actually, and yes, I sure will tell her, and yes, I will for sure stop by if I ever find myself up in that neck of the woods, and thank you so much. My voice kept speaking answers to his questions but my brain was on autopilot.

“She sure did talk about you, Clara,” was the last thing Frank Dutton said before we hung up, the exclamation marks gone from his voice. “Talked about you all the time, all those years. That spelling bee you won, that fancy college you got into, that book you wrote. I never saw a woman so proud of her kid.”





* * *





If the day ever came when I got the test and found out if I had or did not have the gene mutation, maybe it would feel the way this did, as if you were standing at the top of a peak that had been shrouded in clouds, and the clouds had broken suddenly. Behind you, all the way that you’d climbed, was your past. Ahead of you was your future. Here at the summit you held the jigsaw puzzle piece that placed pattern to chaos. The puzzle piece that gave you the information you needed to figure out certain things: A child or not. A spouse or not. A future that stretched out or didn’t.

Eli Chamberlain and Tamar Winter.

I sat on my chair on the porch, wrapped up in the quilt, and held the puzzle piece in my hand and looked back. Not thinking so much as reconfiguring. The times Eli had stopped by our house to bring Asa something he needed, the times the four of us had sat at the kitchen table and played blackjack or rummy. The times when, after Martha left, Tamar had given me a ride to Asa’s house and stopped in for a while. The times we had run into Eli at the gas station or the post office or the bank or the grocery store. The times we had been sitting in a booth at Crystal’s Diner and watched him push the door open and smile and wave.

All this time.

How long?

I did not know. There was no way to tell from the conversation with Frank Dutton.

I tried to imagine my way back into the way we were then. Asa and me. It had been a long time, and at first the same memories that conjured themselves up in my brain were the same ones that always did: Looking up from the pits below the bleacher to see Asa looking at me from the concession stand. Driving around the back roads late on summer nights, all the windows open and my hair blowing back in the breeze, him driving one-handed with the other hand holding mine. The notes that, before he graduated, he used to stick through the slats in my locker, each one a heart. A heart in crayon, a heart in pencil, a heart in pen, a heart made of tiny pieces of duct tape carefully angled together to form the necessary curving swoops.

All those images came to me the way they always did. They had long ago worn grooves into the pathways and circuitry of my brain. They would be with me forever, and even if I had the gene mutation they would be among the last to go, because the disease tended to rob your memories backward.

Knowing what I knew about Asa, what did he go through when he found out about his father and my mother? I tried to imagine my way into his mind and his heart. It was like a Words by Winter assignment x 1,000. Go back in time, to a time that was filled with so much confusion and hurt that you can’t bear to think about it, and think about it. Put yourself in your own place and then put yourself in another’s. This was when being the Winter of Words by Winter became unbearable.

I did it anyway. I sat on the porch and felt my way back into the darkness. High school. Asa had graduated. His mother had moved out. I conjured him in the rooms of the house he lived in with Eli, that house I knew so well, moving from kitchen to living room to bathroom to bedroom. I conjured up plates of food, the hiss of beer cans popped open, Eli watching over him, cooking for him, saying goodnight to him. How many days or weeks or months went by before Asa found out about his father and my mother? Feel your way back, Clara.