Never Coming Back(81)

His arms were still around me. He was so much older now, a man in solid middle age, but half my life ago, when I was seventeen, he had been a young man. I could see that now, could picture his face and his big shoulders and his big laugh, back when I was a girl and his son and I used to go riding around with him. He had barely been in his forties then, a decade younger than my young mother was now.

“IshouldhavecalledIshouldhavecomeseeyouIshouldhavewritten.”

Words tumbled out of me, not enough space in between them to make any sense, but they must have made sense anyway, because he nodded, I felt him nodding. Then we were sitting on the old bench that was still on the little front porch. So many summer nights his son and I had snuck back late, sat on that same bench and held each other as dark smoothed into dawn.

“I feel so guilty,” I said. “I was so angry at her when things must have been so hard for her.”

“You couldn’t have been as angry at her as Asa was angry at me.”

“How did he find out?”

“Martha told him. She wanted him to know why she moved out. She blamed me. Which was justified.”

Martha Chamberlain, the tough nut.

“He broke up with you because he saw no way out,” Eli said. His hands were spread in front of him, as if he were trying to explain something puzzling, something almost incomprehensible. Theoretical physics. “He saw no way through Martha’s anger, no way that your mother and I could be together, no way that the two of you could ever be happy in the middle of it all.”

The sight of my mother and Asa across the kitchen table from each other, that night when the air was thick with words that had already been spoken, words that neither of them would ever recount to me, rose up in my mind. No way out. The words, little dark knives of hurt, severed by.

“And he knew how much you loved your mother, and he didn’t want to hurt you any more than he felt he had to. He didn’t want to say anything bad about her to you.”

“He didn’t have a lot of perspective,” I said. “Neither did I. I know that now.”

He turned his big hands palms up, then laced them together. They sat quietly on his lap, a giant lump of laced-up fingers.

“Perspective,” he said. “The gift of growing up.”

I hitched myself a little closer to him and laid my hands on top of his. A complicated Jenga tower rose up in my head. It began with four people who loved each other, me and Asa and Tamar and Eli, and it ended when Asa yanked the middle block from the stack and it all came tumbling down. We sat together in silence until Eli spoke.

“How’s your mother?”

“She’s okay.”

“Is she?”

I shook my head. No. She wasn’t. She was going away, faster and faster every week now, and he knew it as well as I did, because he didn’t say anything else. There was so much I wanted to say to Eli, so much I wanted to apologize for, but everything I wanted to say was translating itself into another language, a wordless one that he already understood.





* * *





The next time I went to Annabelle Lee’s house, dark had fallen. Early, the way it did in December. I drove up the driveway and parked next to the Impala. Her double-wide shone bright in the car headlights. It still looked brand-new and had looked that way for all the years I’d known her. It was lit up like a ship, and when the door opened, the smell of fresh bread wafted out. Annabelle Lee wore a Kiss My Blarney Stone apron and The Doors were belting out “Riders on the Storm” from the enormous speakers that doubled as a coffee table. I stood on the rickety stairs and breathed in the warmth.

“What?” she said, at what must have been a look on my face. “You think choir directors go home and listen to hymns all day? Let go of your preconceived notions, Clara. They’ll be the death of you.”

“I came to tell you I’m sorry,” I said.

“What are you sorry about?”

“For a lot of things, starting with my mother thinking I was a lonely child. She told you I was a lonely child, right?”

She nodded.

“I wasn’t,” I said. “I wasn’t lonely. I had the old man. I had some friends at school. Later I had Asa. And I had books.”

“Books you did have,” she said. “She always called you her word girl.”

I pushed my hand down in my pocket and held onto the silver earring. Yes. I had been a word girl. Her strange child, her word girl.

“But mostly?” I said. “I had her. I had my mother. I had Tamar Winter.”

Annabelle Lee nodded and I tipped my head back to keep from crying. An old white pine towered at the edge of her lawn, close to the road, just like the white pines at the cabin on Turnip Hill Road. Starlight filtered through the crown of the pine like lace against the navy December sky. Annabelle shut the door and leaned against the stair rail—it swayed—and looked up too. The two women who knew my mother best, standing together in the wintry air.

“I know you did,” Annabelle said. “She was always there.”

It was true. Tamar had been there, chopping wood outside the storage barn, anytime I looked out the kitchen window. She had been in the kitchen eating out of jars and cans with her cocktail fork. She had handed me book after hardcover book about a child facing the perils of the world and overcoming them on her own. Every step of the way, she had been there. None of those thoughts came out, though, because they were monkey-minded together in a clump in my brain. Messing up my words. Messing up my ability to talk.