“Ma?”
She looked up, her hands full of withered blossoms, and shook her head. “No. You know I don’t like orange juice. Too sweet. I got that for you.”
“I found it in the dishes cupboard.”
“What are you talking about?”
I jiggled the carton. “This. It was between the bowls and plates.”
“Stop,” she said, frowning. Still shaking her head. “Put it back where it belongs. Orange juice is expensive.”
It was then that a weird feeling came over me. When I remembered that moment I could still feel the heaviness of the carton in my hand, how I had spread my fingers out to hold it so it wouldn’t fall, how it was room temperature and not cold the way you expected orange juice to be. I saw the frown on her face, the way she glanced from the faded red and pink flowers in her hands back to me. I felt my other hand shove itself by instinct down into the pocket of my jeans to close around the silver hammer earring, the talisman that was always with me to keep bad things from happening.
“It was in the dishes cupboard,” I said again. This annoyed her.
“Stop it, Clara. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”
Had my mother ever, even once in her life, said, If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all? She had not. Plenty of other mothers said that—I had heard it from other mothers all my life, directed at their own children in that singsong mother voice—but not my own. Had you asked me, I would have bet every bit of money I had that my mother had not uttered and would not ever utter that line. What did that sentence have to do with this orange juice situation anyway? The weird feeling spread.
“Ma?”
What was I hoping she’d do? Laugh, because what she’d just said was such a non-her thing to say? Turn it into a joke? My mother was not the joking type and never had been. Was I hoping that she would come up with some kind of an explanation, maybe explain that the orange juice in the cabinet was part of an elaborate ruse, and then explain what exactly that ruse was? Yes. That was what I hoped for. Because knowledge—of wrongness, of something-is-not-rightness—was creeping up from my feet, spreading through my body, on its way to my heart and from there to my mind.
I had come home for the weekend because it was her birthday.
She was about to turn fifty.
I was thirty-one.
Yes, my mother was eighteen and a half when she had me. And she had just turned fifty years old when they told us what she had. Not old enough. Way too young. Young young young young young was how old my mother was, when we heard those words “early” and “onset.”
And if I could tell you one thing, people, with regard to those clichés about the brevity of life and how fast it zips by and how it’ll be over before you know it? It would be that all of them, every damn one of them, was true.
* * *
The cabin on Turnip Hill Road that I bought when I moved back home-ish to the Adirondacks was one room. Two hundred and fifty square feet, which, spelled out like that, looked bigger than 250. The first time Sunshine and Brown came to see the cabin, I sat in the porch chair, angled because the porch was so narrow, and waited while their station wagon picked its way around the curve and up the dirt driveway.
“But there’s no room for anyone but you,” Sunshine said. “You and your computer.”
Her voice was full of wonder. She peered through the door as if she were in a museum looking at a diorama.
“Why so tiny?” Brown said, his eyes lit up, as if there had to be a fascinating reason.
But there wasn’t. If there was a reason at all it was about excess, the existence of it and the not wanting it. It was about not having room for anything more than was physically in the cabin. Because there was already something huge in my nonphysical life, something that couldn’t be wrestled down into a manageable, handle-able size.
Sunshine and Brown stepped inside the single room and stood on either side of the ladder that led to the sleeping loft and looked around. They didn’t touch anything that first visit. It must have looked like a dollhouse. Like a museum. Everything perfectly in its place because there were so few places for anything. Two towels, one in use and one hung over the door to dry. Three pairs of socks in a drawer with two shirts and two pairs of jeans. No waffle iron, no hair dryer, no cupboards filled with dishes and pots and pans. A half-full bottle of Jack Daniel’s sat on top of the miniature fridge next to the miniature stove next to a small blue ceramic jug that held the ashes of Dog.
“Nothing in excess, I see,” Brown said.
“Except books,” Sunshine said. “Books are definitely in excess.”
They were talking to each other as if I weren’t right there in the room with them.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but is that coffee table made of books?”
“It is. So is that lamp stand.”
“So is this dining table,” Brown said. He crouched to examine the construction of my table. A piece of plywood set on four cornered stacks of books. He gave the plywood an experimental push. It slid, but not much. Plywood was heavier than it looked.
“Oh my God, Brown,” Sunshine said. She had climbed up into the sleeping loft. “Get up here and take a look at her bed. She’s literally sleeping with books. On books. Books as box spring.”
“Hello,” I said. “Hello? I’m right here. I can hear you.”
They ignored me.
“How do I love thee, books?” Brown said. “Let me count the ways.”
“Her one true love,” Sunshine said. “Some things do not change.”
I lifted the bottle of Jack from its perch and went out onto the porch to wait until they finished with their self-guided tour. It’s a monument to minimalism, I heard Brown say from the sleeping loft, and She’s winnowed, Sunshine said, but isn’t she too young to be winnowed? Winnow, winnowing, winnowed, which was a word that sounded like “widowed.” Once you started giving things up, it became easy. Or easier.
Not everything, though. Not everything could be given up.
If my mother could not remain the same, then something else must. That first little fool of a pig built a house of straw, and the second pig built one of sticks, and down they both came. But the third little pig, that little pig built a house of bricks, and it stood.
Books were something real. Books were something true. Books would be my bricks.
* * *