Exclamation marks, scrolling along. Sunshine was not intimidated by them. Sunshine was not intimidated by much of anything. She had been earlier in her life, though, hadn’t she? Before she got cancer? Had there been a moment in there, a moment in the chemo room, maybe, or in the middle of an unsleeping night, that Sunshine had turned a corner in her mind, grown instantly out of being intimidated by anything ever again? Decided there was no more time in her life for things like intimidation, and, poof, zapped it right out of herself? Look at her, shaking her head. Look how fast the crochet hook moved between her fingers, flashing in and out of the pale green and white wool.
“There is no time,” she said. “There’s never time. People just think there is. They plod along as if it’s an endless resource. As if it’ll never run out.”
Brown looked up from his typing. “Wait, did you say long-term-care policy?” he said. “That’s kind of weird. Wasn’t—isn’t—she young to have one of those things?”
I had not even known what such a thing was until that first conversation with the doctor, when my mind first began to spin with what-ifs and wheres and hows.
“Early-onset often seems to progress quite fast,” the doctor said. “This perception may actually result from the fact that most early-onset patients have already been living with the disease for quite a long time, but because they are so young, it’s not recognized.”
That would be my mother. Check.
“But Tamar is lucky in one way,” the doctor said, “which is that she’s got a very good long-term-care policy.”
The idea of my mother with a long-term-care policy, or a policy of any kind—she was not a woman of words, nor was she a woman of insurance forms and legal documents, not to mention money, of which she had little—almost made me laugh. A long-term-care policy? The doctor had nodded, his lips pursed, as if this were excellent news.
“Exactly how is that luck?” I said.
My mother had never had a job of any kind that gave her anything but a biweekly paycheck, which was docked if she was sick or snowed in or spent a summer day taking her daughter to Old Forge. So if in fact there was a long-term-care policy, she must have gone out and gotten it on her own. I pictured her sitting in a chair on the opposite side of a desk in an insurance agency somewhere in Utica, no one in the spouse chair next to her, looking at brochures that the person opposite kept pushing at her.
“I hate the thought of that almost more than anything,” I said to Sunshine and Brown. “That she went out and got that thing.”
“Do you know when she got it?” Brown said.
“Years ago. Six or seven.”
“Too early, then, to know about the”—when he hesitated, Sunshine filled in the rest of the sentence—“situation.”
“Way too early. Her mother died young of cancer and her father died of emphysema. So why’d she get one? Those things are so expensive. She never had any money to spare.”
One of the gene mutation what-ifs that tormented me was a long-term-care policy for myself. Should I get one? Now, just in case? The image of me in a nursing home sometimes rose up in my mind: me with a walker, me watching a blank television, me not knowing who Sunshine and Brown were when they came to visit. Shhh, Clara. Sunshine and Brown were nodding. That Tamar never had any money to spare was a known fact. Not that she ever talked about money worries. Not her style.
“It’s a mystery,” I said, and Sunshine laughed.
“How is it possibly a mystery?” she said. “Your mother got that policy for your sake. She didn’t want to be a burden to her only child, for any indeterminate reason, in some indeterminate future.”
The second she spoke, in that duh tone of voice, I knew she was right. It must have shown on my face, because they didn’t say anything. They just sat there on the floor, elbows resting on the coffee table made of books, waiting.
“Goddammit,” I said. “What else am I too stupid to figure out?”
“Lots, probably,” Brown said, and that made Sunshine laugh, and then I was laughing too. We couldn’t stop laughing, the same way we had laughed the night they told me Sunshine had cancer. By then, they had known for a week. They hadn’t told anyone, not even their parents. We were all still living in Boston then. Cancer? I said, you mean, like, cancer-cancer? and they had nodded, both of them. Cancer-cancer. But we’re only twenty-four! I said, and I could hear the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence. Because we were. We were twenty-four, and twenty-four-year-olds didn’t get cancer. Except that some of them did, apparently, because here was Sunshine, looking healthy as always, but there it was, cancer. I had laughed—out of the sheer disbelief of it? Shock?—and then they started laughing too, and we all laughed and laughed. We choked on it, our laughter, and then we drank two bottles of wine and talked about cancer and chemo and wigs versus hats and all that stuff we had never imagined we’d be talking about, at our age—twenty-four! Twenty-four!—or ever, maybe, but there it was.
We didn’t laugh the second and third time. We didn’t feel so young anymore. Or maybe we did, and it felt so unfair.
“Remember the night you guys told me Sunshine had cancer and we couldn’t stop laughing?”
They nodded, because they were my best friends and they knew exactly what I meant, which was that this situation with my mother and me felt as strange and weird as the fact of Sunshine’s cancer had felt, so long ago.
“No one knows me like you guys,” I said. “No one in the world.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Brown said. “Fearsome, we’re coming for you.”
Double Jeopardy
The next day, I saw the bartender in Adirondack Hardware. I was signing copies of The Old Man at a table next to a display of Dutch ovens, near the pickles and jams. The hardware ladies had brought me a cup of coffee and a blueberry scone for sustenance. The scone was dry, and every time I took a bite, crumbs were strewn over the table, my lap and the stack of books. People kept wandering up and examining the book while I brushed away crumbs and answered questions and inscribed the book if they wanted a copy.
If x = taking a bite and y = someone talking to me then x + y = crumb strewage. But at that particular moment no one was talking to me. No one was even in sight. Quick, Clara. One big bite. Then I looked up and there was the bartender, standing in front of the table. Smiling. He tilted his head to read my name on the cover of The Old Man stack.
“It’s you,” he said. “Clara Winter, the gimlet girl.”
The scone had the best of me. All I could do was nod. He kept on smiling.
“That right there is the problem with scones,” he said. “Can’t stand the things.”
That made me laugh, which made me open my mouth, which caused a crumb explosion. The bartender was one of those people who didn’t look away. Didn’t pretend he hadn’t just seen something embarrassing. Was willing to acknowledge a scone disaster and by acknowledging it ally himself with the scone victim. He laughed too.
“Why didn’t you go for a muffin? So much easier.”
“I know. But a scone is what the ladies”—I nodded at the Adirondack Hardware owners—“brought me.”
“And you couldn’t look a gift scone in the mouth—is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”