“A bartender? Free drinks!”
The bartender materialized again in my mind. He stood behind the bar, slicing limes into thin wedges. Sunshine and Brown were talking about the drinks they would order when they met the bartender. They would go big because the drinks would be free, or should be free, because weren’t drinks always free if you were with the bartender’s girlfriend? Wasn’t that like an unwritten rule or something?
“He’s not my boyfriend. I just met him.”
“Can you imagine her and her boyfriend in the tiny cabin?” Brown said. “Where would she put him? Maybe she could turn him into a piece of furniture too. Or artwork! A human-size sculpture made out of a human.”
“There would be room if she made room,” Sunshine said.
“Are you speaking metaphorically, Sunshine?”
“I am, Brown.”
Brown turned to me. “Sunshine is speaking Metaphor,” Brown said, as if it were a nearly forgotten language and he a professor instructing me in its ways. “And she’s also speaking Literal. Kind of like simulcast.”
“Stop,” I said. “It’s not right to talk about this kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing?”
“You know. Happy-ish things.”
“Why not?” Sunshine said.
“Because. It’s not the time or place. We’re here to talk about Tamar, not the bartender.”
“Of course it’s the time and place. We can talk about Tamar and we can talk about the bartender.”
“Simulcast,” Brown said helpfully. “See?”
“Happy-ish things don’t stop because Tamar has Alzheimer’s,” Sunshine said. “Being a cancer survivor gives me the right to say that.”
She tilted her head and smiled her brave-cancer-survivor smile and we automatically tilted our heads and smiled our brave-cancer-survivor-supporter smiles back at her. Our smiles were closed-mouthed and flat-eyed. We had invented them long ago, when people started referring to Sunshine as a cancer survivor, which was a term we all hated. It put the cancer first and Sunshine second, and if we couldn’t get rid of the cancer entirely we at least wanted the wording to be the other way around.
* * *
“But enough of happy-ish things,” Brown said. He had the ability to pivot like that, and we pivoted with him. “This meeting is called to order. First order of business: other than that there was at least one moment in her life, corroborated by mysterious photographic evidence, that she was wearing a non-woodcutter-type shirt and she looked pretty, what have we learned about Tamar Winter since last we convened?”
Was that an existential statement? Or a rhetorical question? Question marks scrolled across the bottom of my brain. ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Curlicued little sea serpents hunching along in search of answers. Sum up what you do know about your mother, Clara.
“Tamar Winter is my mother. She applied and unapplied decals for Dairylea for thirty years. She was justice of the peace for fourteen. She was a choir singer who never sang in church. She is a fan of firewood, food eaten straight out of the jar and Jeopardy! She was also a fan of Asa. At least until the night before he broke up with me.”
“Asa,” Sunshine said. She always said his name wrong, with a z sound instead of an s sound. “Asa Chamberlain. I wish I’d known him. I feel as if I’d know you better, if I knew what he was like.”
“You would have loved him. Everyone did.”
“Why?”
“He was one of those people.” Asa appeared in my head, standing in the doorway of an unfamiliar room, smiling. A lump rose in my throat. I wanted to tell them more about him, about the unicycle he taught himself to ride, about the way he used to sing me to sleep, but the words wouldn’t come out. All I could manage was “He was a good singer.”
“Was he?”
“Yes. He used to go up to Fairchild Continuing Care and sing to the residents. Hymns.”
“So he was religious?”
I shook my head. No, Asa was not religious. Unless he was all-religious, in that way that some people are, where everything in the world has meaning, and everything and everyone is worthy. “Asa said that hymns were just songs. He had a magical ability to remember the words to any song. He used to sing Leonard Cohen songs to my mother.”
“Her man Cohen? She must have loved Asa, then.”
“Yes. Which is why I will never understand what went down between them that night I came back and he was so upset.”
“She never talked about it? Ever?”
I shook my head. They had heard bits and pieces about Asa over the years. A little when we were freshmen getting to know one another. More when he was deployed—Sunshine had been there when my mother told me the news over the telephone—and then those blurry weeks and months years ago, after the Humvee he was in blew up. That was it, though. There had been a lot left out.
* * *
He was a senior and I was a sophomore, but time goes slower in high school. So the two years I was with Asa, from fall of sophomore year until fall of senior year, were long, long years. They stretched out from morning, when I woke up and lay in bed picturing him, until night, when I undressed in the dark and lay down between cool sheets imagining that he was with me.
Sometimes he was. When Tamar was asleep and the pre-Asa Clara would’ve been too, when it was way into the night, he’d drive over and park on the logging road and then walk up to the house and brush his hand against the screen of my window. “You up?” he’d whisper, and I’d press my hand against his through the screen, and then he’d ease open the never-used front door instead of the always-used kitchen door off the porch, and then there he’d be. In my room.
He was like a miracle. This living, breathing boy, this boy I loved who loved me back.
“Are you real?” I would ask sometimes.
“As real as the Velveteen Rabbit,” he would say. His favorite book from childhood, which he gave me a copy of for my birthday and which, because of him, I tried to love too, but couldn’t. Too sad. Too hard.
We were together even after he graduated from Sterns High and started driving truck for Byrne Dairy, the rival company to Dairylea. He didn’t want to go to college, which made his mother angry. His parents were struggling with each other, had always struggled, according to Asa. By the end of his senior year his mother had moved out and Asa lived with his father in Sterns.
“Martha Chamberlain is a tough nut,” Tamar said once.