You have to get that fixed. You have to get that fixed. You have to get that fixed.
Words she had said to me multiple times ran along the bottom of my brain, peaking and valleying, like the readout on an EKG.
“Did she believe it was worth it, do you think?” I said to Sunshine and Brown. “Having a kid? A kid like me?”
They didn’t look surprised at the change of subject. They were used to it. And they didn’t say, Yes. They didn’t say, Of course. They didn’t say, How can you even ask that question.
“Don’t ask us,” Sunshine said. “Ask your mother.”
* * *
“I made a grid for you,” Brown said.
It was the next morning and we were at Walt’s Diner, waiting for pancakes. Blueberry for me and Sunshine, plain buttermilk for Brown. Brown, the man of logic. Brown, the writer of code so precise it almost never needed revision. Brown, who would never need the services of Words by Winter, had constructed a Jeopardy! grid, with my mother the focus of every category.
Cans and Jars
Baseball
Breakup with Asa
Choir but No Church
Out-of-State College
Self-Eviction
$2000
$2000
$2000
$2000
$2000
$2000
“From the ridiculous to the sublime,” he said. “I put the baseball one in there for me, but the others are all yours. Talk to Tamar. Talk to anyone who knows Tamar.”
Just like that, she had gone from being The Fearsome to Tamar. It felt like a demotion. No! Keep calling her The Fearsome! The exclamation marks boldfaced themselves and marched along the bottom of my brain. ! ! ! ! ! ! But the change had happened without conscious thought. It was clear from the way Brown said the word. In the face of new information about The Fearsome, a spontaneous natural event had happened, and The Fearsome was now Tamar. It was like cell division. Once begun, it could not be stopped.
“Also, Brown and I want to help,” Sunshine said. “We want to go with you when you visit her.”
“You can’t. She made me promise not to tell anyone. I owe her that. I owed her that, and I broke the promise.”
“And for good reason. What does it matter at this point if anyone else knows? We want to see Tamar. We love Tamar.”
The pancakes came, plate-size, and then the server with the special coffee-pouring technique came by and transfixed us by refilling our coffee cups. That was good, because the effort of talking about my mother this way, almost clinically, was too much. The pain of it sat there with us at the table, crowded in among the plates and mugs and maple syrup and the white bowl filled with tiny plastic tubs of butter.
“Also, when are we going to your boyfriend’s bar?” Brown said.
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend,” he said again, ignoring me. “I love saying the word boyfriend in conjunction with you. All these years you’ve lived like a nun, and finally, a boyfriend. Boyfriend.”
“Also, free drinks,” Sunshine said. “Don’t forget the free drinks, Brown.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“He probably has nice hands,” Sunshine said. “You know how she is about hands.”
“Piano players,” Brown said. “They’re all about the hands.”
“He’s not my boyfriend. And I only played piano in college.”
“But does he? Have nice hands?”
The bartender’s hands appeared in my mind, fingers grazing the table where I sat. Prelude hands. That light touch. I watched my own fingers open three butter packets. Steam from the blueberries on the underneath pancake curled out when I lifted the top pancake to spread the butter.
“He does,” Sunshine said. “You can tell by the faraway nice-hands look in her eyes.”
“Do you think he’d like Walt’s?” Brown said.
“Who doesn’t like Walt’s?”
My pancakes were buttered. Time for the pouring of the syrup, which was a two-step process: first the underneath pancake, then the top pancake. Most people neglected the underneath pancake. Not me.
“The syruping of the bottom pancake has commenced,” Sunshine said.
The syruping of the bottom pancake was a crucial step that required concentration, what with the size of Walt’s pancakes—dinner plates—but I looked up halfway through. One of those times when you look up for no reason, except that there must be a reason, an animal kind of below-the-surface reason, and there he was.
“Winter, heads up,” Brown said. “You’re about to spill.”
I looked back at my plate but too late. Sunshine and Brown had followed my gaze and were looking at him, leaning against the doorjamb, waiting his turn for a seat at the counter.
“Who’s that?” Sunshine said. “Wait. That’s not him, is it?”
It was. The bartender, descended from his dark bar north of Inlet and come down to earth here in Old Forge, waiting with the other mortals for a spot at Walt’s. I said nothing. I dug into my pancakes. I did not look up again, either at the doorjamb or at Sunshine and Brown.
* * *
You might think that making your living writing three to five Words by Winter a day would be easy. You might think, How hard could it be for a word girl to churn out a few hundred words at a hundred bucks a hundred? You might think, Aren’t words what she does, who she is, what matters to her?
You would be right, and you would be wrong.
You would be right when it came to someone like John Stein, a self-published poet who paid me to write blurbs for the back of each of his books, five or six of them a year. All the titles were variations on Real Poems for Real People. The latest was More Real Poems About Real People with Real Problems. Words for John Stein were easy.
In his latest volume, the cannot-be-stopped poet John Stein explores territory familiar to all those over fifty or with a family history of colon cancer. “Up There” takes the reader to literally dark places, places most of us care not to venture. And yet by journey’s end, Stein’s devoted followers may find themselves even more grateful for their polyp-free status. Suitable for all adult readers, those who have had their first colonoscopy and those who are contemplating one. Real poems about real people with real problems indeed!
One hundred dollars, please.
But you would be wrong about other parts of it. That words were what mattered to me was true. That words were what I did was true. That words were easy was not.
What matters most is also what hurts most. If you were a person to whom words were living, breathing animals, animals that you loved and whose lives were in your keeping, then you couldn’t take them for granted or treat them flippantly. Instead, you bent your brain into pretzels of strain, trying to find just the right words. You stood up and paced around the room, opened the porch door and stepped out into the cold morning air, roamed your eyes around the stalwart trunks of the white pines as if they held answers.