“Follow me back to the trailer,” she said. She always called it “the trailer,” never “home” or “my trailer” or “my place.” “It’s too cold out here to be answering questions.”
I parked behind the giant Impala. She held the door open and we went inside. I had Brown’s grid with me, the way I used to have a written-out list on a piece of scrap paper next to the phone when I was a reporter. It was comforting. It was a thing, a tangible thing in the midst of intangible talk. The kitchen seemed to be the only place Annabelle Lee occupied in her immaculate double-wide. It was full of light and music—the soundtrack to Hairspray, with the “You Can’t Stop the Beat” song having been set to repeat, apparently, the whole time Annabelle was at choir practice—and the smell of food, spaghetti and meatballs, so far as I could tell. Beyond the kitchen the living room and bedroom hallway stretched out dark and quiet.
There was a pile of clean laundry on the kitchen table and Annabelle began folding it. She wasn’t someone who could sit still. She was like Sunshine that way; her hands had to be in motion, either conducting the choir or playing the piano or chopping vegetables or folding laundry. She was a precise folder: towels in thirds lengthwise, then thirds horizontally, so that no seams showed. Washcloths the same.
“So,” I said, looking at the neat little grid in my hand. “Do you know why she always ate out of cans and jars?”
“She didn’t. That only started after her mother passed. Her mother was an incredible cook. And when she died, Tamar gave up food. Real food, anyway.”
“Why?”
“God knows, Clara. Penance, maybe. She was angry at herself when her mother got cancer. Angry that she hadn’t pushed her harder to go to the doctor when she had symptoms. Or maybe it hurt, being in that kitchen without her mother. I don’t know. She wouldn’t talk about it.”
I kept my eyes on the grid. You are gathering information, Clara, I told myself. That is all you are doing. You will think about the information later. Right now, you are a gatherer of knowledge.
“Okay. Thank you. Do you know why my mother always went to choir practice but never sang in choir?”
“Because your mother is not a churchwoman. She doesn’t believe in religion. She thinks it’s anti-women.”
Anti-women, I jotted next to the question.
“Why choir, then?”
“Because she loves music. And me. Your mother is my best friend, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Thank you. Next question. Was my mother a baseball fan?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
I jotted no next to baseball.
“Next question. Did my mother tell Asa to break up with me?”
I was trying to ambush her, but she just looked at the list in my hand and frowned, as if the list had asked the question instead of me.
“Did your mother tell Asa to break up with you? What the hell is wrong with you, Clara? Your mother loved Asa.”
“Then what happened between them?”
“Again, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The night before he broke up with me, they had a fight.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I waited, but she wouldn’t look at me and she didn’t say anything else. I sighed.
“One last question, then. Why did she sell the house to the Amish and pack everything up and move herself into that place without telling me?”
She looked at me in surprise, her hands smoothing one gathered corner of a fitted sheet into the opposite corner. “So that you wouldn’t have to,” she said, as if it were obvious.
“But I told her I’d be back in a week. One week. Seven days. She couldn’t wait that long?”
“It wasn’t a question of waiting that long, Clara. You told her seven days? Then that meant she had to be out in six.”
“But why?” The sound of my voice was more exclamation mark than question mark. Annabelle Lee was more than a match for it, though. An Annabelle Lee exclamation mark was the Final Jeopardy! of exclamation marks, compared with the wimpy Daily Double of mine.
“To save you the pain of it!” she thundered. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Clara! She’s your mother! You’re her daughter!”
As if that were all she needed to say, and then I would understand. But I didn’t. Her hands smoothed the pile of folded sheets. She had folded the pillowcases in thirds and then thirds again too. No seams would show when it came to laundry at the trailer of Annabelle Lee. I imagined a closed cupboard door down that dark bedroom hallway and, behind it, stacks of perfectly folded towels and sheets.
“We do what we can, Clara,” Annabelle said, as if she had read my mind. “When you’re someone like Tamar, and you don’t, you don’t”—she groped for the right words and an image of my mother rose up in my mind, my mother pushing her walker down endless halls in search of me—“you’re not a person who opens up easily, you’re someone who maybe doesn’t know how to talk to her daughter easily??—”
She shook her head and turned around and walked the three steps from the table to the stove. Lifted the pot lid and stirred whatever was inside. Spaghetti sauce? Marinara? Something that involved tomatoes.
“You do what you can,” she said, with her back turned to me. “And that’s what she did.”
There was a tone in her voice as if she were trying to figure out why I was so upset.
“She thought it would be easier on you, Clara,” she added, enunciating each word as if she were talking to a preschooler. “She didn’t want you to suffer the way she did.”
“Suffer?”
“With her mother. It was long and hard, the way her mother died. And then when it was over, it was Tamar and all her mother’s things, all the things Tamar had to figure out what to do with, her clothes and her dishes and her canceled checks and the Christmas presents she’d already bought ahead of time. Tamar had to handle it all herself. Her father was no help, believe me.”
I had never heard Annabelle Lee say so much at one time. Nor had I heard her use my mother’s name in that way, as if my mother were not my mother. As if she were a girl, a friend, someone I didn’t know. Someone who had suffered.
“She did the best she could, Clara. She did what she thought would save you pain.”
“It didn’t,” I said.
Annabelle Lee turned to me, wooden spoon dripping red, and nodded, her eyes shadowed.
“Welcome to the world,” she said. She was a middle-aged woman now, lines around her mouth and eyes. Even heavier now than when she was young, if such a thing were possible, and I remembered when she was young.
* * *
It took me hours and hours to get through three Words by Winters next day: