1. A wedding toast from the best man to his brother, the groom, and the brother’s fiancée, who was deeply disliked by the best man, which meant that “my secret hope is that the marriage doesn’t last very long but you can’t really say that in a wedding toast, can you, so barring that, I just want to keep it light and positive but generic, you know? Super generic. And I don’t trust myself to keep it that way because I seriously dislike her, which is why I’m writing to you”; and
2. An invitation to the fiftieth-anniversary party of parents who had been married and divorced and married and divorced and married, so “maybe it should really be sixtieth anniversary but we’re only counting the years they were actually married, and they’re actually really funny together, but we, their children, are not very funny, so could you help us out? Please make it really, really funny. Funny is key. Here are photos of them from each of their weddings”; and
3. An obituary for a ninety-three-year-old mother by her seventy-year-old daughter, who was “not good with words, but my mother was, and she especially loved long, complicated words, and I would like this obituary to live up to her wonderfulness with that kind of words. Words that very few people would even have heard of before, let alone understand. Maybe some long foreign words too? Words that you think she would’ve loved.”
See? Not easy. Exhausting, in fact. But: #1, done; #2, done; #3, done.
Three hundred dollars, please.
Afterward I went to DiOrio’s and ordered a Tree Hugger sandwich and walked back to the rotisserie chickens to wait for it and there was the bartender, coming around the bread display.
“One McCauley Mountain for Chris,” the deli girl called, holding a wax-paper-wrapped sandwich in his direction.
Chris. Chris, not Christopher, was his name. Chris-not-Christopher didn’t know I was there, standing over by the rotisserie with its revolving chickens, waiting for my Tree Hugger. He walked up and the deli girl pulled the sandwich back and laughed as he reached for it. He held his arm steady in the air until she handed it over. “Thanks, Jaynie,” he said, and she smiled.
Why did I see her name as Jaynie instead of Janie? Or Janey. Jaynee, even. Chris-not-Christopher turned, sandwich in hand, and there I was, the many permutations of Jaynie scrolling through my mind.
“One Tree Hugger for Clara,” the deli girl said. She didn’t dangle my sandwich in the air, though. She just set it on top of the deli case and picked up her order pad for the next customer in line. Chris-not-Christopher retrieved the Tree Hugger and brought it to me and the rack of revolving chickens.
“Here you go, tree hugger,” he said. “Do you want to do something sometime?”
“Sure.”
“Good. Give me your phone.”
I pulled it up out of my pocket, the tiny silver hammer almost falling out but not. He tapped something into it. From the back pocket of his jeans came a ding-dong sound.
“That’s you,” he said. “You’re calling me.”
He held my phone out to me and I took it. The chickens revolved on their spits, and somewhere behind me a cash register kept beeping, and the deli girl, whose name was Jaynie or more likely Janie, watched from across the way and winked at me.
* * *
2:47 a.m., the familiar waking time. Monkey mind. Was this how it began? Was this a sign that the plaque was forming deep inside my head, beginning to break off and clot the pathways, blocking memory, spinning me sideways and backward, setting me off down that road my mother was already far down?
“Stop it, Clara.”
Talk out loud to yourself. Say your own name. Be your own doctor, your own nurse, your own statistician. Keep records, but keep them only in your own mind. That way you could deny that you thought about it as much as you did. If you were found to have compiled notebooks, slips of paper, columns and headings and dates and jotted notes, that might be seen as evidence in the court of Alzheimer’s that the early was already onsetting.
2:52 a.m. and the minutes were passing by, the minutes of a dark night that was like the dark night last night, when you also woke at 2:47. Unless you didn’t. Unless this was the only night that you had woken up at 2:47 a.m. thinking thoughts like this. Worrying. Because how would you know for sure if it was beginning?
We strongly advise genetic counseling if you are concerned. If you are thinking of someday having children. If you think you might be falling in love with a bartender that you never, ever want to put through this kind of pain.
3:07 a.m.
It was cold in the cabin. The electric flames of the electric fireplace glowed faintly in the darkness. The fairy lights still glimmered from the trunks of the white pines. Somewhere in the woods a fisher cat screamed and the hairs on the back of my neck prickled at the sound, the sound of a girl screaming, a girl in fear for her life.
Get up, Clara. Get dressed. Feel your way down the ladder with the car keys in your hand and open your door. Find your car in the darkness.
The Subaru roared in response. Down the curves and twists and slopes of Turnip Hill we went, and then through the darkened streets of Old Forge to the darkened parking lot of DiOrio’s. I pulled in next to the handicapped spot by the front door. Kept the car running. Kept telling myself it was already morning, which sounded better than the middle of the night, better than the wee hours. The teeny-tiny wee-hour numbers: one and two and three and four. I stayed in my car, there in the parking lot of the store that would come to light in a few hours. Told myself again that it was already morning. The fisher cat was elusive and solitary and small and because of this tended to hunt only prey smaller than itself. My mother and I were the same exact height. A trapped fisher cat had taken over her brain and its wild twin screamed in the dark woods beyond where I could see. I had a fifty-fifty chance of the eFAD gene mutation. Genetic testing was recommended if. If. If. If.
Stop, Clara. Stop the monkey-minding. Practice detachment. Detach, detach, detach.
I would if I could.
* * *
The next time Sunshine and Brown and I visited my mother, she gazed amiably at Brown.
“How do I know you again?” she said.
“You met Sunshine and me back when your daughter was in college,” he said. “It was a sunny day in the White Mountains. Parents’ Weekend. You were driving a pickup truck.”
Tamar listened intently, her head tilted toward Brown. Follow where she goes, I had told them, but it worked the other way too. We were scooted together on the couch in the Green Room, the four of us, waiting for our show to begin. The order on the couch was like this: Brown, Tamar, Sunshine, me. We were pressed together like the tiny Vienna sausages that, when I was a child, Tamar used to fish out of the Vienna sausage jar with her cocktail fork.
“It’s good to see you, Tamar,” Brown said.
“Good to see you too,” she said, in that new echoey way, in that affable, un-fearsome voice.
“I brought you a gift.” He tapped on her closed fist and she opened it. Obedient, the way she had never been. He placed a tiny jar of maple syrup in her palm and her fingers, again obedient, closed around it. “We made it ourselves,” he said, “Sunshine and I.”
“Maple syrup.”