It was me and the bartender then, waiting on my heart. The overhead hanging lamps, like Gayle’s footsteps, had become familiar, and so had the shadows in the big-beamed ceiling they illuminated. A small constellation of frilled toothpicks clustered in a pool of soft light near an overhang, almost directly above my head. Someone—someones—must have taken straws, stuck the frilled ends inside, tilted their heads back and filled their lungs. Toothpicks, rocketing ceilingward.
The bartender was whittling, there on the chair next to the bench where I lay flat, heart still hammering. A slender limb, drawn from a bucket of them, lay across his lap and he shaved off slivers. The clean smell of new wood filled the air around us.
“What’re you making?” I said.
He turned the limb over, examining it. “Nothing that I know of. Yet anyway.”
“What kind of wood is that?” Woods of the North for $200, even though I, as the daughter of a woodswoman, already knew the answer.
“Red pine.”
Correct. I pointed at the bucket. “And the rest of them?”
“That one’s scrub oak, that one’s maple, that one’s white birch, that one’s white pine.”
He barely looked as he rattled them off.
“Do you have a favorite?”
“Plywood.” He looked up at me, gauging to see if I was dumb enough to think plywood was a kind of tree.
“What a coincidence,” I said. “Me too.”
“Liar. Plywood is no one’s favorite wood.”
“I beg to differ. Plywood’s what my kitchen table’s made from. Partly, anyhow.”
I pictured the stacks of books underneath my table, and the books-as-coffee-table, and the books-as-bed in the tiny cabin. The guys at Foley Lumber had sliced a sheet of plywood in half for me and I had lugged it home in the Subaru and muscled it up on top of the books to make the table. One of the bartender’s hands braced the piece of red pine in his lap and the other held his pocketknife as he shaved off paper-thin shims. He was good with his jackknife the way my mother was good with an ax. I watched and I didn’t say anything.
The bar was quiet around us, and the sound of a single cricket who had made his way inside from the cold drifted through the room. My heart trembled and shook inside me, a rebel, unwilling or unable to stop its frantic beating. I pulled my phone out to look at my favorite photo of Sunshine and Brown, to call up their presence beside me. There they were, their arms spread wide against a backdrop of the Rockies, a cross of snow on the side of a mountain in the distance. Brown’s hair and the scarf Sunshine was wearing to cover her chemo-bald skull blowing wild in the wind. Both of them laughing. I sent them a telepathic message: Hello, my darlings. It’s happening again. Yes, I know I have to get it fixed.
I held the phone straight up in the air above my head. “Want to see my friends? That’s Sunshine. And that’s Brown.”
The bartender leaned forward and craned his neck so that he could see. Then he put down his whittling, pulled three chairs together in a row and lay down on them. Me on the cushioned bench, him next to me on hard wooden chairs. Now we could both look up at the phone above our heads without straining.
“And where was this photo taken?”
“In Colorado. They hiked up and took the gondola down.”
I scrolled past to the next. I had a whole album of Sunshine and Brown photos.
“And where’s this one?”
“Here. At my place. In the living room slash kitchen slash dining room slash everything room of my house slash one-room cabin.”
He pointed. “Am I looking at a coffee table slash pile of books?”
“Nay, sir, you are looking at a books-as-coffee-table. That photo was taken months ago, though. The books-as-coffee-table has mostly disappeared now.”
He took the phone and brought it close to his face, enlarging the photo to study the disappearing table. Then he swiped to the next photo.
“Who’s this?” he said. “She’s pretty.”
It was the mystery photo of Tamar, propped up next to Jack on the little kitchen shelf. Why I had taken it—a photo of a photo of a mystery—I did not know. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t look at it every night when I got home. But here she was, with me in my phone.
“That’s my mother.”
“I figured. There’s a resemblance.”
Was there? I took a long breath and beat, my heart was back to normal. I counted to thirty-two, randomly and because it was my age, then sat up. Blood spun away south, down through my body.
“Back to normal?” the bartender said, and I nodded.
The bar was dark except for the lights in the back, where we had been waiting so long. It was past midnight. The bartender put his arm around me outside, by my car. He smelled like soap and leather and lime and denim and wood shavings. Then we went our separate ways, whittled-down piece of red pine in his hand, tiny silver earring in mine.
* * *
Asa died when I was living on the Florida Panhandle, during a stretch of time right after I quit being a small-town reporter. If you went to college and majored in piano but didn’t intend to make your life about music, and if you had always loved words, it would be logical to accept a job as a reporter, wouldn’t it?
Wrong. The job of reporting, like most jobs that used words, was about not the love of words themselves but the usefulness of words. The everydayness of words. Ways to convey information via the alphabet. When I chose reporting, I didn’t know yet that it had nothing to do with loving words. It took me a long time to figure that out.
Thursday nights back then were when I used to call my mother. Thursdays with Tamar, a routine that began when I was living in Lake Placid and working for the Adirondack Times and continued on to the Panhandle years. She would pick up on the third ring, the way I watched her do all my life. Ring, ring, ring, then snatch it up halfway through. Even if she was standing right next to it when it rang, even though it was a Thursday night at eight o’clock and it could be no one but me, she would wait until it had rung exactly two and a half times.
“Tamar Winter speaking. How may I direct your call?”
“Ma. It’s me.”
“You’re looking for Ma? One moment, please. MAAAAAAA!”
Right in my ear. Full-blast.
“Jesus, Ma! Stop it.”
“Certainly, caller. Ma will be right with you.” Pause. Then, in her normal voice, “Hello? Clara?”
“Can you please stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“MA.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. How was your week?”
“It was okay,” I would say, already tired of the phone call. Of the ritual. Of the way it never changed. “My week was okay.”
“Anything interesting happen?”
Her use of that word used to infuriate me. “Everything’s interesting, Ma, if you look at it the right way.”