I put that away in the back of my mind, Sunshine’s surprise at Brown’s question, as if he should know that of course Clara would take care of her, and my own surprise at her confidence in me. We were at the bar then, the bar where lights were strung up around the roofline and windows twinkled in the dark November night. Then we were pushing open the door, and a couple sitting next to it gasped and shivered from the freezing air, and then the bartender was looking at us and smiling from behind the bar, and he turned to Gayle, who was ringing something up on the cash register next to him, and said something, and she nodded and turned around and flashed me a smile.
The bartender came around the end of the bar and pointed toward the back booth where we had waited hours for my heart to stop racing. He held out his hand to Sunshine, then Brown, and “Chris,” he said, and “Sunshine” and “Brown” and “Heard a lot about you,” Brown said, “a lot for Winter anyway,” and he nodded in my direction as if the bartender knew exactly what he was talking about—that Winter was chary with information in general, and surely he, the bartender, would already have learned that about her—which wasn’t true, because I wasn’t that way around the bartender. Did he look surprised? Did he look puzzled? Did he look as if he were about to debate Brown’s words? He did not. What the bartender did was take my hand in his and hold it.
“Gimlets for the table?” he said. “Clara likes them.”
Behind the bar Gayle lifted the bottle with a flourish and upended it so that the gin streamed steadily into first one shaker and then another. She lifted them high too and shook them back and forth, pirouetting them in an air ballet that she made up as she went. The words on her inner arm were dark and indecipherable from across the room, but I knew what they said. Sunshine and Brown and the bartender were talking about crocheting and whittling and code-writing.
Gayle brought us another round of gimlets without asking and slid a bowl of popcorn between us, popcorn that must have been made by someone back in the kitchen, because it was too fresh and hot and salty and buttery to come from a machine. She handled the bar alone, even after it got busy, so that we could keep talking.
And we kept talking. About Dog, and how he watched over me from his blue urn in the cabin. About fireflies, which might or might not live on air alone. About one-person cabins. About furniture, including furniture made entirely of books. About Sunshine and Brown’s heavy wooden slab of a table found curbside in Boston. About Sunshine’s former breasts. About the pros and cons of working from home, the way Sunshine and Brown and I did, as opposed to working in a bar, the way the bartender did. About the bartender’s grandmother, the one who had raised him, the one laughing, with her arms around him, at his high school graduation in the photo taped to the cash register. About the blankets and stuffed animals we had carried with us as toddlers. Brown still had the blanket he had been found in, a white flannel blanket printed with stars that had been swaddled around him on the steps of the courthouse in Jefferson City, Missouri, which was something I had never known until just then. We talked about my heart and about John Stein’s latest book of poems, More Real Poems About Real People with Real Problems. We, meaning Brown and Sunshine, talked about my tattoo. Sunshine wrapped her arms around her chest and rocked back and forth, mimicking me.
“She holds herself together with wire,” Brown said. “Wire and words.”
“That was how we knew something was up when she first moved back,” Sunshine said, “even if we didn’t know it was about Tamar. She kept doing the hold-herself-together thing. Like, all the time.”
“Did you freak out when you saw the entire tattoo?” Brown said. “The way it winds around her?”
He looked to the bartender for confirmation, but the bartender was shaking his head and smiling, as if he didn’t know what Brown meant, because he didn’t. He had never seen me without clothes. We had kissed only the once, on that frigid day in Adirondack Hardware. I watched as comprehension dawned on first Brown’s and then Sunshine’s face. They didn’t look at each other but I could feel them communicating in their silent way. They haven’t slept together? they were saying to each other. Whoa.
* * *
“Has he met Tamar?” Brown said to me, as if the bartender weren’t right there. We were all standing outside the bar. My Subaru and the bartender’s big white boat of a car were the only ones left, and it was freezing, and our breath puffed out in clouds. Soon the snow would begin to fall, and the mountains would be blanketed in white, or blue, or pink, or dark green, depending on the light and the time of day.
“I have not,” the bartender said. “But I’d like to.”
“Come with us, then,” Brown said.
Hello, hello, I’m standing right here. Hello, is she not my mother? Is this not an invitation that I should be the one to make, Brown, not you? Who says I want to have the bartender meet my mother, anyway? Those were all the thoughts that on another day would have run through my head, and which I would have turned from thoughts into sentences. But that day must have been past, must already have been in the rearview mirror, because I didn’t even think them, let alone say them.
“What should I expect?” the bartender said, but he wasn’t asking Brown or Sunshine. He had turned to me and he was asking me, not them. “What should I know?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nada. Zip. Zilch.”
“It’s better to have no expectations,” Sunshine said.
Maybe it would be an evening when Tamar was there. Maybe it would be an evening when she was gone, walking the endless hallways in search of her daughter. Maybe she would recognize Sunshine and Brown and not me, or me and not them. Maybe she would recognize the bartender even though she had never met him.
“Nothing it is, then,” the bartender said.
He shook hands again with Sunshine and Brown, put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed, then got in his car and drove off north.
“Okay,” Brown said, and “Okay,” Sunshine said, when we were in the car.
“Okay,” I said too. Because we all knew what we were saying. The conversation that was happening among us, the miles back to their house, was happening below the surface. Wordless Conversations for $400. He’s a good guy, Clara, he’s a good, good guy. That feeling went around and around the car, from me in the driver’s seat to Brown riding shotgun, his arm stretched back to hold hands with Sunshine in the backseat. And this, too, the feeling that Sometimes it’s simple. Sometimes it’s not complicated at all.
* * *
It was the bartender’s first visit. We walked in to find her at the juice station, turned sideways, her walker leaning against the wall. She held a Dixie cup beneath the apple juice spigot, then moved it mid-splash to the cranberry juice spigot. Drops of juice splashed onto the tray beneath.
“Hey, Ma,” I said.
She turned, again mid-splash, and examined me. Brown-red juice sloshed in the tiny cup in her hand.
“Orange juice,” she said.
“You want some?”
She nodded. I moved to help her but the bartender was quicker. He slid another paper cup off the upside-down stack and then moved around her to the orange juice dispenser, which was separate and next to the ice chest.
“Here you go,” he said.
She took the cup and drank it down in one go and held it out to him again.
“More?”
She nodded. He filled it, she drank it, while Sunshine and Brown and I watched.