Yes.
I sat there on the porch and pictured my high school years. All those afternoons and evenings with Asa, slipping out to meet him, roaming around the country roads, walking into the clamor of parties and out into the cool darkness filled with the songs of night birds and tree frogs, the squeak of boards on his porch, the silence of cement on mine, the long backseat of his car where we loved each other. Where was Tamar in those memories? She was home in Sterns, leaning against the counter eating supper by herself, out chopping wood, whistling for Dog and heading down Williams Road, driving down to choir practice, lying on the couch and reading that ridiculous seagull book yet again. Maybe, on rare occasions, meeting Annabelle Lee at Crystal’s Diner for a milkshake.
Unless she wasn’t.
“Your parents are divorced?”
That was a question Asa asked, back in the beginning of us, before I told him about the beginnings of me. It was a reasonable assumption, but I shook my head and spat out a laugh so hard that it startled us both.
“No,” I said. “Ma was never married.”
“Okay,” he said. I could still hear the careful tone of his voice. “Does she have a boyfriend or anything?”
“Oh my God no. My mother is not the boyfriend type.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Look at her! She’s just, she’s not, she’s, I mean, come on, can you even . . .”
Even what, Clara? I asked myself now. But I knew the answer already. Had I ever imagined my mother as a person someone would want to hold, to touch, to kiss? Imagined her causing a man to feel his heart open? Feel his blood quicken? Feel himself moving closer to her, his hands in his pockets because he wanted so much to touch her? No and no and no and no.
But someone had.
* * *
“How go the Words, Winter?”
I could hear the uppercase W of Words in Brown’s voice. He did that whenever he was feeling snarky about my line of work. Sometimes he spoiled for a fight, and if he needled me long enough he knew he could get one. Sunshine shot him a warning glance.
“With difficulty,” I said. “And stop uppercasing the word Words, and don’t think I can’t hear that you’re doing it. Also, I don’t need your scorn.”
“Clara. Correction. I have scorn for those who pay you to write their words, not for the words that you provide.”
“Well, today the words I provided included a eulogy for a father despised by all his kids, a retirement toast for a boss despised by all his employees, and a fiftieth-birthday card from a sister to the brother she’s been estranged from for twenty-three years.”
“Ouch.”
Yes, ouch. It had been a tough day in the word business, a Tough Days for $2000 Daily Double bet-it-all kind of tough day, so tough that I had worked outside on the freezing porch so as not to fill the air of the cabin with the sadness and anger inside those assignments, and the shock and bewilderment inside me. Onward, ever onward. The tough assignments kept coming.
“You guys, I found something out,” I said.
They looked at each other in their silent, telepathic way. You guys was what they were saying to each other. She never says “you guys.”
“And what was it that you found out?” Brown said.
“That there was someone in her life. My mother was in love with someone.”
“No way!” He spluttered out one of those surprise-laughs. “Not The Fearsome.”
“Yes way.”
“What makes you think so?”
“That photo.”
“Whoa! You found a photo? Like, a you know what I mean kind of photo?”
“Stop it. No. That photo, The Mystery, the one you’ve already seen. The one with her wearing that white shirt. It’s the look on her face. She was in love.”
They were both instantly quiet, in the same way I had gone quiet when I looked at the strip of photo-booth photos of the bartender and me. They knew I was right. They didn’t know how they knew, or how I knew, but we all knew I was right.
“Who would it have been, though?” Brown said after a minute. “Don’t you know everyone in Sterns?”
“I thought I did. But whoever he was, I obviously didn’t know him. And he’s obviously not around anymore.”
“What about Annabelle?” Sunshine said. “Did you ask her?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“She clammed up and wouldn’t look me in the eye. Which just confirms it.”
“The Secret Lives of the Sternsians,” Brown intoned, in a PBS-announcer sort of voice. “We’d tell you about them if we could, but they’re secret.”
“Shut up, Brown,” Sunshine said. “Not funny.”
Brown shut up. Not funny. I looked down to make sure the wire was holding me tight together. What was happening inside me was that the past was expanding again, horizons pushing out to make room for new information. My mother, with a man. My mother, with someone who wasn’t me and wasn’t Annabelle. Who? For how long? Why were they not together? What had happened?
Sunshine put down the baby hat she was crocheting, a serious move for her, a woman whose hands always needed to be in motion. “Ask your mother, Clara.”
“She doesn’t know who I am half the time anymore.”
“Ask anyway.”
But I shook my head. I had already said too much. It felt as if I had betrayed her: Brown’s splutter of a laugh and Sunshine’s quieted hands and the soft look on my mother’s face in that photo combined to make my heart swell with a feeling I couldn’t at first name because in conjunction with my mother it was so unfamiliar. I waited for the word to come to me, and as I waited, with the two of them looking at me, I pictured my mother as she looked back when I was in high school, in her jeans and her Keds and her un-made-up face and her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail or a braid or a knot. Not so different from the way she was still, down there in the place where she lived now, where she deadheaded the orchids and trod the hallways back and forth and up and down. I waited for the word to name the feeling inside me, and then it came floating up out of the darkness: wonder. Wonder was the feeling inside me, that my mother had been loved and loved back. That there were rooms within rooms within her, rooms filled with white and light and space, rooms I’d never known about.
* * *
If the place where my mother lived now called, I picked up instantly.
I had given the number its own special ring tone: Old Phone. Old Phone was the sound of the telephone we had when I was growing up, that heavy receiver attached to the long curly cord, the telephone that we never referred to as “phone.”
“This is Clara.”
“Hi Clara. This is Sylvia. I know you were here just last night but today’s been a rough day. Your mom’s been crying on and off all morning. She’s agitated. She’s been looking for her daughter. And a cookie.”
Sylvia pronounced the words carefully, as if the words “daughter” and “cookie” might be foreign to me.