I was groggy. From a painkiller?
I felt a tightness to my face. With my free hand I started opening drawers until I found a hand mirror. A neat line of stitches under my jaw stopped at my chin. There wouldn’t be a scar. Joe was the best closer in the business.
“Are you awake?” It was Timby, sitting in the corner, drawing in a spiral notebook.
“Hi, sweetie.” I winced. My jaw was wood, splintering with each small movement.
“Daddy said after the dog bit your arm you fell off the stage!”
A voice from the hallway. “Let me pop in to say good-bye.”
Alonzo appeared, followed by a classically pretty blonde wearing pastel-pink cashmere and a black purse with a gold chain strap. Alonzo introduced his wife, Hailey.
“Thank you for today,” Alonzo said to me.
All we could do was look into each other’s eyes and smile. We just liked each other; we always had. At our first poetry lesson, we’d cried over Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking”; the waitress had asked, “Did you two just get engaged?”
How-is-a-corkscrew-like-a-hammer?
Alonzo reached into his pocket. “Time to delete this app.”
“Aww-uhh!” said a disappointed Timby.
“They’re both tools,” Hailey said. “And they both have handles.” She cutely blew the smoke off a finger pistol and returned it to an imaginary holster.
“This morning,” I said to Alonzo. “I’m sorry for calling you ‘my poet.’”
“That was okay,” he said. “Although I wasn’t thrilled to be stuck with the breakfast bill. And the gift-basket bill. And you didn’t pay me my fifty bucks.”
“Plus he bought me fudge at the Center House,” Timby added.
I gasped, mortified. “Is my wallet around?”
“Let’s roll it forward,” Alonzo said.
Joe was in the doorway now. “Hey, babe.” He turned to Alonzo and Hailey. “I’ll let you out. It’s tricky after hours.”
“Until next week,” Alonzo said.
“‘At the Fishhouses,’” I said.
“Let’s do a different Elizabeth Bishop,” he said. “‘One Art,’ it’s called.”
“‘One Art.’ I somehow sense it’s an indictment of me.”
“Quite the opposite,” he said.
“Hailey?” I said. “I love this guy.”
“Everyone does.” She beamed, and they headed out.
It was just me and Timby.
“Look, Mom. I drew you.”
“Oh, baby,” I said. “I don’t want to be Mad Mommy.”
“So don’t.”
“It’s harder than that,” I said.
Timby shrugged: have it your way.
Joe was back. He scooted toward me on a stool.
“You, Mrs. Wallace, should inform me the next time you collide with a sculpture and lose consciousness.”
“I told him,” Timby said with a scrunched-up face.
Joe ripped the paper out of the screen.
My forearm was covered in puncture wounds and torn skin. The whole thing was swollen, red, and gooey with ointment.
“Yowza,” I said.
“No broken bones or foreign bodies,” Joe said. “We’ll give it seventy-two hours to make sure there’s no infection.” He put on his reading glasses and got in closer. “We might have to close this guy up.”
“Joe,” I said. “Do you think I’m a mean person?”
“You’re not a mean person,” he immediately answered, and paused. “You’re a mean nice person. Big difference.”
“See,” I said. “I need you for this stuff. You’re my Competent Traveler. Don’t go all Jesus-y on me.”
“Can I go kind of Jesus-y on you?”
“What’s Jesus-y?” Timby said.
“Nothing that can’t be worked out,” Joe said to me. “Genuinely.”
“I know that.”
We smiled. Our smile.
Joe got up and stuffed the blue paper in the trash can. “Are you aware,” he said, “that Thomas Jefferson, the model of reason, called the New Testament ‘the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man’?”
That’s Jesus-y, I mouthed to Timby.
“But,” Joe continued, “even Jefferson struggled with its contradictions. So get this. He took a razor blade to the four Gospels and cut out the miracles, mysticism, and other hoo-ha, and pasted the good parts into one coherent story.”
“He performed surgery on the Bible,” I said.
“There you go!” Joe said.
Then I noticed it, on the wall.
I’d sketched it on our second date. I’d forgotten Joe had saved it. Or that he’d had it framed.
He was still so exotic to me then. I remember the thrill in my stomach. Could he be the one, this serious med student from Buffalo? Brilliant in so many ways, but uncomplicated in his kindness.
And there we were, twenty years after we’d met in an examination room, back in an examination room. Now we were three. My little family.
“I think I can do this,” I said.
Joe turned.
“Let’s move,” I said. “New York, Chicago, Scotland, it doesn’t matter.”
“We’re moving?” Timby asked.
“Even Spokane,” I said. “It would be an adventure. A pretty lame adventure. But we are old.”
“Mom and I need to discuss it,” Joe said to Timby.
“Nothing’s keeping me in Seattle,” I said. “I can draw and do damage anywhere.”
“I want to move to Scotland!” Timby said.