Asa.
Next day Asa was back, standing in the driveway with her daughter. Something was happening. I pictured my mother pulling the curtain aside with one finger, just enough to see out. A cool fall day, a hint of winter to come on the edges of the breeze. She had watched me stand in front of Asa, arms out, saying, “Why? Why, Asa, why?” She had watched Asa shake his head. Back and forth and back and forth. “Why, Asa?” Back and forth. “Why, Asa?” Back and forth.
My mother had watched Asa break up with me. Worlds were coming apart, and so was her child.
This was where it got harder. I had to be my mother, imagine myself into her with the knowledge that I now had, the knowledge that she and Eli Chamberlain had loved each other. What happened inside her, when she pulled that curtain aside and knew that Asa and I were no more?
Correction: This was where it should get harder. This was where I should go back and forth in my mind, trying to imagine exactly what went on inside my mother, the trying to figure out what to do now because Clara and Asa weren’t but she and Eli were. Could she and Eli keep seeing each other? Martha had moved out by then, a divorce was in the offing or soon would be; would somehow the children be okay if she and Eli, at some point in the future, were in the open? Could it all work, somehow? That scenario was what I should be trying to conjure up, what I should by way of imagination and empathy be ferreting my way into, except that there was no such scenario.
I already knew what had happened that day. What happened was that my mother witnessed the breakup, watched Asa try but fail to start his car, called Eli to come get his boy, and then called it off with Eli.
At that moment my heart clawed at itself the way Eli’s heart must have when my mother told him it was over. The sense of a man bent over his kitchen table, fingers clutching it for dear life, kept coming to me and I couldn’t shake it. He lost so much. His son. My mother. And me, too, the girl who, he told me once after he and Asa and I took the brewery tour and he had drunk the two beers they give you for free in the old-time parlor afterward, was like a daughter to him.
I got up from the porch and loaded my quilt-wrapped self into the Subaru, the way Annabelle Lee loaded herself into her ancient Impala, and I drove to Annabelle’s trailer. I told her what I thought I knew and I watched her eyes shift away from mine, up to the ceiling, then finally back to me.
“So?” I said. “Is that the way it went down?”
“Well,” she said, “you know your mother.”
“Is that a yes?”
“It’s the way she told me it happened, yes.”
“Why did she break up with him?”
“Because in the wake of what Asa had done she could not see any way to stay with Eli,” Annabelle said. “‘I can’t hurt my daughter. I can’t hurt her more.’ Exact quote.”
But the way she said it, the words she could not see any way to stay with Eli translated and retranslated themselves in my mind as She did it for you and then It broke her heart and then It broke his heart too.
“She thought it was the only way she could spare you yet more hurt,” Annabelle said. “You know your mother, Clara.”
“I don’t know if I do.”
“You’re trying. I’ll give you that. Late in the game or not, you’re trying.”
* * *
Why the army? The Chamberlains weren’t a military family and the military had never been part of Asa’s plan. His plan was to drive truck for Byrne Dairy and maybe buy his own big rig someday and be his own boss, be a long-haul trucker. That way he could see all fifty states. Hawaii he would have to fly to, but it was possible to drive to Alaska, if you had the time, and that way you could knock off a vast portion of the west. A big map of the United States hung on his wall, colored pins stuck in all the states he’d been to so far. Only eighteen. Barely over a third.
In a different life this would have been one of those questions I would ask him, in that imaginary future years and years hence, when everything that had gone wrong was long in the past, and we were sitting on a bench somewhere, setting things right between us. He would ask me about college and I would ask him about the army and what it had been like all the years up until his deployment, and from the filling-in of generalities we would narrow down and down and down until there was enough ease between us that we could tell each other that we had truly loved each other, that it had been real, and how sorry we were, sorry how things ended.
But there would be no conversation years hence, because there was no Asa. First enlistment and training and finally deployment and death. The quickness of it still startled me awake sometimes, my heart thudding in the dark, sweat rippling over me in waves.
There was no one to ask now. No one to fill in the blanks. When Asa broke it off with me, I broke it off with Eli, and we had not spoken since.
“Eli tried,” Annabelle said. “He did try.”
“How?”
“Called her. Drove up to Watertown once, when she was up there working on the trucks. Wrote her a letter.”
“Wrote her a letter?”
She frowned. “Yes, he wrote to her. You’re not the only person in the world who can write a letter, Clara. Most people do learn how to write, you know. Usually in first grade.”
Of course they did. Everyone learned how to print and some still learned cursive, and everyone now used a keyboard and a computer and a smartphone and if you were blind you might still learn how to write Braille but knowing how to write and writing a letter to the woman you loved, the woman who broke up with you, were two separate animals. Annabelle was watching me with her eyes narrowed, as if she were daring me to say something else about writing so that she could leap on it and remind me that I was not the only person in the world who could put words to feelings.
“Annabelle.”
She lifted her eyebrows, still waiting, waiting for me to mess up so that she could pounce. It was exhausting. Could she not see that? Could she not see that I was no longer the woman I had been even a few months ago? No longer the girl I had been in high school, oblivious, unable to see my mother as anything but my mother? Could she not see just how hard I was trying?
“I know everyone learns to write,” I said. “But it’s hard to imagine Eli Chamberlain sitting down and writing a letter.”
“Why is it hard?” she said, after a pause. Her voice lacked the Ha, I’ve got you now pounce it had earlier. Maybe she was trying too.
“I guess because in all the time I knew him I never saw him write anything. I never saw him read anything either. He wasn’t a word person, is what I’m trying to say. At least the Eli that I knew.”
“I would say that is accurate.”
“So if he wrote my mother a letter, then he must have??—”
“Loved her,” Annabelle finished. “Yes. He did.”
“What did the letter say?”
“I have no idea.”