Notes about: Jeremiah Mason Bass
Born: August 5, 1932 Died: June 21, 2007, 4:10 p.m.
Winthrop Nursing Facility Laconia, New Hampshire
Mr. Bass was my last assignment in New Hampshire. Luke had instructed that I leave on a high note and clearly there will not be one higher than this. Luke’s request, other than to throw him a good funeral and make sure all legal issues were in order, was that I leave New Hampshire when I felt healthy and confident and had had a good experience. After Suzanne Sullivan, I feared that I would not be able to keep my word and I told the supervisor this. I had already said that I knew I could not handle children and now I had added anyone dying prematurely. I had dreamed of Suzanne Sullivan many times in the weeks after her death. In the dreams she always had the long blond hair she had in the pictures on the wall of her house and she was always doing other things, unwrapping snacks for her kids or looking up phone numbers. Once she was grooming a horse and she kept telling me that there had been a mistake and she wasn’t supposed to leave at all, that I needed to speak to people and make phone calls and see if I couldn’t get this mistake fixed.
No one can change this, Luke had said, meaning his own situation. The world is in motion.
“Can’t change it,” Mr. Bass said the first day I met him. He had been described by several as “colorful” and that would be a gross understatement. He said his whole life had been dictated by his name—Bigmouth Bass they call him. He said he had fished since he was big enough to hold a pole. He fished all over the United States of America and once down in Mexico when his wife won a trip for selling the most cars over at Regal Chevrolet. That was in 1976. He caught a marlin once and loved to tell the tale, what a fight it was—the pull, the pull—He was widowed in 1997 and has successfully gotten loose of every hook that almost caught him. They don’t call me slippery for nothing.
He wore his white hair so slicked you could see the grooves of the fine-toothed comb he kept in his front pocket and he was missing quite a few teeth which he self-consciously hid with one hand cupping his chin and covering his mouth. “I’ve caught nearly everything you can catch,” he said. “Fish, I mean, and people always give me fish things because of my name and my work. Ran a bait-and-tackle shop for years while my wife sold cars. She was something. Now that was my hardest catch of all, took all kinds of lures and tackle to get her to bite—you know, Aqua Velva, which I think stinks, but she liked it quite good, and a luxury automobile and steak dinners and a shiny diamond ring. They called me Bigmouth Bass and they called her the other Bigmouth Bass. Once I called her the Bigmouth Ass and I wished I hadn’t done that ’cause she made me pay. I am not about to tell a decent young woman such as yourself how she made me pay, but just trust me that she did.”
Every inch of his room was decorated with posters and photographs and lures and tackle. He had a huge stack of rods in the corner and said he had a photo of every fish he’d caught since about 1956 when his daughter was born. He’s got every fish she caught and her brother, too. Every one. Every one. I cleaned them all and ate my fair share. He had several plaques of mounted rubber fish and he loved to press the little red buttons that made them flop and sing: “Take Me to the River,” “Pretty Fishy,” “Catch Us if You Can.” He liked to get them all flopping and singing at once and he did that right up to the day he died.
“You know what is so strange?” he asked, just before he drifted off and stopped talking. “I love the bottom feeders. I love to catch them and I love to eat them. I love grouper and I love catfish. But”—he paused and beckoned his son, a giant boy-looking man in his big summer shorts and tennis shoes, who kept wiping his face and blowing his nose into Dunkin’ Donuts napkins he kept pulling from his pocket—“I don’t like them in life. Don’t be a bottom feeder in life.” He shook his finger. “Your mother was not a bottom feeder and she sold cars so that should tell you something.”
The big boy son nodded and wiped his eyes and then looked at me and started laughing. He laughed until he wheezed and his father joined in with him. I left to get a cup of coffee when the daughter arrived, a woman built just like her brother who wore a Bass Pro Shop T-shirt and cap and placed an extra cap on her father’s head. I could hear their laughter all the way down the hall and when I returned they told me that they thought he was gone, that they were singing along to Pretty Fishy, and he just stopped breathing. “We sure are gonna miss you, old man.” The son leaned and kissed his father’s forehead and then blew his nose into a napkin and draped his arm around his sister. “He was a good one, wasn’t he?”
“A real keeper,” the daughter said. “A real prize.”
This was the high point Luke told me to find. Can’t change it. They don’t call me slippery for nothing. Anything about fishing will bring Jeremiah Bass to mind: lures and tackle and bait and hooks—the pull, the pull.
[from Joanna’s notebook]
Jeremiah Mason Bass
A hand-crafted lure is valuable and it takes a lot of time and some good eyes and the still and steady hands of a surgeon and he has to get the light just right, a bright light under a magnifier and carefully loop and tie fine filament and one day he will build a ship in a bottle, maybe have a room full of ships in bottles and imagine himself a tiny little captain way down in there but Mrs. Bass says that’s leisure work and leisure time, but they aren’t there yet because children cost money and there needs to be food on the table and money in the bank and what better food is there than a fish, the Lord multiplied and multiplied those baskets of fish, the scales on their bodies numbered and all you need is a line and pole and some luck like a lucky lure, sparkly and shiny spinning down there below the murky surface down where it’s cold and the light can’t quite reach and you just sink a little lower and lower down where it’s cooler and darker, a little colder, a little darker, a wavy spin of algae and roots, down and down to the soft muddy bottom.
Stanley
STANLEY HAS BEEN READING a lot lately when he’s by himself—about roses—and listening to music. He has some of Martha’s books as well as all the catalogs she used to get that still get forwarded, his old address marked through and replaced with a yellow sticker and this address. It amazes him—this process of lives being forwarded, of someone like Martha, long dead, still being asked for her support, her opinion, her use of a coupon worth a hundred dollars if she acts now. He never realized until he started flipping through all of Martha’s magazines and books that he had really loved her garden, too. He didn’t do anything except admire it and can’t even recall if he admired it directly to her, but he certainly accepted compliments from so many people in town who said they often altered their driving path just to pass by. One young woman who had worked as an intern at the court house told him how her wedding bouquet came straight from his yard and that she had always felt guilty because she stole them in the middle of the night. He accepted her apology but didn’t tell her that this was something that had happened often through the years, so often in fact, that Martha was insulted when people did not take roses. Sometimes she would even tie a pair of scissors to a length of rope on the fence with a note that they pick respectfully and not touch this or that or the other, because so-and-so was planning to use those on the table of her debutante luncheon. It had not occurred to him how the garden had allowed Martha invitations to nearly every event in town and how she knew almost everyone as a result. It was something to admire and he has come to also admire the work that went into it. He has studied the layers and soil system and the constant pruning and tending that all those finicky fancy varieties required and marvels how she had done it all herself. She might send him or Ned down to the nursery with a list, but she was the one out there in dirty pedal pushers and white Keds (just like the pink ones Rachel Silverman wears). She wore a floppy yellow straw hat she had bought at Virginia Beach years before and what he has recently learned are called gauntlet gloves whose thick rubber protected her arms from the thorns.
He could imagine trying to have a garden, maybe even right outside his window there along the far side of the parking lot where he watches Rachel Silverman walk back and forth and where, unfortunately, he often sees the arrival of the funeral home car over at nursing. They try to be discreet but how impossible is that? Maybe some climbing roses on a trellis (like what he has marked on page 96 of one enormous catalog) would do the trick and he has found the names of many hardy climbers that he believes would take over in no time. Who knew there were roses with the growing habits and ethics of something like kudzu or bamboo, those types willing to run over whatever is in their path, like some people he has known, like himself from time to time he has to admit. And he has been just as prickly and unpredictable. What would Martha have said about that analogy? And what would Ned say? Ned would probably roll up his sleeves and show his scars; Ned can probably recall every prick and scratch of his life. Knock Outs, ramblers. Those would be Stanley’s kind of roses as opposed to the pedigreed tea varieties, which remain exactly as the pedigree dictates—this height and that weight—not unlike Martha who never changed in appearance except that couple of times when she got in her head that she needed to try to be someone other than herself and dressed up in some night garb that embarrassed him. He’s not sure why. Maybe it was because it wasn’t what he expected and as much as he liked to fantasize on the ramblers and the Knock Outs and things like men in a ring beating the shit out of one another, it really was not his nature either. He had wanted the pedigree and the guarantee of what he was getting, like the Labrador retrievers Sadie is always talking about and the one whose breeder had guaranteed there were not hip problems in that line. But no one could have guaranteed Martha’s health. No one saw it coming. God, he can’t go there, but what he can do is try to start a garden that might bring people out again. It would give some of these old shut-ins something to do. He could probably get old Toby out there digging and hauling manure and no telling who else might join in. Maybe Rachel Silverman. Maybe this would be something Ned could also take an interest in and would make him feel he’d finally done enough. Maybe he could grow some vegetables, too, or have a water garden with some koi. That was something he’d said he wanted to do when he retired and Martha as a result had given him books all about it for every birthday, Christmas, and anniversary. He is reaching for the water garden catalog that comes from up around where Rachel Silverman is from, filing a note in his head to ask her if she’s ever been to Paradise Gardens up in MassaTOOsetts. He hears a knock at his door and quickly stashes the catalog and turns instead to the pinup poster in his latest Wrestling magazine, a great big poster of Kurt Angle who the crowds always greet with YOU SUCK. That’s what he’ll say to whoever it is. Ned.
“You suck!” he says, and waves the picture at Ned who eases the door shut and comes and sits. “I thought you left already. You need more money or something?”
“No. I just hate thinking about you sitting around all day with nothing to do.” Ned looks a lot like Martha—the fair skin and big blue eyes—the expression of someone who would love to laugh or scream but seems afraid to. “Why don’t we go out, do something. We can go to lunch. We could go hit some golf balls.”
“Since when do you golf?” Stanley asks, and quickly adds, “I thought you were more into cooking and playing with yourself.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” Ned says. “I do like to cook, but I also like to golf and read and go to the movies.”
“What about date? Do you ever think about trying that?” Stanley leans forward and pushes all of his catalogs under his chair and pulls back out the Herb Alpert album cover. “You need to find someone like this—a creamy delight.”
“Dad.”
“Really. I’ve got just three words for you.” He raises his fist before he considers how this was Martha’s old joke with the kids. I have three words for you, she would say in an angry loud voice that was so foreign to her mouth, and then after much clamor and question, she would scream out in the same angry tone, I love you.
“Just three,” he says again. “Match dot com.”
“No.” Ned starts laughing. “God only knows what you know about Match dot com, but it’s not for me, not yet, at least.”
“Too good, huh?”
“No. Just not interested.”
“Why don’t you call your wife. She might at least be good for some sex.”
“Nice thought there, but she remarried,” Ned says, and Stanley can tell he’s getting to him, though Ned still doesn’t lash out with what would be so easy, how he has told Stanley that a million times, how he has told how she has a two-year-old and is pregnant with another. Ned cried when he told Stanley about it, maybe hoping for some sympathy, but Stanley was unable to reach his hand out and do anything. He couldn’t afford to blow his cover so all he said was good riddance, bet those are some ugly children. Now Stanley wants to say something that isn’t too mean but will still convince him to leave and stay gone at least until tomorrow.
“She wasn’t right for you,” he says. “Everything that happened was a blessing. Something to celebrate.”
Ned takes a deep breath, face red and fists curled. “It was not a blessing,” he says. “I don’t even know why I try.” He looks at the portrait of Martha as if she is the one he is talking to. Maybe he promised Martha that he would make amends, maybe this is all about some kind of deathbed promise and Ned hates it all as much as Stanley does.
“I don’t know why you do either,” Stanley says. “And she sure as hell doesn’t know.” He points to Martha. “She’s as dead as a doornail. Remember? You were there.”
“Nice. Thanks, Dad.” He stands and pulls an envelope from his back pocket and places two tickets to an upcoming wrestling event on the table beside Stanley’s magazine. “If you need someone to go with you, I’ll be glad to drive,” he says, no eye contact.
“You sat there and cried, remember? Cried like a two-year-old.”
“Yes. I remember,” Ned says, his voice a little louder, jaw clenched. “And I remember how you just sat there.” He leaves, letting the door slam behind him, and when Stanley is absolutely sure he’s gone he leans forward and cries. This plan is not working the way he had hoped it would.
Toby
WELCOME HOME, GIRL. Toby is relieved to get back in her own space, her little cottage filled with belongings she has known her whole life: her mother’s furniture and china and the big dark mantel clock that had belonged to her father’s father. She pulls out her yoga bolster and eye bag and leans back to do some deep breathing, each breath a way of ridding herself of all those bad feelings Marge Walker left her with. You think you’ve got your skin grown nice and thick and healthy and then it starts sliding right off of you, like a snake or a burn victim, leaving you tender and exposed.
Mr. Thornton Wilder once said how people who have lived in it for years know less about love than the child who has lost a dog yesterday, or something like that, and she knows it’s true. Just looking at poor Abby sitting there, she knows everyone is helpless to heal her; only time can do that. And that is a truth for everyone, even old large barge Marge. Everyone has a hurt. Everyone has a weakness and how humans can live with devoting time to rubbing salt in and on another, she will never ever know.
Ommmmm. Ommmmmm. She is playing a CD she bought at Walgreens called Global Soundings and there’s all kinds of things in there, thunder and waterfalls and birds and lions. She likes to close her eyes and just follow along just like she does when she visits Sadie. Poor Sadie. It does wonders for her to have guests posing for this and that and Toby faithfully shows up to ask for something whether she really feels like it or not. Some days she just likes to read and smoke cigarettes—her little secret. It’s why she won’t wear the nicotine patch but opts to keep smacking on Nicorette instead. Allowing herself to cheat and smoke every now and again is one great pleasure she has in life. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. She tries to do the kind of breathing so many of the people in her old yoga class did, breathing there at the back of their throats with what almost sounds like a growl. She has trouble doing it and always has, but she likes how it sounds kind of primal and wild in there just like what she hears on Global Soundings.
When she lies here like this with the sun warming her patch on the floor like a raft in the midst of the cool air-conditioning and the white noise of her system, her mind floats in and out and she is always amazed by what snippets it calls up that don’t have anything to do with anything. It’s almost like being haunted by little past moments and what would that mean? One of hers is of being in the parking lot of her high school on a day so hot the asphalt is soft under the tread of her shoes and the underside of the maple leaves look silver. This one has recurred many times, a free-floating little particle that is detached from any sense of a particular day or event. And another is from her childhood on the sidewalk in front of a grocery store near her home and it is gray winter light, again detached and meaningless like part of a memory looking for a home. There are so many memories looking for a home like when Toby and Sally lived together while they were studying to be teachers and how it was different from all the other friendships she knew. She tried to talk to Sally about it, but it was clear she wasn’t going to be able to do that and what had happened on those rare dark nights would remain there, like those free-floating snippets of memories, nothing to attach them to a particular story or cause or effect. They happened and yet they remained removed from life and all that came after. Sally got married to a man who provided her with a very comfortable and good life and she traveled all over creation and had two beautiful children. Toby is godmother to the oldest and to this day never forgets to acknowledge her: Anna Clarice Martin (now Tolar) of Mt. Pleasant who has a doctorate degree in history and now a baby of her own. Toby is almost certain that the Anna of her name came from her own Annabelle. Sally had always told her how much she loved her name even though Toby had said it had never ever fit her her whole life, like asking a muddy unruly child to step into a designer evening gown and satin high heels. Toby told Sally that she loved her and Sally always said she knew, that she loved her, too, and patted her hand the same as she did her German shepherd and, later, other women friends who went with her on her many trips. Toby went on the one to Greece and the one to Spain and they were both fun trips and both served the purpose to remind her of how distant and long ago whatever it had been was. Free-floating particles. Bits of life. She breathes in and she breathes out. It has occurred to her that someday she might ask Sally what she made of it all, if she ever thinks about it. These days so many young people experiment with who they are and it isn’t the big deal it was when she was young. But she suspects they are all still very vulnerable. After all love is love. Sometimes you just have to believe that love is love and accept that it manifests in many different ways. Accept the great fortune of seeing it at all.
Notes about: Martha Marie Anderson Stone
Born: September 5, 1935 Died: January 2, 2008, 11:30 a.m.
Fulton, North Carolina
It was a beautiful sunny day, clear and cold. At least twelve cardinals gathered near the birdfeeder outside her window, bright red creatures in the leafless oak. She loved her birdfeeders and her rose garden and she loved her box collection. She liked to hold and look at her special boxes, a collection of tiny Limoges containers with special dates and events scripted within. The top is broken on the one to commemorate her older son’s birth and she has glued where the body had split in two. “Ironic,” she said as she showed them. “Ned’s box is whole and Pete’s is broken.” She asked to see the one for her anniversary—white and gold alone on its own shelf—and pointed to where a tiny chip was missing. “But not bad,” she said. “Salvageable.”
She was a beautiful young woman—photos all over the house—May days and graduations, debutante parties and a large wedding portrait over the mantel in the living room. She loved to dance and she loved to garden. Her favorite time of the year was June when she opened her garden to graduates and debutantes and June brides to come and gather roses of all varieties for their little luncheons and brunches and teas. “There is nothing quite like an armload of roses,” she said. Her favorites were ‘Marchesa Bocchella’, pink and so fragrant, and the creamy white ‘Penelope’ with their large pink hips come fall. She liked telling the histories of the various roses to the young women who came seeking them. She told me to please come back in June and take some. “If I’m not here”—she paused, knowing the truth and letting it sink in—“Then you just help yourself. Tell Stanley and the boys I said so.”
Her sons were with her at the end, the whole handsome family pictured all over the house in photographs at various holidays and seasons like scenes from something like Ozzie and Harriet. Pete was making arrangements and writing things into a little leather-bound notebook he kept in the breast pocket of his jacket. He asked his mother what songs she wanted sung and were there scriptures she wanted read. Her look the first time he asked was one of shock, but then she came forward to answer: She wanted “Softly and Tenderly” and Psalm 23. “I know that’s not very original,” she said, “but neither is death.” She smiled, but none of them were able to respond; they were not looking at her.
The younger son, Ned, came and sat beside her, but he always put his head down near her hand and then stayed there, shoulders shaking as she patted and comforted him. Her husband had continued to talk to her like it was an ordinary day and she would be getting up any second now so that life could resume as normal.
Toward the end, she talked about where she grew up there in downtown Richmond, and she talked about her mother and father and her girlhood friends. She named rose after rose with a vivid description, calling their names like old friends: ‘Ferdinand Pichard’ and ‘Mabel Morrison’, ‘Baroness Rothschild’ and ‘White Wings’, until finally her husband told her it was okay to let go. Her husband did not want to tell her good-bye. He did not want to tell her that it was okay to go, but she waited until he did so.
“Our whole marriage has been about me making the decisions,” he said when asked to help her, to give her permission to go. “Do you really mean she can’t die without me telling her to?”
This was a house full of sadness—a silent sadness broken only by that flock of cardinals with their calls of cheer, cheer, cheer. He went to her bedside and she died within seconds. Roses and cardinals and fragile little boxes—these were her obvious, easiest, loves, and what will always hold her in my memory.
[from Joanna’s notebook]
Martha Stone
Her boys are here—such handsome boys—and Stanley. Stanley Jefferson Stone. She had their names painted in a little porcelain box when they got engaged. He could have married anyone but he married her and she carried a large bouquet of ‘Cecile Brunner’, “the sweetheart rose,” and trailing ivy and baby’s breath. He married her. Distances, distances, years make distances. She tried silly things, the negligee, the champagne, the fragrant petals shed from a ‘Charles de Mills’ leading to the bed where she waited in the sheer nylon gown in high heels he said cost too much. He shook his head and asked how much did they cost. They are in the back of the closet reminding her what not to do, what never to do again. He laughed and said she looked ridiculous and she cried the rest of the night. She was only thirty-five and that seemed so old then, but no, she was only thirty-five—the boys at a little sleepaway camp. She was trained in all the good ways to be a good wife and a hostess and a mother, but she wanted to be more, too. She wanted him to keep looking at her the way he did in those first weeks they met, the way he looked at her before the first night she undressed and waited there beneath the sheets, her heart pounding. When would she ever wear those shoes, he asked. Ah, come on now, he said. Jesus. He got quieter and kinder when he learned she was so sick, but that day, that day she stood in her new high heels and lovely sheer gown wishing she were somewhere else. There had been other boys, other paths. She had known many fine boys. Boys will be boys. She told him she didn’t like him to spank their boys, she didn’t believe in doing that, a lot of people don’t do that anymore. Please stop. Please stop. And he never liked her collection, he said look at all the clutter, look. Right here. Right here. Here, here, here. He swept the shelf clear and her beautiful collection she had collected her whole life, went everywhere. Right here! Right here! He puts his hand on her arm and tells her it’s okay for her to leave. She wants him to say stay, but he says it’s okay to leave now. You can leave, Martha, it’s okay. He says, Right here, right here, and here, here, here. He speaks her name because there are rose petals all over the room where she put them like it said to do in a book—here, here, here –he says and she opens her eyes to see.
C.J.
C.J. PICKS UP KURT and drives home, waving to the kid manning the window of the Dog House, a seventeen-year-old girl who makes her feel old with all her talk of vampires and how she’d love to get her own teeth filed sharp. I’m the old one in this picture, C.J. thinks, and it makes her laugh. That’s a first and by way of thinking about age and feeling old, she can’t stop thinking about that old shark, Rachel Silverman, out there talking to dead people like she was on a picnic or something. One of these nights, maybe C.J. will pull out the Ouija board and gather up a bunch of the old guys to have a séance. She bets they’d get a kick out of that and she’d probably hear some really crazy stuff. Hell, they talk crazy stuff anyway so it would just be a little extra. She once worked as a psychic so she can play all that stuff pretty good and truth is she does believe. In what? Who knows, but she does. It’s something she and Joanna talk about often, those times when you are so aware of not being alone, so aware of something big and beyond this life.
And truth is she really likes Rachel Silverman and wouldn’t mind hanging out with her a little or driving her around town, though God only knows what it is she thinks she’ll see. She seems smart enough and still in touch with reality so maybe she really could give some legal advice. C.J. has nothing to lose and maybe a little something to gain and what else does she have to do anyway other than hanging out with Joanna, which is fine but does get a little boring from time to time. Joanna is kind of settled in a way that’s probably good but still could use a little heat or excitement. Like maybe you’re scared of guys or scared of getting hurt, C.J. has told her. Maybe that’s why you never meet the right one.
C.J.’s friend, Sam Lowe, keeps trying to ask her out, but she has managed so far to keep that from actually happening; why risk f*cking up the one friend she has who is close to her own age and she certainly can’t tell him that technically she is seeing someone. She has been tempted to tell Joanna about a thousand times that she does have a boyfriend—or man-friend whatever—but keeps chickening out. She’s scared of making the wrong move and he reminds her often how they really have to be very careful and so her big worry right now is about tonight and what to wear and where to meet. All those cryptic little notes are driving her f*cking crazy and today—just like yesterday—there was nothing there at all. He’s a grown goddamned man. He like slices people open and saves them and shit, jump-starts their old bum hearts and he can’t even pick up a telephone or leave a real note on her door at home or at work to say what he needs to say? He made her promise that she would never ever call him and she has kept her promise. He says he has been leaving notes, but where are they? He accuses her of taking them and not responding; he said he didn’t like her f*cking with him. How stupid would that be? She’s the one who needs him. And how creepy is it anyway that he makes her walk that path out near where her mother is buried because anytime she is out there, it feels like she’s being watched, that her mother is out there watching, and now she’ll feel like those Carlyle people are watching and listening to her, too, which is really f*cked up, like who wants to star in her own horror show? She certainly doesn’t. She has had more than enough of her share. She even told him how she hates to go out there so it’s like he keeps testing her and how mean is it that? Maybe it made sense when they first got together, but that’s been a year and half ago. She loved how after they were together that first time that he immediately told his wife he thought she should give herself a break and have their house cleaned every week—maybe even twice a week—instead of every other and how he thought she should go to a spa somewhere or traveling with friends the way he knows women always like to do. Before C.J. could even blink she had a brand-new cell phone she didn’t even have to pay for and a television and nights of him sneaking her in and out of his house—a huge house with a Jacuzzi and stereo speakers in the ceiling of every room.
But it scares me to walk back there, she told him when he kept insisting they leave each other notes in the cemetery. I don’t like it.
You, he said, unzipping her jeans and reaching in, have no choice. She was six months pregnant and he had already given her a big roll of money for the month and that’s the way it went for quite a while. He is still angry at her for moving into Joanna’s little apartment over the Dog House and not needing him so much. He said that place was not nearly so discreet and it smelled bad, too, like onions and old grease. She thought he would be pleased, proud that she was working and making deals that were aboveboard and helping her to be independent. She got the job at Pine Haven all on her own by responding to a help-wanted ad and then auditioning by shampooing several residents and doing their nails. She thought he’d be pleased, but he had not been happy at all and everything has slowly gone downhill since, no matter how many times she has explained that she wants him to be proud of her. She wants to feel proud of herself.
And it really does scare her to walk back there. She doesn’t like the dark shade and the smell of the damp undergrowth. She doesn’t like the way people leave old dead flowers or, worse, ugly faded plastic ones junked up on the graves. She has had enough horror to deal with like that morning she kept yelling for her mother to get up only to finally give up and head on out to catch the school bus. When she got home and there were policemen there and everything, they asked didn’t she notice her mom wasn’t moving at all and she said that, yeah, she noticed, but it didn’t look any different from any other day for the past five or six or seven years.
Sometimes she tries to imagine her mom’s death, to walk through what happened that night with C.J. right there in the next room, painting her toenails and listening to Nirvana. Her high school art project was a sketch of Kurt Cobain and she played Lithium about a million times while she worked on getting his hands right. Sometimes she wants to give her mom the benefit of the doubt and call it accidental like that one really nice policewoman. That woman kept correcting anyone who said “suicide” like she was trailing behind with a broom, sweeping up the mess they were making. Not suicide. Accidental overdose.
“How about accident waiting to happen?” she had asked the woman, and stared until she looked away. C.J. was a master at the game of chicken and had been for years. She could stare into the worst face or situation and not flinch. The woman was being nice to her and she would have loved to have uncurled her fists and accepted that, but she couldn’t; it had been way too long. The woman wanted to open the exit door so C.J. wouldn’t be trapped and locked in with the great legacy of suicide as all the shrinks and educated cops like to call it. She has thought of that term legacy of suicide so often. Plenty of people outlive it and when they do, they get younger like instantly being given the extra years they might have lost, like passing go and getting two hundred bucks. The thought of Monopoly makes her think of that kid Abby who is always hanging out at Pine Haven. She told how her dog ate the race car, and when it came out the other end, her dad boiled it and put it back in the box. Her dad is that old friend of Joanna’s who once hit on C.J. and is married to a total bitch who C.J. is convinced tried to kill the kid’s dog. Sam Lowe told her all about it, this woman in a tight miniskirt dragging in a dog and demanding that he put it to sleep on the spot. She said she would pay what was owed plus a huge tip. “Bless her heart,” she said, and patted the dog’s head. “She went completely mad and they say will likely do it again.” He took the money and when she turned to leave—maybe she didn’t know she could have demanded to watch—he asked if she wanted her cremated for pickup, but she said that would be way too painful. “It’s better this way,” she said. “The sooner the better, okay?”
He assured her that he would do it as soon as she left and then he sat there and kept putting it off until the end of the day when the dog had fallen asleep with her little pointed nose wedged up beside his foot. “There was nothing wrong with her,” he said. “She’s a great little dog so I took her home. What’s one more?” He had already told her how he had grown up with many dogs—that his dad was known for taking in strays and naming them after pirates. “My dad is known as a dog-collecting weirdo who lived in a trailer in what became a pricey subdivision,” Sam said. “His other claim to fame is being the son of a man who blew his head off when he was only like forty years old or something. Nice, huh?”
It was that story that had gotten C.J.’s interest and they have been friends ever since. She told him all about her own mother and how all she heard at school and from the foster parents who stepped in her senior year of high school was about her goddamned legacy like she might have been in line for the f*cking throne or something. Sam said that when his dad got beyond the age of the suicide, it was kind of like he was born again. “Not religious stuff,” he said. “I mean it was like he seemed younger and was willing to do things he hadn’t ever done. Took my mom on a trip out west, encouraged her to go back to school. Finally built a real house at the beach like he’d always dreamed of doing.”
C.J. had never even thought of that before, how wonderful it would feel to get past the age her mother was—only thirty-six—and in a little over ten years, she would be there. Kurt would be in junior high and it would feel like a whole new life. It could be a whole brand-new life. When she said this to Sam, he turned and hugged her, squeezing so tight she could feel his heart beating, smell the detergent of his clean shirt. She knows that Sam really does like her and he likes Kurt, too, but he seems so young to her. That’s the difference in being a kid with a Mom and Dad who give a shit. It keeps a person younger. He went to college and always knew he would. Now he hopes to go to vet school in another year or so after he takes a few courses and gets his test scores up. He hopes all kinds of things and starts lots of sentences that way. I hope I’m right about this little dog. I hope Kurt will someday know how hard you work and how much you love him. I hope you’ll let me help you get that muffler fixed or at least go to a friend of mine to look at it. I hope we will always be good friends. She would like to tell him that she hopes all of that, too. She hopes for some part of herself to be everything he could ever hope to find in a woman. You deserve that, she wants to tell him. You deserve every good thing this life can give you.
And now, even though she worries about giving him the wrong idea, she has a flyer that she plans to take out to him tomorrow, maybe while she’s driving Rachel Silverman around. It’s a picture of Abby’s dog, Dollbaby, who without a doubt looks just like the one he rescued, and no doubt about it, the woman Sam described sounds a whole lot like Abby’s bitch of a mom.
This is the kind of thing C.J. keeps in her journal in the safe. She has written how she plans to resurrect Dollbaby and leave her right out there on the front porch of their house. Of course she also wrote about that time the weird magician dad came on to her after a party she worked, complimenting her tattoos and wanting her to get into his truck. He’s not bad-looking, really, for an old guy—when he’s not drunk that is—but because C.J. was used to seeing his kid come and go, it changed the whole picture so she couldn’t think of him as just another of those jerks who can’t keep it zipped. Instead he was somebody’s dad who couldn’t keep it zipped. But because of the way Joanna obviously feels about him, C.J. has decided to cut the guy some slack and give him a break; blame it on alcohol as so many people do. Blame it on being married to a bitch, as so many people do. He’s certainly not who Joanna thinks he is or that’s C.J.’s opinion and she thinks Joanna can do a whole lot better and hopes that she will. Occasionally, when she has allowed herself to dream and imagine a secure life with someone like Mr. Jump-Start the Heart, she has immediately thought about how she could maybe introduce Joanna to somebody really cool who is smart and deserving of her. She likes to imagine that her life will be secure and happy, and that she will be someone Kurt is proud of, that he will be a boy like Sadie’s son, happy and successful in his own life but never for a minute forgetting about her.
The phone rings and she picks up to a distant buzzing and finally, on her third hello, he says, Eight p.m. at Esther Cohen’s place. He says, And you better not be late this time, and hangs up. She dreads the walk, but there’s no other way. Kurt is in his bouncy chair and grins when she looks his way. Kurt has his father’s eyes and maybe that is why she has such a hard time saying no these days. She goes in the bathroom and jots a little note in her journal: Meeting at 8 p.m. It sounds like he’s mad, but a lot of nights have started out this way only to end with him being really sweet and offering something extra for Kurt. There’s so much she wants Kurt to have and maybe it’s time to ask, a savings account or something. Kurt will need a lot of things in this life. He will need an education and the right clothes, a good dog and summer camp. Someday he will need a car.
Even if he ever decides that he doesn’t want her anymore, he has to help Kurt. All of this is about Kurt, though there is a part of her that still wishes for something more. It’s hard not to wish for just a little bit more.