I looked at those pictures on her bookcase and figured I did a good job of picking out her mother and her father and her brother, the one in the white frame with his blond, well-groomed wife and their two impeccable children. It was the man in the gold frame I couldn’t place — the one who was standing beside a small plane, leaning on its wing with a cigarette in one hand. I wanted to know who he was but I didn’t want to know the story. There had to be a story behind that picture, and why she chose brown leather, and why she doesn’t move that dying fig into more light, and how she ended up here, without anyone in her life but a bunch a patients who only need her twice a year when they get a runny nose or find a lump.
We sat on her couch and drank scotch and soda and she asked me what I was going to do about the midnight rambler. Was I getting past the conventional crap that says I have to have him all to myself, like the rest of the normal world? That he has to call me three days before he wants to see me, not eleven at night, and promise me exclusivity on his penis and his heart.
Had I gotten past all that, she wanted to know. Could I close my ears to the rest of it, to what I’m supposed to do?
Sure, sure I have, I said, as I chugged my drink and couldn’t figure out why I said I’d have soda, which I’ve never liked and which sits in my stomach, burning, bubbling, until it works its way back up and settles in my chest — carbonated rain against my bones Like that man in the picture, the one in the small gold frame on the bookcase, fizzing and spitting at me from behind a piece of glass. Staring at me. Shaking his head in between drags on his cigarette, and throwing looks of disappointment my way.
I left Mary-Beth’s apartment and walked home, after that.
Then I drove out to Johnny Marks’s sister’s farm.
I stopped a short distance before the house, pulled over, and parked in front of the faces he carved in the fence along the road. They were still there, a lighter shade of grey.
Of course.
Think of all the suns that have risen since then, casting fading rays of hope on the bumps and grooves he left behind. The boundaries we didn’t cross still stand and get splashed by passing cars after a heavy rain has filled the potholes on the road, their wooden eyes never blinking in response.
Dead wood.
That doesn’t flinch.
Or ever move.
Like I did, from the kitchen to the pantry, when Gran went upstairs to the bathroom and came back down and returned to the rocker on the porch and demanded to know what had happened to her mother’s ring.
She had a right to know.
She had given it to my mother, her eldest daughter, years before, and never spoke of it again, until this time. She wanted to see it.
Suddenly.
Suddenly, it was the most important thing in the world, the only thing her failing mind could focus on. The ring. The ring. That fucking, fucking ring.
I didn’t tell Johnny Marks about the ring.
I told him Hal begged me not to leave.
With his eyes.
His silent, silent eyes.
I told Johnny I owed Hal another chance.
That I had an obligation.
I’d made a promise.
To be there.
I wrote it all down and mailed it in a brown package along with that shirt I embroidered for him. That jean shirt with the pearl buttons. I sewed tall blades of grass and grey split-rail fences and simple outlines of old faces. Half-faces, with one eye, part of a nose, half a mouth, carefully placing them on the front and back of the shirt just below the collar. I added a red barn and a chair and some birds on a wire just before they leapt into the future.
I folded it properly, the way my mother taught me, and tucked the note I scribbled one morning when Hal was out into the pocket, with a little hanging out over the top so Johnny wouldn’t miss it.
And I wondered if it would send him flying up the driveway to get me.
To save me from myself. Or convince him I wasn’t capable of leaving, of trusting what we had.
I kept waiting for Johnny to tell me to leave, even though he said he’d never say it, wouldn’t tell me what to do, wouldn’t tell me — that I should hear it in the way we made love that year, but all I heard was silence when I got out of bed at his sister’s house to go to the bathroom.
I couldn’t hear my feet on the floor when I got up, after we spent the afternoon loving and talking and sleeping for minutes here and there until it woke us up for more, before I had to go.
I couldn’t hear my feet, or feel them on the carpet at the end of the bed. On the plank boards in the hallway, painted deep red, bleeding love at my feet.
I took that jean shirt out on the porch after I made another pot of tea and sat beside my mother to finish what I’d started.
“That looks like a man’s shirt,” Gran said.
“It is,” I answered.
“You mean to tell me, Hal’s going to walk around with whatever it is you’ve got on there?”
“It’s a lovely shirt,” Aunt Viv said.
“It’s a silly shirt,” Gran snapped back. “What man would wear a bunch of birds, and, and — what is that? Is that a fence? My God, what man is going to wear a fence embroidered on his chest?”
“Mother,” Aunt Ruth piped in, “just because you can’t imagine something doesn’t mean it’s bad.”
“I never heard of such a silly thing. Birds and fences on a man’s shirt. A tablecloth or a pillow, yes. But a man’s shirt?”
A car went by, breaking the conversation with the sound of shifting gravel. I looked up and saw the haze left behind by speed and dust, then continued sewing the beaks on birds, swatting flies that tickled me with their nothing legs as they ran across my arms.
1 felt a sense of urgency With finishing the shirt. With getting home. With getting to the next moment. It sat in my gut, pounding, as though my heart had sunk to my navel and was banging from the inside like a growing child, restless, uncertain, torn between the dark safety of the womb and the enticing warmth of light on the other side.
His sister was coming home, Johnny said, and it was time for him to go soon, back to Toronto, maybe, or north to Sault St. Marie. He might go there, he said, and spend some time at a cabin in the woods, outside of town, he wasn’t sure. He stared at me from the pillar on his sister’s porch, which he leaned against, with one leg stretched in front of him, the other dangling over the side, his eyes on me, on what I wasn’t saying.
I never told him how Aunt Viv took his shirt out of my hands and showed me how to make tulip stitches, which she placed with precision along the split-rail fences, with green stems and red petals. How Gran grew impatient over the failure of my mother to produce the ring. How Aunt Ruth kept trying to change the subject, pulling out paint swatches from her purse, asking us what we thought of lavender for the hallway.
Any one of them could have pawned it, Gran said. Every one of her daughters had a motive, she pointed out, then went down the list. Aunt Viv wanted to go to Italy. Aunt Ruth had put too many paint and wallpaper and new linen purchases on her credit cards. My mother had to replace the roof on the house, which had started leaking and was losing shingles every time the wind picked up.
Aunt Viv opened a bottle of cherry wine. My mother got some glasses. Aunt Ruth poured and took a glass out to my father who was still puttering in the drive shed. I stayed quiet in my corner, tying off the threads with three or four knots, obsessed about the pictures of our story staying in their proper