Winter, and he’s sitting in Addie’s apartment.
She’s out of coffee, she tells him, but she can make hot chocolate.
“Sure,” he says. “Hot chocolate would be good.”
She goes to put the kettle on.
Her rooms have flowered wallpaper and everything smells like mothballs. She is like an old lady, except she is young. Thirty-six, thirty-seven? No children, no husband, no boyfriend, according to Claree. She has lived in this apartment forever, and worked in the bookstore downstairs. Maybe she feels safe here. Maybe, for her, safe is enough.
“I’m glad you came,” she says, setting their mugs on coasters.
“You are?” He looks at her. “Have you cut your hair?”
“No.”
“You look different.”
“So do you.”
They sip their hot chocolates. All her furniture has slipcovers.
She says, “You didn’t drive all the way to Greensboro just to see me.”
“No.” He tells her about his meeting. “I would have dropped by sooner,” he says. She asks about the program. How does it work? What do they do at meetings? What are the steps?
It isn’t her hair, he realizes. It’s her eyes that are different. They aren’t hard when she looks at him. Careful, but not hard.
“What was it like to stop?” she says. “Do you miss it?”
“Sure,” he says. “It’s like giving up anything you love.”
“Oh,” she says. Her voice, too. There’s something new in her voice, something that doesn’t dismiss him. “Where are you now?” she says. “Which step?”
“The fourth. I’m taking a personal inventory. Listing good and bad things about myself. Guess which list is longer.”
She stares at him, almost smiles. “Remember the time you tried to smoke your pencil?”
“My pencil?”
“Your golf pencil. It was in your cigarette pocket and you pulled it out and stuck it in your mouth and told Sam to light it. And got mad when it wouldn’t draw.”
He forces a laugh. In her way she is being kind. This can’t be the worst thing she remembers.
“Did you need help with the good list?” she says.
“That’s not why I came.” He’s a little irritated — with himself or her, he couldn’t say. He finishes his hot chocolate, which is no longer hot.
“You have good taste in clothes,” she says. “You’ve always been a snappy dresser.”
“Thanks.” He’s wearing his navy sweater and brown wool slacks, the zip-up boots.
“You cook. You always made us breakfast on school days — bacon and eggs. Saturdays you grilled chicken. You made your own barbecue sauce.”
He wants to say, Grilling out isn’t something you get credit for.
“You had your picture on a billboard,” she says.
“It embarrassed you.”
“Everything embarrassed me.”
“I’m sorry,” he says.
She shrugs.
“No,” he says. “Listen to me, Addie. I don’t know how to make amends. I’m not that far along yet. But I want you to know I’m sorry.”
“You took us for ice cream on Sundays,” she says.
Sundays had been his sober days. He remembers hot afternoons in the Tastee Freez parking lot, Addie and Sam in the back seat, their sticky cones dripping on the vinyl, Claree with her hot fudge sundae — no nuts — eating with her tiny spoon as slowly as she could, making hers last long after he’d wolfed down his banana split.
“You can stop now,” he says. “This is starting to feel like a eulogy.”
It will happen in the spring. At work, at his gray metal desk. He’ll open his bottom drawer, take out the lunch Claree has packed for him, a meatloaf sandwich with lettuce and mustard, and feel a stab of pain in his shoulder. At first he won’t want to believe what’s happening, but he will know. The body knows. He will reach for the picture on his desk, an old family snapshot Cicero took with his Brownie camera. Blurry — Cicero’s pictures always came out blurry. In the picture they’re on the porch, the four of them: Addie in her puffy dress, Bryce holding Sam in his baby blanket, Claree leaning on Bryce’s arm, looking up at him, her face young and trusting.
The pain will dart into his chest. He won’t be ready, but he will close his eyes anyway and force a quick prayer, Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, knowing as he prays that there are too many unchangeable things and not enough time to accept them all, even if he had all the time in the world.
“You bought us good shoes,” Addie says. She’s staring at his boots, making him glad he polished them before coming over. “You believed in good shoes.”
Dear Byrd,
I wish you could know my mother, your grandmother.
When my father died, she insisted on being the one to prepare his body for the viewing. She didn’t think he would trust anyone else. I took her to the funeral home, to a little room in the basement that reeked of formaldehyde despite exhaust fans that roared so hard they made our teeth chatter. My father was laid out on a table in the suit she’d chosen, his charcoal double-breasted, with a gray shirt and pink necktie. His mouth was set in a mostly straight line except for the very corner, which turned up in what looked like the beginning of a smile, like he’d just remembered a joke. My mother took off his glasses, polished them and put them back on. She smoothed makeup over the pink blotches on his face. She combed Grecian Formula into his hair and dabbed cologne behind his ears — Old Spice from the set I’d given him for his birthday. Then she stood back.
“He looks nice, doesn’t he?” she said. “Dignified.”
I tried to see what she saw, another version of my father — young, handsome, hopeful.
My mother came over and slipped her arm around my waist. Her arm weighed nothing. “You know,” she said, “he wanted to be different. We both did.”
Now that she is alone I try to visit as often as I can. She still lives in the house I grew up in, though she’s made some changes. New vinyl siding — she wanted something she could clean with a garden hose. A new azalea garden with red and pink bushes given to her when my father died. She has taken down the sweet gum tree that used to shade the driveway, the tree my brother once crashed into on his silver Huffy, his first ten-speed. I remember how he came flying down the hill on School Street, turned too wide, jumped the curb, hit the tree, and was thrown into the yard. I remember the whump when he landed. He didn’t know anyone at first; he didn’t recognize anything except his bike. He asked if it was damaged. I remember he said “damaged” because it sounded wrong, too old for a nine-year-old boy with blood and dirt in his mouth.
On the sweet gum stump there’s now a cast-iron cauldron brimming over with petunias, my mother’s latest touch. She is redecorating her life — new flowers, new sunshine, clean new siding. Her kitchen cabinets are freshly painted; the room is brighter now. She insists on cooking when I visit and never lets me take her out. She never stops being the mother. She always pays for my gas. As soon as I arrived today, she wrote me a check for twenty dollars. You should see her penmanship. She makes her letters exactly as she was taught. Her checks are too beautiful to cash. I carry them around until she calls me complaining that she can’t balance her checkbook.