The cat leapt from the floor to the bed. “There you are. How’s my Merlin?” said my mother.
I scratched his back, and he lowered his chin and raised his tail, and his fur shedded away in tufts.
The day before Terry and I left North Carolina, we drove into Asheville and shopped for fresh fruit and vegetables. The grocery store had decent fish, and I bought sole. My sister and I had finally set in place the health-care and legal provisions required for our mother’s care. We’d scored a victory of sorts. Our mother had suggested a willingness to consider radiation. It looked as if the oil spilled beneath her house would be cleaned up after all. Terry and I loaded the car with supplies, and, on our way home to Black Mountain, we listened to a radio show playing field recordings of Appalachian music — old, plaintive ballads describing betrayal, repentance, redemption, loss in love, alcoholism, and conversations with the devil. These days, it is not merely the subject matter, familiar and disturbing, that makes this music of Tennessee and the Carolinas difficult for me to bear. Rather, it is something heard in the singing, that discernibly nasal, heavily accented, prayerful quality of voice — the voice of the region in which my mother and her family had been born — that can cause me to reach out and shut the music off. That day with my sister, I listened with something like joy. I cannot speak for Terry, but I believe that she, too, heard, rising up from the hissing, popping shellac, the cadences and the rhythms and the slightly downward-falling inflections that occur, in milder form, in our own voices.
We got back to the house and unloaded the groceries into the kitchen. It was a gorgeous, bright day on its way to ending. As on previous days, I was wearing my version of my father’s clothes. Our mother was dressed and moving about. I offered to cook. Dinner was simple. There was the fish, simmered in a pan on top of the stove. There was asparagus. Rice. A salad. Glasses filled with iced tea. While I made dinner, my mother and my sister sat at the old, dinged-up wooden table that had been, during the years when Terry and I were growing up, our family’s dining-room table. This table had been bought by my father and the woman for whom, back when Terry and I were five and six years old, he had left my mother. Now it was here.
And in my mother’s living room, stored in a plastic urn inside a cardboard box, our grandmother’s ashes rested on a shelf.
What I am trying to say is that, in a way, we were pretty much all present, in one form or another, in my mother’s house that night — all of us except our mother’s father.
But then he got invited, too. My mother invited him. I remember this with clarity, because it was astonishing to hear, astonishing, as well, to wonder, as I have over the years since, about the truth regarding her father’s will, though I realize that I will probably never know the truth, and must only imagine my mother in the days immediately following her own mother’s death, my mother sick and with the incipient awareness, surely, of the severity of her illness. I see her collecting my grandmother’s ashes from the undertaker, bringing the ashes home and placing them on the shelf, maybe only then pulling the old paperwork from a box or a file, and making her way up the hill to the lawyer’s office in town. I wonder, imagining such scenes, what had led me so deliberately to pursue, in my thoughts and in my actions, the idea of my mother as a thief, when, just as likely, she was no thief, merely a woman who was sick and alone and scared and grieving, hoping for a better life, one that was not ever going to come, not in this world.
That evening at the dinner table, my mother said, “I remember. I remember. There was another lawyer. Granddaddy said that there was a lawyer in Asheville.”
I recall that the sun was setting. The light outside the partly curtained window above the kitchen sink, the window facing west, with a view of trees, had been growing dark. I turned and looked at my mother. Maybe I was holding a spatula or the pan of cooking fish.
She went on, “What was his name? What was it?” Then she pronounced the name. It was the name of the man with whom I’d spoken a day or two before, whose phone number I’d got out of the phone book, the man my grandfather had contacted about a trust.
She said, “Kids, I’m going to make things right. I’m going to make things right.”
At that point dinner was ready. I plated up, and we gathered around the table, just the three of us — or the six of us, or however many of us were, in body or in spirit, present in that room — and, as I recall, someone said about the fish, “This is good,” and I said a silent prayer that my mother would get well and not die, not ever die, and the next day my sister and I got in the rental car and fastened our seat belts and headed up the hill toward the highway. We drove east across the mountains. Near Lake Lure, we stopped at a roadside stand, where I bought sourwood honey in a mason jar that I tossed into my suitcase. We continued out of the mountains, up and down the foothills, and through rolling farmland toward Charlotte. At the airport, Terry and I dropped off the car and boarded a courtesy bus that took us to the terminal. I checked my suitcase, and, when the time came, she and I walked off down the long concourses leading to our different gates. My sister went one way and I went another.
That night when I got to my apartment I discovered that the honey jar had been smashed to pieces during the flight. Honey and shattered glass were everywhere.
PART VI
At the time when I began trying to draw my father into literary conversations, we were living in a Miami tract development that featured homes whose exteriors evoked a variety of architectural schools. Most were Modernist; several looked like Modernist churches. Ours had a pale green, Bauhaus-style façade, and was settled into an unpruned hammock of overhanging trees and dense, humid-looking flora that appeared as if it might one day advance across the narrow yard and engulf the house. It didn’t matter that the driveway ended in a busy road, or that neighbors were close. A jungle enclosed us. You couldn’t see in, and you couldn’t see out.
The house itself was a single-story rectangle with bedrooms taking up the eastern half, a thin strip of kitchen in the middle, and, looking toward the end opposite the bedrooms, a dining area and a small sunken living room. Sliding glass doors opened from the dining and living rooms onto a screened-in patio and pool out back. My sister and I spent a lot of time splashing in the water, then running into the air-conditioned house for something cold to drink. It was my job, once a week or so, to skim debris off the pool’s surface, vacuum the bottom, and, using a little plastic test kit, check the chlorine. Caring for the pool was dispiriting. The patio, like the property’s front and sides, was surrounded by hardwoods and tall pines, whose branches, arcing overhead, shed decomposing leaves, brown needles, and powdering bark that filtered through the screen and made a scum on the water. The trees blocked much of the day’s light, leaving the pool shaded during the long subtropical afternoons. These factors may have contributed to the algal buildup around the tiles marking the waterline. Algae showed on the bottom, too, and in faintly discoloring streaks that curled down the deep end’s walls. I periodically went at the algae with brushes and chemicals picked up at the pool-supply store by my father on his way home from teaching. We moved into that house in 1972. During the year of our residency there, the algae crept out of the pool and claimed sections of patio, darkly filling the veins and cracks that gave texture to the concrete. I remember dragging aside porch chairs and our glass-topped table, pouring acid over the contaminated spots, then hosing everything down. Sometimes on weekend mornings I got up early and swam a mile’s worth of laps — one of many things I did in solitude — while my parents and sister slept. On afternoons after school, I could often be found lying facedown in the water, staring through a face mask at the light show of refracting shadows cast across the surface by passing clouds and windblown treetops. In anticipation of one day getting scuba certification, I’d begun collecting gear, a piece at a time. I had a tank and a secondhand regulator, and every now and then I’d buckle these on, fasten a weight belt around my waist, plunge into the pool, and sink to the bottom, where, six feet under, I’d sit, breathing.