was her first job after she left my father, in a congressman’s office. The Doyles. That’s who they were. Liz and Pat. They hadn’t been married then.
‘She fixed us up, you know. She told Pat that I wanted him to ask me out. And she told me he was going to, even though he’d never said such a thing. The cheek! And here we are.’ She takes my hand. ‘We’re so sorry, Casey. We were devastated to hear. Just devastated. We were in Vero, or we would have been at the service.’
I nod. If I’d had some warning I might be able to handle it better, but this is a surprise attack. I nod again.
‘We wanted to write you, but we didn’t know where on the globe you were at that point. And then we ran into Ezra, who’d heard you were back here and at Iris!’ She puts a warm hand on my arm. ‘I’ve upset you.’
I shake my head, but my face betrays me and my eyebrows go all funny.
‘She gave me this necklace.’
Of course she did.
‘Excuse me,’ the man behind them says, waving his credit card.
I nod to him and to everyone who stops me on my way back to the wait station. I unroll a place setting from the lunch bin and put my face in the napkin as I print out the check.
‘Get a grip, will you,’ Dana says, but she puts the slip on a tray with chocolates and brings it out to my table for me.
I push through the swinging door into the kitchen. The cooks are busy, their backs to me and to the food that’s waiting for me under the heat lamp. I go into the walk-in. I stand in the dry cold, looking at the dairy shelves in back, the bricks of butter wrapped in wax paper and cartons of heavy cream. Cases of eggs. I breathe. I look down at my hand. Caleb let me have her ring. She wore it my whole life, a sapphire and two small diamonds. The sky and the stars we called it when I was little. Her friend Janet had thought to take it off her finger afterward. My hand looks like hers when I wear it. I can do this, I say to the glinting blue-black eye. And I go out to take the order of Liz and Pat Doyle.
When I bring their pinot grigios and their apps they’re still somber with me, but by the time their swordfish and risotto comes out Pat is talking animatedly, using words I don’t understand like equities and the Shiller PE, and by coffee they’re chuckling about someone named Marvin doing the hustle at their daughter’s wedding and have nearly forgotten they know me at all. They leave me their business cards, though, on the tray with their merchant receipt and cash tip. Sixteen percent. They both own their own businesses. Neither of them works in politics anymore.
Table by table, people vanish, leaving behind their soiled napkins and lipstick markings. The tablecloths are disheveled and crusted, wine bottles turned upside down in their watery holders, a sea of glasses and coffee cups and smeared dessert plates. Everything left for someone else to clean up. We work slowly now, getting the room and the deck back in order. Only Yasmin and Omar, who have dates waiting for them at the bar, are still moving quickly.
The last thing is drying glasses and rolling more silverware for lunch. Alejandro brings out the steaming green racks of glasses. At first they’re too hot to touch without a cloth. Omar and I do the roll-ups: napkin folded into a triangle, spoon on top of fork on top of knife laid alongside the long edge, two side points folded in then everything rolled to the pointed tip. Craig is laughing with Omar’s skinny date at the bar, so he’s rolling them faster and faster. We have to have a hundred of them in the bin before we can leave.
By the time I get on my bike, it’s nearly one in the morning. My body is depleted. The three miles to my potting shed feels far away.
The dark, the heat, the few people paired up on the sidewalks. The river and the moon’s quivering reflection. You taste like the moon, Luke said out in that field in the Berkshires. Fucking poet. On the path a few people are holding hands, drinking from bottles, lying in the grass because they can’t see all the green goose poop. He took me unawares. I didn’t have time to defend myself.
In the morning I ache for my mother. But late at night it is Luke I mourn for.
The BU Bridge is empty, silent. I arc up and over the water. There’s a tightness, a rasp in my breathing, but I do not cry. I sing ‘Psycho Killer’ in honor of Mary Hand. I reach Adam’s driveway, and I have not wept. This is a first. I roll my bike into the garage. This is a small victory.
Two past-due notices and a wedding invitation have been slipped under my door. A message is flashing on my machine. My blood leaps. Old reflex. It’s not him. It’s not him, I tell myself, but my heart slams anyway. I hit Play.
‘Hey.’ Pause. Long breath like a roll of thunder into the receiver.
It’s him.
My mother died six weeks before I went to Red Barn. I called to ask if I could change the dates, if I could come in the fall or next winter. The man who answered gave me his deepest sympathies but told me I’d been offered the longest artist’s residency they had. Eight weeks. April 23 to June 17. The Red Barn calendar, he said, was inalterable.
A long silence spread between us.
‘Are you calling to forfeit your spot?’ he asked.
The last time I’d used the word ‘forfeit’ must have been at recess in fourth grade. If you show your teeth or tongue, you must pay a forfeit.
‘No, I don’t want to forfeit.’
I flew from Bend to Boston and took a bus to Burrillville, Rhode Island. Early spring. New England. I stepped off the bus and smelled my childhood, smelled the thawing earth in our yard and the daffodils at the end of the driveway. I was given a dorm room to sleep in and a cabin to work in, and when I stood on the porch of my cabin the first morning I remembered my mother’s fawn-colored jacket with the white wool cuffs and collar and the smell of her wintergreen Life Savers in the left zip pocket. I heard her say my name, my old name, Camila, that only she called me. I felt the slippery seat in her blue Mustang, cold through my tights.
At Red Barn, my mother was both dead and resurrected.
In the dining room hung a framed letter from Somerset Maugham, who’d been one of the early fellows there.
‘Red Barn is a place out of time,’ he’d written in the letter.
Luke was tall and scrawny, like one of my brother’s goofy friends from middle school. Before he was anything else, he was familiar.
It started the fourth night I was there. One of the fellows was showing her film in the art shed. I’d gotten there too late for a seat and stood in back. Luke came in a few minutes later. Onscreen, a power tool was drilling a screw into a raw egg. In very slow motion.
‘What’d I miss?’ he said in a fake whisper. ‘What’d I miss?’
He slipped in behind me. I’d been seated at his table once for dinner—there was a new seating chart for dinner every night—and passed him in the hallways of the farmhouse a few times. I hadn’t thought much. I wasn’t registering other people well at that point. Nor was I writing. I had eight weeks to devote to my novel, but I couldn’t focus. The cabin I’d been given had a funny smell. My heart beat too fast and under my skin it felt mealy, like an old apple. I wanted to sleep, but I was scared of dreaming. In my dreams my mother was never herself. Something was always off. She was too pale or too bloated or wearing
