The vinyl creases of the booth resembled the lines in my grandmother’s palm. Her wrinkle’s deep, free rivers winding and burrowing their way from the droop of her ears to her once prominent but now weathered chin to the rounded edges of her mouth to the cliffs of her forward brow. A history. Our history. Those wrinkles bore our history, told of comedies and tragedies, of births and deaths, of hits and hits harder. A history hid itself between each crevice of those wrinkles that were once smooth, that shone and felt of marble in her twenties and thirties, now lay themselves as witnesses and storytellers between the two coffee cups. Who are the witnesses? Who tells the story? Two children and two husbands dead. A crippled daughter in crippled marriage. The ashtrays at Smitty’s Café had not been emptied from the night’s last shift. The smell of bacon and old cigarettes wrestled with a honeyed Sarah Vaughn’s “September Song” on the local station.
He imagined that the ninety-first birthday left little to be desired but he made his way north for her party. Simple. A dinner and a cake. But something had been forgotten. A trip to the IGA for the candles and she insisted she go with him. They lopped down the walk toward the store where his brother broke his ankle after a hard shove. He turned back to look through the large picture window of the tiny ranch house. The old television antenna they climbed to conquer the roof and the neighborhood, its masthead sacrificed to cable, loomed still. The cherry tree had long ago died and the brick façade yielded to an inch of space between the house and its own weight. She had kept up the perennials—lavender and yarrow, day lilies and columbine—and the annuals—black-eyed susan and impatiens, petunias and marigolds—but they had long ago given way to a plain of dandelions. No doubt a decline of spirit, a shift in philosophy about her beginning and her end. The robust rose bushes that once peaked against the side of the house were thorny stumps that resembled the upturned hand of a skeleton. The broad and majestic silver maples along the rough-hewn berm had long been removed to make way for the garish though neat cement curbs. The shade had provided respite from the sun and the sun provided too much.
They left the IGA holding hands. She had gripped his hand too tightly as a child on the night walks they had taken and that had not changed now. Snatching him back from the curb and from a noise. Safe. Older, he had laughed about it. Just beyond the IGA was Smitty’s Café. Looking at the café front she inhaled deeply and stopped. This café dredged arthritic memories from every part of her body. It was here that she sat some sixty years ago. They entered and sat. Smitty’s had witnessed and told its own history. Proposals and rejections. Hellos and goodbyes. Smitty’s had forced the hands of management and unions over banana cream pie and had softened the break up of the “Marys and Tommys” of the town. It had overheard truths and half-truths that could never be uttered. A blind but eager listener. Smitty’s had become a kind of secular confessional.
1971. She and Neal had sat with their only daughter. They offered her an envelope of cash and papers to sign. Her son had lost his life, the lake taking every last one of those daring and beautiful twenty-one years. And she had already lost one child at birth. Her body throbbed for another child, her daughter’s child. How dare her daughter fashion herself a mother. She at the County Beauty Academy still wanting to be a girl, still wanting the independence that being eighteen gave her. The baby’s father a shoeless loser. They both prodded and they both jabbed. Please say yes with our eyes open she thought. (Please say yes with our eyes closed.) Her daughter answered.
2007. She wanted this admission to be her final confession and sought a reprieve from the boy—the man—that sat in front of her. And the moment had arrived. The moment of truth she sought. The moment of release and reverence for a misinterpreted history. The blinds were half open. The coffee cooled. The moment passed and folded. She smiled. He smiled. She took his hand and squeezed. Safe.
