“Where are you from?” I venture.
“I’m from a little town in the Rockies. But now I live on a farm near Lake Michigan.”
“By yourself?” I wonder aloud.
“More or less. I have some friends who kind of look after me. Family friends.” She looks down at her hands and there’s a long pause. “They are in a snit with me about this trip. I drove all the way out here myself, if you can believe it. They didn’t want me to do it.” This genuinely shocks me, and it registers on my face which is always registering things and she gives a kind of harrumphing laugh.
“How long did that take you?”
“Something like two weeks. First I stopped in my hometown.”
“And why… here,” I say, I mean of all places.
“During the war my husband worked not too far from here, in a forestry camp.” I must have looked quizzical. “He was a conscientious objector. A pacifist, you know. They had camps for them out here.” “Huh,” I say. The only camp I know of that is near here is the Tule Lake internment camp where they put Japanese-Americans which nobody here ever talks about I don’t think. Honey stirs but then settles back in, her body dragging down on the straps of the Ergo.
“I visited him one time before we were married, before our kids. It was maybe the nicest trip we ever took together. I just got a yen to see the place again, I guess.”
“But your friends didn’t want you to come.”
“No,” she says. “It took me weeks to convince them. They have medical power of attorney, so they might have been able to stop me, but we finally came to an agreement. I’m supposed to take my medicine and call them every day,” which seems fair to me. She looks over at the counter where Sal has produced a coffee and a hideous slab of brownie. I stand and trot up to get them, taking care not to jostle Honey. My new friend spears a corner of the brownie with a fork and brings it to her mouth with an incredibly gnarled but reasonably steady hand. I wait. There is something odd but not unpleasant about what’s going on. She doesn’t seem to care whether I’m there or not and for once I have no anxiety about divining whether that is the case. Honey is asleep and work thinks I’m bereaved and things seem just fine in this particular moment. Sal comes around and wipes a table adjacent with a rag and as she passes by I smell vinegar from the rag.
“There was a while when driving a car was the only thing that didn’t hurt,” the crone says. I want to ask how old she is but that seems rude. “I’m ninety-two,” she says, as though I had spoken aloud. “I went to the library and had the librarian search the Internet for ‘old people’ and ‘road trips’ and she found an article about some hundred-year-old fool jogging across the country. I showed Mark and Yarrow the printout.” I laugh aloud. She looks disdainfully at the rest of the brownie. “Those are my caretakers,” she adds. “Mark and Yarrow.”
“Like the flower,” I say. I must know that from my mom. “Yes, just like,” she says. “They have a little boy named Rain. They are hippie types, you might say.” She chips more of the brownie off and pushes the debris onto the tines of her fork.
“I’m kind of stalled out now, though,” she says. “I seem to have run out of steam for getting in the car. It hurts a lot more. So I’m here taking a break before pushing on.”
“What a place to take a break,” I say. “The end of the earth!” She looks around at the café.
“It has changed a lot from what I remember. We would have been here around forty-five.”
“That’s what everyone says,” I say.
The door to Sal’s opens and the teens I saw walking a few days ago come in and elevate the level of noise in the place and Honey stirs against me.
“What brings you here?” she asks.
“My mom was from here. She’s gone now and I inherited my grandparents’ house. I just came up to see how everything was looking.”
“My hometown was kind of the same way,” she says. I love the extemporaneous way she talks, she’s like an Oracle breathing fumes from a vent. “I knocked on the door of my old house—a woman was there living with her son. It was a mess, pizza boxes everywhere. Slatternly, my mother would have said. There had been a tree out in the back that I just loved, I used to sit on a swing tied to its big branch, but it was gone.” She pushes the plate with the brownie toward me and says “You can have this if you want” and I pull it toward myself because I always need a treat. “They seemed very unhappy in the house. I guess my family wasn’t very happy either, but my mother always was one for housekeeping.” She dabs her mouth with her napkin. “What’s the line, ‘Unhappy families are unhappy in their own way’?” I scan my brain. “Tolstoy,” I say. Or Dostoyevsky? I should know. She nods. “Anyway, I saw the house and I just decided to keep on going till I got somewhere I wanted to be,” she says. “Westward ho!” She grins a surprisingly vital and grin-like grin for such an old person. She’s beautiful, I think.
“Where are you staying?” I ask.
“The Arrowhead Motel, it’s called.” She raises her eyebrows. “It’s passable.”
Her eyes focus on me. “Where do you live when you aren’t here?” she asks.
“We live in the City—San Francisco,” I say. Honey is suddenly awake and squirmy. Her body is strong enough that she can put considerable strain on the Ergo when she decides she wants to be free and I have to stand and dance and hush her.
The crone reaches a hand out to touch Honey’s foot, which Honey swiftly kicks away, and I grab it and hold it tight and say “Gentle” and the crone’s hand stays hovering in the air, grasping at nothing. Then she pats around her person and her hair and then very slowly and stiffly stands up and says “Well, I’m off” and starts to shuffle away without so much as a by- your-leave. Normally I would wonder whether I offended her but there is Honey to deal with and I take Honey out of the pack and give her a string cheese and set her down, and she stumbles and puts both hands on the ground with her butt in the air and comes up with hair and fuzz all over the cheese. I dip a napkin into my water glass and wipe it off more or less and return it to her. We open the computer and Skype Engin. He clicks on and I see he is somewhere not his mother’s, appears to be smoking a cigarette on an unknown balcony with café lights and I wonder whose balcony what balcony and then I think Jesus he gets to have fun, and feel momentarily so pissed and bewildered that someone could be out there having fun at a party instead of drinking with Islamophobes and dealing with torn baby fingers but his face lights up when he blows kisses to Honey and she looks at him and waves furiously and they babble to each other and I again say a small prayer of thanks that she doesn’t break his heart by being indifferent to the sight of him on the screen. Then he looks at me and says “My love.” And I say it back and then he says “I was hoping when you opened the computer there would be some news but based on the view you haven’t gone home yet.” “No,” I say. “I’m paralyzed. I’m the nymph who turned into a tree.” I don’t remember the Turkish word for nymph so I say the latter in English and he looks puzzled but I decide not to clarify and say “I just need a few more days to make a plan.”
“The church was depressing,” I go on. “Only six people. We left early.”
“It’s depressing there,” he says. “You should go home.” He looks exasperated and despairing and I feel like screaming and I ask where he is and he says Sema his friend from high school is having a party and then I remember again how much he gave up to come and marry me, a whole life lived in one city and all the dense social webs thus accumulated, and what it must feel like when they are severed and now what it feels like to try and repair them all. “I’ll go back this week,” I say, and he communes a little longer with Honey and asks what happened to her finger and I tell him she fell and that’s it and then I let him go back to his balcony party, the lights of the city glittering behind him.