Tom Lake(87)

My grandmother closed Stitch--It around the time I moved to Los Angeles. Even when she used her brightest light she had trouble with her eyes, which turned out to be the early stages of macular degeneration. She couldn’t do the fine little stitches anymore, though she could manage plenty of other things. Even without the shop, people brought their clothes to her. She kept the yellow tape measure around her neck and did the work as long as she could because she believed that was her role in our town. Neither of my brothers settled in New Hampshire after college, and then my parents moved to Florida because my mother suffered terribly with arthritis in the winter. They invited my grandmother to come with them but that was never going to happen. She had other children, and they had children, and, in a few cases, those children had children. When I came back, my foot still locked in the fiberglass boot just the way it had been on television, it was clear to everyone that I was the person my grandmother wanted. Why not stay? I had money and no plans. I moved back into my room, which now housed two sewing machines and the button--holer and racks of thread and the Juki serger which, after me, was her pride. I helped her with the sewing. She would talk me through whatever needed to be done if she couldn’t quite manage it herself. In the evenings I read aloud. I told Ripley to have his secretary mail me any books he didn’t want to deal with and she shipped them out in boxes. People stopped me on the street to tell me what a good job I’d done in the movie. I was easy to spot: the crutches, the cast. They thought I was famous, and so were amazed that I’d come home at all. The leaves turned red. The cast came off. I was sure there had been some terrible mistake since now I was in excruciating pain all the time. I couldn’t put my foot flat on the ground, but the doctor said it would happen and after a while it did. I started physical therapy and then I finished it. My sweaters came out of the cedar chest. I found my boots. I wondered about Duke and Pallace and Sebastian, sure the three of them had gone their separate ways. More than anything, I wondered if they ever wondered about me. I tried to find Veronica but she was gone. Veronica, her mother, her brothers, all of them. Those were the days when people could move away and not even the post office knew where to find them.

My grandmother said I should open Stitch--It again, there would be plenty of business. I believed the part about the business, I just didn’t know if I was ready to sign off on a life in New Hampshire spent sewing. Then one night a report about breast cancer came on the news, all about mammograms and early detection, women talking about finding a lump in their breast. We were making dinner. We always turned the television off when we sat down to eat but we could watch it while we were cooking. That was the rule.

“I have one of those,” she said to the television set.

“You had a mammogram?”

She shook her head. She wasn’t looking at me. “A lump.”

I had been cutting up a head of broccoli and I put down the knife and washed my hands. “What did you do about it?”

“I didn’t do anything about it.”

“What did the doctor say?”

She looked at me then. “The whole thing scared me to death.”

“So what happened?” My brain insisted on hearing it in the past tense, I had a lump in my breast once. I couldn’t understand that this was something that was happening.

“I thought I’d wait for you to come home,” she said. “You’re always so good at figuring things out.”

“I’ve been home three months.”

But she had found the lump a year before, and taped a gauze square over it when it started to leak. When I looked at her again I could actually see a disruption in the pattern of her dress. That’s how big it was.

Once we started making the hopeless rounds of oncologist appointments, the past broke away. All the things I’d thought about myself before—-I am an actress, I am not an actress, I was in love, I was betrayed—-disintegrated into nothing. I made bowls of Cream of Wheat she wouldn’t eat and then scraped them into the trash once they turned cold. I managed the schedule of people who wanted to come and see her, her two sons and two daughters—-one of those daughters my mother—-my father, my brothers, all my cousins, all her friends. I made sure no one stayed too long. I sat by her bed and read to her. I read her Our Town, doing all the parts, and we cried at the end when the Stage Manager talked about the planet straining away to make something of itself and how we were all so tired. I told her about Uncle Wallace then, not that he had died but what a wonderful Stage Manager he had been. She held my hand and later I held her hand. I called her Nell in those days because Nell, which was her own name, was all she answered to.

“You know who’s here?” Nell said to me, her eyes closed. She had been asleep all afternoon and I was sitting there turning hems because, unbelievably, people were bringing their sewing by, thinking it would give her something to do while she was dying. She wanted me to finish it.

“Who?” So many people came in and out.

“Brian. Whenever I wake up now he’s sitting at the foot of the bed.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“He hasn’t changed. I always wondered if he would grow up but he didn’t.” She was looking out the window at the snow, or maybe she wasn’t. Her eyes were clouded.

“Do you want a pill now?”

She nodded a little and I poured a glass of water and helped her sit. When she was asleep again I went to the kitchen and called my mother to ask her who Brian was and she told me the story of her brother who had died in the snow. All those years and I’d never heard of him.