People Who Knew Me Page 7

“It’s Jade,” she said, “from Mathers and James.”

  Despite the years that had passed, she looked exactly the same, except that her hair was now dyed auburn red. She must have been in her sixties, but her skin was still porcelain-white and relatively wrinkle-free. I stared at the hand that was still clasping my forearm. Each of her fingernails was painted a different color, just like back then.

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  Claire was listening to us now, watching this strange woman attempt to convince me of who I was.

  “I was your boss! In New York! Eons ago!”

  She was so excited about this fateful meeting. I felt bad letting her down. It was the first time in California that I kind of wanted to be Emily Morris, for just a second.

  “I don’t know—”

  “You never lived in New York?” She was genuinely baffled.

  I shook my head. “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s just incredible,” she said. “The hair is different, but the face. I remember faces. And auras. I remember auras.”

  It made bizarre sense that she would be here, in hippie Topanga Canyon, looking at homemade jewelry.

  “Maybe I have a twin,” I said. I attempted a laugh. It came out choked, false.

  She looked at Claire, long and hard, then back at me. Her smile suggested that she knew I was lying, but that she’d accepted it, moved on already. Jade, seeker of peace.

  “Well,” she said, “maybe you do.”

  She finally released my arm and said, “Sorry to bother you. Have a beautiful day.”

  I said, “You, too,” and turned back to the jewelry, fiddling with pieces, pretending that this encounter hadn’t completely unnerved me.

  “That was weird,” Claire said, picking up a bracelet and turning it over in her hand.

  “Really weird,” I said. I helped her with the clasp. “You want it?” I would have bought her anything in that moment.

  “Can I?” she said. I nodded.

  We walked to the cashier and she looked up at me and said, “You don’t even look like an Emily.”

  That night, I did not sleep.

  * * *

  The night before the biopsy, my old friend insomnia returns. I make the mistake of going online, researching inflammatory breast cancer. Rare. Very aggressive. Invasive. Progresses rapidly, often within a matter of weeks or months. Poor prognosis. Then there is this fact, confirmed by many sources: Women with stage three have a forty percent survival rate at five years, and women with stage four have an eleven percent survival rate at five years.

  It’s that eleven percent that keeps me up until sunrise.

  Only eleven percent of people survive five years.

  That means eighty-nine percent of people die.

  That means by the time Claire is eighteen, she no longer has a mom.

  Eighteen. Technically a grown-up. This might comfort some mothers with cancer, but not me. In my life, all the truly difficult and important things happened well after I crossed the threshold to adulthood.

  * * *

  Claire says I look like I need a cup of a coffee, then proceeds to pour me one. She drinks the milk in her cereal bowl, turned pink by her Froot Loops, and tells me she’ll meet me in the car. She’s ready for this day that I dread.

  I drop her off at school, wish her luck on her math test, and watch her walk away, a hop in her step. Claire gets excited for math tests—for any test, actually. She’s an overachiever who has somehow dodged the title of “nerd.” I don’t know how she does it. I was never smart or popular. “You’re very average, hon, flying under the radar,” my mom once told me, as a compliment. The other kids like Claire. One of them—a boy—runs up to her. Maybe that’s Tyler. She’s mentioned him—“just a friend,” she insisted, though her blush indicated otherwise. They walk side by side. They’re both lanky. She’s slightly taller than him. He says something that makes her throw her head back and laugh. Despite my nine A.M. appointment, I smile.

  * * *

  The biopsy is, in a word, unpleasant. The needle is the size of a pencil. I leave knowing that they have a chunk of my breast tissue—and my fate—in their lab. They tell me the results should be back Monday morning. On my way out, they say, “Have a good weekend,” as if that’s possible.

  * * *

  On Saturday, Claire and I go to the Melrose flea market. She is on the hunt for a pair of vintage cowboy boots. We buy pink lemonade and a big salted pretzel, passing it back and forth between us, pulling off pieces until it’s gone. She tries on a pair of boots that are three sizes too big and asks if she should stuff the toes with toilet paper. I ask her why she wants cowboy boots so badly and she can’t say anything besides, “I just do.” Instead, she buys a miniature succulent in a tiny clay pot, clutching it in her palm like it’s a living pet.

  On Saturday night, I take her to Heather’s house for a sleepover, exchange a few forgettable pleasantries with Heather’s mom, whose name I can never remember—Melissa? Carissa? Something with an “issa.” Then I work my shift at the bar. I make the usual small talk with the usual customers. Bill’s in construction and comes in every Friday and Saturday night because “those are the best days to meet ladies.” It is a very rare occurrence for a female to set foot in Al’s Place, but Bill never seems to realize this. Arnie is a sixty-something alcoholic who’s at the bar at least four times a week, for several hours at a time. He doesn’t get sloppy, so we don’t cut him off. The only way I can tell he’s actually drunk is when he starts talking about his daughter, who, incidentally, died of breast cancer a couple years ago. It’s not clear if he was an alcoholic before that.

  At the end of my shift, nearing two A.M., as Al is shuffling out Bill and Arnie, who, somehow, have a track record of getting home safely, I fill a frosted glass with Budweiser from the tap and take a sip.

  “You okay there, Con?” Al says.

  See, I never drink at work. Or, hardly ever. Al knows me well enough to know that I only drink at work when I’m celebrating something or when I’m very upset. The last time I drank at work was when Claire got first place in a science fair. I came in bragging, one of those annoying parents everyone despises, and Al said, “Well, we gotta drink to that,” and we did. Before that, there was the time JT had a heart attack and I got shit-faced on gin and tonics. I thought he was going to die. My despondence surprised me. I’d grown rather fond of JT, I guess. It’s not that we’re particularly close, but he’s always checked in on Claire and me at least once a week. He cares. He never gives me a hard time about being late on rent. Whenever something goes wrong with the water heater or the air conditioner or whatever else at the cottage, he deals with it. Claire doles out hugs whenever he stops by. I heard her refer to him as “like a grandpa” once when she was talking to Heather. The heart attack didn’t kill him, though, didn’t even come close. “The Big Man in the Sky doesn’t want anything to do with me,” he said. And then he made fun of me for fretting.

  “I’m okay,” I say. “Just got some things on my mind.”

  It’s tempting to tell Al everything. I know he’d wrap his big, tattooed arm around me and tell me everything will be fine, and it would be tough to doubt him. He’d tell me to take some time off. He’d send me home with a bottle of his finest whiskey. I can’t tell him, though, not yet. I don’t even have the results yet. Maybe it’s nothing. It has to be nothing.

  “If you say so, little lady,” he says, wiping down the counter and then throwing the damp towel around his neck.

  I tell him I’ll lock up, which is my way of saying I want to drink alone.

  * * *

  I’m hungover on Sunday, but Claire and I do our usual beach walk anyway. She once asked me, around the same time she asked who her father was, why we didn’t go to church. I didn’t want to explain what an atheist was, or that I was one, so I told her the beach was our church. That began a Sunday tradition of running through the waves before any of the sunbathers show up, when dedicated surfers dot the horizon.r />
  “I am so looking forward to this week,” she says, rolling up the legs of her jeans so she can let the waves crash into her.

  “Why’s that?” I ask, trying to share her enthusiasm for this upcoming week, this week when I find out if I have cancer. I vacillate—back and forth, back and forth—between thinking it’s truly impossible I have cancer to thinking I have a few weeks to live. I’ve decided it’s best to prepare for the worst and be nicely surprised if it turns out okay. That must be what the professionals—these mammogram-takers, these biopsy-readers—do. No sense getting hopes up, implying all alarms are false. If they do that and the news turns out bad, the shock could kill someone faster than cancer itself.

  “I forgot, I didn’t tell you, I’m going to submit my name to run for class president.”

  “Really?” I say.

  “Really,” she says. “Wouldn’t that be the best thing ever?”

  I miss the overused superlatives of youth.

  “I’m so proud of you, sweetie,” I say, reaching for her and pulling her into my chest with so much force that we almost fall backward onto the sand.

  “God, Mom, what’s wrong with you?” she says, worming her way out of my embrace.

  “I can help you make posters and stuff.”

  She shrugs. “Sure, if you want.” She doesn’t really need me to help, that much is clear.

  She does a spontaneous cartwheel. Her enthusiasm, this high she’s on, scares me. If I have to tell her I’m sick, the comedown could be crushing.

  “Just know I’ll be proud whether you win or lose,” I say, doing my best to temper her excitement.

  She looks at me like I’m growing a second head. “Why are you acting so weird?”

  “I’m not acting weird,” I say. “I just want you to be realistic.”

  But, see, kids her age aren’t that interested in reality.

  She does another cartwheel and says, “What’s the fun in that?”

  * * *

  The call comes around noon on Monday. I know it’s the doctor’s office because the number is blocked. I’m working a shift at the bar. It’s quiet. Mondays get busy, but not until after six. I abandon my post and go into the back office. Even though there’s nobody else in the bar, I still feel the need to hole up somewhere.

  After three rings: “Hello?”

  “Connie?” a voice says, in lieu of the expected, May I please speak to Connie Prynne?

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Dr. Tan.”

  I sit down in Al’s leather chair, with its ornately curved wood arms. It’s meant for a lawyer’s office, absolutely absurd for a bar.

  She takes a deep breath, which is not good.

  “They got your biopsy report back. I wanted to call you myself,” she says.

  So we can grab a drink and cheers to good test results?

  “I’m afraid it’s cancer.”

  I wait a beat and then say, “I’m afraid, too,” an uneasy attempt at humor.

  She is silent.

  And then she launches into a three-minute description of the much-feared-but-needed next steps. She says we’ll need to see if it’s spread to the lymph nodes, determine the stage of it. There will be tests. She rattles off some of them—ultrasound, CT scan, bone scan, breast MRI. She says the oncologist will likely recommend six cycles of chemotherapy. She doesn’t explain what a cycle is and I don’t ask because I’m not ready to know. I’m still stuck on “I’m afraid it’s cancer.” After the chemotherapy, she says they’ll likely do a mastectomy, then radiation to target the “residual cancer.” She ends her diatribe with, “This is an aggressive cancer, Connie, but people beat it.”

  Eleven percent of people, I want to say. But I don’t. Because I don’t want her to confirm that.

  “I’ve asked my colleagues for some great recommendations of oncologists in the area. Do you have a pen?”

  I say I do, and then I dig through Al’s drawer to find one. He’s got more packets of Skittles than he does pens. He gives them to Claire when she comes.

  On the back of an electricity bill, I scribble down the names and phone numbers of strangers who may be responsible for saving my life.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” she says.

  “I’m sorry, too.”

  “If there’s anything I can—”

  “Do I have to tell Claire?” I ask.

  “Claire?”

  She delivered my daughter, but she doesn’t know her name offhand. She has so many patients besides me. Suddenly I feel very alone.

  “My daughter,” I say.

  She takes another ominous deep breath.

  “Connie,” she says, “the treatment is tough. You’ll feel ill. You’re going to lose your hair.”

  And for some reason, that’s the news of this phone call that makes me cry. I cover the phone with one hand, my mouth with the other.

  “Claire will understand,” she says, in a stiff doctor’s attempt at consolation. Doctors are trained in medicine, not kindness. They can’t be blamed for their missteps.

  “That’s the problem,” I say. “She’ll understand.”

  NINE

  Drew’s restaurant, the Modern Taco, opened on November 9, 1997, and closed on October 3, 1998. It didn’t even make it a year. It should have shut down in summer, but Drew wanted to give it a chance and I couldn’t bring myself to discourage him.

  We knew starting the restaurant would demand large up-front costs. Domingo, Drew’s partner, knew that, too. He was the one with most of the funds to invest. We contributed the twenty grand in savings we’d accumulated in the years I’d been at Mathers and James. I told Drew that was all we had, which was a lie. I’d put five thousand in a separate account. A secret account. A just-in-case account I didn’t tell him about because he would have said preparing for failure would jinx any success. Who knows, maybe that was true.

  Domingo should have known better. He was older—in his late thirties—and claimed to have grown up in the restaurant business. His father, he said, owned a very successful Cuban restaurant in Queens. He’d been saving up for his own taco shop for years. He had eighty grand to prove it, so we took him seriously. We trusted him.

  It wasn’t the food that was the problem. Drew developed the menu—a variety of tacos, from the usual to the exotic. There were short rib tacos and pork belly tacos and wild mushroom tacos and lobster tacos and black bean tacos. Every day he offered a special: fried chicken tacos or rabbit tacos or plain ol’ ground beef tacos. He went to different markets around Brooklyn, seeking ingredients that called out to him. It made him feel alive, he said. He spent fourteen hours a day at the restaurant—cooking, mingling with the customers. They loved his food. Some became regulars, stopping in for a couple tacos on lunch break. So, no, the food wasn’t the problem.

  The problem was Domingo. Domingo was in charge of running the day-to-day business. Maybe because most of the up-front money was his, he took to spending it without consulting Drew. Not that Drew would have helped. Drew wasn’t a businessman; he was a chef. “An artist,” he liked to say.

  Domingo insisted on top-of-the-line equipment, better advertising, new décor. They bought heavy rustic tables from a designer furniture store when they could have scoured the classifieds or yard sales for better deals. Domingo hired three servers when they really only needed two—and he paid them ten bucks an hour when they should have made eight, at most. His rationale was that he wanted to attract top-notch employees. That was the thing with Domingo—his ideas were good in theory, but only in theory. For the first two months, he didn’t even use a bookkeeping system. It wasn’t until February that he realized they were way too far in the red.

  There were other issues, too. It cost a thousand dollars to fix a plumbing problem that caused the drains in the kitchen to back up. During the dinner rush, customers said they couldn’t find anywhere to park on the street. A few complained about the cost of the tacos—three or four bucks a pop. Street-cart tacos were a doll
ar each, after all. These were gourmet. They knew that. They appreciated the special ingredients, the sophistication. But a four-dollar taco was a four-dollar taco.

  Drew was convinced it would get better. Sure, they had kinks to work out, but that was just part of opening a restaurant. He maintained his enthusiasm, his almost manic energy, for months. It wasn’t until July that he came to me, in bed, just before midnight, smelling of sweat and food, and said, “I think we’re in trouble.” He fell onto the mattress, flat on his stomach, his head turned to one side, not facing me. I put my hand on his back—hot and sticky. All I said was, “I know, babe.”

  After the “Closed” sign went up in the front window, I let Drew wallow in self-pity. There’s a certain equilibrium in all relationships and I knew I had to counteract his sadness for us to maintain some kind of normalcy. I perked up for his benefit. I assured him we’d be fine, even though I had doubts. It was usually his role to be optimistic—to a nearly delusional degree, at times—but he abandoned that post and I felt compelled to occupy it. The restaurant was separate from us; it could fail, but we wouldn’t. Yes, we lost our investment, but we would be okay. I told him about the five thousand dollars, hoping that would raise his spirits, but the fact that I’d had the secret account depressed him more.

  The thing is, I’d always known Drew was a dreamer; I just never knew what would happen when the dreams fell apart.

  He’d never been much of a drinker. We had wine with dinner most nights, and there was always a six-pack of beer in the fridge, but he was never the type who needed a drink. In fact, he was downright cautious about becoming that type. His mom had told him that his father had had a drinking problem, and whether that was true or a lie constructed by a woman bitter about her husband leaving, Drew lived in fear of the power of genetics. But about a week after the restaurant closed up, I came home from work to find him on the couch with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s next to him—a cliché scene if I ever saw one. I had to restrain myself from rolling my eyes. I’d asked Marni, over drinks after work, “When can I tell him to start looking for another job?” and she said, “Why should you have to tell him? He should know.” She was right. But I understood Drew. I knew what the taco shop meant to him.