six

Two people came by to say hello to Willa: Francie and a man whose name I’ve heard but whom I’ve never met—Benson. He works at the Bohemian and arranges Willa’s open-mike nights.

Their voices are a chorus of overlapping laugher.

“Remember that singer from last month with the dreadlocks?” Bensons asks.

“Carlton or something like that.” Francie looks up in the air, as if the name might be there.

“No,” Willa says. “Charleston. He was named after the city and he was so proud.”

“I wanted to flirt with him,” Francie says. “But I didn’t have on enough mascara.”

Willa’s laughter is loud and raucous. “Dumbest excuse ever.”

“You two are nuts,” Benson says. “His name was Clay and he just got a music deal in Nashville for that song we didn’t even like.”

“The one about his mama?” Francie asks. “Ugh. It was sappy and ridiculous.”

“Well, some music muckety-muck liked it. I’m only telling you so you two don’t give up. Keep at it.”

In their conversation and lyric lingo, I listen for hints of what happened the night of the accident. Finally, I ask Benson. “Were you there that night?”

“Yep,” he says. “I was. But I have no idea what happened. One minute she was practicing in the back room and then she was gone.”

Before I can respond, Gwen calls for me from the hospital hallway. She needs me to convince her dad to let her meet Dylan for dinner. I shake my head. “No way, Gwen. Go home, and I’ll meet you there. We’ll have a family dinner.”

“Family dinner,” she says in a tone that suggests I’ve asked her to eat garbage. “Can’t wait.” She walks down the hall, her long legs swinging out, trying to get ahead of her, as if she can’t get away from me fast enough.

*   *   *

In the car on the way home, I try to stop thinking about Willa and her swollen temporal lobe, her memory and that night, about Cooper driving into a tree while Willa grabbed the wheel. I turn on the radio, cranking the volume to adolescent level—meaning LOUD. Lucinda Williams sings at a “Kiss Like Your Kiss,” and my mind wanders to the last time Cooper kissed me. Not the kind at the door on his way out, or the respectable sort of kiss he’ll use to acknowledge me in public. I mean the kind of kiss that pulls the body closer, that makes time come undone and the heart slow. When was the last time? I come up blank. I remember our first kiss, but I can’t remember the last.

Before going home, I drive into the parking lot at Cameron’s Print Shop to buy ink. This is how it goes with me: A disturbing thought, a hint of something amiss, and I’m buying ink, wandering through aisles of antique fonts, holding Italian cotton paper up to the light. I know every ink shop, print shop, and stationery store in the city.

The store is low-lit; a seductive barroom. Cameron, the owner, sits on a stool behind the counter, reading a magazine, raising his fingers to turn the pages and humming under his breath. “Hey, Cam,” I say.

He glances up at me. “Hi there, Eve. How’s it flying?”

“Been better flights than today.” I smile. “I need to order some more of that Twinrocker handmade paper and I’m almost out of magenta base color.”

“Got it,” Cam says. “But what’s going on in your world that could be anything but superior?” He rises from his stool.

Cam has never told me his age, but then again, I’ve never asked. I’ve estimated anywhere from sixty to ninety. Today I give him a seventy-five. He moves with ease, but slowly, and his wild gray hair is combed back with pomade. His rimless glasses are perched on his wrinkled nose.

“Not all days can be superior,” I reply.

“Well, all your days should be.” He peers at me directly. “Is Gwen okay?”

“Yes,” I say. “But things aren’t great for my family, Cameron. My sister and husband were in a car wreck.”

“Over on Preston?” he asks.

I nod.

“Heard about that.”

“Really?” I lift my eyebrows, and I’m so tired, even that seems to hurt.

“I live a block away. They okay?”

“Cooper’s face is cut up pretty bad. Willa has something like a concussion.” I’m practicing this sentence, one I know I’ll say over and over again.

“I’m sorry, Eve.”

I’m quiet as I follow Cam through the aisles, as if the flywheels, levers, and pedals deserve a reverential silence. Shelves are filled with boxes of leftover metal fonts. Flywheels like shrunken Ferris wheels sit discarded on a lower shelf. A Vandercook and a Heidelberg lean against each another for support while wishing for an owner to clean them up, make them useful again. After we find what I need, I tell Cam to put the items on the company tab and I leave with a hug.

I make one more stop at the market for dinner. I buy Gwen’s favorite—sea bass—and Cooper’s favorite—sweet potatoes. Family dinner: It was my parents’ cure-all for any ailment. I’m repeating patterns, but something has to be done, and a family dinner seems as good an option as any.

I turn off the radio and roll down the driver’s window, allowing the muggy air to fill my car. I return home and instead of going straight into the garages, I turn on the gravel drive toward the barn. Francie is at the hospital and Max will be long gone, but I want to check on things.

If the printing rollers aren’t cleaned every night, they’ll gum up, rending themselves useless. If that happens (which it has), an entire day of printing is lost. It’s the last thing we do every day before locking the barn doors—insuring that the rollers are clean and stored properly.

I slide the barn doors open and flick on the overhead lights. New customers often walk in and say, “Oh, it smells so good in here. What is that?” And we shrug. “Candles and machine cleaner.”

Through the years, we’ve burned so many fragrant candles, they’ve soaked into the hardwood floors, the cedar pillars reaching to the loft above, and the cobwebs we sometimes remember to clean so high above us.

A single light burns over Max’s desk and I hope to see him bent over a piece of machinery, but his stall is empty. I drop the ink and trip lever he ordered onto his desk and then walk over to the project table. An empty coffee cup, a napkin with the remains of Francie’s afternoon cookie, and papers are scattered across the table. I bend over to see what they worked on while I was gone.

Francie’s sketches are easy to recognize; her pictures tip to the right. When I tell her that her pictures are “tipsy” she says that is what graphic art computer programs are for—“to fix tipsy.” I’m looking at a card’s design that isn’t any different: A drunken dense-limbed tree is perched on the left, reaching toward the corner of the paper. Francie drew a live oak tree, its branches spread wide and high, until the leaves and arms disappear off the deckled edge of paper. At the roots are the number 1 and the words Be Kind. I stare at this rendering of my first commandment, of the first idea. I run my finger across the tree, the number, and the words. This card has sold more units than any we’ve ever made.

Max’s handwriting is on another sheet of paper, a mix of script and block that is his alone. Then on smaller scrap papers there are other sketches: a heart, two hands reaching out, a man and a woman kissing—half-formed ideas discarded in a pile. I look at Max’s handwriting, and I feel the same way I did when I first met him: my stomach upside down, a slow-crawling ache along my ribs, a need without name.

Max and I were so young when we worked together at the print shop in Savannah. He was a student at SCAD, but my parents couldn’t afford the tuition. Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma had offered me a full ride, in deference to my dad, which I’d quickly turned down, and that transformed our house into a battlefield with a months-long war. “It’s an education,” Dad said over and over.

“What I’m doing right now is more of an education than anything I’ll learn there” was my counterattack. This verbal dead zone continued until Willa came home drunk one night and the family drama turned to her. I actually thanked her the next day. And I continued my job and preoccupation with printing presses.

We worked together for a year—Max and I—learning how to dance together with the verbal and visual elements of imagery. It’s a complicated choreography.

Max had a girlfriend then. Amanda was her name. Adorable was her game. They lived together for ten years before she finally decided that she was “living the wrong life.” By then, I was married and had a four-year-old daughter. I told myself I wasn’t in love with Max, only with what we did together, what we created.

Typography and letterpress, design and branding take place in a social world, when listening to coworkers, clients, and their narrative. It comes from working together, from storytelling. Once the story is finally told, the typeface is chosen, and this is where I excel. All those years ago, we’d lived, worked, read, talked, and thrived on design in a small ink-stained studio on Bull Street. Francie joined us a month into the job, and through late nights, hangovers and laughter, we’d become close.

“Why do you do this craziness?” Francie asked late one night while lying flat on the hardwood floor of the Soapbox studio.

We then went around the room, the three of us exhausted at the end of a long project, satisfied with our results, and gave our reasons for wanting to pursue the art and craft of design, letterpress, logos, and bookmaking. We talked about our dreams and where this typography life might take us—“this type of life,” Max said.

It was my turn, and I said, “You know that feeling when you go to the mailbox?”

“Which one?” Max asked. “When you know there are bills you can’t pay?”

We laughed. “No,” I said. “That feeling when you go to the mailbox and there’s a letter, and it’s on cotton paper and someone has handwritten a note to you? Someone bought the card, wrote on it, and sent it to you. They didn’t e-mail or call or leave a voice message. That’s good mail. I do this for good mail,” I said.

With that, our company began in utero, yet the Fine Line, Ink wasn’t born until many years later, after I’d married and Gwen was eleven years old. I ran it by myself and then approached Francie and Max for help. They started at one day a week, and the company has grown so rapidly that now it is a full-time job—for all of us. It is Max and Francie who create the success; I know this. Their creative powers forge something new, and I’m mostly along for the ride.

I sit at the project table and gaze at the results of the brainstorming session that went on without me, the one about Good Ideas numbers seven and eight. I feel a wave of intense love for all of it, for all the ideas and the designs so far finished and for the ones yet to be created.

A pad of paper, smooth cotton paper without lines, sits across the project table. I pull it toward me, writing the commandments quickly and crookedly in my rushed handwriting. I do this hoping that some visceral memory will kick in and number nine will appear under my fingers.

Nothing appears but this singular thought: The groceries.

Damn. It’s hot as hell outside and the fish I bought for dinner is probably turning into a science experiment in my backseat. I haven’t cleaned the rollers yet, and it’s my turn.

I’m looking for the Putz Pomade and cleaning apron when I see that Max has already done it all. The rollers are hanging in their storage units, waiting for a new day. I shut off the lights in the studio and run outside to the car to get home.

The kitchen is brightly lit. A cereal bowl crusted with Raisin Bran sits in the sink. Muffled music comes from upstairs, a thumping rapper rhythm. I unpack the market bags and open the fish package, touching it gently to see if it has retained any of its refrigeration. Nope. Warm and toasty. There are many things I’m willing to take chances on, but not spoiled fish. That happens only once.

I reach for the phone and call for order-in Chinese, setting the table for three. At the kitchen desk, I glance down at the Remington, remembering when it had worked, when the ribbon was damp with ink. The letter p is now missing. The carriage is thick with dust and the ribbon cracked dry earth. Not one note has been typed in at least ten years. I write myself a reminder to order a ribbon and p key from Cameron.

The Remington was the first thing I brought with me to this house when we moved in. The house was empty, echoing with only the past Morrison ghosts, a handed-down china cabinet, and dangling wires from the walls and ceilings where Mrs. Morrison had removed her favorite antique light fixtures to take to their new “downtown home.”

I’d come to the house alone to measure the rooms for furniture and curtains, carrying my typewriter in a hard black case. I went straight to the kitchen and its 1970s avocado-colored appliances and green Corian counters, craving clean and sleek, not colorful and trendy. I set the typewriter on the built-in kitchen desk and patted it like a child. Then I said “Welcome home” to this inanimate object.

Cooper and I had been married a full year when Louise and Averitt told us that it was time they moved. The land had become too much for them to care for and they’d asked Cooper to take over the family home, to buy it from them so that they wouldn’t have to sell to outsiders. I agreed under one condition: that his parents knew that it was our home. I couldn’t feel as if I was staying at my in-laws house without building our own family, our own home. It was a frank and uncomfortable discussion, but it ended well. At least until our first Christmas, when I put the tree in the wrong corner.

The typewriter’s placement was my meager way of settling into the house. I claimed my stake. This, the Remington said, is where we live. This is home.

During our first few years of living in the house, I typed love notes to Cooper and left them on the kitchen counter for him to see when he woke or left for work—private jokes, intimate thoughts. Then slowly—who knows when anything turns from one thing to another—notes became a vehicle for fact communication: Home by 6 after yoga. Gwen has chorus practice until 7; please pick her up on your way home.

Changing again, the typed notes became text messages, until the useless typewriter now sits as a reminder of my first stake claimed.

*   *   *

My hand is still resting on the typewriter when Cooper comes downstairs in his pajama bottoms and a T-shirt to drop a magazine on the counter. I startle. The bandages are clean and white, new. “You changed the bandages again,” I say. “I could have done that for you.”

“Yes.” He reaches his hand up to touch the gauze. “You don’t need to see what’s under there.”

I go to him, placing my hand on his chest. “I don’t care what it looks like.”

“You will when you see it,” he says. “My face is mangled. A mess.” He looks away from me.

“As if I love you for what you look like.” I hug him and place my head on his shoulder, inhaling the scent of pine soap.

“It’s bad,” he says into my hair. “I can’t see how it’s ever going to look the same. I also have a bald spot as big as an egg.” He squeezes me and then pulls back.

“So we shave your head and you can go with the macho bald look.” I touch his cheek.

“Bruce Willis in Die Hard? Like that?”

“Exactly.” I rub at the top of his headful of hair. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know what to say. Dr. Lewis said plastic surgery will fix—I’m just glad you’re alive and okay.” My lips feel shaky, the way they do when I try not to cry.

“My work, my clients, my travel—it’s all screwed up now.”

“I’m so sorry, Cooper.”

He stares at me through that one opaque blue eye and then in slow motion he reaches up and peels off his bandage. An angry red slash screams from underneath his left eye and extends upward along the side of his face. Black stitches crawl like spiders and pull his skin tight to close the wound, yanking at his face and causing his cheek to slant upward. An oval of sheared skin shines from behind his ear.

I hold my face still, taking in a long breath and walking closer to him. “It’s an injury. It will heal.”

He replaces the tape and bandage just as Gwen enters the kitchen. The doorbell rings—delivery guy with the Chinese food—and I pay, carrying the brown paper bags to the table, where we all sit together.

“Does it hurt?” Gwen asks her dad, sidling up to the table.

“Yes,” he says. “Like hell. It has its own heartbeat.”

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

And there we sit at the table, the three of us, my family, silently eating fried rice and kung pao chicken.

“Great home-cooked meal for family dinner night,” Gwen finally says, scraping her fork across her plate.

“Thanks,” I say. “I worked hard at it.”

Gwen smiles, grateful, I believe, for a sarcastic reply instead of a reprimand.

“I bought sea bass and then left it in the car too long.”

“Sea bass?” Cooper stops eating.

There’s a thing in marriage—a secret code used in front of kids and others. Words can be said and only the spouse knows the true meaning. So if the sentence was dictated and put on paper, the utterings would be harmless, unless of course you knew what the spouse was really saying. And this is what Cooper is really saying: You bought expensive fish from the best market in town and let it go bad?

Then I get to choose: Do I answer the asked question or the real question? I choose the asked. “Yes, sea bass.”

“My favorite,” Gwen says.

“I know. That’s why I got it. Sorry, Pea.”

She shrugs. “It’s okay.” She hesitates, her fork in the air. “Can I please go back to see Aunt Willa tonight? I can hardly stand thinking about her alone in the hospital.…”

I look to Cooper. “What do you think?”

“No,” Cooper says. “You’re grounded for sneaking out.” He glances from Gwen to me and then again at Gwen. “Does anyone remember that part of the night? Sneaked out with her boyfriend? Am I the only one who thinks she shouldn’t go out?”

“It’s my sister in the hospital,” I say. “That’s not going out.”

“Then you take her,” he says. “Because I don’t trust her with the car.”

Gwen stifles a cry and stands quickly, so her chair falls backward, hitting the ground with a crack. “You hate me.”

“No, I don’t. I love you and want to keep you safe.” Cooper’s voice is low and tired, an admission and an accusation combined. “And while we’re talking about this, I need you to hand over the credit card. You’ve abused its purpose, which was only for emergencies.”

“What do you mean?” Gwen asks.

“The shopping. The clothes. Restaurants and movies. If you want to spend that kind of money, you need to get a job.”

“What is going on?” Gwen covers her face. “Aunt Willa is, like, totally unconscious or something and you’re worried about me going to too many movies? This is insane.”

I want to step into the conversation, to ease the tension and clear the air. But the lost sleep finally catches me and is wrestling me to the ground. I stand also. “Let’s all just get a good night’s sleep and start over tomorrow.”

“‘Start over’?” Gwen asks. “As if Aunt Willa can start over tomorrow?”

I reach for my daughter and place my hand on her arm. “I mean us, baby. I mean us.”

“Will you please take me to see her?” Gwen asks. “Or please let me take the car.”

“If I drive now,” I say, “it would be about as good as driving drunk. So you can take my car. But to the hospital and home. That’s it.”

“I promise,” she says.

Cooper gathers the dishes and I place them into the sink, the clanging and ringing of porcelain our only statement. He walks out of the room without a word. Gwen looks at me. “He hates me.”

“Of course not.”

“Well, I hate him.”

“Of course not,” I say, repeating myself.

“As if you know how I feel. You’re not me.”

Gwen takes the keys and leaves the house, slamming the door on the way out. I stand alone in the kitchen and sink into a chair when Cooper reappears in the doorway from the family room. “I need you to support me.” His voice is deep enough to reach the center of the earth.

“What’s that?”

“You can’t negate me in front of Gwen. It’s not fair to me,” he says, using the palm of his hand to punctuate every word, as if pressing against an unseen wall.

“She’s just going to see Willa.”

Cooper comes toward me. “You really think she’s going to see Willa?”

“Yes,” I say. “I do.”

And then, sounding as if he’s absorbed the adolescent lingo, he says, “Whatever,” and walks away.

*   *   *

I rest on my half of the bed with my eyes wide open. Cooper is lying next to me. I’m on my side and I stare at the silver frame on my bedside table, which glints in the slight moonlight. The room is too dark to see the photo inside the frame, but I know what’s there: Cooper holding Gwen on the day she was born. He looks impossibly young to have a baby, although at the time he was twenty-seven years old. I was twenty-four.

“Baby,” he says.

I roll over and place my hand on his forehead, gently, so as to avoid the bandage. “How are you feeling?” I ask.

“Percocet says I feel fine.” He smiles, and in the dark his teeth and the whites of his eyes shine through.

The house creaks in the way it does when it’s left alone, and I try to find some words of solace. “I’m so sorry this happened. I know it was my sister’s fault, which makes me feel like it’s also my fault. I just don’t understand any of it.”

“What don’t you understand?” He wraps an arm around me and pulls me closer, so my body runs along his, skin on skin.

Yes, I think, my husband, I can ask anything. “Why did you make her leave the bar? I mean, what was she really doing? She wasn’t drunk. I’m trying to figure out what it … could be.”

“All I can tell you is that she seemed drunk. Other than that, I don’t know what to say. I didn’t ask her if she’d taken anything. Honestly, all I wanted to do was get her out of there because I’d been working so long with these clients that the last thing I wanted was to be embarrassed in front of them.”

“Wasn’t leaving them alone at the restaurant embarrassing?”

“Dinner was over. I was about to go anyway.…” He brushes his hand through my hair. “You know I don’t blame you. So you can stop saying sorry.”

“I know.”

His hand slips from my head and his eyes close. The pain meds are doing their job and my husband slips into sleep. I set my alarm so I can get up in four hours to give him another pill. “Stay ahead of the pain,” the doctor told me. Yes, stay ahead of the pain. I wish there was a way in the real world to do the very same damn thing.