Page 124 of The Maverick
I turned.
His face was doing the focused, serious thing.
"You okay?"
"It's beautiful," I said. "That's all."
He looked out my window. Back at me.
"Yeah," he said. "It is."
I'd asked about his mother on the drive to the airfield, in the careful way I'd learned to ask about things that lived in the closed rooms.
"What's she like?" I said. "When she's—when she's there."
He'd thought about it for a long time. Long enough that I'd almost let him off the hook.
"She's the funniest person I've ever known," he said finally. "And the strongest. Not in a loud way. In the way that just—held. Everything. She held everything. Seven boys and a man who came and went and a ranch that ran thin some years and she just—held." He paused. "She used to hum while she cooked. Not songs, exactly. Just sound. Whatever was in her head. I didn't know until I was grown that it was something she did when she was happy."
I thought about my own mama rolling biscuit dough. The sideways wisdom. The raspberry jam in mason jars.
"She's going to love you," he said.
"You don't know that."
"I do."
"How?"
He looked at me.
"Because I know her," he said. "And I know you. And I know that the two of you are the same person in different decades."
I looked out the window at the clouds below us.
I thought:I hope so.
I thought:Please.
Marfa was smaller than I'd expected and stranger than I'd imagined.
The drive from the airfield took us through a high desert that was nothing like the Smokies—flat and wide and bone-dry, the sky enormous in the way Tommy had described, pressed down low over a landscape that didn't apologize for its plainness.
I looked out the window of the car and understood something about him that I hadn't been able to understand before. This was what made a man like Tommy. Not the mountains with their softness and their green, but this—the exposure of it. The way there was nowhere to hide out here, no fold of ridge or valley to duck into. You were just a person under a sky, and the sky was not interested in your feelings about it.
"It looks like your soul," I said, and then felt embarrassed about it.
He looked at me.
"Yeah," he said. "I think that might be right."
The memory care facility was called Sunrise at Marfa, which was the kind of name these places had, soft and misdirecting, designed to make everyone more comfortable about what the place actually was. It was clean. The staff knew Tommy by nameand lit up when he came through the door, which told me he came as often as he could and that they'd noticed.
A woman named Deb walked us back.
"She's having a pretty good day," Deb said quietly, which was the phrase the staff at places like this used when they meantthe fog is lighter today than some days. I had learned, from Tommy on the plane, to hear the hope in it.
The room was bright. A window that faced west, which the brothers had apparently requested and paid extra for, so she'd get the afternoon light. Photographs on a dresser—seven boys at various ages, stair-stepped, loud even in photographs. A quilt on the bed in a pattern I recognized as the kind of pattern women in communities like Caton's Chapel made, the kind that had a name that meant something to the family.
