Stubbornly Hopeful

“Good morning,” is all Dottie says when she sees Annie’s face, dark-purple and bruised from the corner of her right eye to the top of her cheek. She’d helped her ice it when she’d walked into the kitchen last night but knew, from experience, that the bump on her face was going to look worse in the morning.

Annie stands next to Dottie at the open window, the diamonds of morning light wink at her from the other side of the glass. Annie feels something light stir inside her chest despite the pain in her face.

“That’s where he died last year,” Dottie says with an exhale of gray smoke rising above her head as she moves her gaze from the light on the window to a spot on the gleaming wood floor. “Maeve’s cat, he laid down in that sun spot near the table and never got up. Maeve was pretty torn up that she didn’t get to say good-bye to Mr. Boo Boo. But life’s not fair now, is it?”

Annie feels a tightening of her insides but doesn’t say a word.

“I’m going to miss Charlie.” Dottie says without lifting her eyes from the square of light on the dark wood floor.

“We aren’t talking about this now, are we?” Annie asks without lighting the joint she’s holding in her mouth. She takes it between her two fingers, like a cigarette, and lifts it from her mouth and holds it casually.

 Dottie turns her head away from the sun spot on the floor and looks into Annie’s eyes and nods with a small smile that lifts the edges of her dry lips and tilts her head toward Father Lorenzo opening the gate across the street. They stand at the open window and watch Father Lorenzo leaving Nona’s house with a small black case held tightly in his right hand. “He visits her every morning.” Dottie says still staring at Father Lorenzo walking slowly down Pemberton Street. “That’s his clarinet, he joined a Klezmer band with some of his interfaith people,” Dottie says without taking her eyes off the disappearing silhouette. “Interfaith, that’s something Maeve is always going on about from that hell hole she’s covering in the Middle East. She’s only been gone for five years but I worry every single day. And I miss her, but I’ve been lonelier,” Dottie says, motioning for Annie to join her as she walks into the kitchen with the cigarette alit in her right hand. She stands at the white ceramic sink, opens the kitchen window and stares at the clouds passing above. “Like when Maeve finally decided to take that assignment half way around the world. I knew it was time for her to move out, she was almost twenty-seven for goodness sake! And I was very lonely then. But it’s going to bad when he’s up there.” She tilts her head toward the sky. “Then I’ll be all alone.”

“You’re not alone, Mom. We’re still here, you have us. You said Maeve may be here for Easter.” Annie gives Dottie a slightly crooked grin. 

Dottie exhales a long puff of smoke and begins to cough.

“Let me get you some tea,” Annie says while holding onto Dottie’s arm as she leads her to the cushioned bench in the kitchen corner.  “I’ve been thinking of baking more,” Annie says before turning back to pour the hot water from the electric kettle into a small blue tea cup. “Maybe I’ll make the lemon cake that Mama Sarfati taught me. I wonder what I need to pick up?” She mutters to herself.

“Honestly,” Dottie says taking the warm tea cup in her two hands, “it’s surprises me that a woman like her knew how to bake. That woman always scared me, a little.”

“She’d be happy to know that.” Annie smiles as she places the tea cup on the table before sitting down. “Mama Sarfati told me she learned to bake with her nanny. And she did teach me how to bake most of my favorite recipes. That’s when she liked me, for a brief moment.” She pauses for a moment and smiles with a long forgotten memory. “When I first met her  she called me a strange little creature.” Annie laughs remembering meeting JP’s mama on the dock for the ferry into Oaks Bluff. Annie was in all black from the tips of her doc martins to the baseball cap on her head, and Mama Sarfati was dressed in her summer uniform of a floral dress, straw hat and oversized sunglasses.

Dottie points her manicured finger at the joint tucked behind Annie’s right ear. “That scares me a little too, but it seems to make you feel good.”

“Feeling good is not a problem.” Is all Annie says grabbing the lighter on the table as she pulls the joint from her ear and lights the tip, inhaling gently and exhaling with a long sigh.  

“I think Mama Sarfati liked you for most of that summer, enough to share her favorite lemon cake recipe.”

“And her secret to perfect ratatouille. But she would have liked me more if I hadn’t run away with her eighteen year-old son.” Annie laughs but Dottie just shakes her head.

“All those boys had big imaginations and fancy educations and they didn’t know what they had in you.”

“True,” Annie says with a thoughtful sigh and leans her back against the wall behind the wooden bench. “I remember one night sitting on that balcony outside my bedroom window on the Vineyard and JP was playing in the garage, with Byron and Todd’s, next door. They were playing this really weird advanced theoretical jazz and then something sad and French that Mama Sarfati loved. I could see her sitting on the lawn outside the open garage door with her perfect summer tan and impeccably dress. But she always left before they were finished, like she had someplace more important to be. Everyone could see it made JP sad. I never knew how she could ever leave before they finished because once I was invited in, every night was a rejuvenation of my soul. The music would have been enough, but those summer nights surrounded by candlelight and inhaling all that weed, plus you know how I love the night.”

“You were born under the stars.”

“I got them that first gig at the West Tisbury Farmer’s Market, remember?”

“They were such rebels,” Dottie laughs. “What did they call themselves again?”

“The Wrong Kind Of Weird.”

“What does that even mean?”

Annie smiles but doesn’t say a word. They sit in silence and think about the past.

“On those nights with the candles burning and the music playing, the world felt alright.” Annie says with a breathless recognition of how far she has come from that time.

 “You look like that time, you know,” Dottie says acknowledging the bruise covering the side of Annie’s face. “It was the only time, you know. And technically I hurt myself when I hit the floor with my face.” Annie leans across the table and lays her hands-on Dottie’s. “I’m going to miss him, you know that. But it wasn’t always clear he was going to choose us instead of the bottle.” Annie can see the pain that still sits inside her mom and squeezes her hand a little tighter. “Make sure you ice that. You the know that I can still feel that pain in my head from where I hit my head that night.”  Dottie pulls her hand from Annie and gently touches her left temple.  “He needed help, it wasn’t fair and he kept yelling at me. I’d never felt so alone in all my life.”

“And you married him and he stopped?”

She nods. “But this illness, I’ve hit a wall baby. You showed up at exactly the right time. It feels like I’ve been standing for a hundred years waiting for the end and it’s only been since Christmas,” Dottie says taking out another cigarette from the pink case on the table. “I’m glad you’re here baby and I’m not telling you what to do, or how do live your life, but you can’t leave anytime soon looking like that.”

Annie touches the side of her head and winces remembering the image she saw of herself that morning in her mirror.

“I think you should move into the master bedroom, that way you can smoke your joints on the porch. And then  Maeve can have her room if she visits for Easter.”

 “Sure.”

“Does that mean you’re staying?”

“I can’t leave looking like this.” Annie smiles. “Maybe I can make a healing salve. On the road I learned to infuse butters and oils.”

“Infuse with what?”

“Cannabis,” Annie smiles. “ I used it to infuse different foods too, made everyone more manageable. We should try it with Dad. We can tell Dad I’m baking with flax seed.” She sighs. “We can talk about it, him, if you want.”

“You’re a good listener,” Dottie says to Annie, “Father Lorenzo would tell you that compassion is a virtue. I know you don’t believe much in the religious stuff, but it can help. At night I like to sit on the porch, the windows open to the world with candles lit and pray.”

Annie takes the phone from her robe pocket and taps a few times, her face alit by the bluish screen. “You need this,” she says to Dottie, her eyes bright with anticipated joy as the voice of Little Richard croons into the warm kitchen. Annie smiles at Dottie as she jumps a little in her seat.

“This is my favorite,  Rip it Up! Let’s dance.”

They twirl and sing until the last notes finish. They stand together in morning sunlight and laugh. “I feel good.” Dottie smiles as she’s catching her breath.

“Khadijah always danced, it was her thing. It’s how she fixed every problem.” Annie says breathlessly, feeling a small hole of loneliness open in her gut. “Why do I miss her?”

“I miss listening to Little Richard,” Dottie says, knowing Annie wants her to listen but unable to pull herself from the world the music conjured. “ He was my Papa’s favorite singer, always played him at our parties. It reminds me of my summers on the beach in Maine. It’s what was playing when I met your dad.”

“I don’t remember music playing when you met Charlie at the t-shirt factory.”

“Not Charlie, honey. Your biological dad.”

Annie feels her heart stop for a moment as she takes in Dottie’s words. “What are you talking about? You don’t know who my dad is.”

Dottie casts her eyes down and nods slowly. “Let’s sit.”

Annie and Dottie move slowly to the kitchen table, neither one willing to make eye contact. As they moments of silence build in Annie’s head she feels dizzy with expectation. “Tell me.” Annie says slightly louder than a whisper.

“It was that summer after my first year in college. I was home and was working in the Uncle Tommy’s motel in Portland. It wasn’t my idea of a great job but I needed work. I’d wanted to stay on campus that summer but I couldn’t find a job. Tommy said I could clean the rooms so he could run the business,” she says lighting up another Marlboro light. “But all he was really doing was drinking and playing cards in the motel office.” Dottie takes a long inhale, reaches across the table and takes Annie’s hands in hers. “He was a motel guest, Annie. He was a college boy whose family had a big house in the cliffs but he wanted a room of his own so he rented it for the whole summer. His was the first room I cleaned that summer.” Dottie smiles with the long-forgotten memory.  “When he walked into the motel room  I was in the  bathroom cleaning the shower and I couldn’t hear him over the water and the music. I  had turned the music up on the radio in the room, Little Richard was playing. And when he found me I was on my knees in the shower, wiggling my ass in the air.” She laughs until her coughing takes her breath away.

“Let me get you another cup of tea.” Annie stands slowly and walks toward the electric kettle on the counter.

“And I was singing at the top of my lungs. I didn’t even hear him laughing until he turned the volume down. I thought it was Uncle Tommy checking in on me and I was yelling at him to put it back on before I turned and saw it was not Tommy.” Dottie stops and takes in a long slow breath. “I saw his eyes, blue like the morning sky, laughing at me. Baby, you have his eyes.” Dottie’s own fill but not one tear slides down her stoic face.

 “Did he have a name, Mom?”

 “Chapman,” she says quietly. “His name is, was.”  She stops and shakes her head. “His name was Chapman Todd.”