“I still wish you’d told me,” Barbara says.
Olivia looks tired (tired unto death, Barbara thinks), but she also looks interested. “Why?”
Barbara has no answer. This woman will be a hundred in the fall, and somewhere behind those doors there may be bald children who won’t live to see their tenth birthday. So why indeed?
“Can you scream, Barbara?” The eyes above her mask, which is imprinted with red, white, and blue peace signs, are as bright as ever.
“What? Why?”
“Have you ever screamed? A full-out, full-throated scream, the kind that leaves you hoarse afterward?”
Barbara thinks of her history with Brady Hartsfield, Morris Bellamy, and Chet Ondowsky. Especially Ondowsky. “Yes.”
“You won’t scream here, this is no place for screaming, but perhaps later. Here you must be quiet. I could have waited until we got home to have Marie call you, but the older I get the poorer my impulse control becomes. Besides, I didn’t know how long the MRI would take. So I asked Marie to ask you to come here.”
She slides her big purse from her shoulder and fumbles it open. From inside she takes an envelope with a quill-and-inkpot logo Barbara recognizes at once. Her heart, which has been beating rapidly ever since she got Marie’s call, goes into overdrive.
“I took the liberty of opening this in order to give you bad news gently, if the news was bad. It isn’t. There are fifteen poets under the age of thirty on the Penley shortlist. You are one of them.”
Barbara sees her hand take the envelope. She sees her hand open it and pull out the heavy sheet of folded paper inside. She sees the same logo on top of the letter, which begins The Penley Committee is pleased to inform you. Then her eyes blur with tears.
2
They go back to Ridge Road in Marie’s car. Barbara sits in back. The radio, tuned to Sirius XM, plays a constant stream of forties tunes. Olivia sings along with some of them. Barbara guesses when they were first popular, Olivia wore penny loafers and did her hair in a pageboy. On the drive, Barbara reads the letter over and over again, making herself understand it’s real.
When they get to the house, Barbara and Marie help Olivia out of the car and up the steps, a slow process accompanied by several loud farts. “Just backfiring,” Olivia says matter-of-factly. “Clearing the exhaust system.”
In the foyer, with the door shut, Olivia faces Barbara with a cane gripped in each hand. “If you want to scream, now would be a good time. I’d do it myself, but I no longer have the lungpower.”
Barbara is still in the running to win the Penley, and to be published by Random House. She thinks it would be nice, she could certainly use the money for college, but that isn’t the important part. Olivia has all but assured her that her poems will be published even if she doesn’t win. They will be read. Not by multitudes, but certainly by people who love what she loves.
She draws in breath and screams. Not with horror, but for joy.
“Good.” Olivia is smiling. “How about another? Can you manage that?”
She can. Marie puts an arm around her shoulders and they scream together.
“Excellent,” Olivia says. “Just so you know, I’ve mentored two young men who were longlisted for the Penley, but you, Barbara Robinson, are the first to be shortlisted, and by far the youngest. There are more hurdles to jump, however, and they’re high ones. Remember that you’re in the company of fourteen men and women of immense talent and dedication.”
“You need to rest, Olivia,” Marie says.
“I will. But first we have things to discuss.”
July 27, 2021
1
At quarter to eleven in the morning, the universe throws Holly a rope.
She’s in her office (all furniture reassuringly in place), filling out an insurance company payment invoice. Every time she sees a jolly insurance ad on TV—the Aflac duck, Flo the Progressive lady, Doug and his emu—Holly mutes the sound. Insurance ads are a laugh a minute. The companies themselves, not so much. You can save them a quarter of a million dollars on a bogus claim and still have to bill them two, three, sometimes four times before you get paid. When filling out invoices of this sort, she often thinks of a line from some old folk song: a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much obliged.
The phone rings just as she’s finishing the last few lines of the poopy three-page form. “Finders Keepers, Holly Gibney speaking, how can I help?”
“Hi, Ms. Gibney, this is Emilio Herrera. From Jet Mart? We talked yesterday.”
“Yes we did.” Holly sits up straight, the invoice forgotten.
“You asked me if any other of my regulars ever just stopped showing up.”
“And have you thought of someone, Mr. Herrera?”
“Well, maybe. Last night before I went to bed I was switching around the channels for something to watch while I waited for my melatonin to work, and The Big Lebowski was on AMC. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen it.”
“I have,” Holly says. Three times, in fact.
“Anyway, that made me think of the bowling guy. He used to come in all the time. He’d buy snacks and soda and sometimes Rizla papers. Nice kid—seemed like a kid to me, I’m pushing sixty—but his picture could have been in the dictionary next to stoner.”
“What was his name?”
“I don’t really remember. Cory, maybe? Cameron? This was five years ago at least, maybe more.”
“What did he look like?”
“Skinny. Long blond hair. He kept it tied back, probably because he drove a moped. Not a motorcycle and not really a scooter, just a kind of bike with a motor. The new ones are electric, but this one ran on gasoline.”
“I know what they are.”
“And it was noisy. I don’t know if something was wrong with the motor or if that was just the way mopeds like that are supposed to sound, but it was really noisy, blak-blak-blak, like that. And covered with stickers, silly stuff like NUKE THE GAY WHALES and I DO WHATEVER THE LITTLE VOICES TELL ME TO. Also Grateful Dead stickers. He was a Deadhead kind of guy. Used to come in just about every weeknight in warm weather—you know, April to October. Sometimes even November. We used to talk about movies. He always got the same thing. Two or three candybars and a P-Co’. Sometimes rolling papers.”
“What’s a P-Co’?”
“PeruCola. Kind of like Jolt. Do you remember Jolt?”
Holly certainly does. For awhile in the eighties, she was a Jolt fiend. “Their motto was ‘all the sugar and twice the caffeine.’ ”
“That’s the one. P-Co’ was all the sugar and about nine times the caffeine. I think he’d go up to Drive-In Rock and watch the movies at Magic City—you can see the screen really well from up there, he said—”
“I’ve been there, and you can.” Holly is excited now. She turns over the pain-in-the-butt insurance payment invoice and scribbles Cory or Cameron, moped w/ funny stickers.
“He said he only went up on weeknights, because there were too many kids on the weekends, goofing off and grab-assing around. A nice enough young fellow, but a stoner. Did I already say that?”
“You did, but that’s okay. Go on.” She scribbles Drive-In Rock and then RED BANK AVENUE!!!