Home > The Center of Everything(3)

The Center of Everything(3)
Author: Jamie Harrison

No one anticipated any sort of brain cell death spiral; the doctors said these small, mostly peaceful pauses should become less frequent. Polly needed a few months to recover and should ideally avoid future impacts. Some glitches might persist, executive function issues. Her first impulse would no longer be her best.

Ned and Polly decided to let the manager at Peake’s buy into the business and take on more responsibility, and Ned cut down on his own shifts. He and Polly came up with bits of the menu she could manage at home. Friends were oddly eager to stop by. Josie, who worked as a grant writer, taking the town through incremental improvements, claimed she needed help revising the local soup kitchen’s fundraising materials, and said the incomprehensible pages Polly turned in were brilliant. Polly’s cousin Harry badgered her for help researching the old Poor Farm graveyard at the county museum; Harry’s mother, Opal, wanted to learn how to use an iMac. The children were in high demand for playdates. Nora Susak, an internist who was still nursing her youngest child, said she wanted to learn how to bake; her husband, Vinnie, eloquent attorney, asked for help with a letter to the editor. Ariel Delgado, the girl now lost in the river, asked for tutoring on the GRE and claimed she needed help writing a graduate school admissions letter six months in advance.

Over the last decade, half the town had brought Polly business letters, brochures, oral histories and obituaries, short stories, and even poems, the way you’d bring the sick to a shaman. Fix it, make the story come to life, make it true. Polly felt like a sham even before she smacked her head—she could only do so much. Now she couldn’t move a paragraph. She would either wander away from a thought the way she wandered away from the stove, or she’d descend into a visual whirlpool, sometimes with an accompanying earworm melody. For an overdue mystery edit she confused character names, covered the printout with enraged comments, wrote knight for night, toe for tow, and—weirdest of all—now for gnaw. Knew instead of new, passed instead of past. Right rite, bow bough beau. When she picked up an old coworker’s cookbook project, she shredded rather than edited and put the recipes back together in a novel order, with missing steps and fresh errors on quantities.

Polly’s remaining independent source of income came from vetting scripts for Drake Aasgard, an actor she’d known since he was a teenager. Drake understood what had happened—Ned had been at his cabin when Polly went flying over the Bentley in March—and his agenda was so wayward that Polly could operate with little harm. He overpaid her to read and assess, to issue simple, graceful kiss-offs—this was sometimes a challenge now, given her damaged impulse control—to the scripts and novels his heartbroken agent still sent to Montana. Jane was snooty about the job, but trying to describe each script or novel plot was a good way for Polly to work toward making sense again. Drake, who hadn’t filmed anything in four years, had no real intention of working soon, but he checked the notes before they went out.

The world became terribly fragile; the center, the imperfect brain Polly had been fond of, had fallen apart. The bleaks, short but sharp, swept over her after every error in judgment or memory, and when she sensed pity, she blew up in a nasty stew of confusion and panic. Polly felt sure she would need a minder forever, she would wear Ned out and he would leave, she would now be a horrible mother. What would Helen and Sam remember out of this mess?

You’ll be fine, said Ned. We’ll be fine. It wasn’t as if he didn’t understand her fear, and he knew having Jane around opened this question up like a wound. Polly had always known she was lucky to have Jane, but the bad mothers, cruel mothers, absent mothers, rang in Polly’s head. She still loved the feel of Jane’s fingers on the good side of her skull, fluffing her fresh-cropped hair, stroking her cheek.

Good mothers, good mothers were rarities, the center of everything.

 


On that Sunday morning, Polly had things to do, errants, most having to do with the looming arrival of Maude Swanberg, great-aunt, for whom they’d planned a large birthday party on July 5. These plans were now complicated by Ariel Delgado’s accident—it was hard to throw a party for a hundred people when someone you loved was probably floating facedown in the river. It was almost equally hard not to have a birthday party for a woman turning ninety. “What if they find her right away?” asked Maude, her voice reedy on the phone.

“Fifty people, not a hundred,” said Jane, who was depressed by the idea that Polly’s younger brothers and sister couldn’t come—they’d used their time off helping after the accident that spring. “The ones you truly care about. Do you want to come later, when we can do it right?”

Maude did not; she wanted to turn ninety in the town where she’d been born. Later was problematic. She thought she’d die soon, and she probably would, because she was eighty-nine. Consider the actuarial reality, she said.

Merle, designated asshole, called the guests who’d been cut. Ned canceled the tent and the cellist and planned pork specials at Peake’s with one of the two pigs they’d planned to cook. And so the tasks for today, after Polly resisted the urge to loose the dogs on the rabbit, were simpler than they might have been. At the grocery store, Jane and Polly still looked like a ranch family on a monthly shopping spree, groceries as a sport and a pastime. They bought a cheap wading pool and squirt guns and new badminton and croquet sets to amuse the kids over the next few days, poster board for all the photos of Maude’s life, socks and Velcro sneakers for Helen, who was still uninterested in clothing and liked to deposit items in corners of the garden. They picked up Sam’s friend Ian, who was terrified about most things in life, and listened to the boys gibber about medieval warfare, Helen content in her own world. They dropped off containers of sauces at Peake’s—the Berrigans’ home kitchen was licensed, and despite her dented head, Polly still prepped some nitpicky things. She’d cooked the night before, drinking wine and only burning one batch of carta di musica. She hadn’t ruined the lemon curd or meringues or duck confit, though she had eaten too much of the crunchy skin.

Polly found Ned in the restaurant kitchen, fresh from searching another stretch of the river with Harry. He was sunburnt, his brown hair bleaching out, and he shook his head—no news—before he kissed her and went back to prepping duck. He said the walk-in compressor was dying, but it was always something. Could she braise fennel and onions that afternoon? Would she remember to add the pistachios to the focaccia this time?

“I will,” said Polly (though she wouldn’t), floating off to the basement storage to determine how many tables would need to be carted to the house for the party.

Outside, the sky was dark blue, with just a breath of wind. Seventy-mile-an-hour gusts were routine on this part of the Rocky Mountain front, sixty miles north of Yellowstone Park, but at this moment the air was dulcet, and the town felt sweet-tempered, with only a few crushed plastic glasses in the gutter to warn a traveler of the place’s roaring alcoholic heart. Livingston had only eight thousand people within a county that was twice the size of Long Island, and they were on the brink of peak tourist season. Polly and Jane and the kids stopped at a food truck in the hardware store parking lot and ordered coleslaw and fried clams, though Livingston was a mile high and a thousand miles short of an ocean. They drove to the river and walked toward a bench behind the baseball diamonds, where the dogs could run around. An osprey platform stood between the lights on the outfield fence, and the dogs sniffed for bones and scraps underneath. From the higher ground on the river path, Jane said she saw two small heads bobbing around an adult osprey in the nest, rather than the three Polly had counted the day before, and Jane wondered if the third chick had blown out during the wind the night before.

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