The Stories We Tell (7 page)

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.