The Stories We Tell (4 page)

I didn't think of us as poor. We had enough. Our house was tiny, with walls made of Sheetrock and spit, it seemed. If my parents needed a private conversation in our one-story home, they went outside or took a ride in the car. But the size of the house wasn't the real problem. It was the space occupied by my parents' expectations.

Then there they were—the Morrisons—living in a house big enough to grow any family larger than life. Theirs was a home full of activity and noise and the aroma of pot roast, a house where Cooper had grown from the boy I saw at school into the man who had asked me to marry him. Music (Sinatra and Tony Bennett, mostly) was always playing on their stereo. Louise made her husband a whiskey sour neat at exactly 5:00
P.M.
The holidays were steeped in secular traditions, with no interruption in the form of church services.

I wanted this family. I wanted them to be mine. I wanted to be theirs.

Louise was quiet and kind, smiling at me like you would greet a new and sun-filled day. Averitt was distant but benevolent, like a lowercase god smiling down on me with warmth. I'd believed the shimmering image I'd seen, and it wasn't until our wedding day that I realized the truth.

Standing in the back of the vestibule, holding my lace gloves in my right hand while Willa held my bouquet, we waited for the organ music to start for the seating of the parents. I idled slowly out of the bride's room, ready. Willa and I hid, hushing each other, behind a pillar. Mom had already been seated. Louise stood erect behind the closed double doors, waiting for them to open. Averitt was already at the altar as Cooper's best man.

Louise wore a gold lamé dress that day. Her hair was piled high in a Q-tip imitation. Her red lipstick had bled into the lines around her mouth, and I saw this as she turned to the wedding coordinator—her best friend, Lina, whom she'd hired to make sure I did everything right—and said in a clipped but firm tone, “So he's going through with this, isn't he?”

Lina nodded, her hand on the door handle ready to open it.

“My only son, and this is what I get for loving him so much. He goes and marries a girl way beneath him.” She dabbed at her eyes. “I swear, I thought he'd back out at the last minute.” She stood taller and exhaled through pursed lips as Lina opened the door. Organ music flowed down the aisle.

Willa grabbed my hand. “Witch.”

“It's okay,” I said. “I get it. They wanted someone different. But it'll be okay. Cooper loves me.”

“They have no idea, no idea at all, that they are the luckiest people in the world. Cooper could never have, at any time, in any way, found a woman like you.
He's
not the catch; you are.”

I smiled at Willa and pulled on my gloves before reaching for the bouquet. “Let's go.”

*   *   *

Cooper's home now, deep in his Percocet sleep. I need to call both Averitt and Louise. If someone else tells them about the accident before I do, it will be another thing to add to the list of my great blunders. I push number three on my speed dial.

“Hello, Eve.” It's Louise who answers, and she greets me with the soft voice I once took to mean she loved me but now think of as the whitewash on disdain.

“Louise,” I say. “How are you this morning?”

“I'm fine, darling. How are you?”

“I'm okay, but I need to tell you that Cooper was in a car accident. He's okay, Louise. He has some deep cuts and bruises, but he's okay.”

“Oh. Oh, my baby.”

“He's okay, Louise. Awake and home.”

“How is he hurt? Where is he hurt?” Her voice cracks.

“His face,” I say quietly.

“No. Not his face.” Her pause is long enough that I think she might have hung up, until she says, “I'm coming now.”

“I know you want to. I know you want to help, but right now he's finally asleep. I promise I'll call as soon as he wakes up.”

“But he's … okay, right?” I can hear she's on the edge of crying.

“He is. Just a lot of stitches and pain. There will be more surgeries. But that comes later.…”

“Were you in the accident? What about Gwen?… Oh dear God. Gwen!” She is almost screaming, but only almost.

“No.” Deep breath in. Deep breath out. “I wasn't with him. Neither was Gwen. He was coming home from Charleston.” I proceed to give my mother-in-law the facts, one after the other, and yet I leave out the part about Willa. It feels like a lie of omission, but I can't bring my sister into the conversation.

We hang up, with promises that I'll call the minute Cooper wakes up. The last day and night have been a blur—Willa moving to a private room, Cooper coming home with bandages, medicines, and wound care instructions. I called Max and Francie to explain my absence yesterday, and now I walk toward the studio and wonder how to tell them about the accident; I haven't practiced enough, I think.

The coffeepot is always my first priority when I get to the studio, and today's no different. I turn the pot on immediately and then the music. The Civil Wars sing “The One You Should've Let Go.” I attempt to unravel my tangled thoughts and focus on work. I hope Max ordered the dead bar we need for the press. I wonder if Francie has started the photopolymer plate for the baby shower invites. E-mails have piled up, with urgent subject lines like “Need Immediately” or “Typo Problem” or “Order Late,” and there are the mundane ones with exclamation points and inspirational quotes. No matter the subject, the in-box blinks at me with too many blue dots signaling “unread.” The chalkboard with our schedule is full to the very edges with appointments, design meetings, and print runs. It will be a long day.

On the project table I see brainstorming notes and random stacks of sketches from yesterday, and I'm unable to focus. Even sorting through fonts—my go-to method of procrastination—isn't helping. Last month, I bought a box of antique cut-wood fonts at a craft show, and I'm sifting through them, forming piles across the table. Sorting this way, losing myself in the vernacular of typefaces, I'm able to forget for a moment about the outside world. There's always a low-hum hope that I'll find the letter
t
for our vintage Paragon wooden font set, which Max and I paid too much for at auction.

Francie is the first to arrive this morning. The youngest of our group at thirty-four years old, she's unaware of her beauty and influence. Our best ideas and images come from this smiling, tiny girl who doubts her own brilliance. She walks into the barn, earphone in and talking on the phone. “No way.” She laughs and drops keys on her desk. Her long brown curls fall in tangles over her shoulder and her blue eyes are bright behind tortoiseshell glasses. She waves at me. “Hey, gotta go. I'm at work. I'll call you later.” She drops her phone into her oversized purse. “Hey, boss.”

“Morning, Francie.” I smile at her.

Francie is our artist and, outside these barn walls, a singer/songwriter. The music is what drew her to Willa, and their friendship formed as quickly as a clap of thunder.

When Max comes in, he walks straight to the coffee, pouring it into his oversized mug with
SAND GNATS BASEBALL
on one side and a chubby sand gnat throwing a baseball on the other. He turns to Francie, picking up on a discussion they'd had yesterday, as if they'd never stopped. “By the way, I looked it up, and Elegy was designed by Jim Waseo. So again, you're right.” He lifts his mug in salute.

“Of course I'm right. That's my way.” She bows to Max.

I look at my coworkers, my dearest friends. Francie squints at me. “You okay? You look like hell.”

“Thanks.” I toss a wad of crumpled paper at her. “It's been a rough night.”

“What happened?” Max walks to the table and sits across from me.

I take in a deep breath. “Cooper and Willa were in a car accident. Cooper's face is all … cut up. Willa has a concussion, or brain swelling.” I state only the most important facts.

“How? What?” Francie asks on exhaled breath.

I repeat Cooper's story as best I can—Willa's drunken wobbling, the rain, the wheel being grabbed, and then the tree, the obdurate, unmoving tree.

“No.” Francie shakes her head. “No.”

“It's awful,” I say, and then the tears come—the ones I've suppressed for hours, the ones that I didn't want Cooper or Gwen to see. I drop my face into my hands.

Francie comes to me and places her hand on the back of my neck, a warm, calm presence. “Go home, Eve. Get some sleep. We got it here.…”

I look up and wipe at the tears, betrayers of emotion. “Cooper is sleeping with the help of pain pills,” I say. “Gwen is home, too. Willa is sedated and they're calling me when she wakes up. This is where I want to be and this is what I want to be doing.”

“Can I go see her?” Francie asks.

“Of course. She's at Savannah Memorial.”

Francie grabs her purse and glances up at the chalkboard. “I have an afternoon appointment with a wedding photographer. I'll be back by then.” And she's gone.

Max sits next to me. “That's a crazy story. I'm so sorry.”

The story. Max always wants “the story,” always wants to know “What happens next?” Max Winder, our writer and graphic designer, who would be our CFO if we had a CFO, runs the business, does the PR and marketing, pays the bills, and maintains our letterpress machines in top shape. There is no real title for someone who is everything. He's single, forty years old, and as intrigued with vintage fonts and their stories as I am. And I love him. I hope I love him the way I love Francie, the way I love antique fonts or the Vandercook, which I fell for some twenty years before. I've mostly convinced myself this is true. (It's the
not mostly
that's causing some problems.) His smile reaches all the way up to and then across his eyes to his ears.

I think this, too, will pass.

That was my mom's second-favorite quote from a Bible verse from only (of course only) the King James Version.

Yes, this feeling for Max will pass. Everything does. Everything will.

I look to Max then. “I can't seem to work it all out in my head yet,” I say. “But it's what happened.”

Max reaches for my hand and squeezes it before rising to go to his own stall, his own desk. Now the Civil Wars sing “If I Didn't Know Better.” The large overhead fan whirs on high with a pleasant whisper. We sit at our individual desks. Each work space, each stall, is as different as our personalities. My space holds a desk cut from an oak that fell in the back field. Pictures of my family hang on the plank cedar walls next to posters showcasing our designs. I keep a large burlap bulletin board, where inspirational quotes, photos, and random ideas are pinned above my desk.

Francie's work spot contains an old teacher's desk, which she salvaged from a torn-down elementary school. Sheet music and poems are tacked in crooked patterns on her walls. A guitar case is propped in the corner on a circular flowered rug.

Max's place is dominated with an ancient bar, scarred and still covered in shellac, which he'd found in an alleyway downtown. Next to this desk, he keeps an wooden storage unit, where he meticulously files his personal assortment of type fonts. His CD collection fills an entire metal bookshelf, so his books—so many books—are piled on the floor.

An hour later, the day turns brutally hot, one of those blistering afternoons when people visit the Low Country and say, “God, how could you ever live here? It's so blankety-blank hot.” Hot as hell, air thick as syrup, humidity stifling as steam. On the most brutal days, the barn smells like hay and horses, as if the heat awakens ghosts of the past. The tin roof is a musical instrument on a rainy day, but on a blankety-blank hot day like this one, it turns into a frying pan.

Max and I work quietly, and the only sound is the music and then the groan of the press as he begins to print a run of birth announcements—a bunny image deeply pressed into handmade cotton paper and the name Beatrice underneath in pink foil. The particulars of her birth—date, time, and full name—scroll underneath in a custom-designed font with daisies at the edge of the letters. A pile begins to form at the edge of the press. When he takes a break, he comes around the corner and rubs his hands on a towel, where grease stains make Rorschach images on the white cotton.

“We need a new gear pedal for the Heidelberg,” he says.

“I know.” I look up from my desk, and he's already walking away. I check my cell phone again, afraid that I won't hear it ring or beep. I review notes from an interview with an interior designer who needs a new logo. Usually, I can escape with the designs and visuals, but all I can think of is my damaged family.

Oh, Willa, I think.

Ours is a relationship of opposites—complex and simple. We're eleven months apart; “Irish twins,” we'd be called if we were Irish. But we're English through and through, Mom always bragged. Puritans all the way back to the
Mayflower,
if you believe her stories.

Dad was a sales rep for small electronic parts Company, but his pride and all his attention went to his position as lay minister at Calvary Independent Church. He wasn't the head pastor, and he didn't get paid at all for his devotion, but he took his position as seriously as if he were in charge of the universe itself. A reverend, a minister, an elder—all of the above. For my parents life was good and bad, black and white, heaven and hell. Anything in between was of the devil, foggy and destructive. My parents moved to Savannah from New York when they were eighteen-year-old newlyweds and Dad had been assigned to the southern parts office.

Willa and I can always claim to be southerners, as we were born in Savannah. We swam in the muck and flotsam of the Savannah River and ran barefoot through dormant cotton fields. Outside, our childhood was soaked with the joy of freedom. Inside, it was constrained by the board and batten walls of the church.