Writers & Lovers - Lily King Page 0,31

wasn’t just absentmindedly singing. I’d been going for the compliment. My voice is nothing special, but when your mother tells you something about yourself, even if you’ve coaxed it out of her, it’s hard not to always believe it.

I sing to the geese. And I feel her. It’s different from remembering her or yearning for her. I feel her near me. I don’t know if she is the geese or the river or the sky or the moon. I don’t know if she is outside of me or inside of me, but she is here. I feel her love for me. I feel my love reach her. A brief, easy exchange.

I finish the song and push my bike back up the embankment. A few geese watch, their heads above the rest. Their necks look navy in the moonlight, their chinstraps pale blue.

A few mornings later I get hit by a car. I was giving myself a pep talk while walking the dog. I’d had a few bad days of writing, and I was tempted to go back a chapter to fix it, but I could not. I just needed to move forward, get to the end. Painters, I told myself, though I know nothing about painting, don’t start at one side of the canvas and work meticulously across to the other side. They create an underpainting, a base of shape, of light and dark. They find the composition slowly, layer after layer. This was only my first layer, I told myself as we turned the corner, the dog pulling toward something ahead, his nails loud on the sidewalk. It’s not supposed to be good or complete. It’s okay that it feels like a liquid not a solid, a vast and spreading goo I can’t manage, I told myself. It’s okay that I’m not sure what’s next, that it might be something unexpected. I need to trust—the leash snaps out of my hand and the dog bolts across the street after a squirrel and I bolt after him and slam into a silver sedan.

I find myself on the ground a few feet away from where I was. It all probably looks a lot worse than it is. The car stops immediately and a woman comes flying out saying ‘sorry, sorry, sorry’ in a Caribbean accent and lifts me up and holds me in her arms. Someone else brings the dog back. I’m crying but not because I feel any pain. My hip and wrist are a little sore, but that’s it.

‘I will take you right this minute to hospital,’ she says.

But I can’t go to the hospital and am relieved I don’t need to. She insists, just to make sure, she says. Sometimes there are injuries inside the body. I have to explain I can’t afford it.

‘I will pay! Of course I will pay!’

When I tell her that without insurance X-rays will cost hundreds of dollars, she grows frightened and gets back in her car.

At work the wrist gets sorer, and by the end of the night the busboy is carrying most of my food. It doesn’t feel broken, though. I got lucky. If the accident had been any worse, the cost would have sunk me.

When Liz and Pat Doyle come back a few nights later and tell me about a job, a real job with health benefits, I’m more receptive than I would have been before the accident.

‘I thought of you because your mum helped get this organization off the ground,’ Liz says. ‘And it’s a writing job. They need a writer.’ She hands me a card: LYNN FLORENCE MATHERS. FAMILIES IN NEED. ‘Lynn is a character. You’ll love her.’

Muriel makes me wear pantyhose and a pair of her beige pumps to the interview. I blend in with the women I pass on Boylston Street, but I feel like a freak.

Lynn didn’t know my mother, but she’s the type of person my mother loved: quick, outspoken, a thin but charming layer of femininity covering a masculine confidence and drive.

‘Sit, sit,’ she says, directing me to a green padded chair. She sinks into the armchair behind her desk. I slide my resume toward her. She scans it and passes it back. ‘You’re thoroughly overqualified. Hablas español?’

‘Si. Viví dos años a Barcelona con mi novio Paco que era un profesor de Catalan pero me hizo loca y tuve—’

‘Whoa. Okay. You lost me back at Barcelona.’ She exaggerates the theta.

She gives me a W-9 form and tells me about their health insurance—a gold