Saturday, November 7
At ten, Mrs. Levin wanted to drive to the supermarket.
“Not go in,” she said. “Just get there.”
They had been practicing on quieter streets. The supermarket route had a turn that worried her, and she had described it at the last lesson with a precision that made Willa suspect she walked out to inspect it.
“We can go part of the way,” Willa said.
“I don't want to rush.”
“Good.”
She meant it. She meant all the things she usually said. But halfway through the first right turn a new ending occurred to her and she lost a moment of Mrs. Levin talking.
“What?”
“The light.”
“Keep looking ahead.”
“I asked if this was the street.”
“It is. Sorry. Yes.”
Mrs. Levin glanced at her and then back through the windshield. Willa felt a flush begin at her collar. There were people whose whole fear of driving was another person's inattention. She folded her hands in her lap and made herself watch the street without turning it into something to say later.
At the next corner they pulled over. Mrs. Levin didn't want to be told she'd done well. She wanted to know how far she had been from the parked truck.
“More than you thought,” Willa said. “The mirror makes it feel closer.”
“Can I see it again?”
They went around and did it again. Willa had to talk her through the approach, then keep quiet while she made the turn. It took longer than it would have taken yesterday. Yesterday Willa would not have minded.
By the fourth time, Mrs. Levin was angry.
“I know you have to say the same things.”
“I don't mind.”
“I do.”
“All right.”
“Not with you.”
“I know.”
Mrs. Levin sat looking at the wheel. Her rings had turned inward against her palms. She straightened one, then another.
“Forty-nine years,” she said. “I could have learned at any point in forty-nine years.”
Willa waited.
“He offered. I'm not saying he didn't. I liked being driven. I read the paper. I looked at things.”
“You can still look at things.”
“Not in the same way.”
“No.”
They sat while a dog on the sidewalk smelled each of the bags outside a restaurant. Its owner waited too, without checking a phone.
“I didn't think I'd have to get good at something else,” Mrs. Levin said.
Willa knew what she wanted to say to that. She could have made it neat and kind. Instead she asked whether Mrs. Levin wanted to stop for the day.
“No.”
They took the corner once more. It was better. Mrs. Levin didn't smile, but she let go of the wheel after parking as though it belonged to her. Willa wrote the route on a piece of paper and gave it to her to take home.
“You're not writing jokes about me?” Mrs. Levin asked.
“No.”
“My son says you're a comedian.”
“Sometimes.”
“He said you might make me famous.”
“I won't.”
Mrs. Levin seemed almost disappointed. Willa had to smile.
“You can tell him you have a private engagement.”
“Is that funny?”
“Not particularly.”
“Then don't use it.”
Willa laughed. She said goodbye, waited until Mrs. Levin had reached the bus stop, and took the keys inside for her break. In the bathroom she read the notebook once, quickly. Then she put it in the trunk of the car.
At four in the afternoon, Willa sat in the training car and ate a banana one small bite at a time. The lesson had ended. She had repeated a question her pupil had already answered, and he had glanced at her as if she were the nervous one.
Beth called while she was folding the peel into a napkin.
“Did Mom do something yesterday?”
“She tell you?”
“She said you'd had a nice discussion. That usually means someone's dead.”
“She put Atlantic City in the show.”
“Oh, Will.”
Willa looked at the fog on the inside of the windshield.
“She made it a thing where I sent him home because room service was late. Then I got a better room.”
“You didn't even go downstairs.”
“I know.”
Beth breathed into the phone. Willa heard a cardboard box being dragged, perhaps at Jo's house, perhaps somewhere else.
“What did she say when you asked her not to?”
“She said I should answer.”
“Of course she did.”
“I'm trying something tonight.”
“At Rafi's?”
“Yeah.”
“Give her hell.”
Willa peeled a string of banana from her thumb.
“You coming?”
“Can't. Simon's taking me out. He's booked a place.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah.”
Neither of them said anything else about it.
“Don't wear the green shirt,” Beth said. “It goes see-through under the light.”
After they hung up, Willa got out to wipe the extra mirror. Her notebook lay closed in the trunk, its blue elastic band pulled over the cover. She left it there until she returned the car.
She went home to change and found the green shirt draped over her chair. It had a small tear by the hem. She put it in the laundry and chose black.
At the kitchen table she wrote the running order on a clean page. There was enough mother material for a short set without Beth. She counted it, timed it under her breath, took out one sentence and found that removing it made the next one better. She worked on that for twenty minutes. Work she could do with her hands calm.
Then she put a small star beside the chair.
On the way to the club, she stopped for cash. The machine charged her a fee for finding her own money. That would have made it into the notebook on an ordinary day. Today she put the receipt in her pocket and left it there.
Rafi was breaking down a cardboard box when she came in.
“Your mother coming?”
“She said she was.”
“Tell me if she changes her mind. I've got a table.”
“You don't need to.”
“I want to. She'll have people standing around her if I put her at the bar.”
Willa nodded.
“Don't make it a thing,” he said.
“I didn't say anything.”
“I'm giving you information. You're the one looking at me.”
He put his foot on the box and flattened it. One end sprang up again. He swore, found a knife, and cut the tape.
She stood near the door until he finished. He hadn't asked what she'd written. She could have told him; instead she asked what time she was going on.
The club was nearly full when Jo arrived. Somebody at the bar recognized her and tried a joke from a show ten years ago. She laughed, touched his arm, and asked where he had seen her. His face changed with the pleasure of having information she wanted. Willa watched him tell her about taking his mother, watched Jo ask about the mother, watched him become for a moment the most interesting person in the place.
Mae wore jeans and a small dark sweater. She kissed Willa on the cheek.
“This is a good room,” she said.
Willa didn't mention that the bathroom lock had been repaired with a fork.
Rafi found seats for them at the little table beside the pillar. He didn't normally reserve seats. Jo took off her coat and draped it over the empty chair beside her; Mae set a drink on the table. A real audience would be behind them tonight, not a red sea of empty seats and a man eating an apple.
“Eight,” Rafi reminded Willa.
“I know.”
“You always know. Then you get to six and start remembering things.”
She went to the hallway beside the stage. The comic before her was doing a piece about his landlord. She could hear his endings coming, hear him hurry over one good line to reach a weaker one. She held her notebook open. The page began with her mother and ended with Beth. Across the bottom she had written a different finish, a safe finish, a joke about Jo retiring so the family could finally have a Christmas without a recording light.
She could do the driving material. Mae had heard some of it; Jo had watched some online. She could do her seven, add the Christmas joke, take her forty dollars, and have the six thousand still coming. She pressed her thumbnail into the edge of a page until it made a white crescent.