Lorrie Moore: A Gate at the Stairs

The phone rang again before I’d had time to let the coffee kick in and give me words to say; nonetheless, I picked up the receiver.

“Hi, is this Tassie?” said the newly familiar voice.

“Yes, it is.” I frantically gulped at my coffee. What time was it? Too soon for calls.

“This is Sarah Brink. Did I wake you up? I’m sorry. I’m calling too early, aren’t I?”

“Oh, no,” I said, lest she think I was a shiftless bum. Better a lying sack of shit.

“I didn’t know whether I’d left a message on the correct machine or not. And I wanted to get back to you as soon as possible before you accepted an offer from someone else.” Little did she know. “I’ve talked it over with my husband and we’d like to offer you the job.”

Could she even have called the references I’d listed? Had there been enough time to?

“Oh, thank you,” I said.

“We’ll start you at ten dollars an hour, with the possibility of raises down the line.”

“OK.” I sipped at the coffee, trying to wake my brain. Let the coffee speak!

“The problem is this. The job starts today.”

“Today?” I sipped again.

“Yes, I’m sorry. We are going to Kronenkee to meet the birth mother and we’d like you to come with us.”

“Yes, well, I think that would be OK.”

“So you accept the position?”

“Yes, I guess I do.”

“You do? You can’t know how happy you’ve made me.”

“Really?” I asked, all the while wondering, Where’s the new employee’s first-day orientation meeting? Where is the “You’ve Picked a Great Place to Work” PowerPoint presentation? The coffee was kicking in, but not helpfully.

“Oh, yes, really,” she said. “Can you be here by noon?”

The appointment with the birth mother was for two p.m. at the Perkins restaurant in Kronenkee, a town an hour away with a part-German, part-Indian name that I’d always assumed meant “wampum.” The social worker who ran the adoption agency was supposed to meet us there with the birth mother, and everyone would cheerfully assess one another. I had walked the half hour to Sarah Brink’s house and then waited twenty minutes while she scrambled around doing things, making quick phone calls to the restaurant—“Meeska, the Concord coulis has got to be more than grape jam!”—or searching madly for her sunglasses (“I hate that snow glare on those two-lane roads”), all the while apologizing to me from the next room. In the car, on our way up, I sat next to her in the front seat, since her husband, Edward, whom, strangely, I still hadn’t met, couldn’t get out of some meeting or other and had apparently told Sarah to go ahead without him.

“Marriage,” Sarah sighed. As if I had any idea what that meant. Yet it did seem odd that he wasn’t with her, and odder still that I seemed to be going in his stead.

But I nodded. “He must be busy,” I said, giving Edward the benefit of the doubt, though I was beginning to think Edward might be, well, an asshole. I looked sideways at Sarah, who was hatless, with a long cranberry scarf coiled twice about her neck. The sun caught the shiny artifice of her hair as well as the stray tufts of white lint on her peacoat. Still, especially with the sunglasses in winter — something I had seldom seen before — she looked glamorous. I was not especially used to speaking to adults, so I felt comfortable just being quiet with her, and soon she turned on the classical music station and we listened to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Night on Bald Mountain for the entire ride. “They’ve told me the birth mother is very beautiful,” said Sarah, at one point. And I said nothing, not knowing what to say.

We waited in the second booth in at Perkins, Sarah and I sitting on the same side, to leave the seat opposite fully open for the two people we were waiting for. Sarah ordered coffee for us both and I sat looking over the plasticized Perkins menu, with its little pictures of golden french fries laid out on frilly, verdant lettuce next to tomato slices the size of small clocks. What would I order? There was the Bread Bowl Salad, the Heartland Omelette, and various “bottomless” beverages, for the greedy and thirsty — I feared I was both. Sarah ordered Perkins’s Bottomless Pot of Coffee, for the entire table, and the waitress went away to bring it.

“Oh, look, here they are,” murmured Sarah, and I looked up to see a heavily made-up middle-aged woman in a deep pink parka holding the arm of a girl probably my age, maybe younger, who was very pregnant, very pretty, and when she smiled at us, even from that distance, I could see she had scarcely a tooth in her head. We stood and moved toward them. The girl wore an electronic bracelet on her wrist, but was clearly unembarrassed by this because she energetically thrust her hand out from her sleeve in greeting. I shook it. “Hi,” she said to me. I wondered what she had done, and why the bracelet was not around her ankle instead. Perhaps she had been very, very bad and had both.

“Hi,” I replied, trying to smile companionably and not stare at her stomach.

“ This is the mother, here ,” the woman in the pink parka told the pregnant girl, indicating Sarah. “Sarah Brink? Amber Bowers.”

“Hi — it’s so wonderful to meet you.” Sarah grasped Amber’s hand warmly and shook it for too long. Amber kept turning back hopefully toward me, as if she were as baffled as I was to be in the company of these mysterious middle-aged women.

“I’m Tassie Keltjin,” I said quickly, shaking Amber’s penalized hand yet again. The delicate knobs of her wrists and her elegant fingers were in strange contrast to her toothlessness and the hard plastic parole band. “I’m going to work for Sarah, as a childcare provider.”

“And I’m Letitia Gherlich,” said the adoption agency woman, shaking my hand though not letting go of Amber’s coat sleeve, as if she might escape. Amber did have the face, if not currently the body, of someone who perhaps more than once had suddenly made a run for it.

“Hey, Letitia,” said Sarah, who threw her arms around her as if they were old friends, though Letitia stiffened a little. “Here, come sit down,” she added. “The waitress is bringing coffee.”

After that, things moved with swiftness and awkwardness both, like something simultaneously strong and broken. We hung up coats; we ordered; we ate; we made chitchat about the food and the snow. “Oh, there’s my probation officer,” Amber said, giggling; her face brightened, as if she had a little crush on him. “I think he sees us. He’s sitting right over there by the window.” We looked up to see the probation officer, his blue jacket still on, his bottomless Diet Coke stacked with ice. A going-to-seed hunk in a windbreaker: the world seemed full of them. We all just stared to buy ourselves time, I suppose, and to avoid the actual question of Amber’s crimes.

Letitia began to speak to Sarah, on Amber’s behalf. “Amber is happy to meet Tassie as well as you, Sarah.” Here Amber looked across at me and rolled her eyes, as if we were two girls out with our embarrassing mothers. I had been noticing Amber’s face, which was as lovely as advertised but sassy, with a strange electricity animating it, and with the missing teeth she seemed like a slightly educated hillbilly or an infant freak. Her hair was a gingery blond, shoulder length, as straight and coarse as a horse’s tail. “Amber is wondering, of course, about your religious plans for the baby. She is very interested in having the baby baptized Catholic, aren’t you, Amber?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Amber. “That’s the whole point of this.” She pulled out the front of her bulging stretchy sweater and let it snap back.