The From-Aways by C.J. Hauser Page B

for my movie.
    The nurse popped a cassette into the VCR.
    Man, I said.
    Dim the lights, Lucille, he told the nurse, and she did.
    If you stay, there is to be no idle chatter, he said. He was a hell of a guy. He was strong-looking in the chest and arms, but his legs looked skinny in his hospital pants. He wore a hospital top, but over it a tweed sport coat with elbow patches.
    What are we watching? I said.
    All the President’s Men, he said. It’s my film. I have a cameo.
    Are you an actor? I said
    As I mentioned, he said. I have a cameo.
    We started watching the movie and I was thinking it was pretty good. Better than game shows, for sure. By the last scenes I was so into it, all I could see were Woodward and Bernstein scurrying around trying to get their backup by phone. The guy spoke up.
    There, he said.
    What? I said.
    He pointed at the screen. Fourth cubicle from the back, he said. I looked. In that cubicle was another newspaperman. Yammering silently into his phone. Writing things down and touching his temple in distress.
    That’s you? I said.
    That’s me, he said.
    When the movie was over the nurse came back and pressed rewind. She stood there looking at the cassette the whole time. She popped it out, stuck it in the case, and wheeled him out.
    The next day she rolled him in again. It’s time for my movie, he said. And Lucille went through the whole thing again.
    Alzheimer’s, she said.
    We watched the movie.
    The thing is, the more I watched it, the better it got. The more I realized it was actually the best movie of all time. It was a month later, when I had seen All the President’s Men two dozen times, that they realized there was something wrong with my mother other than being tired. That it wasn’t just a nervous breakdown set off by my hormones, and that probably she had cancer instead. So they moved her to a different hospital. And I went too.
    When Marta’s hair started falling out, she insisted on brushing it anyway. Let’s just get this over with, she said. The losing, I think she meant. She brushed until she had just a few whorls left, curled against her head in patterns like a galaxy map. The tangles that came away in her brush she would pluck from the bristles and let go out the window. She’d drop them, soft knots of hair drifting out across the lawn. A bird will use this to make a nest, she’d say. I wasn’t sure if that was true.
    In the new hospital lounge I watched game shows again, but, man, did I miss that movie. I missed Mr. Fourth-Cubicle-from-the-Back and Woodward and Bernstein too. I missed thinking that my mom was just a little tired, a little crazy. That I could watch my film and wait it out and then it would be time for Marta and me to go home.
    When they finally did send us home, it was because they had run out of ideas. When college started in the fall, and they asked me what I was majoring in, I said journalism. Investigative reporting. And that was it. I was a journalist, just like the boys in the film.
    I WISH L EAH were here because I have a masochistic urge to tell her how badly I fucked up the interview, even though it would only confirm all her worst professional suspicions about me.
    “You’re a pretty girl,” Jethro says. “You look just like an Irish setter I used to have.” He twirls the end of my hair around his finger.
    “You make a girl feel special, Jethro,” I say, batting his hand away.
    This is when the bartender, Sara Riley, tells me she thinks I’d better go outside. Leah is driving around the parking lot in circles. The woody used to be a red car. Now it’s old-lady-lace-colored. There are orange stripes, like rings around an Easter egg, circling the passenger door, roof, wood panels, and driver door. The best part is the hood, which is a cheerful springtime green. In sloppy green script, on the driver’s-side door, is inscribed: THE MENAMON STAR .
    “This is my lobster pot!” Leah drunkenly yells as she passes me, black hair flapping out the