Sneak Peek!

The Bristlecone Writers’ Group

Chapter One

Whenever Abe Goodman reflected on what happened to Margaret after the writers’ group that day, his thoughts fluctuated wildly, like a lie detector needle, between thinking he could be blamed and admitting no responsibility at all.

Traditionally, the first to arrive at the Friday afternoon writers’ group read from their work-in-progress first, and on that day early in April, Abe was determined that it would be him. He was proud of his attempt to write from a woman’s point of view, something he never would have tried as a younger man. As he crossed the unkempt Bristlecone Village courtyard, passing the ancient bristlecone pine with the plaque and the bench next to it, a dated red Mustang convertible squealed into the handicapped spot by the front door of the two-story brick administration hall. Abe quickened his steps as Margaret Tinker emerged, brandishing her cane as her pot-bellied husband hoisted her from the low seat.

The oldest writers’ group member at eighty-two, frail and disheveled, Margaret wore a jacket with padded shoulders that might have been avant-garde during the 1980s. She never came prepared with anything written down. Each week, she used her time to tell unbelievable stories that were surely the product of a declining mind. It irked Abe that the others were too kind-hearted to kick her out.

Abe could not let her beat him to the conference room.

To attempt an end-run, Abe hurried through the side door of the admin building and took the stairs two at a time to the dated second-floor library and conference room, with its yellowed copies of The Great Books and Encyclopedia Britannica and its smells of leather and dust. But as his doctor warned he might, Abe became winded from the exertion and had to stop on the stair landing to take a few breaths. Adjusting to this new way of being was most annoying.

“You doing all right, Dr. Abe?” the young Black woman with the sweet face and long braids at the reception desk called up to him, half-rising from her chair.

“I’m fine.” Abe waved and nodded, feeling embarrassed that the young woman had noticed him slowing down, and also slightly guilty that he could never remember her name and now was too far away to read her nametag. Was it something biblical, perhaps?

Before he reached the second floor, the elevator door dinged, then opened, and Margaret and Roy emerged.

Damn!

“Ah, you beat me. Hello, Margaret. Afternoon, Roy,” he said, hoping he sounded more cordial than he felt.

Roy, with his ruddy, youthful face, left Margaret with Abe, refusing to meet his eye as he headed down the stairs, tossing “See you at five” over his shoulder as he went. Conveniently for him, Roy normally squeezed in nine holes of golf during writing group. Roy was always late to pick Margaret up, smelling like cigars and beer.

As Abe helped Margaret into her chair beside the scarred pine conference table, she gripped his arm like a vise.

“Thank you, young man,” Margaret said with a toothy grin as he helped her get settled in one of the ancient pleather chairs. Margaret was partially deaf, and throughout their meetings wore a hearing aid that emitted intermittent high-pitched squeals loud enough to make a dog yelp.

“Sure, my pleasure.” Young man, indeed. Abe was possibly seven years younger than Margaret.

One of the shortcomings of the writing group at Bristlecone was that anyone who lived at the Bristlecone retirement community was welcome to attend. In circumstances such as these where anyone, regardless of talent (or lack thereof), could be admitted to a group, sometimes one had to endure situations that weren’t ideal. Of course, Abe didn’t actually know if Margaret had writing talent, as she never brought anything she’d written.

Abe tried not to seem impatient. “Here’s your briefcase.” It weighed no more than a feather, as usual, proof that once again this week she hadn’t written anything. Why did she even bother to carry it around?

“Oh, thank you. I don’t want to let that out of my sight.”

“Hello, everybody.” Jennie Rossi arrived a minute or so after Abe, and he was relieved not to be alone with Margaret any longer. Jennie was a kind, attractive, and fit woman in her early seventies, a little younger than Abe, with olive skin that tanned easily, and white, corkscrew hair with a mind of its own.

Abe had seen her helping teach the wheelchair yoga class that met on Tuesday mornings in the exercise center but really didn’t know her outside of the writers’ group. He did know she was working on a novel that she’d never had time to pursue during her days as a social worker.

Abe grudgingly admitted that Jennie’s writing was quite good, though he often felt obliged to offer his expertise, since her manuscript was a historical novel about Enheduanna, a princess and priestess from ancient Iraq, and supposedly the world’s first known author. The Middle East had been one of his specialties while teaching at the university. Sometimes he heard a hint of pompousness in his voice as he commented on Jennie’s manuscript and tried, without great success, to rein it in. His students used to be enthralled, but these women seemed less dazzled by Abe’s oratory. That was a part of retirement that had been hard for him to adjust to over the last two years.

Willoughby Philpott arrived last.

“Hi, folks, you’ll be happy to know I didn’t forget the egg timer” From her large purse Willoughby produced the small five-minute egg timer they used to time their readings. It was antiquated, a holdover from a writers’ group Willoughby had been in years before, but they liked the symbolism of it. When she forgot the hourglass, they simply used the timers on their phones, but it wasn’t the same. Willoughby had been the one to organize the Bristlecone Writers’ Group a year ago, explaining that after she’d transferred her husband to the memory-care wing she needed something to look forward to.

Abe had always appreciated the fact that Willoughby wore her gray hair shoulder-length, longer than many women in their sixties and seventies wore it. She was tall—almost as tall as Abe—Southern, and athletic. Abe had noticed her agile play several times on the pickleball court, and he thought she looked young for seventy-one.

Willoughby, he thought, might be a family surname, as prominent Southern families sometimes followed that tradition with daughters to remind others from whence they came. Abe sensed, through her writing, that Willoughby was lonely. Her husband lived in the memory-care wing, and she lived on her own. She was the only one in their group who had published a novel, called Between the Shelves, about the secret inner life of a shy librarian, which was indeed what Willoughby had been before she retired. Although in Abe’s view, Willoughby was now anything but shy. He saw her as the leader of the group, the glue that held it together. Had she been shy when she was younger, perhaps? Abe fully intended to read Willoughby’s book out of courtesy but just couldn’t seem to get around to it.

“So who was first?” Willoughby looked around as she settled herself and laid her pages on the table.

“I was.” Margaret’s voice quavered. “I didn’t write anything down, but I’m going to talk about the story I’m going to write.” Her hearing apparatus squealed with electrifying vigor, and they all winced and tried not to put their fingers in their ears.

Abe sighed. Of course she hadn’t written anything down. For God’s sake, this was a writing group.

Willoughby glanced reprovingly at Abe, which he didn’t think was necessary. She put on her bright blue reading glasses, looked over the tops at Margaret with a kind and patient expression, then said exactly the same thing she always said. “Margaret, we’ll let you use your time by talking about your story today. Next time, please bring something you have actually written.” She turned the egg timer over. “Timer starting now. You have five minutes.”

Margaret looked crestfallen, but only for a few seconds. “All right, then, I’ll go quickly. The story I’d like to tell is about a family who kept moving their deceased patriarch to more prestigious cemeteries to burnish their family reputation and possibly erase failures, bankruptcies, and sins of the past.”

Abe, trying to keep his expression neutral, made a brief note about the legality of moving people who had already been buried.

As usual, Margaret rambled on with her imaginary and slightly implausible story. She finished at last by saying that in her story, the patriarch did in fact regain previous status and the past was successfully erased, and those who remembered the fall of the family questioned their own memories. Margaret’s hearing apparatus squealed again.

“It’s a true story,” Margaret concluded. “And that’s only the beginning. Just so you know, everything’s in here.” She patted her empty briefcase.

Abe couldn’t believe that after all of Margaret’s nonsense, the other women nodded politely. Why didn’t they just kick her out?

“Time’s up,” Willoughby said, as the last few grains of sand slipped to the bottom of the hourglass. “Comments?” Each group member took a few minutes to comment on Margaret’s story, going in clockwise order around the scarred old table.

“That sounds like a thought-provoking and hard-hitting story about the ways that people try to cover the past,” Jennie said in a kind tone that Abe never could have mustered. “I do hope you write it down.”

Willoughby was also extremely kind, complimenting Margaret on the unusual nature of the story and its metaphorical strength, and encouraging her to go back to her room and put the story on paper.

Abe couldn’t help himself when his turn came. “I haven’t actually done the research on this, but can people move their deceased relatives?”

“I believe they can,” Jennie said.

“I have no comment,” Margaret said, staring at the ceiling.

Willoughby gave Abe another reproving look. “I don’t think it’s that important, do you, Abe? It’s a metaphor.”

“Well, I think we should strive for accuracy.” Margaret reminded Abe of the students in his classes who didn’t do their work and tried to get away with it.

Margaret fixed her dark, heavily lidded eyes on Abe. “When you’re old, people don’t take you seriously and try to push you out.” Her deep quavering tone hovered close to tears. “One day it will be you and you’ll see what it’s like.”

The air rushed out of Abe’s chest as if he’d been punched, and he felt so ashamed that goosebumps broke out over his scalp. Silence hung in the air for long seconds. Both of the other women seemed at a loss for words at this strangely prescient and hostile statement coming from Margaret.

“Let’s go ahead and move on.” Willoughby raised her eyebrows and cleared her throat. “Abe, you were next?”

Abe nodded, strangely self-conscious, and began to read his work. “Abby tried on a tight fuchsia sweater that accentuated her breasts, then took it off. He would make assumptions. She then put on an oversized gray sweater that swallowed her and made her look frumpy. She took that off, too. Her third option was a plain, high-necked, navy-blue top that her mother might have approved of but that did absolutely nothing for her. Oh, God, maybe she’d just go in her bra.” It went on from there. Abe told himself that he didn’t care what the other members, all women, might say about these pages written from the point of view of a widowed, middle-aged woman getting ready for her first online date.

Willoughby cleared her throat as soon as Abe finished reading. “As librarians we were discouraged from acquiring books written by outsiders. For example, a White person trying to write about the Black experience. Or a man trying to write about what it’s like to be a woman.”

Abe put down his pen. “But isn’t it one of the great benefits and challenges of reading and writing books to understand what it might be like to be inside the head of a person who is different from you?”

“Though I did identify with the agony of trying to represent the entirety of oneself with one outfit, Willoughby is probably right that you might have a tough time publishing this,” Jennie said. “If you indeed wanted to publish it.”

“It could be risky, that’s all,” Willoughby said, in a kinder tone.

Abe leaned forward. “Well, now that I’m in my seventies, I figure, what the hell? I’ll take a risk. I have always liked women. I respect women. I don’t know why I can’t try to write from the point of view of one. Barbara Kingsolver wrote Demon Copperhead, and that’s a male written from a female point of view.”

“I don’t mean to be discouraging, Abe. Brilliant writers can do whatever they want,” Willoughby said.

“You don’t think I’m brilliant?” he joked, then rushed on when they didn’t laugh. “But what did you think about what I actually wrote?”

“As I said, I could identify with it,” Jennie said.

“I still wear many of the sweaters that I wore as a young woman,” said Margaret.

“I do appreciate the value of you doing this. But a woman trying on multiple outfits before a date might be considered by some to be a bit cliché.” Willoughby took off her bright blue glasses, smiled kindly, and turned over the hourglass.

Willoughby’s comment, more critical than usual, Abe thought, struck a nerve. After Ellen died, Abe had tried on at least five shirts before his first online date a year later. He’d limited the scene he’d written to three changes because five had seemed like overkill. Abe traced the soft skin of his empty ring finger. He kept his wedding ring in the top drawer of his dresser, between some handkerchiefs.

When Jennie read her piece about Enheduanna, and when Willoughby read her piece about the reclusive, nearly agoraphobic author who refused to make public appearances, Abe was aware that out of sheer spite he made biting, scathingly critical comments. At the end of the meeting, he stood, gathering his pages. Maybe he just wouldn’t return. He was tired of being the only male in the group anyway.

Still, trained by his mother, Abe courteously helped Margaret out of her chair, despite her belligerent comment earlier. Just ahead of Jennie and Willoughby, he escorted Margaret from the conference room and into the hallway. As usual, Roy was nowhere in sight.

“The golf course may have been crowded. Maybe we can meet him just outside the building,” Abe suggested, leading Margaret toward the elevator. But the professor in him could not resist a dig. “And I feel confident that next week you will grace us with actual pages you’ve written. Am I right, Margaret?”

To Abe’s surprise, Margaret glared at him, shook him off, and lurched toward the staircase. As she jerked her arm away, she lost her balance. The rest of them watched in horror as she fell down the stairs, tumbling loudly over and over like an unbalanced load of laundry. At the landing, her head smacked the floor with a spine-chilling thud, and her ear apparatus began screeching non-stop.

“Oh my Lord!” Jennie skimmed down the steps ahead of Abe and kneeled on the landing beside Margaret’s prone form. “Margaret, are you okay? Can you get up?”

Abe raced down and started to help Jennie pull Margaret up. The incessant screeching of her hearing aid continued, adding to the general sense of panic, until Abe yanked it from her ear and unplugged it. The silence was glorious.

“Stop!” Willoughby said, running down after them. “I don’t think you’re supposed to move a person. She might have broken something.”

“Oh, of course.” Abe stood back and looked down from the landing to the lobby, where the young woman at the desk had seen everything. “Miss, could you—”

“I’m on it.” She had already picked up the phone to call for help.

Margaret lay on her side. She seemed barely conscious, and one side of her grayish face sagged. Jennie remained on the floor beside her, holding her hand, telling her that help was coming soon. Meanwhile, the attendant—Abe now saw that her nametag said Destiny—raced up to the landing.

“I know CPR,” she said, kneeling and tossing her long braids out of the way to begin chest compressions.

Within minutes, two of the Bristlecone Village medical staff arrived, checked Margaret’s vitals, and lifted her onto a stretcher. The bump on her forehead was already the size of a Ping-Pong ball. Abe, Jennie, and Willoughby, who had taken Margaret’s empty orange briefcase from Destiny, followed them down the sidewalk toward the nursing wing, between the leggy azaleas and half-hearted clumps of tulips trembling in a slight breeze.

“Wait, does anyone have Roy’s cell?” Abe asked.

Willoughby and Jennie shook their heads.

“Maybe I should stay here in the lobby to tell him what’s happened,” Abe offered.

“Good idea, and we’ll go with her,” Willoughby agreed, and they both hurried off behind the stretcher.

Abe stood outside waiting, contemplating all that had taken place, regretting his impatience with Margaret, knowing the other two women were disgusted with him. He rejected his previous thoughts about leaving the writing group as being completely juvenile, the impulse of someone who was seventeen and not seventy-five. Roy’s ancient red Mustang squealed into the lot.

Roy rolled down the passenger window, his eyes wide, a cigar in his hand.

“Margaret fell down the stairs. She’s in the health-care wing.”

Roy leaped out of the car and they jogged thirty yards across the courtyard to the rather outdated Bristlecone medical wing, with its brick and white trim façade. Abe headed inside, holding the door for Roy, who still had his cigar. “I don’t think you can smoke in there.”

He grunted and tossed the cigar into an already ailing flowerbed before heading inside. Abe went over and stomped on the still-burning tip before going inside himself.

“My wife Margaret was just brought in here.” Roy clutched his golf cap in his hands and he sounded short of breath.

“Come with me, sir.”

Abe joined Jennie and Willoughby on the dated flowered couches in the waiting area as the attendant led Roy to be with Margaret.

“Did they say anything about her condition?” Abe asked Jennie and Willoughby.

Jennie shook her head. “They just rushed her back and told us to wait out here since we’re not family.”

The three sat in silence for a few moments.

“I bet Roy is going to blame us,” Abe finally said, sotto voce. He did feel guilty for not being able to grab Margaret’s arm in time. Could it, in fact, have been his fault?

“You tried to help,” Jennie said, which endeared her to Abe.

“We need to talk to her, and to Roy,” Willoughby said. “I think it’s time she stopped coming to the group. I’m not even sure she can write anymore.”

Abe nodded. “I’ve been thinking that for months!”

Jennie’s eyes welled. “Maybe you’re right. But I just hate this. She deserves to be able to express herself somehow. Don’t we all?”

The physician’s assistant, with a solemn expression and tired eyes, came into the waiting area and addressed them. “I’m so sorry to tell you this, but your friend has had a seizure and died.”

*

Abe, Willoughby, and Jennie stood in the waiting area, stunned. How could she be dead? They’d only just been subjected to yet another of her rambling stories. Abe swallowed, glancing at Jennie and Willoughby’s shocked expressions. They thought Roy might come back through the lobby, but he didn’t.

“Maybe he went out the back to wait for the funeral home attendant,” Abe suggested.

“I feel terrible about how badly we treated Margaret,” Jennie said.

“I, on the other hand, feel we had the patience of Job,” Abe said.

“Yes, we were patient.” Willoughby held up the empty orange cloth briefcase. “I still have this. How will we get this back to Roy?” As Willoughby held up the briefcase, the corner of a sheet of paper stuck out the top. “Look, she did have something in it after all.” Willoughby squinted. “I don’t feel right about pulling the whole thing out, but here at the top it says, ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.’”

“That’s certainly odd,” Abe said.

“That’s the title of a book,” Willoughby said. “My daughter, Courtney, loved it so much I read it, and I loved it too. It’s about a young girl coming of age. By Judy Blume.”

“I loved that book too!” Jennie said. “Such honesty about something people never used to talk about. So refreshing. It was one of the first books that made girls feel normal about the changes their bodies went through.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” Abe admitted.

“I wonder why Margaret wrote that title down, though,” Jennie said. “Does it mean anything?”

Abe shrugged. He recalled with slight embarrassment Margaret’s warning to him about being old but reassured himself that her cognitive abilities were diminished. He wondered if they’d look for a new member for the Bristlecone Writers’ Group, but he knew it was boorish to mention it so soon. Frankly, he intended to recruit another man so he wouldn’t feel quite so outnumbered. Then, as the sun slid lower and dusk began to fall, Willoughby headed off to visit her husband in memory care, and Jennie went back to her apartment for dinner.

*

Abe, striding almost silently through the pine-needle covered paths back to his own dark, 1960s cottage, reflected on the bristlecone pine at the end of the courtyard. It was neither graceful nor beautiful nor majestic but dwarf-like, gnarled, and stubby. Long life, that’s what the bristlecone pine had going for it. Was it worth it? he wondered and considered his own life.

After childhood and an early career in New York City, Abe had in later years enjoyed the bucolic joys of teaching at the small university of Eden Forest in the North Carolina piedmont, his alma mater. Teaching at Eden Forest had carried a bit of prestige, which was why he had elected to stay in the immediate area and chosen Bristlecone Village for his retirement. It was not the most highly regarded of the various retirement options in Eden Forest, but Abe had received a meaningful discount by making his deposit in advance.

Bristlecone Village covered about twenty acres and featured several different types of residences, from the older two-bedroom brick cottages like Abe’s, to smaller one- and two-bedroom apartments in the main building, and larger two- and three-bedroom condos in the new building. There was also an assisted living center and a memory-care unit. Bristlecone boasted two restaurants—one casual, featuring pub fare, and the other more formal, with white tablecloths, good cutlery, and fine china. The grounds, though not particularly well-maintained, featured wooded walking paths for active residents, courtyards with gardens, and four pickleball courts that needed their lines repainted.

He didn’t feel like meeting his regular group for dinner and sent a text saying he couldn’t make it. His son Jacob had called, but Abe wasn’t in the mood to talk to him either. He poured himself a glass of red wine when he arrived home, which his cardiologist had recommended over any other types of spirits. He sat in the maroon leather chair that Ellen had chosen for him so carefully all those years ago and tried to read the new issue of The Bristlecone Weekly. Still in a daze over what had happened to Margaret, he read entire articles without processing the words. He kept seeing Margaret tumbling down those stairs.

Unbidden, the experience of his heart attack came back to him, with vivid memories of excruciating pain.

There but for the grace of God go I, he thought.

Then he was taken back to the last week of Ellen’s life, when she lay in the big white bed in hospice, wearing her white turban, and had asked him to get her a newly published book on near-death experiences and life after death. He’d raced to the quaint Eden Forest bookstore on Main Street and got her the book, knowing she no longer had the stamina to read it, but being so grateful there was some small thing he could still do for her. He had spent swaths of her last week reading to her from it, lying in the bed next to her, though he now wished he’d simply held her since he didn’t believe in life after death then, and certainly not after Ellen’s passing.

He forced himself to return to the newspaper, skimming an article buried in the back explaining that the bristlecone pine could be the longest-lived species on earth, surviving in some cases up to five thousand years. Scientists had core-dated one somewhere in California at over forty-eight hundred years. The scientists had named it Methuselah, after the nine-hundred-year-old man in the Old Testament. Its location was being kept secret by the forest service to prevent vandalism. A shame, Abe thought, that even a tree needed to be put in the witness protection program in today’s fractious times.

Bristlecone pines were native to California and the Southwest, he read. The article featured a photograph of the oldest bristlecone pine in the Village, in the back Bristlecone courtyard, with its gnarled, dwarf-like trunk and thick-growing blue-green needles. A bronze plaque near the foot of the tree stated the genus and species: “Pinus Aristata.”

The article went on to tell a “myth,” or “fable” about that ancient pine. Apparently, back in the 1980s, a new Bristlecone administration had planned to cut down the tree to build new apartments, but a retired botanist from Eden Forest College, where Abe himself had taught, wanted to save the tree because it had been core-dated at over 450 years old, which meant it had been growing in the North Carolina piedmont back when the Catawba Indians made their homes there. The botanist found the presence of such an old bristlecone pine extremely mysterious, as bristlecone pines were not native to North Carolina. How could a non-native species have appeared here 450 years ago? Had a seed been carried from another location by a nomadic tribe, or by a horse or pig that had eaten a pinecone centuries ago? Or maybe it had been dropped by a migrating bird, such as a finch or crosshatch? No one knew, and perhaps no one ever would.

But the mystery of it was intriguing enough that when the bulldozers came to clear the land, a group of retirees sat peacefully around the tree, arms linked, refusing to move, until the administration backed down and located the apartments elsewhere. After that, the plaque and bench appeared.

Abe folded The Bristlecone Weekly, thinking he’d rest his eyes for a few moments. That story was certainly archetypal, but Abe didn’t know whether he believed it or not. Tonight, after all that had happened with Margaret, he felt as old and gnarled and endangered and out of place as that lone North Carolina bristlecone pine.