Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn by Alice Mattison Read Free Book Online

one pocket and a cell phonein the other, but though she kept the phone on, she hoped it wouldn’t ring. At the corner she turned toward Prospect Park, falling into step behind families with children; it was almost like a summer Sunday. A woman ran with a stroller next to a little girl who pedaled a wobbling bicycle, pink streamers floating back from the handlebars. They stopped when the bike wobbled. As Con walked on, her cell phone rang.
    The call was from Joanna. Even when Joanna had been missing—back in 1989—when Con could calm down she understood that her daughter was probably not dead, and indeed, though Joanna’s disappearance would make Con change her life, Joanna was not only alive but, in 2003, had been staying with her mother until a few days earlier. She lived in Durham, North Carolina, with a boyfriend named Tim, and just now she’d interrupted a three-month stay in New York to go back there for a week or so. “What are you doing?” Joanna said.
    â€œI’m on my way to the park.” The woman and children passed Con. At the corner they all waited to cross Grand Army Plaza.
    â€œI’ve got a problem,” Joanna said.
    â€œAbout Tim?” Without an excuse—she’d never met him—Con didn’t like Tim.
    â€œNo, nothing’s wrong with Tim,” said Joanna. “Barney called.”
    Joanna had flunked out of one college and interrupted attendance at another to spend time in rehab because of a drinking problem. Eventually she’d graduated with a degree in art, and had become a sculptor, making her living waiting on tables. She’d quit her restaurant job and come to New York when she’d been awarded a three-month internship with awell-known sculptor in TriBeCa. Staying in Con’s spare bedroom, she filled the apartment with her work and kept Con up late talking about sculpture and the famous sculptor, whose name was Barnaby Willis. Barnaby Willis worked in steel, and Joanna was learning techniques she had never picked up in school. “I could work like this too, maybe,” she’d said, a couple of weeks earlier.
    â€œI thought you didn’t want to,” Con had said.
    â€œI think I do want to.” What Barnaby Willis did was expensive and even dangerous—welding, manipulating metal—but bold and ambitious, and Con liked hearing Joanna sound ambitious. “Sculptors have to learn so much,” Joanna said. “Things people in hard hats know.”
    Another day she said, “I once did a piece in aluminum. Aluminum sucks. But steel—you can bend steel, twist it. Steel has ductility.” Joanna’s present sculptures were large but not rigid shapes—something like sea creatures, something like plants, made of industrial gray-green twine that she secured from a factory. Sometimes she knotted it until it took on a shape, sometimes she actually crocheted or knitted. Con loved to look at them; she could scarcely believe that her years of worrying about Joanna might be over. Sometimes she didn’t believe it, and worried.
    â€œHow did you learn to do that?” Con had said one night, watching as Joanna crocheted an irregular gray shape with an enormous needle. “It looks like something you’d have to have surgically removed.”
    â€œThat’s the idea,” said Joanna. “Grandma knitted and crocheted. Don’t you remember, all over her house?”
    Con didn’t remember.
    â€œShe made sweaters and blankets,” said Joanna. “Wonderful ugly colors.”
    â€œDid she teach you?”
    â€œI guess so.” She paused and continued, “I wouldn’t mind working in wool. A ten-foot monster made of green alpaca. It would cost ten thousand dollars to make, but maybe I’d sell it and make a hundred thousand. An investment. Want to invest?” Joanna was tall and sturdy, with roughly cut black curls. She looked up from crocheting and her eyes