French Braid(45)

If Greta answered, she planned to be downright effusive. A regular cheerleader type. “Greta!” she would say. “This is your new sister!” Or no, maybe not. That might be going too far. “Hello, Greta, I’m so pleased to hear—”

But it was David who answered. “Hello?” he said.

“Hi, David.”

“Hi, Lily.”

“So you’re married.”

“Right.”

“Well, congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

He seemed to be waiting for something more.

“It was such a surprise!” she said. “I didn’t know till I heard it from Alice.”

“Yeah, well, I was planning to tell you. I was going to write Mom and Dad first, though.”

“I see,” she said. “Well. Anyhow. I just wanted to say I’m happy for you.”

“Thanks,” he said, but he still seemed to be waiting for something.

“I thought Greta seemed very nice,” she offered finally.

“Oh, she is,” he said. “She’s just…remarkable! She hasn’t had an easy life, you know. She comes from these immigrant parents who struggled to make a living; she had polio as a child; she worked her way through school as a waitress and a caretaker for old people and a dishwasher in a diner—”

Lily couldn’t remember when she’d last heard David utter so many words at one time. It was a river of words, a torrent. “Her husband was this total cad,” he was saying, “an orthopedist; he left her for his secretary a month after Emily was born but now he thinks he’s this father type; he’s always angling for custody when at first he purely resented her, wouldn’t give her so much as a—”

“Oh, and Emily seems like a sweetie,” Lily said.

“She is the child of my heart,” David said.

Lily was struck dumb.

“She’s such a—she’s no ordinary kid, you know. I just love watching how her mind works! Oh, I tell you, Lily, I never in this world gave a thought to having children. I really couldn’t imagine I’d be able to connect with children. But over Christmas, when Emily had to fly alone to visit her father, I was way more worried than Greta was. We were seeing her off in the airport and I said, ‘Emily,’ I said, ‘let’s say someone starts acting pushy or talking to you too much. Let’s say you start feeling uncomfortable. What you should do is just—here,’ I said. ‘I want you to look around you right now and choose a person you would go to for help. Someone you think you could trust.’ And then Greta laughs and says, ‘David,’ she says. ‘She has her very own assigned stewardess,’ she says. ‘She has an ID tag pinned to her front. She is labeled like a parcel. She will be fine!’ she says, but meanwhile Emily’s begun looking all around and she says, ‘Well, um, I don’t know; I could trust that person, maybe?’ and wouldn’t you know she has singled out this totally inappropriate teenage boy bopping about with his Walkman. Ha!”

Lily almost couldn’t believe that this was really David. And David must have sensed it, because he stopped speaking all at once and cleared his throat. “Well, listen to me go on!” he said. And then, more quietly, “Greta still teases me about that. When we first discussed getting married, she gave me a nudge in the ribs and said, ‘Tell me the truth, now, is it a wife you would like or a daughter?’ And I said, ‘Both! I want you both! I want the entire package!’ I wanted to have a family; I never thought I did but I do, it turns out. And I’ll be good at this, Lily; I know I will.”

“Well, of course you will,” Lily said.

There was a whole lot more she could have said. “Why, David!” she could have said. “There you are! I thought you were gone!” But she didn’t want to scare him off, so all she did was tell him again, meaning it this time, that she was very happy for him, and he thanked her again and they said their goodbyes and hung up. After that she sat at the table awhile, gazing into space.

She really didn’t remember David’s mouse joke. Maybe he’d never told it to her, although that seemed unlikely. Or maybe, at age thirteen, she’d been too caught up in her own concerns to listen. At any rate, it had rung no bells when Alice reminded her. Now, though, she could hear his small voice so distinctly; she could hear him singing out the punch line. “I been sick!” he said, and that curly chortle of his traveled across the years to her from long, long ago when they were still a family.





5


Robin and Mercy’s fiftieth anniversary happened to fall on a Thursday. Specifically, Thursday, the fifth of July, 1990. At first, Robin felt this was unfortunate. Who throws a party on a Thursday? Particularly a daytime party. And it should definitely be a daytime party, because young children were involved.

But then he saw a solution. He wanted this party to be a surprise, and if he scheduled it before their anniversary—say on the Sunday before, since Sundays were the most wide-open day of the week for everyone—Mercy was all the more likely to be taken unawares.

Oh, things were shaping up nicely, he felt.

He started with Lily; he approached her at work. Theoretically he was retired by now, but he tended to drop by the store fairly often, because what else did he have to do? He would take his time over breakfast, most days, and putter a bit afterward, but then he would start feeling itchy. He would wander the house; he would tackle some minor yardwork out back that was over with way too soon; he would find himself in front of the fridge, forking cold spaghetti directly from the dish even though he wasn’t hungry. (All his pants were getting snug around the middle. Who’d have thought he would be the type to put on weight?) And so eventually he would show up at the store just to nose around a bit, as Lily put it. “What are you doing nosing around?” she would ask, but playfully, teasingly. “You’re supposed to be lolling at home!”