French Braid(73)

She was one of those young women without any airs, curly-haired and sturdy in Levi’s and a tank top. A bandanna-print mask covered the lower half of her face, but David could tell by her eyes that she was smiling. “I’ve just been calling him ‘boy,’?” she told Benny, “so you’ll have to come up with a name for him.” And then, to Nicholas, “How you been, Nick?”

“Pretty good. And you?”

“Oh, hanging in there.”

“You remember my parents, Greta and David,” Nicholas said. “And this, of course, is Benny. Julie Drumm,” he reminded his family.

“Hi there,” Julie said. Since all the Garretts wore masks as well, she couldn’t have seen any more of them than they could see of her, but she gave them a friendly wave. “Looks to me like we’ve got a match, am I right?” and she tilted her head toward Benny and the dog.

“Yes, I’d say so,” Nicholas said. “You like him, Ben?”

“I love him!” Benny said.

So Nicholas followed Julie down to her car for the supplies she’d brought, while Benny ventured to stroke the top of the dog’s head. “What name will you give him?” Greta asked.

“I’m not sure,” Benny said.

“I had a dog named Cap, once,” David offered helpfully.

Benny gave him a pitying look. (He had tugged his mask below his chin the very instant Julie left them, so that he seemed to be wearing a little candy-stripe Amish beard.) “No,” he said at last, “his name is John.”

“John. Okay.”

And when Nicholas returned, hugging a giant bag of dog chow and clutching a coiled leash, Benny said, “Meet John, Daddy!”

“How do you do, John,” Nicholas said. And they all went into the house.



* * *



—

It didn’t take long for them to settle into a routine. The first one up in the morning was Nicholas. David and Greta would come downstairs to find the study door closed and Nicholas murmuring behind it, probably talking to Juana, who often called very early. David would let the dog out to pee in the backyard and then feed him, after which he and Greta had breakfast. They learned not to bother offering Nicholas any breakfast; he would subsist till lunchtime on the pot of coffee he’d brewed. The last to rise was Benny. He would tumble downstairs at nine or so, calling, “John? John?” which suggested he might have stayed in bed even later if not for the lure of the dog. John, who’d clearly been just making do with David and Greta, would prick up his one erect ear and race to the bottom of the stairs to make joyful snuffling sounds while Benny hugged him. Then Greta tried to wheedle Benny into eating something, although he was far more interested in trying to place a call to his mother. (The first of many calls, every day; they had her on speed dial now, although she wasn’t always free to answer.) After that, while Greta busied herself around the house, David would spend his biggest block of dedicated time with Benny. They would go out to the garden and pull a few weeds, empty the wading pool from yesterday and refill it, and then start the drip hose in the garden and take John for his walk. David, remembering his years with Cap, assumed John should walk glued to Benny’s left side. However, John had his own ideas. His leash was the retractable kind that gave him a lot of leeway, and he frequently lagged behind when he came upon some intriguing smell or raced ahead when a squirrel crossed his path. Otherwise, though, he trotted along docilely enough, and David gave up trying to make him heel.

This neighborhood was a nondescript bedroom community, a modest Philadelphia suburb that had grown leafier and more established-looking as it aged. David and Greta had become less a part of it after their children left; but now, out walking with Benny, David noticed all the new young families who had moved in. Everybody was home these days, of course, out mowing the lawn or teaching a child to ride a bike or speaking to a next-door neighbor over a hedge. Although Benny wasn’t supposed to play with the children he came across, they did manage to interact to a degree. Benny would pull his mask up and stay at a respectful distance, and they would eye one another in silence awhile. Then a boy might throw a soccer ball toward him and he would clumsily catch it, or a little girl might let her chihuahua stretch to the end of his leash and touch his nose to John’s nose. As time went on, David hung farther and farther back—so far back that he seldom bothered pulling his own mask up—and their walks became longer. Often they didn’t get home until lunch was being served. “It’s our wanderers!” Nicholas would call from his seat at the table. “What’s the news from the outside world?”

Surprisingly, Benny always did have news. “My friend Jason got a skateboard,” he might say, or “Did you know if you stand under a trellis and press the backs of your hands to both sides of it, your arms will float up by themselves after you step away?” He serenaded them with one of those eternal-loop songs David remembered from his own childhood, the kind that kept circling back to its beginning and driving grown-ups crazy:

    This is a song that never ends.

Yes, it goes on and on, my friends…



Years ago, when electronic devices were first becoming popular, David had read that children’s age-old sidewalk games were in danger of being forgotten. Jump-rope rhymes and hopscotch and such, the experts said, were passed by word of mouth from child to child; they were never taught by grown-ups. So if just one generation of children failed to teach the younger ones, those traditions would vanish forever.