The Sweetness of Forgetting (14)

“You’re welcome!” Annie replies brightly. For a moment, she sounds exactly like the girl who inhabited her body before the divorce. Mrs. Koontz murmurs a thank-you too, and Annie chirps, “Yes, ma’am!”

She hovers while they each take their first sips of coffee, and she’s practically hopping from foot to foot by the time Mrs. Sullivan takes a bite of her blueberry muffin and Mrs. Koontz picks up her cinnamon-sugar doughnut.

“Um, can I, like, ask you a question?” Annie asks. I’m tidying up behind the counter, and I pause, straining to hear what she wants to know.

“You may, dear,” Mrs. Koontz says. “But you mustn’t use like in the middle of a sentence that way.”

“Huh?” Annie asks, confused. Mrs. Koontz raises an eyebrow, and Annie’s smart enough to correct herself. “I mean, excuse me,” she amends.

“The word like is not a space holder in a sentence,” Mrs. Koontz tells my daughter seriously. I duck behind the counter to hide my smile.

“Oh,” Annie says. “I mean, I know.” I peek over the counter and see her face flaming red. I feel bad for her; Mrs. Koontz, who’d been my tenth-grade English teacher years ago, is a tough cookie. I think about coming to Annie’s defense, but before I have a chance, Mrs. Sullivan jumps in.

“Oh, Barbara, give the child a break,” she says, swatting her friend on the arm. She turns to Annie and says, “Ignore her. She simply misses being able to boss children around, now that she’s retired.” Mrs. Koontz starts to protest, but Mrs. Sullivan swats her again and smiles at Annie. “Did you say you had a question for us, dear?”

Annie clears her throat. “Uh, yeah,” she says. “I mean, yes, ma’am. I was just wondering . . .” She pauses, and the women wait. “Well, you knew my great-grandma, right?”

The women glance at each other, then back at Annie. “Yes, of course,” Mrs. Sullivan finally replies. “We’ve known her for years. How is she?”

“Fine,” Annie says instantly. “I mean, not totally fine. She’s having some—problems. But, um, mostly fine.” Her face is flaming again. “Anyways, I was just wondering, do you, um, know who Leona is?”

The women exchange looks again. “Leona,” Mrs. Sullivan says slowly. She mulls it over for a moment and shakes her head. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t sound familiar. Barbara?”

Mrs. Koontz shakes her head. “No,” she says. “I don’t think we know a Leona. Why?”

Annie looks down. “It’s just something she keeps calling me. I was just wondering, like, who she is.” She looks horrified for a second and mumbles, “Sorry for saying ‘like.’ ”

Mrs. Sullivan reaches out and pats Annie’s hand. “Now you’ve gone and scared the child, Barbara,” she says.

Mrs. Koontz sighs and says, “I’m just trying to correct her grammar.”

“Yes, well, this isn’t the time or place,” Mrs. Sullivan replies. She winks at Annie. “Why is this so important to you, dear? The question of who this Leona is?”

“My great-grandma seems sad,” Annie replies after a minute, in a voice so low I have to strain to hear her. “And I don’t know that much about her, you know? My great-grandma, I mean. I want to help her, but I don’t know how.”

A pair of customers come in then, a gray-haired man and a young blonde woman I don’t know, and I miss what Annie and the women are talking about while I help them. The blonde orders a piece of carrot cake, after asking if we have anything diet—we don’t—and her male companion, who looks a few decades too old to be squeezing her hand and kissing her ear, orders an éclair. By the time they leave and I glance back at Annie, she’s seated with the two older women.

I glance at my watch and consider reminding Annie that if she doesn’t leave in the next few minutes, she’ll be late to school, but the look on her face is so earnest that instead, I freeze for a minute and just look at her. I’m used to her sneering and rolling her eyes lately every time she’s around me, but in this moment, she just looks innocent and interested. I swallow the lump in my throat.

I walk into the dining room with a rag and a spray bottle so that I can eavesdrop under the pretense of cleaning up. The women, I realize, are telling Annie the story of how Mamie came to live in Cape Cod.

“All the girls in town used to be in love with Ted, your great-grandfather,” Mrs. Koontz is telling her.

“Oh my.” Mrs. Sullivan fans herself with her newspaper. “I used to scribble his name and mine in a notebook every day during our senior year of high school.”

“He was older than us,” Mrs. Koontz says.

“By four years,” Mrs. Sullivan agrees. “He was off at college—Harvard, you know—but he’d come home every few weeks to visit. He had a car, a nice one, which was a big deal out here in those days. And the girls would just swoon.”

“He was so kind,” Mrs. Koontz agrees. “And like so many others, he joined the army the day after Pearl Harbor.”

The women pause in tandem and look down at their hands. I know they’re thinking about other young men they’d lost, so long ago. Annie shifts in her seat and asks, “So then what happened? He met my great-grandma in the war, right?”