The Sweetness of Forgetting (90)

I look closely at her as I say this. I want her to know I really mean it.

She looks embarrassed. “I know,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t, like, go out on a date with Mr. Keyes.”

I laugh. “Honey, he hasn’t asked me on a date.”

“Yet,” she says. She pauses. “For real, he probably hasn’t ’cause you act like you don’t like him. But you can’t, like, be alone forever.”

My thoughts from last night come flooding back in. “I’m not alone,” I say softly. “I have you. And Mamie. And now Alain.”

“Mom, I’m not going to be here forever,” she says solemnly. “I’m going to go off to college and stuff in, like, a few years. Alain’s probably going to go back to Paris, right? And Mamie’s going to die someday.”

I draw in a sharp breath. I hadn’t known how to broach the subject with Annie. “Yes, she will. But I’m hoping we’ll get a little more time with her first.” I pause. “Are you okay with that? With the idea that we’ll probably lose her soon?”

She shrugs. “I’ll just miss her a lot, you know?”

“Me too.”

We’re silent for a long time. My heart aches for my daughter, who has already had to experience too much loss.

“I don’t want you to be alone, Mom,” Annie says after a while. “No one should be alone.”

I nod, blinking back tears that I didn’t expect.

“Just find Jacob, okay?” she says softly. “You have to find him.”

“I know. I want to find him too. I promise, I’ll do my very best.”

Annie nods solemnly and stands up to pour her milk out in the sink and to put her bowl and juice glass in the dishwasher. “I’m gonna go back to bed. I just wanted to get up and say good luck,” she says. She walks toward the door of the kitchen and pauses. “Mom?” she says.

“Yes, honey?”

“The way Mr. Keyes looks at you . . .” She trails off and looks down. “I think maybe it’s kinda how Jacob Levy used to look at Mamie.”



When Gavin picks me up at four in his Jeep Wrangler, he has a cup of gas station coffee waiting for me.

“I know you’re used to getting up before dawn,” he says as he waits for me to buckle my seat belt. He hands me the coffee cup and says, “But I had to stop for coffee, because in my world, I’d still be sleeping right now.”

“Sorry,” I mumble.

He laughs. “Don’t be silly. I’m happy to be here. But the caffeine’s helping.”

“You don’t have to drive, you know,” I say. “We could take my car.”

“Nah,” he says. “This baby’s already gassed up and ready to go. I’ll drive.” He pauses and adds, “Unless you really want to. I just figure it’s easier this way. You can navigate.”

“If you’re sure you don’t mind,” I say.

We’re quiet for the first thirty minutes, except to make small talk about the route we’ll take down to New York, and the possibility we’ll hit traffic just outside Manhattan. Gavin yawns and turns the radio up when Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” comes on.

“I love this song,” he says. He sings along with the chorus so enthusiastically that it makes me giggle.

“I didn’t even know you knew this song,” I say when it ends.

He shoots me a glance. “Who doesn’t know ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’?”

I feel myself turning red. “I just meant you seem young to know it.”

“I’m twenty-nine,” Gavin says. “Which means I was just as alive when you were when this song came out.”

“You were what, three?” I ask. I was almost eleven in 1986. Worlds away.

“I was four,” Gavin says. He shoots me a glance. “Why are you being weird?”

I look at my lap. “It’s just that you’re so young. A lot younger than thirty-six.”

He shrugs. “So?”

“So, don’t you think I’m kind of old?” I ask. I resist the urge to add for you.

“Yeah, you should be getting your AARP membership card in the mail any day now,” Gavin says. He seems to realize I’m not laughing. “Look, Hope, I know how old you are. What does it matter?”

“You don’t feel like we’re from two different worlds or something?”

He hesitates. “Hope, you can’t go through life living by all the rules and doing what people expect of you without thinking for yourself, you know? That’s how you wake up at the age of eighty or whatever and realize life has passed you by.”

I wonder whether this is how Mamie feels. Did she do the things she was expected to? Did she marry and become a mother only because that was the prescribed plan for women in those days? Had she regretted it?

“But how do you know?” I ask, trying to slow my racing heart. “I mean, how do you know which rules you’re supposed to live by and which you’re not?”

Gavin glances over at me. “I don’t think there are really supposed to be rules. I think you’re supposed to figure it out as you go, learn from experience, and try to correct your mistakes moving forward. Don’t you think?”