“It’s not so proud for long.”
“Why shouldn’t it be?”
“Business is terrible.”
“What do you mean? What about all those customers, all the fine merchandise?”
“It looks better than it is,” she says somberly. “It’s not at all good, really. The corporate office wants to close the store. I think they knew it when they hired me. It was a horrible summer. People in Ebbington don’t have much extra money to spend. No one else knows this yet, but we’ll be closing at the end of the month.”
“This month? But that’s less than three weeks from now….”
“I know.” She says softly, “On Monday I have to give everybody notice.”
“But what about you?”
“What about me. When there’s no store, there’s no manager. I’ve been looking around, but this whole town is in the dumps. Lerner’s doesn’t have openings anywhere else. I’ll have to be a salesclerk somewhere again. It doesn’t matter. I’ll get by. I always have.”
“But there’s Thomas. Who will look after him? I know that day care can be very costly. You must look harder. You must find another management position. I can help you. I still know a number of businesspeople in Bedley Run—”
“Please!” she says quite forcefully. “I’ve been fine all these years. Let’s not start. I didn’t send the card to you to start something like this. And you should know I won’t take one step in that town, and neither will Thomas. There’s no chance of that. So please don’t try to change my mind.”
“But I can help you with Thomas,” I tell her. “I’ll pay for a sitter, or for day camp. Whatever else he needs, I’ll provide. Please let me do this, at least. Please, Sunny. It can’t hurt, to let me do this.”
And yet, invariably, we all know how it does. In a few moments Sunny leaves to go back to the store, and I decide to walk about the mall with the last of my tea. We’ve made a plan to speak once again, sometime next week, after which I’ll go to their apartment in Ebbington to pick him up for a short visit; we’ll take a fun shopping trip, for some new sneakers or toys. And now, though I half-promised Sunny I wouldn’t, I go past the Kiddie Kare once more, slowing my pace by the window, to see what he’s up to inside. I can find him too easily amid the plastic barrels and chutes; he’s by far the oldest and biggest, towering a bit too much over the other boys and girls, and I think how it is that Sunny was able to send that card to me, unsigned as it was, a message and non-message for the sole sake of her boy. And the idea entreats me once more, to wonder if something like love is forever victorious, truly conquering all, or if there are those who, like me, remain somehow whole and sovereign, still live unvanquished.
11
HOW I AM STILL UP SO LATE and sleepless in this darkened, unwarm kitchen, after spending the entire afternoon with Sunny’s energetic boy, is an amazement to me. I must be rejuvenated, or at least somehow, for now, made over. Surely it is in good part Tommy’s presence happily lingering with me, the slightly dizzied, hyperactive romp of him, the constant, as if self-winding locomotion of his sturdy, pumping limbs. It seems to me I should be tucked away in my bed and dreaming of myself on younger legs, running after the boy with joyous, flowing ease, instead of sitting here at the table with shoots of a draft prickling my feet and a tepid cup of green tea cooling in my hands. I am certainly concerned that I might be rubbing Sunny the wrong way, encroaching too far and too fast into the wide territory she has set between us, which I have never thought ill of her for and have even looked upon with a certain measure of relief and gratitude; she has always been able to exercise her resolve, a trait that was difficult to handle when she was young but one I am beginning to appreciate more with each passing day. So I am starting to think that the real cause of my restlessness is something that I saw this afternoon, which was most ordinary and trivial.
It was after I dropped Tommy off at the mall at the end of our appointed day together. He and I had thoroughly enjoyed a shopping spree along Route 3A, where we visited, in turn, the Toy Palace and the Sports Section and the old roller-skating rink, and then sat side by side on revolving stools at the ice cream counter of the Woolworth’s. It was a wonderful day for me, really, beginning at the toy shop where the stout little boy — whom I told people was my grandson — shed his initial shyness and healthy suspicion of me and suddenly bounded down the aisles touching and handling as many of the brightly packaged toys as he could. I told him he could pick out two things, though looking upon his desperate expression of trying to choose I weakened and said three, and soon enough I lost all resolve and it was five items he could have, then somehow seven. In the end he’d filled up the cart to the exact number, and I could tell he was fundamentally a well-raised boy because he picked out the smaller, modest things rather than some pedal-driven car or grandly boxed building set.
Sunny was somewhat cross with me when we arrived at the store, me bearing the bulging bags of his things and Tommy, drooling and gregarious, methodically aiming his special noise-and-light-making pistol at the Lerner’s customers. But I could see that she was taken, too, by the lightness of his feet, his giddy, errant leaps and twirls, and maybe, as well, with the way he kept circling the racks of clothes and then returning to me, to shoot me square in the belly, clicking away again and again. Sunny didn’t say much except to tell Tommy that he should thank “Mr. Hata,” and then nodded to me with a lukewarm smile and a wave of her hand. But she was not being unkind. She had given her employees the news of the store closing a few days earlier, and the mood on the floor and among the staff was decidedly somber, all the more distinguished from Tommy’s brusque, overpleased activity.
And then, surprisingly, I was caught off guard by my own stirring, at least the sudden thrum-thrum in my chest as I shook his small hand goodbye, which was a sensation one might usually describe as both sweet and bitter but to me was also squarely, terribly rueful, as I realized how brief and few my times with him might be in future days. It seems curious, all these years alone and my rarely thinking twice of the larger questions, perhaps save certain reconsiderations in the last few weeks, but now the simple padding touch of his boy’s fingers seemed to have the force of a thousand pulling hands. It was everything I could do to heed his mother’s unspoken (though readily clear) wishes and keep a dignified face and uneventfully leave him until our next time together, which was as yet unarranged.
So I went out from the Lerner’s feeling as though my spirit was being loosed into the expansive, dusky caverns of the mall, wafting upward against the bank of skylights whose grimy filter recast the bright autumn sunshine into a hazy, gauzy glow. I felt lacking, of course, bereft in the thought of my adopted daughter and her son simply staying behind in the store, as they must do at the end of every afternoon and with hardly a thought of missing anything or anyone. And I thought if I were the boy, what would I know tonight except that a silver-haired man with wiry fingers had taken me around and bought me things and seemed to know Momma well enough and had plenty of the money she did not? What would I remember by the next afternoon, except for his old man’s voice like a soft bellows, the strangely slow shuffle of his feet, his high, weak cough? For who was I to him, really, or to his mother, for that matter, but a too-late-in-coming, too-late-in-life notion of a grandfather, a sorry, open-handed figure of a patriarch, come back hungry and hopeful to people he never knew?
As such, I wouldn’t have blamed Sunny if she couldn’t help but make a scene and denounce me in front of all. Perhaps I would have welcomed it had she thought twice about my reappearance in her life and flashed me those hard eyes from her youth; that way, at least, I might not have come back to this house of mine sensing that it had grown even vaster — and me that much smaller within it — in the wake of the easy, joyful hours I spent with her son. And then my having the companion feeling, too, that my life had all at once become provisional again, the way a young man’s might be, open to possibility and choice and then vulnerability as well, a state of being I have always treated with veritable dread. For it is the vulnerability of people that has long haunted me: the mortality and fragility, of the like I witnessed performing my duties in the war, which never ceased to alarm, but also the surprisingly subject condition of even the most stolid of men’s wills during wartime, the inhuman capacities to which they are helplessly given if they have but ears to hear and eyes to see.