“I wasn’t trying to convert them! I was having a theoretical discussion.”
“A theoretical discussion, with people who’ve been Jewish longer than this country’s been a nation! Oh, I will never understand. Why, Ian? Why have you turned out this way? Why do you keep doing penance for something that never happened? I know it never happened; I promise it never happened. Why do you persist in believing all that foolishness?”
“Bee, dear heart,” Grandpa said.
Now Thomas noticed how still the room had grown. Maybe Grandma noticed too, because she stopped talking and two pink spots started blooming in her cheeks.
“Bee,” Grandpa said, “we’ve got a crew of hungry kids here wondering if you plan on coming their way.”
The others made murmury laughing sounds, although Thomas didn’t see anything so funny. Then Grandma quirked the corners of her mouth and raised her chin. “Why! I certainly doo-oo!” she said musically, and off she sailed with her cake.
The frosting was caramel. Thomas had checked earlier. His grandma made the best caramel frosting in Baltimore — rich and deep and golden, as smooth as butter when it slid across your tongue.
Daphne went off at nine, kicking up a fuss in Ian’s arms because the cousins were still there, but Thomas and Agatha got to stay awake till the last of the guests had said good night — almost ten-thirty, which was way past their normal bedtime.
“Don’t forget your baths!” Ian called after them as they climbed the stairs, but Thomas was too sleepy for a bath and he fell into bed in his underwear, leaving his clothes in a heap on the floor. He shut his eyes and saw turquoise blue, the color of Sister Myra’s swimming pool. He heard the clatter of china downstairs, and the rattle of silver, and the slow, dancy radio songs his grandma liked to listen to while she did the dishes. (She would be washing and Ian would be clearing away and drying; she always said the hot water felt so good on her finger joints.) “Where do you want these place mats?” Ian called. Loud announcers’ voices interrupted each other in the living room; Grandpa was hunting baseball scores on TV. “… never saw Jessie Jordan so gossipy,” Grandma said, and someone shouted, “BEEN IN A BATTING SLUMP SINCE MID-JUNE—”
“Could you turn that down?” Grandma called.
Then Thomas must have slept, because the next thing he knew the house was silent and he had a feeling the silence had been going on a long time. There wasn’t even a cricket chirping. There wasn’t even a faraway truck or a train whistle. The only sounds were those scraps of past voices that float across your mind sometimes when there’s nothing else to listen to. “Thank you, Sister Audrey,” Reverend Emmett said, and Grandma said, “Why, Ian? Why?”
Thomas should have told her why. He knew the answer, after all. Or, at least, he thought he did. The answer is, you get to meet in heaven. They’ll be waiting for you there if you’ve been careful to do things right. His mother would be waiting in her frilly pink dress. She would drive her station wagon to the gate and she’d sit there with the motor idling, her elbow resting on the window ledge, and when she caught sight of him her face would light up all happy and she would wave. “Thomas! Over here!” she would call, and if he didn’t spot her right away she would honk, and then he would catch sight of her and start running in her direction.
5. People Who Don’t Know the Answers
After Doug Bedloe retired, he had a little trouble thinking up things to do with himself. This took him by surprise, because he was accustomed to the schoolteacher’s lengthy summer vacations and he’d never found it hard to fill them. But retirement, it seemed, was another matter. There wasn’t any end to it. Also it was given more significance. Loaf around in summer, Bee would say he deserved his rest. Loaf in winter, she read it as pure laziness. “Don’t you have someplace to go?” she asked him. “Lots of men join clubs or something. Couldn’t you do Meals on Wheels? Volunteer at the hospital?”
Well, he tried. He approached a group at his church that worked with disadvantaged youths. Told them he had forty years’ experience coaching baseball. They were delighted. First he was supposed to get some training, though — spend three Saturdays learning about the emotional ups and downs of adolescents. The second Saturday, it occurred to him he was tired of adolescents. He’d been dealing with their ups and downs for forty years now, and the fact was, they were shallow.
So then he enrolled in this night course in the modern short story (his daughter’s idea). Figured that would not be shallow, and short stories were perfect since he never had been what you would call a speed reader. It turned out, though, he didn’t have a knack for discussing things. You read a story; it’s good or it’s bad. What’s to discuss? The other people in the class, they could ramble on forever. Halfway through the course, he just stopped attending.
He retreated to the basement, then. He built a toy chest for his youngest grandchild — a pretty decent effort, although Ian (Mr. Artsy-Craftsy) objected to particleboard. Also, carpentry didn’t give him quite enough to think about. Left a kind of empty space in his mind that all sorts of bothersome notions could rush in and fill.
Once in a while something needed fixing; that was always welcome. Bee would bring him some household object and he would click his tongue happily and ask her, “What did you do to this?”
“I just broke it, Doug, all right?” she would say. “I deliberately went and broke it. I sat up late last night plotting how to break it.”
And he would shake his head, feeling gratified and important.
Such occasions didn’t arise every day, though, or even every week. Not nearly enough to keep him fully occupied.
It had been assumed all along that he would help out more with the grandkids, once he’d retired. Lord knows help was needed. Daphne was in first grade now but still a holy terror. Even the older two — ten and thirteen — took quite a lot of seeing to. And Bee’s arthritis had all but crippled her and Ian was running himself ragged. They talked about getting a woman in a couple of days a week, but what with the cost of things … well, money was a bit tight for that. So Doug tried to lend a hand, but he turned out to be kind of a dunderhead. For instance, he saw the kids had tracked mud across the kitchen floor and so he fetched the mop and bucket with the very best of intentions, but next thing he knew Bee was saying, “Doug, I swan, not to sweep first and swabbing all that dirty water around …” and Ian said, “Here, Dad, I’ll take over.” Doug yielded the mop, feeling both miffed and relieved, and put on his jacket and whistled up the dog for a walk.
He and Beastie took long, long walks these days. Not long in distance but in time; Beastie was so old now she could barely creep. Probably she’d have preferred to stay home, but Doug would have felt foolish strolling the streets with no purpose. This gave him something to hang onto — her ancient, cracked leather leash, which sagged between them as she inched down the sidewalk. He could remember when she was a puppy and the leash grew taut as a clothesline every time a squirrel passed.
For no good reason, he pictured what it would look like if Bee were the one walking Beastie. The two of them hunched and arthritic, a matched set. It hurt to think of it. He had often seen such couples — aged widows and their decrepit pets. If he died, Bee would have to walk Beastie, at least in the daytime when the kids weren’t home. But of course, he was not about to die. He had always kept in shape. His hair might be gray now but it was still there, and he could fit into trousers he’d bought thirty years ago.