Polly looked at him quizzically.
“Native Americans. I don’t see them often in Cape Deel.”
“How do you know?”
He shrugged. “By the way, Agnes hired a lawyer to defend the girl who shot the eagles.” He bumped her with his elbow.
“She would. I mean that in the best way.”
They stopped in the library and each chose two books. Robert picked out a new novel and a gardening book. Polly wanted a particular Edith Wharton, though she couldn’t remember what it was called, so she took two. No way to miss with Edith.
Next Polly sprang for a pie—a very expensive pie!
By the time they got back to the car, Polly was tired and didn’t notice until they were already in the interior that he’d gone the back way. She moaned.
“What? You feel bad?” he asked.
“Oh—I try not to come this way.”
“It’s faster.”
“I feel nervous here.”
Immediately she wished she could take this back.
He didn’t take offense. “Shall I turn around?”
“No, no. It’s fine.”
He tapped at the wheel and whistled. Polly sat back. The children were out, as always, and dirty, as always, and stared at the car—if they noticed it—with faces big and blank as basketballs.
“Hey,” he said, “remember when you were in a car and you looked straight ahead to see the trees as they are and then turned your head fast to the side to make them blurry?”
She smiled. “Yes. I loved doing all those tricks—like covering one eye and seeing a completely different part of the scene than with both eyes.”
“How about staring at a light bulb and then closing your eyes and watching a light show?”
“Going into a completely dark closet and waiting until your eyes adjusted and you saw shapes?”
“I haven’t done any of those things in a long time. I guess I’ve stopped playing.” He had a new melancholy note in his voice this summer, and who could blame him. “I can’t even remember how.”
“It’ll come back.” She wondered how much he cared that he’d never had children.
He drummed the steering wheel. “I guess it’s play for me to build a pond, or design a terrace.”
The conversation had pushed the street into the background, and she’d nearly forgotten it. Yet a part of her had kept track, and as they approached that yard her muscles tightened. Her grandchildren had had an incantation they repeated when passing a graveyard, but she saw the dog before she could remember it. She saw him from behind, before they pulled parallel. Her heart beat as if the dog were her true love, found again. Nothing about the situation had changed. He still stood on top of the doghouse, listless in every aspect. He’d still hang if he stepped off the box.
“It’s him,” she said, heart slamming her ribs.
“Who?”
“The dog.”
Robert peered at it. “The dog?”
“It’s the one we saved. How is he back?”
Robert squinted through the windshield. “Are you sure it’s the same dog?”
“Yes!”
He parked the car.
“I have money,” she said. She fished out her wallet and handed him a few bills.
He took them and nodded. “Why not wait here?” he said lightly.
She nodded, fighting frustrated tears.
Robert walked past the dog without glancing at it and up to the trailer door. He knocked. After a while the door opened, and Polly saw him turn around and point at the dog. After a minute Robert walked back across the yard, slipped the rope off the dog’s neck, and carried it to the car.
Polly got out and opened the back door. Robert repeated “Shh, shh.” Its head fell back against Robert’s chest, and Polly touched her hand to her own chest. The boys’ heavy heads, the scent of sweaty curls, trust imparted. The dog shuddered and paddled its legs. Robert lowered him. He stood stiffly on the backseat, shaking so hard the car seemed to rock.
“Jesus wept,” Polly said. She’d never said that before, but it had always stayed with her from a moment in the movie Lawrence of Arabia. A scene of carnage, and someone saying Jesus wept. The shortest verse in the Bible, she’d learned.
“What are we going to do with him?” she asked.
“Too soon to know,” Robert said. “He’s not much at the moment.”
They emerged from the road. An eagle flew low over an open field, the same sight Polly saw the first day she found the dog. “Dick never allowed the boys to have a dog.”
Robert considered this. “Would you rather I take him somewhere else?”
He’d understood her, once again. It was all she needed to find her own feelings. “No. He can come with us.”
Back on the Point, Robert dropped her off and took the dog with him to his house in the Rookerie. She didn’t see Robert again that day. The next morning he showed up during her breakfast.
“I want to name her Hope,” he said.
“He’s a girl?”
“As it turns out, yes.”
“Hope’s a good name,” Polly said.
“I’m taking her to the vet.”
“I’ll pay for that.”
“We’ll see,” Robert said.
Nothing had to be decided today.
* * *
Her boys joked about Dick during their visit, telling stories about moments when he’d embarrassed them at restaurants, or came down hard on them for something small, yet they had always had her intervention on their behalf, and their own solidarity, to buffet them, and their recollections weren’t bitter. It was she who heard Dick’s voice in how her sons spoke to their own children. “No, and that is final.” “No, because I said so.” “Do I look like a bank to you?” No one, including her, said it was unnecessary to speak so harshly, but it jarred her, just as it had when Dick did it. Dick had been strict with them—too strict, in her opinion. She had explained to them over and over that he wanted them to do their best, and she explained to him that they were children. She always thought—if only he knew them, and they him. But they had known him, how he was. The less powerful always know the ways of those above them.
They had his good qualities, too: intelligence, focus, high-mindedness in certain areas. They all felt strongly about social justice, and were solicitous toward and inclusive of Robert in their activities. He declined to join in except for two dinners. Asked and answered, decent all around.
She didn’t really know them anymore, not even Theo. They had grown away from her, as boys did. It was, apparently, natural. She’d mourned it—the loss of their easy affection, especially, their sweaty bodies in her lap, the spontaneous, completely ecstatic embraces that weren’t mere hugs. All that, long gone. Past that, there’d been other distancing. The relationship now was one of people with a shared common past, nostalgic and wistful. They asked her how she was, but didn’t really ask; she asked them, and they didn’t really tell. Instead, they all turned to the grandchildren, who were inventing their own common past, their summer rituals. Remember last summer when we… Polly understood—they wanted to repeat that thing rather than try something new; they wanted to know what summer would hold for them at Meadowlea. This made it easy to be together, and made up for the lack of intimacy. If she knew anyone now, it was Robert.