Robby swiveled his head to stare at her. Morris said, “Really!”
“Greta wrote Alice a thank-you note and just happened to mention the fact.”
“But they didn’t invite us!” Robby wailed.
“Well, it wasn’t a wedding wedding, sounds like. Still,” Lily said to Morris, “they must have known they were going to get married when they were here for Easter. Why didn’t they at least tell us?”
“They probably didn’t want a scene,” Morris said.
“We wouldn’t have made a scene!”
“No,” he said, “but maybe David worried one of you would say something that sounded…unwelcoming.”
“We’d have been very welcoming! We even had the champagne ready!”
“You did?” Morris blinked.
“We’re not cold sticks, you know.”
“Hey! You-all!” Robby protested, because the Hulk was on the screen again.
Lily stood up and went back out to the kitchen. The quiet there was a relief, after the blare of the TV. She sat down at the table and reached for the address book that dangled on a string from the wall phone.
Didn’t it say it all, that she didn’t know her own brother’s number! She looked it up and dialed it, and then she sat back in her chair and listened to the ringing at the other end of the line.
If Greta answered, she planned to be downright effusive. A regular cheerleader type. “Greta!” she would say. “This is your new sister!” Or no, maybe not. That might be going too far. “Hello, Greta, I’m so pleased to hear—”
But it was David who answered. “Hello?” he said.
“Hi, David.”
“Hi, Lily.”
“So you’re married.”
“Right.”
“Well, congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
He seemed to be waiting for something more.
“It was such a surprise!” she said. “I didn’t know till I heard it from Alice.”
“Yeah, well, I was planning to tell you. I was going to write Mom and Dad first, though.”
“I see,” she said. “Well. Anyhow. I just wanted to say I’m happy for you.”
“Thanks,” he said, but he still seemed to be waiting for something.
“I thought Greta seemed very nice,” she offered finally.
“Oh, she is,” he said. “She’s just…remarkable! She hasn’t had an easy life, you know. She comes from these immigrant parents who struggled to make a living; she had polio as a child; she worked her way through school as a waitress and a caretaker for old people and a dishwasher in a diner—”
Lily couldn’t remember when she’d last heard David utter so many words at one time. It was a river of words, a torrent. “Her husband was this total cad,” he was saying, “an orthopedist; he left her for his secretary a month after Emily was born but now he thinks he’s this father type; he’s always angling for custody when at first he purely resented her, wouldn’t give her so much as a—”
“Oh, and Emily seems like a sweetie,” Lily said.
“She is the child of my heart,” David said.
Lily was struck dumb.
“She’s such a—she’s no ordinary kid, you know. I just love watching how her mind works! Oh, I tell you, Lily, I never in this world gave a thought to having children. I really couldn’t imagine I’d be able to connect with children. But over Christmas, when Emily had to fly alone to visit her father, I was way more worried than Greta was. We were seeing her off in the airport and I said, ‘Emily,’ I said, ‘let’s say someone starts acting pushy or talking to you too much. Let’s say you start feeling uncomfortable. What you should do is just—here,’ I said. ‘I want you to look around you right now and choose a person you would go to for help. Someone you think you could trust.’ And then Greta laughs and says, ‘David,’ she says. ‘She has her very own assigned stewardess,’ she says. ‘She has an ID tag pinned to her front. She is labeled like a parcel. She will be fine!’ she says, but meanwhile Emily’s begun looking all around and she says, ‘Well, um, I don’t know; I could trust that person, maybe?’ and wouldn’t you know she has singled out this totally inappropriate teenage boy bopping about with his Walkman. Ha!”
Lily almost couldn’t believe that this was really David. And David must have sensed it, because he stopped speaking all at once and cleared his throat. “Well, listen to me go on!” he said. And then, more quietly, “Greta still teases me about that. When we first discussed getting married, she gave me a nudge in the ribs and said, ‘Tell me the truth, now, is it a wife you would like or a daughter?’ And I said, ‘Both! I want you both! I want the entire package!’ I wanted to have a family; I never thought I did but I do, it turns out. And I’ll be good at this, Lily; I know I will.”