“Well…”
He knew what Lily was thinking. He could read her like a book. She was thinking he probably would do it all wrong. “I was hoping you and your sister could advise me,” he told her. “I mean, not help me with the meal or such; I have my own ideas on that; just advise me on the etiquette of how a golden anniversary works, exactly.”
“But things like the guest list,” Lily said. “You know she’d have all kinds of opinions about the guest list.”
“The guest list is our family,” he said. “How could she argue with that?”
“Oh.”
“Now, for instance,” he said, cannily, “you girls might have some notion about the proper time of day for this. A Sunday, I’m thinking—Sunday, July the first—but would we want it to be in the evening? Bear in mind we’ll have the little ’uns.”
“Oh, not in the evening! Not if the children are coming!”
He pretended to think this over. “Well, you’re right,” he said at last.
“We should make it an early lunch,” she said, “and that way David and them can drive back before it gets dark. It could be at our house, if you like.”
“No, I want it at our house,” Robin said.
“At your house. Okay.”
And he had her. It was just that easy.
* * *
—
The greatest accomplishment of Robin’s life was: not a single one of his children guessed that Mercy wasn’t living at home anymore.
Oh, they knew they should try her studio first if they wanted to get in touch with her. Or the girls knew, at least. （There was no telling what David knew, since he wasn’t much in touch with any of them.） And they never seemed surprised if they dropped by the house for some reason and found Robin on his own. But that could be explained by her work, her dedication to her work. Artists! They were all crazy. In a good way, of course.
And his greatest fear was: Mercy might come right out someday and tell them the truth. “Your father and I live separately, needless to say,” she might tell them—letting it drop just offhandedly, just by the by, as if she assumed they already knew. It would kill them. They would be devastated. Just the thought of her doing that could almost make him mad at her, although in fact she’d never spilled a word on the subject. He had nothing to be mad at her for.
His great-aunt had disapproved of Mercy. She hadn’t actually said so; she’d merely spoken against marriage in general. “I just want to warn you,” she’d said, “that the quality you marry a person for will end up being what you hate them for, most often.” Robin knew she was referring to Mercy’s “high-class manner,” as she called it, but that was not what he was marrying her for. What did he care about class? No, it was Mercy’s quiet dignity that first attracted him—her upright posture and her composure as she stood behind the counter. She was so different from the clingy, flirtatious, giggly girls he was used to. It was Aunt Alice—a lifelong cannery employee—who was concerned with questions of class.
He had lived with Aunt Alice since the age of fourteen, after his mother died of cancer. Although really, Aunt Alice said, she had died of a broken heart. “If it wasn’t for that father of yours, she’d be alive and well to this day,” she told him. His father was a long-haul trucker who met some woman up in New Jersey and filed for divorce when Robin was six years old. “Divorce”—a word like a knife, in Robin’s opinion: hard and sharp and vicious, the cause of his mother’s eternal mute, damp misery. She went to work after that for a dry cleaner, doing alterations, but when Robin thought of her now he pictured her endlessly at home, endlessly slumped in a comma shape on the living-room sofa. Possibly, he allowed, there were some factors—physical cruelty, for instance—that could justify divorce, but otherwise, no. Couples who divorced were shirkers. They were simply not grown up. He had said as much to Mercy when he proposed. “I tell you this,” he had said. “If you can imagine us ever, ever divorcing, then I don’t want you to accept.” And she had known to take him seriously. She had squared her shoulders and looked him in the eye and said, “I promise you, Robin. That will never happen.”
But who could say what quality had attracted Mercy to him? He still marveled, after all these years, that she’d given him the time of day. He knew he was nothing much to look at, short of stature and socially awkward, forever doing the wrong thing and then groaning at his mistake, shaking his head at himself for hours afterward. A neighbor might call out a greeting, for instance, and Robin would answer, “Well, hey!” and wave an arm like a fool, only to realize a second later that the neighbor had meant the greeting for somebody farther down the street. Or a cashier at the store would tell him, “Enjoy your lunch,” as Robin left for his noontime break, and he would say, “You too,” and then wince and clap a hand to his forehead once he was outside, because she wasn’t going to lunch! She was just back from her lunch, for God’s sake!