This neighborhood was a nondescript bedroom community, a modest Philadelphia suburb that had grown leafier and more established-looking as it aged. David and Greta had become less a part of it after their children left; but now, out walking with Benny, David noticed all the new young families who had moved in. Everybody was home these days, of course, out mowing the lawn or teaching a child to ride a bike or speaking to a next-door neighbor over a hedge. Although Benny wasn’t supposed to play with the children he came across, they did manage to interact to a degree. Benny would pull his mask up and stay at a respectful distance, and they would eye one another in silence awhile. Then a boy might throw a soccer ball toward him and he would clumsily catch it, or a little girl might let her chihuahua stretch to the end of his leash and touch his nose to John’s nose. As time went on, David hung farther and farther back—so far back that he seldom bothered pulling his own mask up—and their walks became longer. Often they didn’t get home until lunch was being served. “It’s our wanderers!” Nicholas would call from his seat at the table. “What’s the news from the outside world?”
Surprisingly, Benny always did have news. “My friend Jason got a skateboard,” he might say, or “Did you know if you stand under a trellis and press the backs of your hands to both sides of it, your arms will float up by themselves after you step away?” He serenaded them with one of those eternal-loop songs David remembered from his own childhood, the kind that kept circling back to its beginning and driving grown-ups crazy:
This is a song that never ends.
Yes, it goes on and on, my friends…
Years ago, when electronic devices were first becoming popular, David had read that children’s age-old sidewalk games were in danger of being forgotten. Jump-rope rhymes and hopscotch and such, the experts said, were passed by word of mouth from child to child; they were never taught by grown-ups. So if just one generation of children failed to teach the younger ones, those traditions would vanish forever.
But guess what: even socially distanced, even deprived of normal playdates, Benny had somehow learned the levitating-arms trick and the song that never ends.
* * *
—
After lunch, Nicholas would return to the study for a couple of hours while Benny spent some time with Greta. The two of them would make things together: cookies, lemonade, child-size masks from leftover quilting fabric. For the masks, Greta taught Benny how to use her sewing machine. David worried he was too young, but in fact he did just fine, producing masks that actually functioned, although they did look a little bit messy where the machine had gotten away from him. Then along about mid-afternoon or so, Nicholas would re-emerge and collect Benny and the dog for another walk. David had to admit that he welcomed the break. Finally, a chance to slump in a chair, to give up acting optimistic and enthusiastic and focused! But then, bit by bit, he would begin to notice the silence. It was a shocked silence, almost. “What’ll we do when they leave for good?” he asked Greta. “Will we have to go through that whole empty-nest thing all over again?”
“This time we might be better at it,” Greta told him. “I’m hoping it’s an acquired skill.”
“I kind of doubt it,” he said. And when they heard the dog barking out front, he was the first to jump up and fling open the door.
* * *
—
It wasn’t till after supper that the four of them spent any length of time together. They would sit in the backyard; or rather, David and Greta would sit, while Nicholas and Benny played a haphazard game of badminton. The days were so long now that the sun was still shining and the heat was still oppressive, and eventually Nicholas would drop into a chair alongside his parents and Benny would start splashing around in the wading pool. Other families were outside as well, hidden behind their hedges. David could hear their voices, here and there. Occasionally he caught a few words, but in general, all he could make out were unintelligible murmurs. He began to appreciate the rhythms of ordinary conversation—the taking of turns, the questions, the answers, the chiming in, the soft laughter. Wasn’t it amazing how resilient people were, how they persisted, how they kept trying to connect! When Greta announced, finally, “Off to bed with you, Master Benny,” David half regretted leaving the voices behind.
After Benny had told Juana good night on the phone and Greta had tucked him in, the grown-ups would adjourn to the living room. Then Nicholas might report on the day’s virtual meetings with his business associates. （He’d designed a kind of sleeping bag that had arms and legs, just in case any schools held outdoor classes this winter. An EduBunting, he called it.） Or he and David would exchange jokey suggestions for a Covid cure they might stumble on by accident. （“Philly cheesesteaks!” “Crystallized ginger!” “Beer! But not the pale kind.”） And since Nicholas belonged to that generation that never left home without a cell phone, not even for a neighborhood walk, he usually had new photos to show them from that day’s outing. Benny and a little redheaded girl sat six feet apart eating peaches on somebody’s front step; Benny and the dog ran through somebody’s sprinkler. “Email these to me, please,” Greta would instruct him, but David studied them without speaking. He marveled that already they looked like something from the distant past, faded and nostalgic. And what a surprise to see how much of a Garrett Benny was! Since birth he had seemed entirely an other—not a pale beige biscuit of a person like David’s people but black-haired and brown-eyed and golden-brown-skinned, small for his age and wiry. These were differences David had always been glad of, in fact. For him, Benny represented a fresh beginning. But now he noticed the child’s raised shoulders as he cupped a hand to catch the peach juice, and his tucked-in chin when he ran. David’s father had raised his shoulders like that whenever he was intent on some task—a man Benny had never laid eyes on. David’s sisters used to run with their chins tucked, but Benny hadn’t met them, either, so far as David knew. And while he realized that most children went through some sort of playacting stage, he couldn’t help feeling that Benny’s complicated dialogues with his bear （who seemed to have an English accent, of all things） were very like his own long-ago scenarios with his plastic veterinarians.