“Well, tell them all hello,” David said. “Give Lily my congratulations when you speak to her.”
“I’m not sure I want to speak to her,” Alice said. “Really: what does this family actually have to do with each other anymore?”
But David was getting that too-long-on-the-phone feeling now, and he said, “Okay, well, thanks for calling.”
He passed the receiver back to Greta and she hung it up. “Lily seems to have gotten married,” he told her.
“So I gathered,” Greta said.
Nicholas asked, “Who’d she marry?”
“Some history professor nobody’s met, and she lives in Winston-Salem now.”
“Just like that!” Nicholas said in a wondering tone.
“Serena didn’t even know the man existed,” David said.
“But…Serena is Lily’s daughter, right?”
“Right.”
Nicholas looked at Greta. He said, “So Lily didn’t inform her own daughter she was getting married?”
“Oh, well,” Greta said. “This is America, remember.”
“What’s that have to do with it?”
“Consider the gene pool,” she told him. “This country was settled by dissidents and malcontents and misfits and adventurers. Thorny people. They don’t always follow the etiquette.”
“Seems to me we’re dealing here with more than a question of etiquette,” Nicholas said. “To me this seems downright peculiar.”
Then Benny asked, “Can I still have dessert if I don’t eat my peas?” and Greta said, “Did you try a spoonful, at least?” and the subject of Lily was dropped.
It was a couple of days afterward that Nicholas emerged from the study with one of the old photo albums David had somehow fallen heir to. He had his finger on a crinkle-edged black-and-white snapshot that must have dated from the 1930s: a strikingly handsome man in a fedora. “Who’s this?” he asked David.
“No idea,” David said.
Nicholas turned next to a picture of a small woman wearing a dress with prominent shoulder pads. “And this?” he asked.
“Couldn’t tell you.”
Same for the photos on the facing page: two little girls crammed into an armchair with a puppy, and a baby whose vast bouffant christening gown seemed to be wearing him rather than the other way around. There were no captions. Once the subjects’ identities must have seemed so obvious; it hadn’t occurred to the album’s creator that the time would come when no one alive remembered them. David said, “I do at least know that this is your grandmom’s side of the family. I don’t think my dad’s people had the money for things like cameras.”
“Oh, here’s one I recognize,” Nicholas said, because he had flipped several pages ahead and was gazing now at a photo of David himself at age six or so, wearing a short white bathrobe. A framed copy of this picture used to hang in David’s parents’ bedroom. David didn’t comment, and Nicholas sank down on a kitchen chair and continued turning pages. “Huh,” he said once or twice, and then, “This must be Lily’s motorcycle mechanic.” David was fairly sure it wasn’t （B.J. had always made himself scarce when a camera was brought out）， but he didn’t glance over to check. He was thinking about that white bathrobe.
So much of his past was lost now, whole years of it. （Nearly all of junior high, for instance.） But every now and then some fragment would jump out at him vividly, viscerally. He remembered that the white bathrobe was a beach robe, in fact—the kind worn over a swimsuit. And he knew the precise summer he’d worn it: he’d been seven, not six. It was the summer before second grade, when they’d all gone to Deep Creek Lake for a week. He recalled the coarse texture of the sand underneath his bare feet, and he saw his father standing on the dock next to his new friend Bentley, a tough-faced, muscular guy who made his father look puny. He heard the explosive churning of water as Bentley’s son Charlie swam past, showing off his Australian crawl. In David’s memory, the droplets spattered his face even there on the shore. And his father was saying, “Come on, son. What’s the holdup?” in a bossy voice he would never have used if the two of them had been alone. So David had untied his sash, and let his robe drop, and felt the air on his bare chest as he inched into the lake. The bottom felt like some kind of pudding; it oozed up between his toes with every step. He kept going, though, because he didn’t want his father to feel ashamed in front of Bentley. Deeper and deeper he waded, holding his arms straight out at his sides to keep them dry, clenching his jaw to stop his teeth from chattering. Step after step, until—