“So,” Greta told him, “then surely you know that your father thought very highly of you.”
“Yes, fine. I know that,” he said, giving up.
“And you thought highly of him,” she said, and she took hold of his hand and drew closer to him. “You were a good son to him.”
“If you say so.”
“Of course I say so! It was nice of you, for example, never to show that you knew your mother lived separately from him.”
“Well, naturally. He would have felt humiliated,” David said. （He didn’t remind her that he hadn’t known, in fact, until she herself pointed it out.）
“So, this is how it works,” she said. “This is what families do for each other—hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions. Little kindnesses.”
“And little cruelties,” he said.
“And little cruelties,” she agreed, and she swung his hand between them.
He was relieved that she seemed so unimpressed by what he’d told her. Suppose she had looked at him differently, all at once! Suppose she’d said, “Oh, yes, now that you mention it I see that you are unlikable.”
But he should have trusted that she wouldn’t. Not his Greta.
* * *
—
Nicholas waited till mid-morning before they set off, because he wanted to avoid the rush-hour traffic. As always in these situations, David teetered between dreading their leave-taking and wishing they’d just get it over with. （“I’d rather sit around the airport than sit around the living room,” he used to tell Greta at the end of their visits to Emily.） So when Nicholas finally stood up and said, “Well…” David was almost glad. They all walked out front, the dog on his leash in case he balked at getting into the car, and David and Greta gave Benny a goodbye hug before Nicholas fastened him into his booster seat. John settled beside him, groaning to himself, and Nicholas shut the rear door and turned to his parents. “Thanks, you guys,” he said. “I guess you’ll be happy to have a little peace and quiet again.”
“Oh, right,” David said, and then they both hugged him and stepped back and watched until he had driven away.
“So,” David said finally. “Here we are again, Mrs. G. Aging in place the same as always.” And Greta linked her arm through his and they went back into the house.
They spent the rest of the day restoring some order, straightening the two guest rooms and moving David’s things back into his study. At one point, while he was hooking up his computer, Greta turned from the bookcase and asked, “Have you seen this?” She was holding one of the family albums, the one that Nicholas had leafed through earlier. It lay open to a sheet of typing paper that had been slipped between two pages: a printed-out photo of David and Benny together in the garden. David was stooping a bit to examine the double handful of cherry tomatoes that Benny was holding up to him. “Benny with his beloved Grappa” was the caption, in Nicholas’s blue-ink cursive.
“Aw,” David said, because the sight of Benny’s slightly grimy little fingers gave him a pang that was almost physical.
“I’m going to ask Nicholas to email me this so I can order a print,” Greta told him. “It’s my new favorite picture of you.”
“Shoot: old guy with a scrawny neck,” David said. But he was pleased.
* * *
—
For several days, they kept finding stray belongings here and there. A small sock left in the dryer, a rubber chew toy on the patio…Once David came upon Greta standing motionless in the kitchen, pressing her nose to a scrunch of fabric. She lowered it and looked up at him, her eyes suspiciously shiny. It was a child-size mask, he saw, with a crooked hem and a snarled trail of threads. He said, “Now, now, none of that,” momentarily assuming the role of the sensible one in the marriage, and she gave an embarrassed laugh and handed it over. But as soon as he’d reached the study, where they were compiling a box of left-behind items to mail to New York, he pressed the mask to his own face and drew in a deep breath. He could still catch a trace of Benny’s little-boy scent, salty but sweet, like clean sweat. He could still see Benny’s seashell ears; he could hear his froggy voice:
Some people started singing it not knowing what it was,
And they’ll continue singing it forever just because…
He shook his head and smiled, and he put the mask in the box and went back to Greta.
End
A Note About the Author
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. She is the author of more than twenty novels. Her twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. Her eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.