Mrs. Koontz sighs and says, “I’m just trying to correct her grammar.”
“Yes, well, this isn’t the time or place,” Mrs. Sullivan replies. She winks at Annie. “Why is this so important to you, dear? The question of who this Leona is?”
“My great-grandma seems sad,” Annie replies after a minute, in a voice so low I have to strain to hear her. “And I don’t know that much about her, you know? My great-grandma, I mean. I want to help her, but I don’t know how.”
A pair of customers come in then, a gray-haired man and a young blonde woman I don’t know, and I miss what Annie and the women are talking about while I help them. The blonde orders a piece of carrot cake, after asking if we have anything diet—we don’t—and her male companion, who looks a few decades too old to be squeezing her hand and kissing her ear, orders an éclair. By the time they leave and I glance back at Annie, she’s seated with the two older women.
I glance at my watch and consider reminding Annie that if she doesn’t leave in the next few minutes, she’ll be late to school, but the look on her face is so earnest that instead, I freeze for a minute and just look at her. I’m used to her sneering and rolling her eyes lately every time she’s around me, but in this moment, she just looks innocent and interested. I swallow the lump in my throat.
I walk into the dining room with a rag and a spray bottle so that I can eavesdrop under the pretense of cleaning up. The women, I realize, are telling Annie the story of how Mamie came to live in Cape Cod.
“All the girls in town used to be in love with Ted, your great-grandfather,” Mrs. Koontz is telling her.
“Oh my.” Mrs. Sullivan fans herself with her newspaper. “I used to scribble his name and mine in a notebook every day during our senior year of high school.”
“He was older than us,” Mrs. Koontz says.
“By four years,” Mrs. Sullivan agrees. “He was off at college—Harvard, you know—but he’d come home every few weeks to visit. He had a car, a nice one, which was a big deal out here in those days. And the girls would just swoon.”
“He was so kind,” Mrs. Koontz agrees. “And like so many others, he joined the army the day after Pearl Harbor.”
The women pause in tandem and look down at their hands. I know they’re thinking about other young men they’d lost, so long ago. Annie shifts in her seat and asks, “So then what happened? He met my great-grandma in the war, right?”
“In Spain, I believe,” Mrs. Koontz says, looking to Mrs. Sullivan for confirmation. “He was shot down somewhere in northern France or Belgium, I think. I never heard the whole story; everyone here spent months believing he was missing in action. I was sure he was dead. But he somehow escaped to Spain, and your great-grandmother was there too.”
Annie nods solemnly, like she knows this story by heart, although my grandfather died twelve years before she was born.
“She’s French of course, your great-grandmother Rose. But the way I understand it, her parents died when she was young, and she wanted to leave France because the country was at war, right?” Mrs. Sullivan picks up the thread of the story, glancing at Mrs. Koontz.
Mrs. Koontz nods. “We never found out exactly how they met, but yes, I think Rose was living in Spain. But it was, what, 1944 when we heard he was back in America, and he’d married a girl from France?”
“Late 1943,” Mrs. Sullivan corrects. “I remember it exactly. It was my twentieth birthday.”
“Oh yes, of course. You cried into your birthday cake.” Mrs. Koontz winks at Annie. “She had a silly schoolgirl crush on your great-grandfather. But your great-grandmother stole him away.”
Mrs. Sullivan makes a face. “She was two years younger than us, and she had that exotic French accent. Boys are very easily swayed by accents, you know.”
Annie nods again, solemnly, as if this is something she knows instinctively. I hide a smile as I pretend to concentrate on a particularly tough spot to wipe up. I’ve never heard my grandmother talk about how she and my grandfather met. She rarely talks about the past at all, so I’m interested to hear what the women know.
“Ted got some sort of job in New York, at a secondary school, after he received his doctoral degree,” Mrs. Koontz says. “And then he and your grandmother moved back to the Cape. That’s when he took the job at the Sea Oats.”
My grandfather, whose PhD was in education, had been the first headmaster of the Sea Oats School, a prestigious private school one town over. It used to serve grades K through twelve, but now it’s only a high school. It’s where Annie will go from ninth grade on, on a legacy scholarship.