“Is that so?”
Molly tried a couple of other topics, but none of them, not the state of the CIA or health care or water quality, sparked more than a nod, an all-purpose phrase: You don’t say; imagine that.
Oh, Daddy, Molly thought, and tears came to her eyes. She was a useless, selfish daughter, dragging her father out into the cold against his will so that she could get some fresh air, so that she could breathe, so that she could escape when she knew he could never escape what was happening to him, not if she made him stumble behind his red walker as far as the North Pole. And to top it all off, in these precious moments at what was surely the beginning of the end of his conscious life, she couldn’t even think of anything to say to him. To her own father.
She tried reminiscing. Older people loved to reminisce. “Remember when you had to drive up to Vermont to take me home from camp?”
“You don’t say?”
“Yup. Twice, actually. Because when you got there the first time, I had already changed my mind and wanted to stay. But by the time you got home again, I had changed it again and wanted to leave. I was so bossy. Why did anyone listen to me? I was eleven, for god’s sake.”
But her reminiscences were apparently not his reminiscences. He smiled and patted her gloved hand with his gloved hand, his expression blank.
“Now, look, Daddy,” she said, “you drove all day. I know you remember. You have to. You were so annoyed, but then you just laughed. That got me really upset—that you laughed at me, that my situation was comical and I was just one of a million little girls who did this, just an ordinary, predictable child. You have to remember all that. I got mad when you laughed, and you somehow understood and stopped laughing and pretended to take me very seriously, and then I was happy.”
“Imagine that, imagine that.”
Then another old man with an identical red walker appeared, and Aaron seemed to come alive. He stood up, with great effort, and offered the man his hand. “How do you do?” he said.
The slow determination of his movements, the difficulty and awkwardness of them, lent them a seriousness, almost dignity. Why don’t we revere the elderly? Molly wondered briefly. She knew why. They were difficult and inconvenient. But how brave her father was just by standing up, by insisting on the code of conduct he’d been brought up with, by being, simply, polite. He still tried to open doors for Molly, his hand shaking. At first she told him not to, afraid he’d topple over. But then she saw it mattered. It was what a man did, a man brought up when he was brought up.
Aaron put out his hand to shake the newcomer’s and with some formality introduced first Molly, then himself. There was a cookie crumb in his beard. Molly saw it and thought, for a flash, how foolish he looked, then recanted. The cookie crumb was not foolish at all, it was a battle scar from a battle to exist in a world that insisted on changing if he so much as blinked.
The other man introduced himself as Karl. “And this,” he said, gesturing toward his plump, red-cheeked caretaker, “is Marta. She is kind, though strict.”
“I go coffee,” she said in a heavy accent, Polish, Molly guessed.
“Would you like coffee, too?” Karl asked. “Marta, can you get this nice young lady and her delightful father a cup of coffee?”
Molly pulled her wallet out, but Karl put up his hand and said, “My treat.”
He was a good-looking old man, silky gray hair nicely cut, beautifully dressed. Molly shot a glance at her father. The cookie crumb had been dislodged. His beard could use a trim, but it wasn’t too bad. Her mother took very good care of him. Better than she took of herself, but there are only so many hours in the day, as Joy said when Molly pointed this out to her.
Marta returned with four cups of coffee, and they sat there drinking the scalding coffee in the cold November air.
“Chilly for two old geezers like us,” Karl said to Aaron.
“Not like the war,” Aaron said, shaking his head.
“I don’t know why people call them flying rats,” Karl responded. “Listen to them. They coo like doves.”
Neither Aaron nor Karl seemed to mind the gaps, the non sequiturs, in their conversation.
“We had cold showers in the jungle, but boy oh boy, we sure didn’t mind.”
“Just listen to them cooing. Like lovebirds. They’re pretty, too. Don’t you think?”
“Oh that I had wings like a dove!” Aaron said. “For then would I fly away and be at rest.”
“Dad? That’s beautiful. Is that a poem?”
But her father had no answer for her. He smiled and turned his face up to the golden autumn sun. Molly looked on, a little envious, as the two men sat in a companionable silence, side by side, while the pigeons cooed like doves.
9
When the groceries arrived on Thanksgiving morning, Joy was astonished. “What are all these boxes? There’s no room for them!”
“Don’t worry,” her daughter said.