Beverly! So precious with her British accent, in her soccer jerseys, hanging out in that ancient, smoke-stained pub with the awful breakfasts (shriveled, ruddy sausages; Middlestein had been unable to force himself to even take a bite) with her expat girlfriends, cheering for Tottenham, even though (or because) they were a bunch of losers. Once she had let him come and sit with her for a match early on a Saturday morning, and they had all cheered and roared (this year, at last, Tottenham had been winning), and sipped Guinness (for her and her friends) and Bloody Marys (for him), and afterward she had listened to his problems and, miracle of all miracles, solved them, or some of them anyway, the early-morning alcohol perhaps infusing her with a shocking clarity, and in retrospect he became convinced she could even see into his soul. And now he waited to be invited every week—he knew he couldn’t just crash her party, that would be the surest way to make her lose interest in him—but she hadn’t asked him since, settling instead for quiet little dinners, which were satisfying in their own way, but there was something about the moment they had both experienced during that early-morning drunk, how her hand had fluttered to his hands and once to his cheek, the directness of her gaze, which seemed to melt with his in the dusty streaks of sunlight vibrating in their booth; he hadn’t felt that same connection with her since, and he knew if he could just have one more morning with her, if she would grace him again with that same energy, they would be able to move beyond the gentle pecks on the cheek she gave him when she bid him good-bye in the parking lot of whatever restaurant they had dined in—too briefly!—that night.
It was Beverly who suggested he write a letter to his daughter-in-law, Rachelle, asking for permission to once again be a participant in the lives of his grandchildren. “Your son can’t help you,” she said. “He can’t speak on your behalf. This decision came from her. You have to go directly to the source.” Dust sparkling all around her head. “And a phone call won’t do, nor will an e-mail. Don’t be a lazy man. Write her a proper letter.” She ran “lazy man” together as if it were one word, as if it were an actual thing, a term she had created herself, because Beverly had the power to create new words. “Pour your heart out on that paper, tell her how much you love and miss those children, put it in an envelope, stick a stamp on it, and then mail it.”
To spend time with Josh and Emily is my heart’s desire, he wrote. He was starting to sound like Beverly, which was not such a bad thing.
“Then what?”
“Give her a week.”
Sure enough, a week later, there was Rachelle standing in front of him at the pharmacy, a prescription in her hand, herself with a slight case of the stink eye.
“I’m not completely sure about any of this,” she said. She handed him the prescription; it was for Lopressor, a heart medication, and it was for his someday-ex-wife. If that action was meant to stab him slightly in the chest, it worked.
“About what?” he said.
Say your piece just the once and then let her do all the talking, Beverly had said. He had known that already; he had some understanding of what it meant to contend with an angry woman.
“I don’t want them thinking your behavior, your actions, are excused. Because they are not.”
“Of course not,” he said. He wouldn’t even begin to justify his actions to her, leaving his sick, emotionally unstable, diabetes-and heart-disease- and who-knows-what-else-ridden wife, because he knew she didn’t want to hear it. Even though in his head it made sense.
Beverly understood! Beverly was the first person he had met who got it perfectly, Beverly with her mean drunk of a father, a military man crushed by time as a prisoner of war during World War II. “I had my sympathies for the man,” she said. “We all did.” Richard nodded. Their generation, his and Beverly’s, they all had family, and they all had heard stories from the war growing up.
And then Beverly added—and was this the moment his heart skipped for her?—with a downtrodden yet dreamy voice: You never know what’s worse with the angry ones, watching them live, or watching them die.
“With the b’nai mitzvah approaching,” continued Rachelle, “and with all the family in town, Benny and I want you in attendance of course. And we still would like you to recite the kiddush, obviously.” His daughter-in-law had an insistent formality, spine as straight as a rod, every hair in place, her nails a pearly pink, ironed, pressed, tightly controlled. She reminded him of the average Zoloft or Prozac customer. (He was no doctor, so he would never say anything like that to his son, but she seemed like she might benefit.)
“I’ll be there,” said Richard. “With bells on.”
“Don’t wear bells,” said Rachelle.
“I would never wear bells,” said Richard. “It’s an expression.”
“I know it’s an expression,” she said, suddenly flushed and flustered, her neck delicately purpling. This is hard for her, he thought. Why? In that moment of weakness, he made a grab for the gold.
“I would like to see them before the b’nai mitzvah,” he said. “I could take them to services on Friday night? Or next week?”