AMANDA BROUGHT OUT WINE. IT WAS A VACATION. ALSO: the hair of the dog. When the children complained it was too early to eat, Amanda let them vanish into their game, relieved. She poured pale pink wine into acrylic glasses and handed them around, ceremonial, almost religious. Someone attentive and patient had pressed the cloth napkins. She wondered if it had been Ruth.
“Your children are so polite.” G. H. considered this the highest of praise.
“Thank you.” Amanda was not sure this was not flattery, or just something to say, but she was pleased. “You’ve got a daughter?”
“Maya. She teaches Montessori in Massachusetts.” G. H. still wasn’t entirely certain what this entailed, but he adored her.
“She runs the school. She doesn’t just teach. She’s in charge of the whole operation.” Ruth bit into a baby carrot. She felt light. Maybe some part of her remembered reading once that people with fatal diagnoses entered a period of remission, calm, almost good health, once that’s been established. A honeymoon. An interlude of joy.
“That’s wonderful. We used to send Archie to a Montessori when he was small. It was amazing. Changing into their inside shoes. Washing hands. Saying good morning like colleagues at the office.” She’d loved how he’d referred to play as “work.” Those bumbling toddlers practicing for adulthood by lifting glass beads with a teaspoon, sponging up lunchtime spills.
“They say it’s important for development. Maya is very passionate about it. The boys will start there, goodness, in only a couple of weeks, I suppose it’ll be.” Ruth was defensive.
“It can’t be already!” G. H. knew that every cliché turned out to be true, that they do, in fact, grow up so fast.
“September.” Ruth said it with hope. Her mother would have brought God into it—God willing, a reflex like drawing breath. They hadn’t scorned it, but they hadn’t learned that woman’s devotion. Maybe she was onto something. Maybe it was a folly to assume anything happened without someone—God, sure, why not him—willing it.
Why did Amanda think of the Earth, Wind and Fire song, or why did the thought seem racist? No, some of their best friends were not black. Their friend Peter was married to a woman named Martika, whose mother had been a famous black model in the 1970s. Their neighbor on the ground floor was black, but also transgender, or nonbinary, or—Amanda always referred to this person by name just to be safe: Jordan, so good to see you; Jordan, how is your summer going?; Jordan, it’s been so hot out lately. “It does fly by. Older parents always said that to me when Archie was a baby, and I would think, Well, I can’t wait for this to go by. Because I was exhausted. But now I realize they were right.” She was babbling.
“I was about to say as much to you. You beat me to it. I remember Maya at this age.” G. H. was wistful, but also he was worried. They’d had fine lives, long lives, happy lives. Maya and her family were the only thing that it amounted to, of course, and that was something. A father should protect, and as he’d driven the night before, he’d worked through what he might do for her from the distance of Long Island and realized there wasn’t much. But Maya wasn’t the one who needed help; they were. Maya and the boys were fine.
Ruth wondered what version of the girl was in her husband’s mind. She didn’t want to ask. It was too private in front of this stranger. It was odd enough that they were all sitting there in their swimsuits.
“It must be fun to be grandparents. You get to do all the spoiling and don’t have to get up all night or scold them for bad report cards or whatever.” Amanda’s own parents discharged that office with indifference. They didn’t dislike Archie and Rose, but they didn’t dote upon them. They were two of seven cousins, and her parents had retired to Santa Fe, where her father painted terrible landscapes and her mother volunteered at a dog shelter. They were determined to enjoy the liberty of their old age in that strange place where it took longer for water to boil.
“These sandwiches are good.” Ruth had doubted they would be. Also she wanted a change of subject. The truth was, Maya guarded Beckett and Otto. She thought her parents feeble, or conservative, unable to comprehend the philosophy of it, what she and Clara had agreed upon. Ruth would come bearing bags from Books of Wonder, and Maya would pore over them like a rabbi, searching out their sins. It was well intentioned. Her distrust was not of her parents but of the world that they had made, and maybe she was right. Ruth could not resist buying them adorable things—little gingham shirts, like you’d put onto a teddy bear—and Maya would try to conceal her disdain. No matter, Ruth just wanted to be humored, and hold the boys’ clean-smelling bodies close against her own. It was remarkable, how that made her feel. Invincible.
“They are good,” G. H. agreed.
“Well, we do some spoiling,” she allowed. “When we get the chance.” That’s what she wanted, the chance to see her family.
Amanda no longer thought they were con men, but was this the precursor to dementia, the first warning sign, like keys left in the refrigerator or socks worn into the shower or thinking Reagan was still president? Wasn’t that how it worked: first fiction, then paranoia, then Alzheimer’s? She felt the same way about her parents—their volition seemed suspect. They’d moved to Santa Fe after skiing in New Mexico once or twice a decade earlier; it made no sense to her, and their contentment seemed a bit like delusion. “It’s the whole point of being a grandparent.”
“George is worse than I am—”
“Wait.” She was more rude than she’d meant to be, and gave the people a sheepish look. “I just realized. Your name is George Washington?”
There was no particular shame in it. He’d been explaining it for sixty-plus years. “My name is George Herman Washington.”
“I’m sorry. That was rude of me.” It was the wine, maybe? “It’s just that it seems somehow fitting.” She couldn’t explain it, but maybe it was self-evident; someday there would be an anecdote, the time she sat poolside with a black man named George Washington while her husband went forth to figure out what had gone wrong in the world. They’d traded their disaster stories the night before, and this would just be one more of those.
“No apologies necessary. Part of the reason I settled on using my initials early in my career.”
“It’s a fine name.” Ruth was not insulted, just marveled at the familiarity with which this woman talked to them. She knew it made her sound even more like an old woman, but she missed a sense of propriety about things.
“It is that! A fine name. And wonderful initials, I think. G. H. sounds like a captain of industry, a master of his business. I would trust a G. H. with my money.” Amanda was overcompensating now, but also a little tipsy, the wine, the heat, the strangeness. “Clay should be back soon, don’t you think?” She looked at her wrist but was not wearing her watch.