Mr. Stern scooped Cheddar up with his good arm, and I followed them inside. I opened my mouth to ask Mr. Stern if he knew the women next door, and then snapped it shut. A cardinal rule for people who work in other people’s houses is to refrain from asking nosy questions about them or their neighbors.
Mr. Stern said, “Cheddar likes a coddled egg with his breakfast. Do you know how to coddle an egg?” I said, “While I’m coddling an egg for Cheddar, how about I soft-boil one for you?” It isn’t part of my job to take care of humans, but something about Mr. Stern’s combination of tough irascibility and secret sensitivity reminded me of my grandfather, a man I’d loved with all my heart.
He said, “Make it three for me, and leave one in long enough to hard cook it. I’ll have it later for lunch.”
While I served Cheddar’s coddled egg, Mr. Stern got out a plate for himself and sat down at the kitchen bar. I said, “Would you like me to make coffee and toast to go with your egg?”
“I don’t need to be babied, Ms. Hemingway.” He pointed at a small flat-screen TV on the kitchen wall. “If you’ll turn on the TV, I’ll watch the news.”
I found the remote, turned it on, and handed the remote to Mr. Stern, who was using his good hand to slap at his pockets. “Blast! I left my glasses in the library. Would you get them for me?” I sprinted to the library to look for his glasses and found them on a campaign chest in front of a small sofa. As I snatched them up, the doorbell rang.
Mr. Stern yelled, “Would you get that? Whoever it is, tell them I don’t want any.”
I loped to the front door and pulled it open, ready to be polite but not welcoming.
A young woman wearing huge dark glasses and a baseball cap pulled low over blond hair stood so close to the door the suction of it opening almost pulled her inside. In skinny jeans and a loose white shirt, high heels made her an inch or two taller than me. She had a baby in a pink Onesie balanced on one forearm, a large duffel bag hanging from a shoulder, a diaper bag dangling from the other shoulder, and the hand that steadied the baby against her chest held a big pouchy leather handbag. She was looking furtively over her shoulder at a taxi pulling out of the driveway. I got the impression she was afraid somebody would see it.
Everything about her seemed oddly familiar, but I had no idea who she was.
She swung her head at me and did the same quick I know you, no I don’t reflex that I’d done.
She said, “Who are you?” Without waiting for an answer, she surged forward as if she had every right to come in.
From the kitchen, Mr. Stern yelled, “Who was it?”
The young woman called, “It’s me, Granddad.”
Footsteps sounded, and I could almost feel his grim disapproval before he came into the foyer with Cheddar at his heels.
His voice was frosty. “What are you doing here, Ruby?”
For a moment, the planes of her face sagged, and then she took on the hopeful look of a child who thinks she might get a different response if she asks one more time for something she’s always been denied. She dropped the duffel bag on the floor and removed her dark glasses. Without them, she looked even younger than she had before, barely in her twenties. That’s when I recognized her. She looked like me. Not the current me, but the me of ten years ago. She also looked desperately unhappy.
Maybe it was because I remembered what it was like to be that unhappy, or maybe it was because she reminded me of my own outgrown self, but I felt her misery like a barbed shaft hurled at my chest.
Cheddar trotted to her duffel bag and sniffed it. We all watched him as if he might do something wise that would resolve this awkward moment.
The woman said, “I don’t have any place else to go, Granddad.”
“Why don’t you go to your so-called husband? Or did Zack kick you out for some other drag-race grouper?”
If he hadn’t sounded so contemptuous, I would have found it amusing for him to confuse a fish with a celebrity hanger-on. But there was nothing funny about his coldness.
The woman didn’t seem to notice his slip, but her hopeful look disappeared. “Please, Granddad. We won’t be any trouble.”
He made a sputtering sound and waved his good arm at her, which frightened the baby and made Cheddar climb atop the duffel bag and stare fixedly at him. The baby howled in that immediate, no-leading-up-to-it way that babies do, and Mr. Stern seemed shocked at the amount of noise coming from such a small form. This was something he couldn’t control. The young woman looked as if she might cry too, and began to jiggle the baby as if jostling her would shut her up.
I’m a complete fool about babies. I can’t be around one without wanting to cuddle it, and the sound of a baby crying makes me react like Pavlov’s dog salivating at the sound of a bell. Without even asking for permission, I stepped forward and took her. I held her close so she would feel safe, murmuring softly against her bobbly head, and patted her back in the two-one heart-beat rhythm that babies listen to in the womb. I had soothed Christy that way when she was a baby, and for a moment I lost myself in the scent of innocence and the touch of tender skin brushing the side of my neck like magnolia petals. As if she recognized an experienced hand, she stopped shrieking and regarded me solemnly with wide pansy eyes.
The woman said, “Her name is Opal.”
“Pretty name.”
“It was my grandmother’s.”
A grimace of old grief twisted Mr. Stern’s face. “You can stay, I guess. But nobody’s going to pick up clothes you throw on the floor. And you know I like things clean.”
As she reached to take the baby from me, she said, “I haven’t thrown my clothes on the floor since I was thirteen, Granddad.”
The baby’s bottom lip puckered as if she were thinking of crying again. The woman said, “I need to change her and feed her.”
Mr. Stern said, “Your old room is just like you left it.”
If she found anything contradictory about Mr. Stern acting like the curmudgeon of the year one minute and then in the next minute saying he’d kept her old room unchanged, she didn’t show it. Bending to grab the duffel bag, she gently edged Cheddar off it and clattered down the hall with Opal’s head bobbing above her shoulder.
Cheddar galloped after them.
Mr. Stern and I regarded each other with solemn faces. He said, “That’s my granddaughter, Ruby. She claims she’s married to a drag racer named Zack. Maybe she is, I don’t know.”
I said, “The granddaughter who left Cheddar with you?”
“The only granddaughter I have.”
I said, “Now that she’s here, I don’t suppose you’ll be needing me.”
He snorted. “Ruby’s not the kind you can depend on. I want you to keep coming.”
Acutely aware of the emotions in the house, I hurried to clean Cheddar’s litter box. It was in a guest bathroom across the hall from the flower-sprigged bedroom, and while I washed the box and spritzed it with a mix of water and hydrogen peroxide, I could hear Ruby’s soft voice murmuring to the baby. She sounded the way I remembered sounding when Christy was a baby—the voice of a young mother absolutely besotted with her infant.
When I finished with Cheddar’s litter box and headed down the hall, I glanced through the open bedroom door. Ruby had pulled the crib from the corner so it stood in front of glass sliders open to a little sunshine-filled patio. Opal and Cheddar were both in the crib. Cheddar’s nose was touching Opal’s chin, and Opal was laughing with the soft sound of a baby duckling. Ruby’s face was naked with love. Mr. Stern had said Ruby wasn’t reliable, but a woman who takes time to play with her baby and is gentle with pets goes to the top of my list of trustworthy people.
I found Mr. Stern in the library. He wasn’t reading or watching TV, just sitting on the sofa staring straight ahead. A grouping of framed black and white snapshots was on the wall behind him, all of young men in military uniform. One of them, a tall man with fierce eyes, was apparently their commanding officer. He looked like a much younger version of Mr. Stern, and for a second I wondered if he was a son. Then I noticed a framed banner bearing a red American eagle and inscribed: The 281st Engineer Combat Battalion, 1944, and I realized it was Mr. Stern himself. It reminded me that we can never imagine the histories of people we meet, the challenges they’ve faced, the losses they’ve known.