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By Root 270 0

cars and the glass showering them as the wide green hands of the maple leaves pushed through, right to their faces, Benjie’s white under the red streaming lines across his forehead, spitting out bits of shiny, bloody glass until he fainted and Greta thought, If he is dead, let me die now. And he was not dead, only briefly unconscious, and as he lay on the stretcher, his face wiped with great tenderness by the paramedic, he smiled at his mother. “It’s okay, Mom. I’m okay.” And for one minute, she was grateful as she had never been. Surviving the camps, in the golden arms of a big American, terrible white and red acne around his beautiful smile, she was not so grateful or sure as she was in that minute with Benjie that life was hers, that she was meant to live.

“She’s killing you,” Greta said.

Max pressed his feet into the sand, noting the imprint of his whole right foot and his abbreviated left.

“The girl. I’m not criticizing. I’m not criticizing you or even her, but it’s very cruel of her to leave you like that.”

He didn’t ask who, and he hoped Greta wouldn’t say her name.

“What do you think? I don’t see? I see. I saw. She never answered your letters, she never calls anymore.”

Max put his hands out behind him and leaned forward, listening to the crisp gunshot crack of his vertebrae.

“I know it broke your heart, her going away. You haven’t recovered. The mother’s getting remarried soon, I heard. What is it you always say, the triumph of hope over experience?”

“That’s what I say. More sand?”

“No, I’m fine. Very happy. Perhaps she’s back in town for the wedding. Do you call her?”

Max kept watching the water, hoping for a few boats, but the ocean was on Greta’s side. There was nothing to look at but the relentless bouncing light.

“Max, Maxie. You can tell me. Who else can you tell? You think I’m going to hurt you now? No, dearie, not now that you’re in such pain.”

Max felt like every B-movie prisoner of war offered a cigarette by the suddenly kindly Kommandant. If he talked, he’d get the cigarette and lose his self-respect. Probably, in the end, they’d kill him anyway. If he didn’t talk, he wouldn’t get the cigarette, he’d keep his self-respect, and they’d hang him as an example to the others.

“I’m not in pain.”

Greta laughed, not a common thing, and Max smiled back. When she laughed, she sounded like Edith Piaf, Max’s darling for the last thirty years. He has daydreams of playing Piaf for Elizabeth, and in them she sips red wine and sits without jiggling her feet.

“All right. But you’re not hap-pee.” Greta sang the last word.

“You said it’s a mistake to want happiness.”

“It is. But you do, you can’t help it. And I feel bad for you, dearie. That’s all.”

Greta had learned most of her English from a Dover war bride in Jersey City and had been calling people “dearie” and “ducks” and “love” with Czech softness ever since. It was a thing that Max, even as he prayed for her immediate, painless death, even as he envisioned Elizabeth on Greta’s side of the bed, found completely endearing.

“I think you should build a little shrine,” Greta said.

“I think you’re nuts.”

“So? You have not been spared on account of sanity, have you? A little shrine. Her picture from the yearbook, the one you keep in your sock drawer. Maybe a few votive candles. I have those old pressed glass holders, in the shape of hands. That would be nice, you could have those. And maybe some of the letters that came back to you, the ones in the garage. That would be good.”

Max sat down beside her, poking a hole for her navel and laying shell bits out in a star pattern.

“And then what?”

Greta lifted a hand carefully, balancing the packed sand on her forearm.

“And then, in your own little apartment, you listen to Mahler and drink Scotch, you mourn. You could pray.”

That Greta believed not only in a Greater Force but in an attentive, specific God was another source of astonishment to Max. “How can you, of all people?”

“It’s the least I can do,” she said, and moved from synagogue to synagogue, praying in the back until the night they ask her to