“I was a kid with a hobby,” he says, giving her a curious look. “But I moved on. Most people do.”
This last part hits just the way it’s meant to, and Greta can’t help marveling how even when he’s sick, his aim is impeccable. Before she can say anything in response, he lurches for the garbage can and retches into it, then wipes his mouth with a towel. When he lies back again, his face is pale and a little sweaty. Greta grabs a water bottle off the desk and hands it to him. It takes him too long to untwist the plastic cap.
“Dad,” she begins, watching his throat bob up and down as he takes a sip. Some of it dribbles down the front of his pajamas. “Maybe you should—”
“Did I ever tell you about the first time I laid eyes on your mother?”
Of course, she wants to say. Only about a million times.
But she feels sorry for him right then. She thinks of the guy who refused to read her letters, the one who was later forced to hear her lyrics—who could never unhear them—and he seems like an entirely different person from the one desperately missing his wife, heartsick and lonely and stuck in bed on a trip they were meant to be taking together.
Which is how she finds herself saying, “Tell me again.”
“I used to cut the grass for her parents,” he says with a distant smile. “They had this huge house and an even bigger yard. It would take me hours to get through it. I’d seen their daughter around, obviously. She was a couple years younger than me, probably sixteen at the time, and she was beautiful, the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Totally out of my league.”
Not as it turned out, her mother would always say at this point in the story, and the empty space where her voice should be feels so stark right now—like a missing line in a play, a forgotten note in a song—that Greta almost says it herself.
“I was always daydreaming about what I’d say if I got to talk to her,” he finally goes on, “even though I was just this poor kid with a terrible haircut from the wrong side of town, sweaty and covered in grass clippings. Then one day it finally happened, and you know what brilliant thing I said to her when I got my big chance?”
Greta smiles. “You sneezed.”
“I did,” he says with a laugh. “And then I said, ‘Pollen.’ That’s it. Just…‘Pollen.’ ”
“It was a good line,” Greta teases him, “as it turned out.”
But his smile fades, replaced by a worried expression, and he twists sideways and reaches for the garbage can again. For a few seconds, he holds it there in front of his face. But the moment passes. He sets it down again, relieved, and leans back against the pillows.
“Maybe you should rest,” Greta says, but he ignores this.
“I didn’t see her again for years,” he continues. “She went off to Vanderbilt, and I went off to the war, and when I got back, I started bartending at this place called—”
“The Fat Owl,” Greta said.
Conrad nods. “Anyway, one night she walks in with her boyfriend, some preppy guy she met at school. I get them some drinks, and they sit at the bar, and he starts explaining the rules of baseball to her in this really condescending way while she doodles on a napkin, and the whole time I’m thinking: This guy? Really?”
“So then he goes to the bathroom…” Greta prompts, because this is taking longer than usual, and her eyelids are getting heavy.
“I’m wiping down the bar, and she’s still drawing on the napkin, and without even looking up, she goes, ‘How’s the pollen count today?’ I just about fell over. That was it for me. Our eyes met. I asked what was on the napkin and she showed me a picture of a penguin, and I said I could do even better.” He squeezes his eyes shut and laughs hoarsely. “I don’t know what came over me. But I wrote down my phone number.”
“Bold move.”
“It was,” he says, looking satisfied, and when their eyes meet, the warmth between them is real. For a second, Greta is reminded that they have at least one thing in common: they both loved her mother more than anything. He scratches at his chin, his eyes filled with amusement. “And it worked. A few weeks later, she came back to the bar, and that time, she was alone.”
“And the rest is history,” Greta says, which is meant to make him smile, but somehow it has the opposite effect. Instead, his face goes slack.
“Yeah, well, I guess it’s all history now,” he says, and to Greta’s horror, there are tears in the corners of his eyes. He shakes his head. “We were supposed to be doing this part together.”
“What part?”
“Winding down.”
“Dad, come on. You’re only seventy.”
He looks as if this makes it worse, and she knows he’s thinking about all the lonely years that could still be ahead of him. He wipes an arm roughly across his face, then makes a show of arranging his pillows and pulling up his blankets. “Anyway, you should get going.”
“Dad.”
“I’m fine.”
She bites her lip. “Are you sure you don’t—”
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he says with such finality that Greta has no choice but to scrape back the chair. For a second, she stands over him, and he does look old, but also somehow very young too, his pajamas a bit too big, his hair sticking up in the back. She remembers when she was a kid, the way he’d poke his head into the garage to tell her it was time for dinner. Sometimes she wouldn’t hear him over the sound of the guitar, and then she’d look up to find him looming there, solid and immovable, filling up all that space in the doorway.
She puts her jacket back on, then walks over to the door. “Lights on or off?” she asks, a hand on the switch, and he mumbles something she doesn’t hear. She flicks off the light and lingers there another few seconds, listening to the sound of his breathing. After a moment, she opens the door to the hallway, letting in a wedge of fluorescent light.
Just as she’s about to walk out, she hears him say, “Good night.”
“Good night,” she says, closing the door behind her.
Chapter Fourteen
In the morning, the sky is a brilliant blue, so sunlit and dazzling that people can talk of little else at the breakfast buffet.
“Perfect glacier weather,” says the cruise director over the loudspeaker.
“Not a single cloud,” marvels Todd, squinting at the windows.
“Such a shame your dad is missing this,” says Mary as she squirrels away a banana for him.
“Don’t forget your sunscreen,” says the old lady when she passes Greta at the coffee machine.