“Perhaps you can tell me why you didn’t call or write or come back to Stern’s that summer. Even to say goodbye.”
“You never answered my letters.”
Letters? What letters? There were never any letters. Boop began to shake.
“You never wrote me any letters. All I got from you were a few postcards.”
Abe shook his head as he spoke. “Betty, I wrote to you almost every day for a month, asking for your forgiveness, explaining everything. My mother lost her marbles after Aaron died; I couldn’t leave her. I didn’t go back to school, but I wanted you to go to Barnard.” Abe looked down at his hands as if examining a lifetime of wondering.
He hadn’t abandoned her.
“No one gave me any letters. What did they say?” Fury simmered beneath her words—what had her grandparents done?
“They said that I loved you. That I wanted you to write to me from Barnard and tell me everything. I asked you to wait for me.”
Boop felt woozy, as if realizing her loss for the first time. “I couldn’t go to Barnard.”
“Because you decided to marry Marv Peck, which your grandfather was only too happy to tell me.”
“I didn’t know you were here that day.”
“I knew they wouldn’t tell you. I thought Georgia might, but she didn’t know about the letters. When I drove away, I knew I’d lost you. I didn’t understand why you got married so quickly. Though I remember Marv had a thing for you.”
Boop rested her left hand on Abe’s right. “I married Marvin because—” She couldn’t say it.
“Why, Betty? To hurt me because you thought I left you?”
“No,” she said. “Because I was pregnant.”
Abe swayed and grabbed the seat of his chair as if he was about to fall. “Excuse me?”
“I married Marvin because I needed a husband. I was going to have a baby. Our baby.”
Abe glanced at Boop’s midsection as if trying to imagine it, as if he wished to lay a hand there, innocently and tenderly, and feel a kick. “A baby? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Fire and forgotten fears burned inside her. “I tried. They wouldn’t let me. They convinced me you didn’t care. And they were going to send me away. And take the baby.” Boop recoiled at the memory of her own mother wanting to raise the baby. What if she had agreed?
“I would have asked you to marry me.”
Boop gasped. Her instincts had been right. “I so wanted to believe that.” She looked away, ashamed that in that moment she was wishing away the life she’d known for the one she hadn’t.
Abe touched Boop’s face and turned it toward him. “What happened to the baby?” He gulped, cleared his throat, and looked into her eyes. “I haven’t met Hannah, but I talked to her briefly. Is she my granddaughter?”
Boop saw tears mixed with hope. A longing sparkle had replaced the mischievous glint of long ago. “No.” She patted Abe’s hands as a way to soften a blow he didn’t know was coming. And to soften it for herself, even though she did. “I lost our baby.”
Boop had never said it aloud. Back then it was an incident, not a hardship. She knew her grandparents, and even Marvin, had been relieved. Her grief had been swept away like sand from the porch.
“Oh, Betty.” Abe looked away and sniffed. “I’m sorry.”
She allowed him a few moments to grieve a child he never even knew had been a possibility. Boop understood the instantaneous and unexpected hole that a child created in your heart. She felt it now. After all this time.
“But you were okay?” he asked.
“Not at first,” she said. “But a year later I had my son, Stuart. I can’t imagine my life without him.”
“I understand,” Abe said. “But still. That would have been something, huh? If things had been different.”
“Indeed.”
Abe cleared his throat. “Maybe this is none of my business, after so many years, but was he good to you? Were you happy?”
Boop gulped away unexpected reticence. “Yes. I was happy.” Boop smiled at Abe, looking right into his eyes. “I’m blessed. One son, two granddaughters, two great-grandsons, and another great-grandchild on the way.” She hesitated. “But I missed you for a long time. I wondered what we might have been.” Then Boop lowered her voice to a whisper as if she wasn’t sure anyone should hear her. “I also wondered who I might have been if I hadn’t gotten pregnant. But I did.” She composed her barrage of thoughts and plucked out two. “Did you marry? Have children?”
“I married a few years later. Nora and I were happy together for almost fifty years before she died of lung cancer. We had a good life and a lot of fun together. And I loved her. We had three daughters, seven grandchildren, and I have eight greats so far. Becca is our youngest granddaughter—she’s the one who spoke to Hannah.”
Boop smiled at the thought of Abe’s large family. “Nora must have been a lovely woman for you to love her for so long.”
“She was. You might remember her. She worked for your grandparents a few summers. Her maiden name was Rosen. Back then she went by Eleanor.”
Boop smiled wide, knowing that Eleanor had gotten whom she’d wanted all along. Marvin would’ve gotten a strange kick out of that story. Boop placed her hands on her knees and braced to stand.
“Would you like to meet Hannah and my dear friends Natalie and Piper? They’re probably in the parking lot, waiting to see if we ever come out.”
Abe chuckled. “Becca is out there too.”
“I hope you’ll come back to the house. We’re just ordering Chinese but you and Becca are more than welcome.”
“I’d like that,” Abe said. “If you’re sure.”
Boop had never been surer of anything.
After dinner, Boop and Abe sat on the porch alone. They stared into the indigo sky, which, as always, promised a resplendent
