The cover was torn at the edges, yet the spine looked bright and new. Anna handed it to me with eagerness.
“Buy this for me?” She said. Eyes like muddy puddles and hair like silk strand streamers. It was $1.25, a copy of Moby Dick, probably published sometime in the sixties.
I let her walk around with the book, carrying it like she’d be a librarian someday, and I’d remember this day so I could tell it to her, and to her children. “I remember this day, when your mother… ” No, that wouldn’t make much of a story.
She marched in front of me, lifting her knees as she went like she saw the hyenas doing in the Lion King. A Nazi march, but it looked cute with the book hugged to her chest.
And then out of no where was Grace. “Susan!” “Grace!” The last time we had seen each other, we were smoking pot on the tail of her dad’s pick-up. She had been thin, muscular, on the soccer team. And now she looked like her mother.
“You have been busy,” I said, commenting on the children. They clung to her like baby monkeys, filled the shopping cart, and two were big enough to run around the store. They swarmed around her like she was their nest, freckled and squirming.
“Twins—-we had three sets of them.” She said all of their names, most of them began with D’s. David, Daniel, Donny, then Dalihla, Frances and Jake.
“Jesus—“
“Had a lot to do with it.”
“I know. I mean, wow. The probability--” I stammered. I don’t know when she went and found Jesus. I remember the wooden cross that was in their living room, above the fish tank that her brother kept but it was like a dated decoration.
Now she seemed genuinely excited. I watched her face for some slip, some sign that things were not alright but it never came. She was beaming. “And who is this angel?” She said.
“This is Anna. She’s three and plans to be a librarian,” I said.
“How perfect!" And without pause, she asks, "You're married then?”
“Oh," I looked down at Anna. "Of course.” I tried to smile but I didn't convince her.
She checked my ring finger and her friendly demeanor changed to a fighter pilot's intensity.“Oh?”
“Well, we’re not exactly married, but we’ve been together for six years,” I said. “It’s just… easier to tell people we’re married.” And that she’s a he, I left out.
“Oh. It sure changes things,” Grace said and lurched around to locate two of her pack and detach herself from the conversation.
Anna decided it was her time for her to get some attention; she tugged at my shirt, looked up at me and said, "Do you think Mommy will like my book?"
"Yes, I think she will." I said.
And then there was that look. That half-understood, quizzical gaze when maybe Grace remembered that drunken high-school night a long time ago, and then it was gone.
"Well, it has been nice..."
"Yes, it has."