Part Nine: On the Sidewalk
They came out into the late morning. The sun was doing something generous across the shopping block, the particular Saturday morning quality of light that makes a city look like itself on its best behavior.
Robert had walked out with them, in the natural continuation of having sat together for twenty minutes and having established the kind of informal, temporary fellowship that specific shared situations produce.
Lily held the wrapped box in both hands, carefully, with the seriousness of someone transporting something that matters.
“Are you going to open it now or later?” Robert asked her.
She thought about this with genuine deliberation. “Later,” she said. “At dinner. So Grandma can see.”
“That’s a good plan.”
“I already know what it is,” she said. “But it’s still better to open it properly.”
Robert looked at James, who looked back at him with the expression of someone who has had eight years to get used to this and is still continuously surprised by it.
“Thank you again,” James said. “Really.”
“It was nothing,” Robert said. “And also entirely improvised and possibly actionable from a fraud perspective, so perhaps we leave the details unexamined.”
James smiled. It was the first full smile Robert had seen from him, and it changed his face the way full smiles change the faces of people who have been holding something tightly — a release, a reappearance of something that was always there.
“Enjoy the rest of your Saturday,” James said.
“You too,” Robert said. He looked at Lily. “Happy birthday. I hope it’s a good one.”
“It already is,” she said.
She put her hand back in James’s, and they walked away down the block — the man in the grey hoodie and the girl in the light blue dress with the pink cardigan, the white plush rabbit tucked under her arm and the wrapped box in her hands — and Robert stood on the sidewalk and watched them go.
He stood there for a moment longer than was strictly necessary. Then he turned and went back into the store, because he still needed a gift for his wife’s anniversary, and the jeweler who had been working with the store for twelve years presumably knew what would be appropriate.
