being cramped in the recliner.
“Good morning.” Adam planted a kiss on my cheek and, in a single fluid motion, pushed down the footrest and stood up.
For the last time before Gracie’s departure, the girls performed together in a coffeehouse near campus. They all sang. Gracie and Rosie on guitar, Lil played the fiddle.
When Adam and I, the official baby-sitters, arrived, the café tables were already crowded with the familiar faces. Many, whom I could barely see in the low lights, greeted me and Adam by name. They cleared a center table for us as the women cooed over the baby, who slept in my arms.
The lights above the small, open stage brightened and the room quieted. Hans joined us at our table. Carefully, I slipped Baby Adam into his father’s arms. The girls, far more poised than during their first performances years before, began with a pretty song about bringing a baby home.
Through the whole set, the baby slept against his father’s chest, oblivious to the music.
For their last song, they put their instruments down and stepped to the edge of the stage, in front of the mics. An expectant hush swept across the tables and through the bar in the back of the room. Sarah, in her sweet, full soprano, sang a short song that ended with the line: “Mother Earth will swallow you. Lay your body down.” She was the smallest, only eighteen, and still bone-slender. She started the two-line song again, and, one by one, her sisters joined her. They sang in rounds until Gracie’s single voice finished. The girls stepped down off the stage and sang the two lines once more in unison. Their voices mingled and swelled. Again, I had that strange sensation of hearing not four but five voices as they sang. I thought of Jennie as I watched Lil close her mouth on the final syllable of that strange, short song.
In the second of silence that followed their voices, Adam took my hand and squeezed it, a strange blend of sorrow and pride on his face. He brought my hand up to his lips and I felt a tear.
I opened my mouth to speak, but the audience burst into applause and shouts for an encore. Little Adam woke with a start and cried out. Gracie held up Adam’s fiddle and leaned over the mic. “We’d like to call our dad up to help us on this one.” They started on a song I’d never heard before. The audience began to sing along on the refrain. Hans slipped the baby into my arms, then he dashed off to crouch near the girls and take pictures.
They danced and hugged each other onstage. Their friends in the front of the audience rose to their feet and joined them. Baby Adam wiggled, threatening to fuss. So I stood up and swayed, rocking him back and forth. Despite the volume of music, the baby had calmed again. Gracie spotted us and pressed her arm across her chest to keep her milk from letting down. For a moment, I felt a stillness and quiet amid the music as I sniffed the sweet baby odor and warmth of him, my first grandchild. I thought of the sadness I’d just glimpsed in my husband’s eyes, and Time, that cruel, raucous queen of sorrow, passed a hand over my heart.
Nine
Surrender
After Gracie, Hans, and the baby left, there were only the two of us in the house. Sarah had her first apartment near campus. Lil and her new Guatemalan sweetheart, Alphonso, also lived in Gainesville, but would soon join Gracie in DC. Rosie had begun graduate veterinary studies at Tallahassee.
Adam’s restlessness soon became more obvious in the unfamiliar quiet. He continued waking in the middle of the night as if he still heard our grandson’s cries. The horses snuffled noisily, and turned in their stalls, pawing impatiently as he passed. He rode off more on his own, often for hours at a time.
The question of his age remained. Perhaps it was my lack of distraction in such a childless home, or some loss of mental flexibility on my part, but I could not make the current of my daily life flow smoothly past this question as I had so many other questions about Adam. This was not a matter of concocting a new story. It could not be fixed by moving to another state. A new kind of dexterity and resilience was being required of me just as I felt both qualities ebbing.
Adam