Chapter 9 Greta
Greta
As she did every morning, Greta put the kettle on to boil and made a cup of pour-over coffee in her favorite mug to take out
to the deck for the sunrise. Usually, this act provided a moment of peace before her daytime thoughts intruded, but today
she couldn’t stop rehashing last night’s party. Tom had really seemed not to recognize anyone, and though he’d been unfailingly pleasant, she’d seen him getting frustrated—frustrated with her, really, because he clearly
understood that she was the one who’d dragged him to this house full of strangers. All evening, she had struggled, trying to conceal these realities
in each interaction with neighbors and friends they’d known for years or decades.
How long before everyone would know the truth? Would she be able to keep Tom’s condition secret through Hailey’s wedding,
two weeks from now?
It was getting harder to imagine that she would.
Especially since Marjorie Westfield, the worst gossip of The Cove, had been at the party last night, along with her insufferable “cookie cake.” Greta had managed to avoid her, but that didn’t mean Marjorie wouldn’t take any observation she’d made and simply run with it.
Tom had unquestionably seemed out of sorts, probably even from a distance.
Greta picked up her mug, the warmth a comfort to her hands. Walking past the dining table and into the living room, she noticed,
in the half light of dawn, Lindy asleep on the couch.
What on earth? Why wasn’t she upstairs with David?
Greta noticed then that the phone had been moved from its usual place by the stairs to the coffee table in front of Lindy,
the long cord stretching across the floor.
David? she thought.
She quickly shook Lindy awake, and Lindy groggily told her it was true: David never showed. “There must be something really
wrong, Mom,” she said, tears forming in her eyes. She said Hailey, Cody, and Eli had driven to Rhode Island last night, but
all that told them was that he wasn’t there, either, and that he’d forgotten his cell phone at home.
Greta set her mug on the table and hugged Lindy tight, unsettled to think that, on top of everything else, her grandchildren
had gone to Rhode Island in the night while she’d been asleep and totally unaware that anything was wrong. Why hadn’t they
awakened her and told her? Getting old was so bizarre, an abdication of former responsibilities without ever quite agreeing
to the downshift. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry.” Greta had a gut feeling Lindy was right—something was definitely wrong for David
not to show, not to call—but tried to pretend otherwise. “Let’s not count our chickens, though, okay? Today’s a new day. I’m
sure he’ll arrive with some funny story to tell. Car trouble or something! Can you get some more sleep?”
Lindy was already nodding off, her body’s need for rest shrouding over her mind’s alarm. Good, Greta thought, tucking the blanket around her, then picking up the mug again. A long-ago gift from Emma, it featured a complicated
few bars of music framed by the words, What part of .
. . don’t you understand? It usually made her smile.
Not a chance, today. She quietly went outside into the cool morning and sank into one of the Adirondack chairs.
She sipped her coffee, worrying, watching as the red globe of the sun poked above the silver horizon.
Normally, she tried to clear her mind during sunrise, make it a moment of meditation. Another thing that was impossible, today.
Because there was some possibility, she realized, that David’s failing to arrive last night could be her fault.
She had laid too much on David recently, without Lindy knowing. Without at all meaning to!
The possibility had opened up two years ago, really, when Lindy’d had a lump in her breast. Lindy hadn’t wanted Greta to know,
evidently, but David had phoned Greta and, after making her promise not to tell Lindy he was doing so, kept her informed along
the way. The lump turned out to be a benign cyst, thank heaven, but the series of calls it spurred had normalized direct communication
between Greta and David. Previously, their phone contact had been limited to quick hellos on holidays, with Lindy and the
kids lingering and chattering in the background. During the period of the lump, David would call Greta from work, and she
could call him at the office, too, to check for updates.
So, it had not seemed as strange as it might have to call him at work two months ago.
What she didn’t say: Tom had started working with a lawyer right after his diagnosis, but things had just moved too quickly,
and she didn’t understand anything about it, and now this lawyer was saying that the only way she was going to have money
to pay for Tom to go into the memory care facility where she believed he’d get the best care was to sell Innisfree, and something
about how Tom had put it into a revocable trust a few years ago but that didn’t mean she couldn’t sell it now that she needed
the money.
Though she knew this wasn’t David’s exact area of expertise, she still wished she could ask him to help guide her through
the legal aspects of it all.
Obviously, she couldn’t, not while keeping Tom’s diagnosis from him and, most importantly, from Lindy.
So, what she had said to David was, “I’m wondering if you would be willing to buy Innisfree. We’d wanted to leave it to you and Lindy, of course, but we’ve run into an unexpected wrinkle.”
And what David had said was, “A wrinkle?”
She’d spilled out far too much, without meaning to. She did manage not to tell him about Tom’s diagnosis. But the money trouble,
yes. “It’s hard to understand when we’ve been so careful all these years, but we’ve had some unexpected expenses, and we need
to move to Florida.”
“You’re not making sense, Greta. Florida? Anyway, Lindy and I don’t have the money to buy the cottage. We just sent our kids
through college, and there’s Hailey’s wedding . . .”
Greta almost cried out—it had been such an effort to keep the cottage, to keep the summers at The Cove, all these years, for
Lindy, who loved it so, and now it would all be for nothing? But Greta caught herself. “Just forget it. Don’t tell Lindy,
all right? I’ll figure something out!” and hung up.
But he had called her back the next day. “Do you need help, Greta? Is everything all right?”
“You didn’t say anything to Lindy, did you?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“Good. Don’t. But . . .” She’d had another conversation with the lawyer. “We are going to have to sell Innisfree. We’ll wait
till after Hailey’s wedding.”
“But you can’t do that! Lindy—Lindy talks about nothing but wanting to move up there when we retire. She lives for summers up there. The kids do, too! I mean, we met there, we had our wedding there . . .”
“I’m so sorry, David. But listen, there’s still your family’s cottage, right?” Greta knew this was a thin argument. Lindy
loved Innisfree; the yellow cottage was owned in equal shares by David and his siblings, and it was always crowded with the
innumerable cousins. Retiring there would be out of the question. Even visiting would be a chore to work out.
“Just . . . just wait, okay?” David said. “I’m going to try to figure something out.”
“Well, I would hope so. To think you ruined my daughter’s ambitions, and then you can’t even afford to buy Innisfree?
” Greta knew the words were wrong the instant she said them.
But she had been saying wrong things all her life, and if she’d learned anything, it was that there was little you could ever take back. It seemed no use even to try.
David sighed. Greta imagined he was rubbing his temples, leaning his elbows on his desk. “How much do you need for it?” he
said.
She straightened her shoulders. “The real estate agent said it would sell for six hundred thousand. I’m afraid I need the
full amount.” The memory care facility in Florida was fifty-five hundred dollars a month, Tom could live for years, and Greta
needed to buy a condo for herself nearby. They had no equity; they’d been living in the same rent-controlled apartment on
the Upper West Side since Lindy was six years old.
It was amazing how little they’d managed to save.
Equally amazing to Greta was that her father’s wealth, the wealth she’d been born into, was simply gone. Her one brother who’d
survived the war, Harrison, had inherited the Connecticut house, and, when he died—decades ago now—it had gone to his two
sons, who had long since sold it off. All Greta had left was Innisfree, which her father had purchased in 1925 for a hundred
dollars from the developers who’d named the place Summerland Cove. Then he’d lost a good deal of money in the crash of ’29,
and they’d lived a middle-class life ever since. And God knew, she and Tom had never accumulated much money, pursuing their
passions for music and academia and giving whatever they could to people and causes they loved. To Lindy, the grandkids, the
Lincoln Center and the New York City Ballet, the Manhattan School of Music and the Met, the Summerland Cove Point Association
(replacing the roof on the clubhouse three summers ago had not been cheap). Tom gave the doorman in their building two hundred
dollars every Christmas, for God’s sake!
And they had enjoyed their monthlong vacations at Delray Beach each winter for the last decade since Tom had retired, and since Greta had had to retire, too, due to the arthritis developing in her hands.
She hated that she could no longer play—sometimes she sat down and noodled for a few minutes, but it didn’t take long before the pain overwhelmed her—and yet to cease doing so had meant a kind of freedom she had never experienced.
Oh, how they loved their long walks in Florida on the endless sandy beach!
Maine had always seemed to her so cold, so rocky, so rough; life in Florida seemed free and easy and, above all, warm.
Then, as it happened, their neighbor Sue at the condo where they’d always rented had gotten dementia. She’d gone into this
memory care place, Sunset Acres, and her husband, Stan, said he trusted them with her life, he couldn’t imagine her getting
better care anywhere, and God knew he’d have cared for her at home if he could have, but it was a fool’s errand to try.
So, maybe Greta was acting on reflex, but what else did she have? She was in a panic, on behalf of Tom, on behalf of herself,
because things were happening so fast, and she could not stand to think of the day when he would wake up beside her and not
know who she was. That day was clearly coming at her as fast as an express train, and she was frozen in its headlight, just
waiting for it to strike.
“Six hundred thousand?” David said. “Jesus Christ. And you need to sell it this summer? Right now?”
“I’m so sorry, David.” She was blinking back tears, and the tears made her feel surprised, as she had lately felt surprised
by almost everything. She needed to button back up, get things back under control. But thinking of how disappointed Lindy
was going to be, she couldn’t. The tears streamed. She tried wiping them away. “Don’t tell Lindy, okay?” she said to David.
“Please. I don’t want it to ruin things for her . . . all her parties this summer. You know?”
There had been a long pause. Greta blinked, swallowed back more tears. Then David had said, “Okay. But listen, I am going to try to figure something out. You’re not going to put it on the market till after the wedding, right?”
She’d hung up feeling hopeful that day. He would figure something out. He would save the cottage for Lindy.
But now, sitting here on this July morning, on the fiftieth anniversary of the day that David had been born, Greta knew.
It had not been fair to lay that on David, and especially not to ask him to keep it from Lindy.
It had not been fair, and it had not been right.
And now David had left home in Rhode Island but had not come to The Cove, probably because he couldn’t face Greta, couldn’t face Lindy, couldn’t face knowing what was coming just two weeks from now: Lindy getting her heart broken in the worst imaginable way.
Because, clearly, if he’d figured out a way to buy the cottage, he would’ve told Greta by now.
And David didn’t know the half of it. He didn’t know about Tom.
And David wasn’t strong enough to handle all of this, was he? To handle Lindy’s heart being broken in so many different ways
at once?
Though, in fact, he had not been as bad a husband to Lindy as Greta had feared he would be. In many ways, he had been a good husband—better and better over the years. And then, two years ago, of course, Greta had fallen in love with him once and for
all, when he’d had the goodness, the decency, to share Lindy’s health scare with her.
But now, caught up in her own panic, she had done the unforgiveable. She had forgotten the things she’d known to be true about
David. The things that had made her fear so much for Lindy when they were young. The things that had made her and Tom try,
all these years, to keep Lindy and David sheltered in whatever ways they could.
Worse yet, she had forgotten the lesson she had learned when she was twelve years old: Things that had once seemed perfect
could, in an instant, be ruined completely.