Back When We Were Grownups Read Online Free PDF

early teens—that awkward, beanpole stage just after they get their growth spurt—and it seemed to be understood that he was my son.”
    “Do you recall what number train it was?”
    “No, and I don’t know where we were going, either. Just that he and I were traveling.”
    And that she loved him, she wanted to say. But that would sound so theatrical, in this normal, workaday kitchen with the linoleum worn black and the chimney bricks all pocked, the checked plastic tablecloth sandy with toast crumbs, the glass-paned cupboard doors reflecting squares of yellow sunshine.
    “Well,” Poppy said, “I would call that a dream that was lacking in plot. In fact it’s sort of uninteresting; so I’d like to switch the subject to my birthday.”
    “Your birthday!” She felt disoriented. “The birthday you just had?”
    “The birthday coming up.”
    “But that’s not till December!”
    “Yes, December eleventh. I’m going to be one hundred.”
    “Well, I know that, Poppy,” she said.
    He didn’t look it. He had hit a kind of wall in the aging process; he seemed old but not astronomically old, just slightly more shrunken than when she’d first met him. His white mustache was still bushy, and his face (unshaven, till after breakfast) bore only a few deep crevices rather than the netting of wrinkles you would expect.
    “I suppose,” he said, suddenly absorbed in pressing an index finger to the toast crumbs, “you’re planning some big wingding for me. I mean bigger than your usual.”
    “Oh. Well. Yes, certainly I am!” she said. It was his averted gaze that let her know he
wanted
a wingding; that he wasn’t bringing it up just to discourage the notion. “December’s still pretty far away,” she told him, “but when we get a bit closer, oh, I’m going to need your advice about all kinds of things!”
    “I do happen to have a guest list,” he said.
    “Wonderful, Poppy.”
    She thought he meant he had a guest list
somewhere,
but he started fumbling through his trousers and finally came up with a small, fat square of folded paper. As he passed it across the table to her, the telephone rang. She rose to answer, but not before she had tucked the list in her skirt pocket and patted the pocket several times in a reassuring way.
    It was NoNo on the phone. “I called to say thanks for the picnic,” she said. “Barry says thanks, too. He’s going to write you a note.”
    “Oh, honey, he doesn’t have to do that,” Rebecca said. She was watching Poppy, who had started eating marmalade straight from the jar. “I’m just glad you both enjoyed it.”
    “He really liked our family,” NoNo said.
    Her words hung in the air, waiting; so Rebecca said, “And we liked
him
! All of us just loved him.”
    Poppy raised his eyebrows at her. She turned away from him and cupped the receiver. “How’s his little boy?” she asked. “He didn’t catch cold, I hope.”
    “He’s fine, I assume, but I haven’t called them yet today because Barry’s mornings are so frantic. If you could see how the two of them live! He has Peter wear tomorrow’s clothes to bed on school nights, just to save time.”
    “Goodness,” Rebecca said. “Now, where is Peter’s mother, exactly?”
    “Who knows! She went off with a bunch of Buddhists or something; lives in some kind of commune somewhere.”
    This was not so very different from NoNo’s mother, who had abandoned her three children for a career as a New York nightclub singer. (Or would-be singer.) But Rebecca thought it wisest not to point that out. She said, “You’re going to be a real help, once the two of you are married.”
    “Yes, I thought I would start closing my shop a little earlier, so that Peter won’t be alone so many hours after school.”
    “What does he do now that it’s summer?” Rebecca asked.
    “Oh, eventually there’s day camp. Till that begins, he just stays in the house. He’s pretty used to fending for himself.”
    “Maybe he’ll get to be