13. Someone to Watch Over Me

SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME

"How did it change your life? How did it change her life? And when am I gonna find out how sewing saved your life?"

"All in good time," I said. Because even though I was a man without the luxury of time, there was only so long I could talk to the boy. My wasted voice, my ancient heart, could only handle so much.

"But, but—"

"Go talk to someone else. Try Minna."

"I just wanna ask one thing!"

I waved him off with a gnarled fist. "She lives across the hall."

"Please, I need to know. One thing."

"Fine, one thing."

"Does everyone get to…" He paused. "Rise to the occasion of their lives?"

"No," I told him. "Sad to say that plenty of people don't rise so much as sink."

Oof. He didn't like this answer. But rising to the occasion is not like growing taller or shaving, something that just arrives. It's something that must be worked for.

"How old were you when you rose to the occasion of your life?" he asked.

"No more questions!" My voice was soft but my tone harsh, and the boy slunk away as if he'd done something wrong. He hadn't. I had. I was 107. I'd had three lifetimes in which to do it. But the truth was, I still wasn't sure I had risen to the occasion of my life.

The boy recognized Minna as soon as she opened the door. Probably because she was always downstairs, listening to Beethoven in music appreciation, reading in the wing-backed chairs, attending bingo and trivia and the daily news briefings.

"Hi. I'm Alex. I'm volunteering here. I wanted to see if there was anything you needed."

"No, thank you," Minna replied. "I'm fine."

Usually a hummingbird of a woman with fidgety hands and a nervous smile, she seemed dulled somehow. Even the boy, who didn't know her, could see it.

Earlier that day, when Minna had called her son to say hello, he'd answered with a harried "Mom, what's wrong?" as if Minna were a problem to be solved, not a person to be loved. And when she'd said, "Nothing's wrong. I just wanted to hear your voice," he'd replied, "Can it wait? I'm in a meeting," and basically hung up.

"Are you sure you don't need anything?" the boy asked.

"Yes, thank you." As Minna began to close the door, the boy felt overwhelmed with the same powerlessness he'd had with his mom, whom he could sometimes coax out of her darker moods, but in the end could not. Julio had been wrong about him. He had no magic touch. No magic anything.

Just then, his gaze snagged on one of the framed photographs on Minna's entry table. It was a house, just a house, three stories, brick with leaded-glass windows, and a sloping lawn out front with two garden gnomes at the head of a brick walkway. In the dictionary of the boy's imagination, this house would be listed under the entry of real home .

Minna followed the boy's gaze and picked up the photo. "Some people think it's strange to have a picture of a house, but I lived there for sixty years, and it feels like part of my family."

"Sixty years in one house?"

"I know," Minna replied. "If you'd told me that in the beginning, I'd have laughed at you. I hated it at first. I cried when Steven showed it to me."

"Why did you cry?" He could not imagine being anything but thrilled at such a house. He bet it had banisters to slide down, hidden closets, quiet nooks for reading.

"Because it was so big. A house meant for a family. But I'd had two miscarriages and was beginning to worry I'd never have children. I told Steven that, and he said that if we couldn't have children, we'd fill the rooms with cats." Minna laughed. "He was terribly allergic to cats, you see. But we never did have to get a cat. I raised my three boys in that house. I thought one of them would take it over for their own family, but they all moved away, so I sold it and moved in here." Her voice trailed off, the self-pity catching back up with her.

"But you got sixty years there," the boy said. He could scarcely imagine sixty days in a house like that, let alone sixty years.

"That is really good, isn't it?" Minna replied. Because sixty happy years married to the same man, living in the same house, wasn't just really good. It was extraordinary. She'd needed someone to remind her of that. And the boy had. Maybe he had a little magic in him after all.

"Are you sure there isn't anything I can do for you?" he asked.

Minna hesitated. After her son had hurried her off the phone, she'd walked over to Vivian's room. She and Vivian were friendly, if not friends. They sat together three meals a day, but earlier in the year they had attended a production of The Pirates of Penzance , and sometimes they took the Shady Glen van to Target together.

But when Minna had knocked on her door earlier that morning, Vivian had said she could not talk because she and Maya-Jade were going to the nail salon for a girls' beauty day. Minna said that sounded fun, and when Vivian only agreed that it did, she asked if she might join them. Vivian had said she did not want any intrusion on her and her granddaughter's "special time" together, even though the girl volunteered here every day. How much special time did one woman need? But Minna knew she could not say any of that, so she had forced a smile and told her to have fun and wondered how it was she could be nearly ninety and still feel the stinging rejection like a snubbed teenage girl.

"Do you think you could do my nails?" No sooner had she asked the question than she regretted it. Little boys didn't know how to do nails. Now she was just inviting rejection.

But to her surprise he said yes, and to her greater surprise added, "I used to do my mom's nails. So I know how to use the emery board and everything."

He wasn't exaggerating. After she led him inside, he filled a bowl with warm water and dish soap, and after she'd retrieved her nail file and polish, he'd instructed her to put her hands into the water.

"Oh, isn't this luxurious!" she cried, twirling her fingers beneath the suds.

When her fingers were softened, he pushed back the cuticles.

"I bite my nails," Minna said apologetically. "It's a terrible habit."

"My mom bit her nails too," the boy said. "That was why she wore nail polish. To keep from doing it. It was my idea. It didn't work, though."

"Still, wasn't that clever, Alex! Aren't you something?"

Something. The boy's cheeks flushed with pleasure.

He shook the nail polish to mix the color and began to apply it to Minna's nails with what his mother used to call his "surgeon's hands." As he did, Minna began to hum a song.

A pleasant feeling buzzed in his chest, like a hive of happy bees that made the honey for Leyla's baklava. And as he held Minna's hands in his, painting, she began to sing.

Although he may not be

The man some girls think of as handsome

To my heart, he carries the key

"I like that song," the boy said. "Did you make it up?"

"Oh, no," Minna said, laughing, the sadness from before vanished like an early-morning fog. "It's Gershwin. ‘Someone to Watch Over Me.' Ella Fitzgerald made it famous. Steven used to play it on the piano every night. It was the song that was playing when we met."

"How did you meet?" the boy asked, blowing on her nails.

"Oh. It's a long story. You wouldn't want to hear."

"I would." The boy was not saying this because of any order from Julio to work his magic. He did want to hear her story. He liked the stories. They were interesting. And he liked that Minna, like me, wanted to trust him with her memories.

And so Minna told about going to all these dances after the war, hoping to fall in love. One by one her girlfriends caught a beau, but not her. "?‘Always a bridesmaid, never a bride,' they used to joke," she told the boy. "I was so tired of hoping that I almost didn't go to that dance, and when I got there, I almost left early. And I might have, had I not seen this man. Terribly tall and skinny and standing awkwardly with a cane. Maybe that's why all the girls passed by him, but I desperately wanted to dance with him, not because I felt sorry for him but because, my goodness, he looked both handsome and kind, which are not often mates. So finally I gathered my courage and asked him to dance. He hesitated and I nearly cried, but he apologized and said he'd like to, but he wasn't much of a dancer. ‘I don't have a left foot,' he said. He tapped his cane against his left leg; it was wooden!

"?‘I've been told I have two of them,' I said, and he thought that was about the funniest thing in the world. ‘Maybe we're a good fit,' he said, and I said, ‘We won't know until we dance.'

"And we were a perfect fit. We danced all night. The first song that we danced to was ‘Someone to Watch Over Me.' Three months later, at our wedding, that was the first song we danced to. When we bought our house, Steven learned to play the piano so he could play it for me every night. And he did."

"He must've loved you a lot," the boy said.

And as he said it, Minna remembered it. She felt it. She was warmed by the memory of it.

"He did," she said as she began to sing again.

There's a somebody I'm longin' to see

I hope that he turns out to be

Someone who'll watch over me

The song stayed in the boy's head all the rest of the day. It was still playing that night when he fell into a warm, dreamless sleep.