“He doesn’t have to look hard enough to find it,” she says. “Her beauty.”
“So?”
“It’s harder to appreciate what you don’t have to look hard to find.”
They have had this conversation before. Champ focuses on polishing the underside of the swing. It is almost done. It is their wedding present to Thomas and Gwyn. It is their offering.
He rubs his hand along the wood. “They’ll be fine, Anna,” he says.
“You don’t know that.”
“No. I guess you can never know that. But I do like her.”
“What could be more beside the point?” She turns and looks at him straight on. She is better at this now, saying exactly what she thinks.
And he doesn’t say what he thinks because he is better at knowing what she isn’t ready to hear: that he has no idea whether it will last for his son and his wife, the way it lasted for him and Anna. It could go either way. It always can go either way, can’t it? You can stay together for the wrong reasons as much as for the right ones and who is to say you’ll be more or less happy either way? Because of a storm, because her arms were outstretched . . . Champ only knows that the important part is to decide to stay. Again and again. And, on the days you can’t, to resist deciding anything else.
“Read the lyrics to me.”
“Again?”
“Again.”
The lyrics are engraved on a blue plate beneath the seat. The lyrics to their song—Anna’s and his. It hadn’t been their wedding song. What had been? A Cole Porter tune, if he’s remembering right. “Begin the Beguine.” It had been so many people’s wedding song that year. But this song became the one they played the most in recent years. It is the song that Champ would put on the record player on the cold winter nights out here, toward the end, when they needed a reminder that they wanted to spend the cold winter nights out here.
Hopefully, it would help hold Thomas and Gwyn during their beginning.
He’s screwed the plate to the innermost plank of wood, somewhere you have to look close, somewhere you have to be lucky just to find it. And he doesn’t skip any of it this time when he reads the words to her:
And I will stroll the merry way
And jump the hedges first
And I will drink the clear
Clean waterfall to quench my thirst
And I shall watch the ferry-boats
And they’ll get high
On a bluer ocean
Against tomorrow’s sky
And you shall take me strongly
In your arms again
And I will not remember
That I ever felt the pain.
And I will raise my hand up
Into the nighttime sky