off. After a moment, what looks like a thoughtful pause, the other follows. Natasha watches the phone line swing in their absence, and she thinks what a long time it swings for, as if remembering the weight it had been bearing, the bodies of two birds with fluttering hearts, and hesitating to let go.
Sigh
They buy sandwiches at Attman‘s and drive down to the water, where Gerard scouts out a good bench. They sit and eat quietly, watching tourists gathered waiting for the water taxi. A man in a black overcoat hovers by the meter kiosk asking people for change. A woman in a blue-skirted housekeeping uniform sits on the bench to their right, pulls a loaf of bread from a plastic bag, starts to tear it off in bits and throw them into the water, and soon ducks and pigeons and a single white goose churn over the surface of the water following the showers of bread, which are gone in no time, the frenzied birds looking everywhere for more. The woman balls up the bag and drops it into her purse, rises from her bench, and leaves. Gerard silently places his pickle spear on Eve‘s wax paper, next to the uneaten half of Eve‘s sandwich. Eve is a famous pickle lover. ―Thank you honey,‖ Eve says. ―You‘re welcome,‖ says Gerard. They sit quietly, the three of them. And just like that something happens. Something in the moment shifts something in Boris. He feels an ease fall over him, a relief, and he relaxes his vigilance, his hummingbird-like freneticism. He feels he might slide down the air like a wall and keep sliding until he reaches someplace he‘s never been before.
When they are all done eating, Gerard wants to go to a music store down the waterfront, and Eve goes with her, looking up and around the tall, poster-papered walls as if she were in a museum. Natasha waits outside. Gerard pulls his grandmother by the hand to the listening station: a row of five CD players outfitted with earphones for customers to listen to the music before they decide to buy it. A stool per CD player. Eve‘s never been inside anyplace like this. Natasha is outside sitting on a bench, doing work on her telephone. Eve watches Natasha for a moment through the front windows. It‘s sunny, and the light plays on her hair. Eve looks at Natasha and feels something warm, strokes her daughter‘s cheek in her mind before following her daughter‘s son farther into the store and being led to a stool. Gerard is playfully chivalrous. ―Sit, Grandma, please,‖ he says. Eve sits and folds her hands demurely in her lap, obedient as a child, as Gerard adjusts big black foam earphones over Eve‘s head, clicks them to adjust them so they sit firmly over her ears and don‘t jostle. Eve closes her eyes as wires flit across her face, tickling her nose. ―There,‖ says Gerard, seeming to be all set up. ―So, okay one second. It‘ll come on in one second.‖ Eve nods, amused. Boris is faintly here. But only ever so. His sigh washes over the back of Eve‘s neck. She shivers, not unpleasantly. It wakes her up, this shiver, makes her feel the swath of her skin, where it begins and ends, what it covers. Boris? she thinks. But he does not hear. She is momentarily swept into a waterfall of music, this is what it feels like: a waterfall. She listens, and for the moment, lets it all go, lets it all fall away into this strange, stirring music, trusting that Gerard will be here to scoop her up and collect her when it‘s over.