Isaac heard laughter and then his name. His granddaughter Ellen and her husband Steve were entertaining friends in the living room of their high-rise apartment.
“…And then there was the time we were talking about Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal.‘I didn’t know you played bridge,’ he says. I tried to explain that Trump meant business deals. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘The Trump is short for trumpenick.’”
A pause. Steve wasn’t getting his laugh.
“Trumpenick,” Isaac heard him explain the punch line. “It’s a Yiddish word for bum.”
“So the old man is wiser than you thought,” someone said.
“He’s not so old.” That was Ellen’s voice. “It just seems that way because he never was young.”
Isaac smiled. He didn’t mind Steve making fun of him. Accountants don’t have much to joke about, and this one was good to Ellen. He didn’t object—Isaac would be the first to say Steve had every right—when she got this grand idea that Isaac must live with them and Avi in their apartment high above the Hudson.Isaac was going to check on the child now.
Avi was his last, perhaps his only, joy in life. Yet every night Isaac muttered to himself as he entered his great-grandson’s bedroom. Sure, Avi picked the night light himself. But Ellen ought to have known better. A Tyrannosaurus Rex! No child halfway between sleep and wonder should be trapped by its fierce red eyes, razor claws, spiked tail, grinning lines of gruesome teeth. And certainly not this beautiful child, his long brown eyelashes splayed like the crown on the Statue of Liberty. Isaac reached down and turned the sleeping four-year-old on his side, away from the troubling light fixture.
“The ball, the ball, throw me the ball,” Avi murmured without waking.
“Shhh. Shhhhhhhh.”
Gently, Isaac pulled the sheet over the boy’s shoulders. He did this every night. A mother should be glad to have an extra pair of eyes looking over her child, he thought. But Ellen did not accept her grandfather’s vigils as a harmless precaution. “Let the past be past,” she would have said, gently but firmly,...
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