His mind scratched for the word he wanted, his tongue twisting. Sometimes the words came easily; mostly they didn’t. And when the words did come, they weren’t always the ones he was searching for. This frustrated and saddened him, but he tried to live with it as best he could, as he’d been forced to live with so many things.

“It’s a kindly puzzle,” he said. “Thank you.”

“That’s good to hear,” said Gwendolyn. “I hope you’re excited for your visitors.”

“Apples and oranges,” he said, which was not what he meant to say at all. Once upon a time, he said what he meant. Years ago, in 1972, he’d bumped into a beautiful girl named Annie in the middle of a delicatessen, spilling his matzo ball soup all over himself. He’d gazed into her beautiful dark eyes and asked her to marry him right then and there. She’d laughed, but he was never more serious.

“Would you like an apple?” said Gwendolyn. “I can get you one.”

“1972,” he said.

“What happened in 1972, Mr. Adler?”

“It’s all stuff and nonsense,” he said, another thing he hadn’t meant to say. He meant the opposite of stuff and nonsense; he meant that he’d fallen in love with his Annie at the first glance he’d ever had of her; he meant that she was everything and everything was her.

“A song,” he said, trying to correct himself. “La-la-LA-la, la-la-la-LA-la-la.” Annie was a singer and a song.

“1972 is a song? I didn’t know that.”

There was a little girl, also a song. What was her name? M, M, M. Miriam! A tiny replica of her mother, but with his eyes. Born in 1979 in the middle of the night. Never slept. Always yelling. She had something to say before she could say it. Benjamin could sympathize with that now. Hush, little baby, don’t say a word / Daddy’s going to buy you a mockingbird. The birds sing, too.

“We put her bed in the bathtub so she wouldn’t wake up the neighbors,” he said.

“Who was in the bathtub, Mr. Adler?”

“The little song,” said Benjamin. The words weren’t coming out remotely right, but it didn’t matter. He had entire film reels of his past that played on and off in his mind, and watching them was more soothing than talking. And though they didn’t play in order—in one reel he was four years old and riding a horse for the first time; in the next he was fifty-eight and Miriam was having her own little songs; and then he was twenty-three and all the wedding guests were dancing the horah, and he and Annie were lifted in chairs at the center of the circle; in the next, he was sixty and Miriam’s little songs were singing, “Grandpa! Grandpa!”