Then my granddaughter signed me up for a dating app.
Maddie is twenty-eight. She’s a nurse, like her mother, and she has Walter’s ears and Walter’s stubbornness. She came over for Sunday dinner in March, sat down at my kitchen table, and held out her hand.
“Give me your phone, Grandma.”
“What for?”
“Just give it to me.”
I gave it to her. She tapped at it for ten minutes with her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth.
“There,” she said. She turned the screen around. “You’re on SilverHearts. It’s for people over sixty-five.”
“Madeline Rose,” I said. “Take that off right now.”
“No.”
“I’m seventy-eight years old!”
“So?” Maddie said. “Grandpa’s been gone nine years. You deserve company. You deserve somebody to go to the movies with. You deserve somebody to argue with about crossword puzzles.”
“I don’t want a man looking at my face and…”
I stopped.
Maddie looked at me for a long moment. She knew. She’d always known. When she was six, she’d asked me why I shaved like Daddy, and I’d been so embarrassed I’d changed the subject.
“Grandma,” she said gently, “anybody who doesn’t like your face isn’t worth your time. Okay?”
She uploaded a photograph of me she’d taken at Easter. I was laughing at something her husband had said. No napkin. No hand over my mouth. My mustache was right there, plain as anything.
“Not that one,” I said. “Maddie, please. Not that one.”
“That one,” she said. She pressed the button.
Three days later, Arthur appeared.
He was eighty, a widower, a retired commercial photographer. His profile picture showed a tall, thin man with white hair, a neatly trimmed white beard, and kind gray eyes behind wire glasses. He was standing on a dock somewhere, squinting into the sun, holding a fishing rod.
His first message asked whether I preferred doing crossword puzzles in pen or pencil.
I stared at it for a long time. It wasn’t hello, beautiful. It wasn’t I like your smile. It wasn’t about my face at all.
I typed back: Pen. I’m old enough to live dangerously.
His reply came in four minutes.
Then we’d get along.
We messaged every evening after that.
At first just a few lines. Then whole paragraphs. He told me about his late wife, Margaret, who’d died two years earlier after a long illness. He told me about his garden, which he admitted was mostly weeds. He told me he’d worked as a photographer for fifty years, mostly catalogs and advertisements, “nothing anyone would hang on a wall.”
He remembered everything I told him. He remembered that I grew roses, and he asked about them by name. My Peace roses, my Mister Lincolns, the climbing Eden on the trellis by the back door. He remembered that Maddie had just started a new job in the cardiac unit at St. Luke’s, and he asked how her first week went.
Walter used to remember things like that.
