Chapter 2
2
Technically, the Friedman family seder isn’t due to start for another two hours, but a full day of scrambling is as much a part of Passover as the meal itself. When Ezra was a kid, he’d spend the day darting back and forth between helping his mother and both grandmothers in the kitchen and keeping Becca out of trouble. As Becca got older and started getting interested in what was happening in the kitchen rather than undoing all the cleaning Ezra was trying to do, it had been his job to keep her from cutting off any fingertips, supervising her grip on the kosher-for-Passover knives that spent most of their lives in carefully wrapped boxes in the basement for fifty-one weeks of the year.
It’s still weird to think that the kid he once had to lecture about keeping her fingers out of the food processor can now French cut an onion in twenty seconds. And that she knows what French cutting even is.
The front door is rarely locked. Ezra lets himself in, unclipping Sappho’s leash and letting her set off into the living room at an eager trot while he shrugs out of his jacket. The house smells like roasting vegetables and frying oil, and he gives himself a moment to breathe in the scents of old family recipes and listen to the duet of Mom and Becca’s shouting match, competing with—and, somehow, winning over—the blender.
The reverie lasts only a few seconds. “Ezra!” The shout comes from the kitchen, taking him out of the brief foray into pleasant calm. “Your dog is trying to get into the oven!”
Ezra tucks his overnight bag into the nook by the coatrack and jogs into the fray to find Sappho’s nose wedged under Becca’s arm, Becca holding her face out of the oven with one hand and attempting to stick a meat thermometer into the roast beef with the other.
He whistles. Predictably, Sappho ignores him—she’s decently trained, but it’s not like she lives a life filled with quality kosher meat—and Ezra tugs her firmly back by the collar, ignoring her whining.
“Sorry,” he says. “Sappho, sit. Sit. ”
Sappho gives him a canine pout and slinks away, curling up under the kitchen table with a huff. Ezra sticks his tongue out at her and then turns to his sister. “Hi.”
“Hi!” She yanks him into a hug hard enough to eject the air from his lungs. Becca has always been deceptively wiry. “Finally decided to show up once all the work was basically done?”
Ezra eyes the state of the kitchen over her shoulder. Becca tends to move through the world with the oblivious power of a natural disaster, and the kitchen looks like every other room his little sister has spent more than half an hour in, which is to say it resembles the aftermath of a tornado. Every surface is covered, cutting boards and rolls of Saran Wrap and mixing bowls and vegetable scraps and three empty tins of Manischewitz Matzo Meal. There are pots and frying pans on the stove, three out of four burners going strong, the Passover crockpot is stewing along in the corner, and—Ezra squints—there are at least two roasting pans in the oven.
“Yeah,” he says, reaching around her to make sure the wiggly stove knob is set all the way off, before the open gas line sends them all up in smoke. Dad’s been trying to convince Mom to replace the stove for years, but she insists it’s perfectly safe, as long as no one accidentally knocks it. He’s pretty sure that, sentimental attachment to the house aside, half the reason his parents refuse to sell the house and move is that they’d have to repair the ancient gas lines running through the place. Sometimes, Ezra’s genuinely amazed they’re all alive. “It really looks done. Definitely everything is chill here and you absolutely don’t need more help.”
“I want it on record that your sass is unappreciated,” she says tartly.
Ezra grins and boops her nose, looking her over the way he always does when it’s been a few days since he’s seen her. There is something protective and feral knocking beneath his breastbone, making sure she’s still in one piece. At twenty-one, she has yet to outgrow her baby face, and with her oversize glasses and tendency to use pens to hold her hair up, she looks like Ms. Frizzle. But the deep circles under her big brown eyes are new. “You feeling okay, monkey?”
Becca wrinkles her nose at the nickname but shrugs. “School,” she says. Becca’s living at home while she finishes her culinary arts degree at Johnson as long as he gets to set something on fire, he doesn’t really mind who’s around for it.”
Ezra bites back a grin. “Sounds like him,” he says. “How can I be helpful?”
Mom cranes her neck to look at the clock on the microwave. “We’re actually heading to the point where I need Dad and Aaron to start moving things around in the dining room,” she says. “Can you run across to the office and grab them?”
The office is how Mom refers to the funeral home. As a kid, it seemed strange—Dad called it the Chapel and most of the people Ezra talked to in the community called it Friedman’s, but to Mom it was always the office . She never said why, but Ezra assumed it was because Mom had married into the business, and while she was good at it, she would never have picked it for herself. By making it just another office, just another place where she ran logistics, she didn’t have to think about the fridge of bodies, lying stiff and silent across her tulip-lined yard.
—
Abner Joseph Friedman founded the Friedman Memorial Chapel in 1969. He had arrived in Providence twenty years earlier—thirteen years old, orphaned, and with a genocide’s worth of trauma neatly packaged in the back of his mind, never to be touched except in the most strategic of moments to apply the weight of all his murdered family members’ hopes and dreams and legacies onto his children and then, later, his grandchildren.
To the Jewish community that adopted him—and that he adopted in kind—he was Mr. Friedman, the kind but imperious funeral director. To Ezra, he was just Zayde.
In the photos scattered around Ezra’s parents’ house, Zayde Abner is a solemn, world-weary man, with deep circles beneath his eyes even in black and white. Ezra’s brother, Aaron, four years Ezra’s senior and—as far as their Zayde knew, since it would take Ezra another decade to come out—the only boy, was the heir apparent. Even when they were children, the assumption was that Aaron would join Dad as a funeral director, and so Aaron was the only grandchild to give a eulogy at Zayde’s funeral.
Ezra was still refusing to believe that Zayde was dead at all by the time of the service. How could he be, when Ezra kept seeing him, tall and stern and solemn and sad, everywhere he looked?
Becca, barely a toddler at the time, only knows him through photos and their parents’ stories. But Ezra remembers him by his woundedness and warmth, as someone who always made time for an Ezra he knew by a different name.
Ezra had been ten when he finally learned why.
“Your Zayde was the middle child, too,” Mom told him, very quietly, holding Ezra’s hand as they left services on Yom Kippur. “He had a brother and a sister, just like you. Now it’s just him. I think that’s part of why he does the work he does. To remember. And help other people remember.”
Even then, Ezra knew a little bit about being haunted. Nothing like what Zayde knew, but a bit.
It made him understand Zayde a little more.
Which was why it hurt so badly, as the years passed and Ezra became less and less the little girl Zayde loved so much—if he’d ever been that little girl at all—that his grandfather looked more and more disappointed. Every time Ezra turned a corner in the Chapel and ran directly into his ghost, Zayde was there to greet him, brow furrowed and eyes unreadable. It’s one thing to suspect your deceased family might not have approved of the person you grew up to be. It’s another to see it. Zayde’s spectral silence makes it impossible to know: Is it Ezra’s abandonment of who he once was or his abandonment of the place where he was raised that Zayde finds so terrible?
Is it better or worse that he’ll never know?
—
Ezra lets himself in through the employee entrance, sending up a prayer that he’ll get through this visit without a glimpse of the dead. On the surface, the Chapel hasn’t changed much since Zayde was in charge. The exterior of the building is still neatly kept and landscaped, the entryway rug well cared for but worn by decades of grieving footsteps, the furniture in the waiting room identical to the pieces that were there when the doors first opened. It’s curated to be both welcoming and impersonal—not devoid of identity, but adaptable to anyone who might want to find a place for themselves inside it.
It’s intentional, Ezra knows now, and probably one of the most genius things Zayde ever did—creating a blueprint for incremental changes, one year to another, a Theseus’s ship of tiny shifts in color and décor to give a sense that the place never looked different, even as the pieces within it changed.
It’s a sharp contrast to his family’s home, just across the yard. If the Chapel is timelessness and calm and careful neutrality, the house exudes more personality per square foot than it has any right to. Nothing ever quite matches, the styling changing eclectically from room to room, something always mid-project, mid-renovation. When Ezra got permission to redecorate his room before he started high school, he jumped at the opportunity to turn it into a zen garden. It immediately became—even more than it had been before—Aaron and Becca’s refuge, the three of them retreating to the cool, mossy oasis of Ezra’s bedroom when everything else got too loud.
Metaphorically and not.
The employee entrance takes him in through the walk-in basement. There’s a young woman sitting shmira by the cold room, a candle burning on the small table beside her. For half a heartbeat, he catches the shape of another woman, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the first, with a sweep of dark hair and a soft, calm look on her face. He blinks, and the shade is gone.
He shakes his head to clear his vision and continues through the hallway, past the two preparation rooms and the display room, and up the stairs to the public space of the Chapel. Dad’s office door is closed, but Aaron’s is open. Ezra raps his knuckles against the doorframe but finds the room empty when he pokes his head in.
The door to Dad’s office opens, sound rushing out into the hallway. “Like we said,” Aaron is saying, clearly mid-conversation, his voice tight and tense. “We appreciate the offer, but we’re not interested in— Oh, fuck.” He breaks off at the sight of Ezra, clearly taken aback, one hand still on the doorknob, a leather folio and his laptop tucked under his other arm. “What are you doing here?”
“Hi to you, too,” Ezra says dryly.
Aaron holds up a finger, sticking his head back into the office. “Ezra’s here, Dad,” he says.
“Ezra?” Dad comes out, followed closely by a tall woman with sleek blond hair and a suit so sharply tailored, Ezra’s willing to bet it cost more than his car, adjusting the strap of her handbag over her shoulder. She’s too well put together to be a client, Ezra thinks, and the irritated look on Dad’s face that his professional fa?ade hasn’t quite covered confirms it.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Chag sameach, kiddo.” Dad presses a kiss to the top of Ezra’s head, on the opposite side of Mom’s. “How was your move?”
“It was fine.” Ezra eyes the woman in the suit. “Sorry if I’m interrupting.”
“You aren’t,” Aaron says flatly. “Ms. Lawrence was just leaving.”
She gives him a customer service smile, all teeth and too high in the eyebrows. “Of course,” she says. “You have my card, Mr. Friedman.”
“I’ll show you out,” Dad says. “Ezra, I’ll see you at home.”
“Uh,” he says. “Sure?”
The woman’s mouth twitches. “Enjoy your holiday,” she says.
Ezra watches warily as Dad directs her firmly away in the direction of the main exit, then turns to Aaron.
Aaron holds up a hand. “Please don’t ask.”
Ezra narrows his eyes at him. Aaron looks exhausted, his dark hair mussed, his usually impeccable suit a little rumpled around the edges. “Should I be worried?”
“No,” Aaron says, too quickly.
“Wow.” Ezra was already planning to be worried, joking questions or not, but now he frowns, looking more closely at his brother’s face as if he can catch some clue he might have missed earlier. “So definitely yes, then.”
“I will give you my second helping of kneidlach at dinner if you don’t ask me any more questions,” Aaron says.
He really doesn’t want to tell. “Fine,” Ezra says, but he nudges his shoulder against Aaron’s. “You can tell me, though. I can keep a secret, if I need to.”
Aaron smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Yeah,” he says. “I know you can.” He sighs, pulling Ezra into a one-armed hug. Ezra can still feel the tension humming through him, but his grip is firm and affectionate, and he ruffles Ezra’s hair when he pulls away. “Wasn’t expecting to see you over here. I know you avoid the whole building like the plague.”
“I don’t avoid it,” Ezra protests, which is at least ten percent true.
“Sure you don’t.” Aaron gestures to his laptop. “I have to put this away. Did you come over because Mom needs us?”
Ezra lets him change the subject. “Furniture.”
“My favorite. Let me drop this stuff upstairs and I’ll be right there.” He starts to turn, then pauses, giving Ezra the same once-over that Ezra had just given him. “What about you? You’re looking tired. Everything okay?”
Ezra can’t do everything, but he can do this. He pastes on a smile and lies through his teeth.
“Everything’s great,” he says. “Just glad to be home.”