Rules for Ghosting

Chapter 11

11

When Mom texts to ask if he’ll come have breakfast with her, all Ezra can feel is relief.

If nothing else, he’s glad that she was the one to reach out so that he didn’t have to try to figure out a diplomatic way to open up the conversation that wasn’t just Hey, so…what the fuck? He texts back a confirmation and tells his siblings nothing so that he doesn’t have to field a thousand questions he doesn’t have answers to.

Mom’s new apartment turns out to be in a converted Queen Anne just off Waterman Street. It’s a nice house in a nice neighborhood, pretty and well-groomed. None of that is surprising, given the amount of money in neighborhoods like this, but it is surprising that his mother can afford it.

“Maybe her sugar mama has a trust fund,” he mutters, locking the car. It’s kind of a gross thought and he nearly gags as he says it, but—well. He’s allowed to be petty about the woman who broke up his parents’ marriage. At least for a little while.

The door of the house opens as he heads up the porch steps. Ezra barely has time to recognize the casually dressed, beaming woman in the doorway as his mother before she’s exclaiming “Ezra, honey!” and pulling him into a rib-bending hug.

“Oh,” he says. He hugs back mostly on impulse, caught off guard. The angle of the embrace pushes his face into her hair, enveloping him, suddenly, in a smell so familiar he may as well be twelve or six or two again, held in the absolute safety of her peach-and-honeysuckle perfume. “Hi, Mom,” he says, and to his horror, his voice cracks on the word.

Mom pulls back, though she doesn’t let go of him. Her eyes glisten at the corners with the threat of tears. She puts her hands on his shoulders, looking up at him like she’s searching for something.

“Oh, kiddo,” she murmurs, her tone trembling between affection and regret. “How is it every time I think you’re done growing, you shoot up another inch? Or is it all the yoga stretching out your spine?”

She’s being playful, but her smile is tight, as if she can act, even if only for a few minutes, like everything is fine. “I keep telling you to try it,” he says. “Otherwise you’ll keep shrinking. That’s why Grandma was so short.”

“Oh, is that why?” Her eyes glint in the late morning sunshine—brighter than he’s seen them in a long time. Months. Years, maybe. “I’ll have to remember that. Maybe that’ll be what finally gets me out to that studio of yours.” She steps back, inclining her head toward the door. “Come inside, honey, I was about to start breakfast.”

Ezra takes a breath, braces himself, and follows her.

The apartment she leads him into is bright and cheerful, windows open to let in the soft breeze and gleaming sunshine. He peers shamelessly into the rooms they pass on the way to the kitchen—living room and dining room and what he thinks might be an…art studio? Okay, interesting—and the impression he gets is one of softness and color and life. Every surface seems to have something on it, a plant or a book or a knitted blanket or a candle or an artisan incense holder. The walls are covered in prints and framed photographs and hanging bookshelves laden with battered paperbacks, spines crinkled with use.

Everything is texture and pattern, all of it mismatched intentionally, lovingly, miles from the disjointed jumble of the house Mom lived in with Dad for their thirty-two years of marriage. That was the disconnected disorganization of two people who could never quite figure out how to make their styles fit. This is maximalism for the sake of enjoyment, strange and misfit and mismatched objects collected and displayed for the simple delight of their existence.

It’s also, he thinks, eyeing a framed Georgia O’Keeffe print on the wall above a photo of Provincetown, one of the gayest homes he’s ever seen. It gives his own a run for its money.

Which is, he has to admit, horrifying.

“Ezra?” Mom pokes her head out of the kitchen. “Are you coming?” He musters a nod and follows her into the kitchen. Her lips twitch at whatever look he’s wearing. “The décor?”

“It’s very colorful.” The kitchen is no different: mismatched ceramic mugs hang on copper hooks and an eclectic collection of cookbooks are arranged haphazardly on a shelf. The tiled backsplash is aggressively turquoise.

“Just a bit.” There’s fondness in her voice. “I was thinking I could make waffles—our sourdough starter needs feeding anyway, and you loved those when you were little. And I picked up some rhubarb jam at the farmers market the other day; it’s early, so it’s a bit tart still, but—” She breaks off with a frown. “Oh, hell. It’s Becca who likes rhubarb. I forgot.”

Food is his mother’s love language. But here she is, suddenly unable to speak it. “I don’t mind it.”

Her troubled expression doesn’t waver. “Are you sure? I could run out to the store, it’s just a few minutes—”

“Mom,” he interrupts. “It’s fine.”

He’d tell her not to cook if he had the slightest faith that she’d listen. Looking for any possible way to change the subject, he latches on to the pair of work gloves on the kitchen table next to a basket of gardening tools. “Do you have a garden here?”

Relief floods her face, and he tries not to feel sick about it. “In the back,” she says. “It’s still a bit of a work in progress, this early in the season, but it’s such a nice day today.” She hesitates, and then says, almost shyly, “I could show you?”

She leads him out to a small but functional little deck attached to the back of the house, furnished with a glass-top table and chairs, and down a few creaking steps—“Watch the banister, honey,” she says when Ezra nearly stumbles. “We haven’t gotten it fixed yet”—into the little fenced-in yard. There are raised garden beds arranged in a neat line and filled with the first blooms of spring flowers. Becca could probably name all of them—of his siblings, she’s the only one to pick up Mom’s green thumb. Behind the beds is a small patch of freshly turned earth, a mirror of the vegetable garden that Ezra grew up with, tucked against the back wall of the house. There’s not much growth yet, but the rows have been marked out with string and popsicle sticks labeled in Mom’s handwriting describing each one—tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, spinach. It’s not the half-cursive scrawl that Ezra spends half his time at work trying to decipher off sticky notes and file labels, but the calligraphy she learned from Bubbe, copying her mother-in-law’s smooth, confident strokes.

Something about seeing it here, so far from where he expects it, puts a lump in Ezra’s throat.

Swallowing, he brushes his fingertips over the soft tip of one tiny green shoot. The whole space radiates love and care. It is quiet and lovely, and Ezra feels a pang of guilt, like he’s betraying Dad just by allowing himself to relax in it.

Behind him, Mom clears her throat softly. “I still have some more planting to do,” she says, setting her tool basket down between them. “I know you never really took to gardening, but if you wanted…”

He takes it for the offer it is. “Okay.”

She hands him the gloves—they fit his hands—and slips into the gentle, instructing tones of his childhood, his mother demonstrating the distances to place between the seeds and the size of the stones they still need to pick out of the soil. On a strange autopilot, Ezra separates out the smoother, prettier stones; he will add them to the jars in the Chapel’s foyer, for mourners to bring with them to burials and unveilings.

At last, Mom clears her throat. “How’s your new apartment? Are you settling in okay?”

For all their differences, Mom and Dad tackle avoidance the same way. It’s almost comforting. “It’s fine. Good, I mean. It’s an adjustment, I guess, living with people again, but it’s good. Ollie and his roommate live upstairs and they’re over all the time, so it’s sort of like having four roommates instead of two, but Max is great. I like her.”

“Mm,” Mom says. She shapes a mound of dirt over a seed with practiced hands. With Ezra wearing her gloves, there’s already dirt under her nails, visible through the clear polish she favors. “And how is Oliver?”

Also like Dad: She’ll never forgive him and Ollie for breaking up. “He’s good. Thinking about an MFA again. You know how he is.”

“Is he seeing anyone?”

Ezra looks skyward in the hopes of divine intervention. “No.”

She clicks her tongue, clearly disappointed, but for once she doesn’t press.

Silence falls again, thicker now for having been broken. “So,” she says, resignation in her voice as she sits back on her heels. “Here we are.”

Ezra keeps his eyes on the garden. He feels the weight of her gaze like a physical thing, like he’s the one who’s done something that needs to be figured out.

“You look good, honey,” she says finally. “Settled. Is it weird to say that?”

He gives up and looks at her. “Not the weirdest thing,” he says slowly, not totally clear where she’s going with this. “I mean, people have definitely said weirder stuff to me.”

“And you’re…You feel okay? Happy, and everything?”

Ezra puts another small rock in his “to keep” pile. “This is feeling,” he says, as evenly as he can manage, “like a loaded line of questioning.”

He catches the lightning crash across her face before she smooths it away. “It wasn’t meant to be,” she says unconvincingly. She hesitates, and it’s as if her hands keep working without her, using her thumbs to gently open another hole in the softened earth. “I want to say something, and I know it’s not the right way to say it.”

“My go-to is to set a timer and give two minutes of judgment-free questions that I reserve the right not to answer,” he says. “Should I get my phone?”

She has the grace to look abashed at that. “No. But the fact that you had to ask means I probably shouldn’t say what I was going to…” She sighs. “Are you happy, baby?”

Ezra blinks at her. “Am I what?”

“Well, it’s just—” Mom lets out a hopeless, clearly embarrassed little laugh. “This past year, it’s just—you’re so different . I’m not just talking about your transition,” she adds quickly. “Although of course—of course there’s that. But you’re—even the way you’re sitting. You hold yourself differently. And I just wanted to know if you’re happy, because it’s such a change, and after the last few weeks that I’ve had, well—”

“Oh,” Ezra says. He finds a weed that Mom must have missed when she was clearing the garden path and begins to work it free. “This isn’t about me.”

She flushes, but nods, and Ezra’s not sure if he’s offended or relieved to see her admit to it. The ease drains out of her posture, her shoulders hunching. “I knew you’d understand,” she says quietly.

Offended it is. “Sorry, what ?” The weed comes out with more force than he expected, dirt from its roots showering them both. “Please tell me how you got to that conclusion from You look happy, because you took a journey through some hoops and did not bring me along for the ride.”

Mom gives him a lemon-pursed look, the one that means she knows he’s trying to be funny to avoid conflict and she doesn’t find it cute at all. “I just meant,” she says, a hint of defensiveness in her tone, “that you’re not exactly a stranger to—you know. Sexuality-related announcements that require some adjustment from your family members.”

In the romantic comedy of his life, Ezra thinks, this would be a freeze-frame moment. Ferris Bueller –style. He’d widen his eyes, directly breaking the fourth wall, pleading, Do you see the shit I have to deal with? Every looks-directly-into-camera moment, sprung to life. He can’t even say Look at this heterosexual nonsense anymore, because his mom is apparently not a heterosexual.

“Mom,” he says. “When I came out to you in high school, I literally had a PowerPoint presentation about bisexuality, a reading list from the PFLAG website, and my girlfriend’s mom on speed dial in case you needed to Talk to Another Trusted Adult.” He emphasizes the capital letters, in case they aren’t obvious enough. “I laid the groundwork for a literal year before I told you guys I was trans, and I still brought Ollie with me as backup in case I needed to bail out of the house—which, I’ll remind you, I did. You blindsided the whole family in the middle of seder, on basically the one night a year when we all actually try to hold our shit together around company.” He pulls off the gloves and sits back on his heels. The knees of his pants are stained already. “Are you kidding?”

She looks at him, wide-eyed, as if all of that was far more than she’d expected. “It’s not like I planned it.”

“That is so many levels of not the point, I can’t even put it into words.”

Mom looks at the ground between them. Her glasses make her eyelashes look long and full, but they aren’t long enough to hide the misery. She closes her eyes for a long moment, taking deep, shaking breaths, and when she opens them again, she doesn’t look at Ezra but past him, at the little garden.

“It’s beautiful out here,” she says. “Don’t you think?”

She’s not even close to subtle. Out of an unfounded hope that she’s going somewhere with it, Ezra lets it slide.

The little fenced yard around them is pretty, a floral explosion, a wild splash of disorganized beauty so unlike the gardens his mother always favored at home, neat and tidy, the flowers arranged just so. The hands that made this garden, Ezra realizes, are clearly the same ones that designed the apartment inside.

They weren’t, he knows just as surely, his mother’s hands. His mom ran a home that was organized down to the smallest detail. Everything had a place. He’s never bothered wondering what kind of home she might make for herself, if she had the chance.

“Yes,” he says carefully. “It is.”

Mom watches a pair of bumblebees circle a cluster of hydrangeas. “This was Judy’s mom’s place,” she says at last. “She passed away last year and left it to her. Isaac wanted her to sell it, but she convinced him to let her keep it as a studio space.”

Ezra watches her, saying nothing. She gives a little shake of her head, as if rousing herself from a dream. “She and Isaac had this horrible fight last month. God, I don’t even remember what it was about—their younger daughter, I think. She wants to go to art school when she graduates next year, and— Oh, it doesn’t matter now. Judy packed a bag and got in her car and she called me, and she said, Bobbi, I’m done, I’m leaving, and you can come with me or not, but if you’re not coming, then that’s it, I can’t do this halfway anymore.”

There are tears in her eyes, and Ezra digs his fingertips into his knees to keep from reaching for her. It’s too easy to want to fix her sadness, the instinct born out of years of practice.

“I just,” she says after a long moment, “could only think that I was going to lose her. So I finished the kugel I was making your father for dinner and I wrote him a note that said all I could think to say without hurting him any more than I knew I’d have to, and I left. I didn’t even make it to the car before she was calling me back and saying that she didn’t mean it, that she had overreacted, that she just needed a bit of time to be by herself and then she and Isaac would be able to sort things out again. So I went back inside and I threw away the note and I unpacked my bag, but that moment was enough for me to realize that I couldn’t do it halfway anymore, either.” She shakes her head. “I didn’t mean for it to come out when it did, but it had just been boiling up for so long.”

They don’t have time to unpack all of that. “Okay,” Ezra says slowly. “So, when I was in high school, you would have called that an explanation, but not an excuse.”

Mom lets out a shocked laugh, less like he’s amused her and more like he’s punched her in the throat. “Ezra,” she says, half a protest.

“What am I supposed to say?”

It comes out louder and angrier than he means it. He snaps his mouth shut, aware, in the way he has to be now, that to anyone strolling by on the sidewalk, he isn’t a girl yelling at his mom, he’s a man on the dirt with a middle-aged woman, raising his voice.

Mom is watching him, her face expressionless. “I’ve never seen you do that before.”

“Yeah,” Ezra says. “Well.” There’s nothing he can say to that.

After a moment, she sighs. “How’s your father?”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Language.”

He bites back a response to that with the same ruthless efficiency that lets him suppress any possible noise of pain when one of his clients holds his hand when they push.

“Dad,” he says, “is a disaster, just like anyone would be if their spouse of thirty-something years left without any warning to go move in with the wife of one of the most important people in his entire professional network. He’s basically a zombie; work is pretty much the only thing keeping him from drinking himself into a coma. He’s not sleeping, and according to Becca and Aaron, the six-minute conversation I had with him in the break room the other day was the longest he’s talked to anyone other than a client since you left.”

Mom flattens her mouth into one long, thin line. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you that.”

“No kidding,” he says. “And let’s take Becks and Aaron off the table, before you go there next.”

“You—” She hesitates. “You were at the Chapel?”

Ezra shrugs. “I’m doing your job.”

“You hate it there.”

“Someone has to do it.”

Mom laughs, high and humorless and desperate like a sob, and puts her face in her hands, heedless of the dirt. “Oh, katchkaleh, what do you think of me now?”

He’s never heard her Yiddish sound like this, heavy with despair and self-loathing, the language of his childhood affections abruptly steeped in misery.

“Mom…” Ezra rubs his eyes, giving himself a few seconds to breathe, counting the seconds in the spaces between inhale and exhale the way his yoga teachers had taught him: in for two, hold, out for two, hold. He wishes, for a moment, that he’d forgone his binder today, so he could let his ribs expand wide, wide, wide without the spandex tensing them back in.

“Okay,” he says, once he’s tamed his voice into something that resembles calm. “You can’t just hide here forever. You know that, right? You have to talk to Dad. I mean, you have to talk to everyone, but you really need to talk to Dad.”

“I didn’t think he’d talk to me.” It has all the weight of a confession. “Your siblings, either.”

“I know they’ve been texting you,” he says. “Aaron’s called you at least once a day. Becca’s called you. And Becca never calls anyone.”

Which is true. Becca has horrible phone anxiety. Online food delivery was the greatest thing that had ever happened to her.

“I know,” she says. “I suppose I just thought they were calling to yell, or—” She exhales a humorless bark of laughter. “All I’ve wanted to do is hide. This is just—” She shakes her head. “How do I apologize for something like this?”

“I don’t think I can tell you that,” Ezra says. “They don’t cover cheating on your husband in yoga teacher training.”

It’s a blow below the belt.

“Sorry,” he says, and then hates himself for it. Why is he apologizing? It kind of seems like he should get one jab in.

There’s a part of him that wants to try to convince her to come home . Maybe Judy is the love of her life, and maybe she and Dad will have to split up, but they could figure it out, could do it together. Maybe this didn’t have to be horrible and hurtful and miserable, and everyone could be okay again.

Wishful thinking, probably.

“Look,” he says. “I’m spending enough time with Dad and Aaron to get a feel for how they’re doing, and I see Becca four or five times a week these days. So I’ll…see what I can do. I’ll tell them that you’re all in one piece and you haven’t totally lost your mind. You need to talk to them, and I’m willing to be there as…I don’t know, a mediator. But you can’t just expect them to be ready to play nice. And you have to apologize.”

Mom nods.

“Okay.” He pauses. “And I really shouldn’t have to say this, but they probably are not ready to talk to Judy anytime soon, so don’t invite them over for happy-family Shabbat dinner or something.”

“I wouldn’t.”

That’s something, at least. He gets to his feet. “I should head out.”

Mom frowns up at him. “You haven’t eaten.”

He will absolutely throw up if he eats right now. All he wants is a gallon of coffee and an opportunity to turn off his brain. “I need to get back to work.”

Mom looks disappointed, but she nods. “I’ll walk you out.”

He follows her back inside. She hovers close to him as he washes his hands at the kitchen sink with floral soap so strongly scented it dizzies him. She keeps hovering as they walk toward the door, like she wants to reach out to touch him.

Is he grateful or disappointed that she doesn’t try?

Ezra lets himself look more closely at the living room as they pass through it, trying to memorize as many details as he can. His eyes catch on a photo on one of the end tables, and he stops short. Mom walks directly into him, lets out a little “Oops!” of surprise, and then, voice curious, says, “Ezra?”

Ezra shakes his head at her, moving into the room and picking up the frame. It’s a formal wedding photo, clearly taken within the past few years.

There are seven people in the photo, and Ezra recognizes five of them.

The two he doesn’t recognize are both young women, one in her midteens, judging by the baby fat that clings to her cheeks, the other maybe in her very early twenties. They’re both dark-haired, light-eyed, and beaming at the camera, wearing matching dresses in a floaty charcoal gray. Bridesmaids, probably. They stand on the outer edges of the group, one each on either side of Judy and Rabbi Isaac, just as nicely dressed, just as bright-eyed.

Next to Judy is Jonathan, smiling so wide his face looks ready to split in half.

On Jonathan’s other side, his arm around Jonathan’s waist, their heads tilted together in obvious affection, is a man Ezra’s never seen alive. But he recognizes him all the same.

“Oh,” Mom says, coming up beside him. “That’s Ben.”

He startles at the sound of her voice, barely managing not to drop the picture frame. He sets it down on the table with shaking hands. “Ben,” he repeats, rapidly putting puzzle pieces together, faces and rooms and the shadows behind Jonathan’s eyes. “Their son who died?”

Mom nods, reaching out to touch the frame. “Yes. A car accident, almost a year ago. Horrible. I don’t think you ever would have met him, but he was at the Chapel quite a bit before he died.”

“No, I never…” Ezra can’t stop staring at the photo, trying to match this bright, beaming man to the solemn shade he’s used to, who has broken all the rules Ezra thought he’d figured out. “Why was he there?”

“Isaac’s synagogue has its own on-call chevra, and Ben volunteered with them for years. He’s the one who got Jonathan involved. I still can’t believe he went back to it.”

Ezra nods, head spinning slightly. Mom touches his arm. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” He shakes himself slightly. “Sorry, I— When did you say he died?”

“Last summer.” There’s a look in her eyes Ezra’s never seen on any face but his own: haunted. “I don’t think Judy’s ever really forgiven herself for it.”

Ezra frowns. “You said it was a car accident.”

“It was,” Mom says. Her hand lingers on the frame a moment longer. He realizes, for the first time, that she’s not wearing her wedding ring. He’s never seen her without it before. “He wasn’t supposed to be out that night. Judy was supposed to drive something over to the temple for Isaac, and she asked Ben to go for her. The other driver hit him when he was on his way home.”

He doesn’t need her to tell him where Judy was instead.