47
I allowed Ruth to help with bedtime, and we divided and conquered getting the kids bathed and down.
It briefly reminded me of when they were little.
I would bathe Susie while Harry fed Bobby a bottle, then we would trade off, me bathing Bobby, while he read Susie a story.
Maybe Janet was right—maybe no one could do it all alone.
Yes, Ruth had, but she only had one child.
Besides, it was pointless to compare our situations.
No one ever won a medal in the grief Olympics.
Once they were both asleep, I asked Ruth if she would like to join me in the kitchen for a cup of tea. She followed me downstairs, and I put the kettle on.
“I’d rather have sherry,” she said.
“When you left the hospital against Dr. Lefkowitz’s orders? Absolutely not.”
“Spoilsport,” she muttered.
“Another thing,” I said. “It may not have been your heart, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be next time. Your weight is good, but you’re going to take longer walks daily—you can bring Pepper with you. And we’re starting on the heart diet that Harry used. All of us.”
“Much good that did him,” she said.
The kettle started to whistle, and I poured water into the two waiting cups.
“You’re not trying to get rid of me, then?” she asked.
I turned to look at her, wondering if she was being flippant. But her face was serious. “No,” I said. “I told you that. You’re welcome here as long as you want to be here.”
“Thank you,” she said. Then she looked down. “I have a confession.” I studied her, curious. “I may have ... misled you a little bit.”
“About what?”
“The house.”
“This house?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Mine.”
My eyebrows went up. “You mean to tell me that you could have gone home this whole time?” Maybe I could still rescind that open invitation if this whole thing had been an act.
“No,” she said again. “But I fibbed a little in implying that I lost it. I didn’t. I sold it.”
“You sold your house?” I repeated. “Why?”
She looked down at her hands on the kitchen table.
“In case you needed anything. I wanted to be able to help immediately.” She brought her eyes back up to mine.
“Remember how I told you everyone is leaving the neighborhood to move up here and it’s hurting property values?
I didn’t want you to have to sell it and get pennies someday when I’m gone. ”
I contemplated what she had said. “When?”
“Right before I moved in,” she said. “The rest of my things—the things I thought you or the kids might want someday—are in storage.” She swallowed.
“I’m sorry for not telling the truth. I was afraid you wouldn’t let me stay if you knew I had the money to leave.
” She seemed smaller confessing this. Frailer.
This brave, brave woman had been through so much, yet I was the one who made her worry.
A wave of guilt washed over me, knowing that I had made her feel like she couldn’t be honest with me.
Yes, the early days of her residence were fraught, but I was ashamed at the memory of standing in the living room telling her she had to leave. That wasn’t who I wanted to be.
I brought the teacups to the table and sat, reaching across the table to put my hand on hers. “You’re not going anywhere anytime soon.”
“I can,” she said. “I figured I would stay here a couple of months and then rent a small apartment nearby with money from the house.”
“You didn’t have to sell. I know how much that house meant to you.”
She shook her head. “It had become a mausoleum. It was time. And I promised Harry ...” She trailed off.
I squeezed her hand. “What did you promise him?”
Ruth looked up at me, her eyes brimming with tears. “He knew. Oh, Barbara, he knew the clock was ticking. It’s why he bought that insurance policy. He came to me and made me promise to give you a couple of years to mourn, and then he wanted me to help you move on.”
“Move on?”
She nodded. “He didn’t want you to be alone, like I was. He wanted you to find happiness again.”
I remembered a conversation, when Susie was a baby lying in a bassinet next to our bed. I had been exhausted, but content, until he brought up that very subject.
“You’re not going anywhere,” I told him, snuggling a leg against his.
“I hope you’re right,” he said, wrapping an arm around me. “But if you’re not, I don’t want you to be alone.”
“Sure,” I said, teasing. “I’ll bring a date to your funeral.”
“That’s my girl,” he said, kissing my forehead. “But I still mean it.”
“Stop being morbid,” I said. “You told me you were too stubborn to die.”
Then Susie started to cry, and he got out of bed to change her diaper, leaving me more time to rest. Once she settled into his arms, I drifted off to sleep, the conversation all but forgotten. Until now.
Ruth was still talking. “He said, ‘Ma, she’s not going to want you there. She’s so independent. She won’t say it, she’s too nice for that. But you have to stay anyway and help her move on.’”
I shook my head, my eyes now filled. “I’m not ready,” I whispered. “I know it’s what he wanted, but ...” I couldn’t continue.
“You’ll never be ready,” Ruth said. “I’m not ready.”
Talking about her was safer territory. “Ruth, it’s been decades. And Mr. Greene is crazy about you.”
“And what happens in a year or two or ten when he dies too?” she asked. “No. I can’t do that again.”
“You could go first,” I offered helpfully.
“There’s the old joke about that,” she said, wiping at an eye. “Why do Jewish men die before their wives?”
“Not so funny in our situation.”
“No,” Ruth agreed. “But we had two of the good ones.”
I thought about the story of how she and Abe met. How he dumped his fiancée after meeting Ruth. Harry always said he absolutely doted on her. Then again, our friends likely said the same thing about Harry with me. I didn’t see how anyone could ever love me the way Harry did.
“That we did,” I agreed and took a sip of my tea. Then I stood up and crossed to the liquor cabinet. “Hell with it,” I said. “This conversation needs a splash of brandy. Just don’t tell Dr. Lefkowitz when you check in tomorrow.”
Ruth smiled sadly but conspiratorially as she held her cup up to me. “Deal.” I poured a tiny dollop into her cup. “Don’t be stingy now,” she said, continuing to hold it up. I sighed and added a little more, then put some in my cup before placing the bottle on the table and returning to my seat.
“Look,” I said. “If you don’t have feelings for Mr. Greene, tell me that, and I’ll leave it alone. But I don’t think that’s the case.”
She took a sip of her laced tea and sighed. “It’s complicated.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
She set her cup down and spread her arms. “Look at me. I’ll be sixty years old next month. The last time a man saw me naked, I was your age. What could he possibly want with me?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
She chuckled, then leaned forward and smacked my arm.
“You’re supposed to argue with me.”
“Have you tried arguing with you? It’s impossible.” Ruth smiled. “But I’ve seen how he looks at you. Honestly, I’m surprised he didn’t try to run off with you years ago.”
Ruth shook her head. “He would never do something like that.”
“A third good one,” I said. “What are the odds?”
“And what about you?” Ruth asked, sitting up straighter.
“Me?”
“Apples don’t fall far from trees. I’ve seen the way you and Eddie look at each other.”
I studied my cup and didn’t respond.
“Oh, so something did happen,” Ruth said softly.
“Nothing happened,” I said defensively.
“Barbara, in my experience, a man doesn’t go out of his way to help a woman as much as Eddie does if he isn’t madly in love with her.”
I closed my eyes and exhaled forcefully. “I know. He ... he kind of said ... something ... to that effect.”
“What did he say?”
I took another sip of tea to fortify myself, then grabbed the bottle and took a swig directly from it. “I asked what happened when he met the right girl. And he told me the right girl thinks of him as a brother.”
“Are we sure he didn’t mean Janet?”
“Ruth!”
She chuckled. “I’m teasing. Even if he hadn’t said a word, the truth is, he’s too far gone to look at anyone else. The kids love him. What’s the problem?”
“Me,” I said with raw honesty. “I’m the problem.”
She reached across the table and put her hand on mine.
“Then we really are destined to live together until I go, and you become Susie’s problem.
Maybe we deserve each other.” She withdrew her hand, put it in her pocket, and returned it with a gold ring set with a large emerald, surrounded by diamonds.
“This was my mother’s,” she said. “When we left Russia, we grabbed what we could. My parents knew things were getting bad, and my mother had sewn most of her jewels into our clothes. We didn’t even know we were carrying them—she distributed them evenly in case anything happened to one person.
This ring was her grandmother’s. A gift from the czarina, if you could believe my grandmother.
Which you shouldn’t. The woman lied. She stayed behind because one of my aunts was pregnant and couldn’t travel.
” Ruth shook her head. “We never saw or heard from either of them again.”
I sat in silence, trying to imagine losing my own grandmother that way. Then again, mine was still terrorizing her neighborhood in Philadelphia. The Russian army may not have stood a chance against her.
“When we got here, my parents sold her jewelry, piece by piece, when we couldn’t make ends meet.
This was the last piece. The one my mother wouldn’t part with, even if it meant boiled cabbage for another week.
She gave it to me when she got sick, telling me I would have a daughter.
That it had to go from daughter to daughter.
” Ruth smiled sadly. “She couldn’t have known I’d never carry another child to term. ”
The to term part struck me. There had been other babies, then. How much could one woman endure and still wake up in the morning?
But before I could find the words to reply, she reached out again and took my hand, opening my palm and pressing the ring into it. “I want you to have it.”
I looked at the ring in my hand. “I’ll save it for when Susie is old enough,” I said. “Thank you for entrusting it to me.”
“No,” Ruth said, shaking her head. “You don’t understand. You’ll give it to Susie someday, but I want you to have it now.” She swallowed. “When Abe died, I thought I’d never have a daughter. It took losing Harry to realize I do have one.”
My eyes overflowed, tears streaking down my face again. “Ruth, I—”
“It’s okay,” she said. “But you have to promise to give Eddie a chance. Or if not Eddie, someone else. For Harry.”
I slipped the ring onto my right hand, my wedding ring still on my left.
It was a perfect fit. I closed my eyes to compose myself, then looked back at Ruth.
“I will,” I said. “But only if you promise to give Mr. Greene a chance. A real one.” I reached back across the table and clasped her hand, the ring sparkling on mine. “For Harry.”
“I miss him so much,” Ruth said, her own eyes watering. “I pray you never have to feel that pain.”
“I do too,” I said. “Both parts. But I think—I think he’s happy right now.”
“I talk to him sometimes,” Ruth said. “And Abe. And you’re right.”
“I do too,” I confessed. Then I looked up at the ceiling. “You wanted this, huh?” I turned back to Ruth when there was no reply. “Now what do we do?”
“I suppose I need to go shopping for some new brassieres,” she said. “If someone is going to be seeing them.”
A giant belly laugh sounded, and for a moment, I thought it was Harry responding, before I realized it was coming from me. “You’re paying for those,” I said, still laughing. “With that house money.”
She made a disgusted noise. “Fine.”
“Harry always said he wanted you to find someone too.”
This surprised Ruth. “He did?”
I nodded. “He may have sent you for more reasons than he told you.”
“He’s still looking after us, even now, isn’t he?”
I reached across the table again, and Ruth put her hand in mine. Her eyes were shining, and I could feel my own filling. “He is. And I, for one, am glad he is.”
“Me too,” Ruth said, squeezing my hand. Then she took hers back, drank the rest of her tea, and stood, announcing she’d had enough excitement for one day.
I watched her lumber up the stairs, marveling at how quickly life could change once again.