Chapter 3
3
“So you noticed, it too?”
Ezra finishes the buttons on his shirt, glancing at Becca in the mirror. With fifteen minutes before they’re supposed to be groomed, company-ready, and in the living room, Becca’s somehow miles ahead of him, showered and changed and sprawled across his bed, Sappho half in her lap, scratching her ears with one hand. It soothes him to know that she’s just as comfortable barging into his room as she ever was, as heedless of his state of undress as she was when she saw him as a sister, instead of a brother.
“Aaron being really shady? Kind of hard not to, after what I walked in on.” He turns to her. “Does this look all right or am I going to Mom jail?”
Becca sits up on her elbows, studying his clothing and then giving an approving nod. They’ve always walked a fine line dressing for major holiday meals, finding the sweet spot between Nice Enough for Family Photos and Comfortable Enough to Eat Way Too Much. Becca’s trended toward dresses and jumpsuits the last few years, and tonight is no exception, an orange one-piece that brings out all the subtle notes of gold in her brown eyes. Ezra tried on about six different outfits before he finally settled on a white button-down and a pair of khaki joggers—he can wrangle a French tuck and a half-open collar and get away with it, as long as neither of his parents looks too closely and realizes he’s wearing the same pants he’d throw on to teach a yoga class.
“You look good,” Becca says. She studies him for a moment more. “Can you really breathe in that thing?”
“You can say the word binder, it won’t bite,” Ezra says dryly. “And yes. They’re literally designed for me to be able to breathe in them.” They’re not designed to be worn as many hours a day as Ezra wears his, and he’s been on the receiving end of more of Nina’s lectures about it than he cares to count—not that Becca needs to know that. Top surgery is expensive, even with his mostly decent insurance, and it’s not like he has the time to take off for the recuperation period. He’ll be stuffing his tits into nylon and spandex for the foreseeable future. “How long’s it been going on? Aaron and Dad?”
She hums, pulling Sappho a little closer and resuming her ear scratches. Sappho whacks her tail against the wall. “At least a few weeks,” she says. “Let me do your hair. Are you still putting that cheap stuff in it? I thought you were going to get better products.”
“Not all of us can put curl cream on Mom’s credit card, Rebecca,” he drawls, but caves and pulls the—expensive, for his budget (he’d caved after her last rant about sulfates)—styling cream he uses out of his bag and tosses it to her. He sits in front of her so she can thread it through the longer curls at the top of his head, scrunching it through and twisting the individual curls around her fingers until they sit how she likes them. Ezra loosens them a bit when she’s done anyway, because it’s always funny to make her object and because he doesn’t like how stiff it looks.
“Seriously? Weeks?”
Becca nods. “I think that woman’s from the bank or something. It’s gotta be a money thing. Remember how Dad used to get?”
There had been a few months of financial precarity during his junior year of high school, and Dad had been sharp with all of them, his temper on a hair trigger. They’d all walked on eggshells until things evened out. No surprise that it would fall on Aaron now. Uncle Joe, whose easy manner balanced Dad’s short fuse, had resigned and moved out to the Cape two years after his wife died, and Dad would never let any of the regular employees know if they were in trouble.
“Not great,” he says. Becca gives him a look, as if to say, Understatement, bitch, and he drops a hand down to Sappho’s rump, scratching absently. She thumps her tail harder. “Have they said anything?”
“Have you met them?”
Yeah, he should have expected that. “Great. Excellent. Very helpful.”
“In their defense,” Becca says, “we come from a glorious tradition of absolutely not dealing with our shit.”
“You don’t do such a bad job,” he says, reaching over to tap her nose with one finger.
“You used to give me Disappointed Mom Eyes until I talked to you about my feelings,” she says, but she’s grinning when she bats his hand away.
“Ezra!” Mom’s yell comes from downstairs. “Rebecca! People are going to be here in five minutes. Will you come be social, please?”
Becca sighs. “Duty calls,” she says, climbing to her feet. She leans down and cups Sappho’s face in her hands. “Will you be the best girl and sit near me so I can use you as an excuse to not talk to people?”
“Hey,” Ezra says. “Get your own dog.” Sappho enthusiastically licks at Becca’s hands. “Traitor.”
“Ha,” Becca says.
“Now, please!” Mom’s second shout makes them both jump and head for the stairs.
Despite Mom’s panic, the dining room is already set, Aaron and Dad sitting in the living room, glasses in hand and a bottle of plum brandy on the coffee table. “Pregaming already?” Becca teases, plopping down on the couch next to Aaron and peering at his glass. “Bold move, lightweight. Are we forgetting the great fourth glass of wine incident of 2017?”
“Don’t tease your brother,” Dad says. He looks a little more relaxed than he had when Ezra saw him earlier, though he’s still wearing everything but his tie. Ezra briefly considers going back upstairs for shoes, a little worried about being sent up if he doesn’t, but Becca seems perfectly at ease in bare feet.
Then again, Becca’s the baby, and could probably murder a man in the living room and get away with it. She mischievously attempts to wrestle a sip of Aaron’s drink while Dad looks on and does absolutely nothing about it.
“Are you two really drinking already?” Mom asks, drying her hands on a towel as she comes in from the kitchen, frowning at them. “We’re about to spend the night going through about six bottles of wine.”
“Aiming low tonight, I see,” Becca deadpans. Mom gives her a pointed look, and she abandons her efforts to steal Aaron’s glass. “Just saying! There are what, four glasses to a bottle, and if there are going to be eight of us—”
Ezra blinks. “Eight?” He’d known one of the local rabbis was planning to come, along with his wife—which is confusing, because Ezra thought clergy always worked on Passover, but hell if he’s going anywhere near Providence congregational drama by asking—but the last he’d heard, that was it. “Who else is coming?”
“Their son-in-law,” Dad says. “His plans with his family fell through at the last minute, apparently.”
The doorbell rings and Mom goes directly into hostess mode, her face doing a strange transformation as she turns Mom off and slips into Mrs. Friedman, the funeral director’s wife, pillar of the community. It’s never failed to freak Ezra out, and he manages to successfully pluck the drink out of a momentarily distracted Aaron’s hand—“Hey!” Aaron protests, too late—and drains it in one go.
It turns out that Ezra has met Rabbi Isaac Resnick and his wife, Judy, several times—almost always at family gatherings like this, where they blend into the sea of other Upstanding Jewish Community Members in Their Sixties that he files away in the back of his head in a little mental box labeled Open when Necessary for Socializing . Fortunately, they seem to know both his name and his pronouns, so he gets through a few minutes of small talk without too much difficulty, and much less difficulty when Becca casually slips a glass of wine into his hand as they schmooze with Rabbi Resnick—“Call me Isaac, please,” he says, shaking Ezra’s hand, laugh lines deep around his eyes. “I’m off the clock.”—while Mom and Judy retreat into the kitchen.
“You,” Ezra tells Becca under his breath, as she knocks her shoulder against his, settling in with her own glass, “are my favorite sibling.”
“Duh,” she retorts. “Mom and Judy are talking shit in the kitchen, it’s hilarious.”
“Surprised you didn’t stay.”
“I got the sense that their desired topic was about to be talking shit about their kids,” Becca says dryly. “I’m only so much of a masochist.”
Ezra hides his laugh with a sip of wine—and then nearly chokes on it.
There’s a ghost by the front door.
A familiar one.
He looks different in the golden light of late afternoon. More solid, less like a shadow. But Ezra recognizes him all the same as the ghost he’d seen barely a few hours ago, standing in the doorway of his bedroom. And that’s…
That’s not how it works. He may not understand why the ghosts he sees are there or what they want, but after twenty years, he’s managed to scrape together a handful of rules he’s pretty sure they have to follow. One of them—one he’s always been grateful for—is that the ghosts don’t wander, at least not any of the ones he’s ever seen; they haunt the space around their bodies or they haunt the place where they died. They don’t amble from place to place.
This isn’t just a ghost drifting from one room to another. The Chapel is halfway across town from Ezra’s new apartment.
“Ezra?”
He shakes himself back to reality, and the ghost disappears between one blink and the next. “Sorry—what?”
Becca frowns at him. “Are you okay? You went all spacey.”
Ezra shakes his head. “I’m fine.” The doorbell rings again, and he jumps at the distraction. “I’ll get it—keep an eye on Sappho?”
Becca looks at the dog, currently parked by the coffee table and staring mournfully at the cheese board. “I think I can handle it.”
Ezra hands her his wine and goes to the door, then nearly does his second spit take—this time without the benefit of actually having a mouthful of wine, which is just embarrassing—at the sight of Jonathan standing on the front porch.
He’s dressed up since Ezra saw him at the house, and he looks as startled to see Ezra as Ezra is to see him.
“Um,” Ezra says. Either the alcohol’s already going to his head or this guy just makes him feel tongue-tied, and neither of those options can mean anything good. “What are you doing here?”
Jonathan blinks right back at him. “I was invited?” he says. “And…hi, again, I guess?”
Ezra isn’t sure whether to relax or not. “Hi,” he says. “Are you—” His brain, belatedly, catches up with his two sips of Aaron’s brandy and half glass of wine, and he mentally smacks himself. “You’re the son-in-law.”
Something Ezra can’t quite place flashes across Jonathan’s face, but then he’s all smiles again. “Yeah,” he says. “Got a last-minute invitation—are you a stray, too?”
“I live here,” Ezra says. Jesus, Friedman, pull it together. “I mean—my parents live here.”
Jonathan’s face lights up. “Oh my God, that’s how I recognized you earlier.” Ezra bites back the urge to cringe— Please don’t be a horrible this-one-time-my-kids story, he thinks—but Jonathan’s face softens as quickly as it brightened, turning kind, and a little sad. “Your dad handled my husband’s funeral. I saw your picture in his office.”
Oh. That’s so much worse. “I’m sorry for your loss,” Ezra offers, because God, I hope it wasn’t one of the ones where I still look like a girl just seems like way too insensitive a thing to say.
Jonathan inclines his head in the graceful way Ezra has seen from widowed spouses before, that universal There’s really no good response to that, and I’m not sure why you’re apologizing in the first place half nod. “He made it as easy as he could,” he says. “He’s great at his job.”
“Yeah,” Ezra says, and then, way too belatedly realizing he’s still standing in the doorway, shakes his head and steps back. “Sorry, come on in, we’ll get you a drink. Your— Everyone else is already here.”
Aaron, thank every God that’s ever been deified, recognizes Jonathan and greets him with an easy handshake, guiding him over to the makeshift bar. Ezra takes the reprieve and makes a dash to the bathroom, pulling out his phone as soon as the door locks behind him.
Rainbow Gnome Fan Club
well, i figured out why Jonathan-from-downstairs thought I looked familiar
Noah
YUP
apparently my dad did his husband’s funeral and there’s a picture of me in his office
SO THIS IS ALL VERY COOL AND NORMAL
Noah
YIKES DOT GIF
Lily
Did you actually just type that out instead of putting in an image
Noah
Sometimes I like to let y’all choose your own adventures
Also my wifi is garbage right now
Max
Ollie just spat his water all over the floor FYI
Ollie
I AM. WHEEZING.
OH MY GOD.
EZRA. ONLY YOU.
Noah
fwiw I was really banking on it being a summer camp hookup kinda thing
????? he’s like?? five years older than me???
Noah
…did people not hook up with their counselors at your camp
Lily
Therapy. All of you.
Ezra shakes his head, slipping his phone back into his pocket. He flushes the toilet and—for appearances—washes his hands, and then makes his way back toward the living room.
He detours past the kitchen to double-check that Mom doesn’t need any last-minute help—she wouldn’t ask for it if she did, but she’ll absolutely guilt him for not asking—and stops in the doorway at the sight of Mom and Judy sitting at the kitchen table, heads pressed together. Mom has her back to the door but he can see Judy’s face, set in a tight, uncertain almost frown. She’s younger than Rabbi Isaac, all glossy auburn hair and surprisingly youthful skin. She looks like someone who’s usually smiling, and there’s a wrongness to the tension of her face that radiates off her, even though he does not know her at all.
“Bobs,” she’s saying, barely audible from where Ezra’s standing, caught between interrupting and running for the hills. He can only catch every few words, but the line of Mom’s shoulders tells him they’re not going over well. “I know you’re frustrated, I get it, but this is already such a hard time of the year—with everything, you know what we’re dealing with. This just isn’t— right .”
No one calls Mom Bobs . Dad calls her Bubbe; everyone else calls her Bobbi. Ezra has heard her introduce herself as Barbara exactly once, and that was to an overfamiliar telemarketer. Ezra hovers, caught between the temptation to eavesdrop and the urge to bolt.
Mom heaves a sigh and pushes her chair back, wood scraping linoleum. “We should get into the living room,” she says, voice weary in the way Ezra recognizes from a hundred overheard almost arguments between her and Dad. It means I’m not happy, but there’s nothing to be done about it. He’s been on the receiving end of it a thousand times. “It’ll be candle-lighting in a few minutes.”
“Bobbi,” Judy says, something pleading in her voice. “I don’t want us fighting.”
Oh, no thank you. Ezra has enough to deal with keeping Mom and Dad’s drama straight. He’s not getting involved in Mom’s friend fights, too. He makes a strategic retreat to the living room, pointedly ignoring Becca’s curious look as he reunites with his beloved wineglass and drains it just in time for Dad to check his watch, climb to his feet, and call everyone in to light the candles.