Don't Forget to Write: A Novel(96)

“You can’t drive!”

“Dan taught me. And I’ll get a license. But the car isn’t even a drop in the bucket. And you can’t hold money or school over my head as a way to get me to go home now.”

“I meant what I said.” He stood up. “If you stay here—”

My mouth was open to speak. I saw his face on that train platform. While he might have meant it in Avalon, the threat was empty now, and I had no problem arguing until he came around. But my mother beat me to it, putting a hand on his arm. “Walter, enough. With Ada gone, the only blood family I have left are Mildred, Harold, and Marilyn. We’re not disowning anyone.”

He began sputtering, but she wasn’t done. “You can’t bully her into being who you want her to be. She’s different. The world is different. And she’s an incredibly talented writer—something she was probably too scared to even try because you hounded her so. I want her home even more than you do, but she’s grown. And I want her to be happy. She’s never going to be happy doing what you want.” She turned to me. “Will you at least stay engaged in name to keep gossip down?”

I nodded. That was fair.

“Then we give you our blessing.”

“I—” my father began, but my mother didn’t let him continue. She moved around until she was directly in front of him.

“We give them our blessing, Walter. And if you can’t do that much, then I’m moving to Philadelphia too.”

His mouth dropped open. Mine wanted to follow suit, but I kept it firmly shut. I had never seen Mama stand up to him like this. She always waited until he cooled down before launching her quiet campaigns. It was the first time I saw a hint of Ada in her, and I wondered if it was being in this house that did it.

Eventually his shoulders sagged, and he nodded, mumbling something that sounded like a blessing.

I turned to Dan, whose eyes were wide. “What do you say? Want to stay engaged and take pictures?” He looked at me for a long moment, then suddenly I was in his arms and he swung me in the air. “I take it that’s a yes?”

“As long as you’ll still let me buy the ring.”

I smiled, shaking my head. “Ada has one I want to use. It was her mother’s.”

“I think she would like that.”

I agreed.





Slowly people started to leave as afternoon turned into evening. We’d had a full house until ten the previous two nights, but custom dictated that shiva end at sundown on Shabbat and the visitors knew enough to leave before that, even if no one in our house would be observing. Dan’s parents had left around noon to return to the city in time to lead Shabbat services at our synagogue, but Dan remained with my parents. My mother and Dan helped me, Lillian, and Frannie clean up while my father read Ada’s untouched Philadelphia Inquirer in the den.

My mother and I wound up alone in the dining room. “Mama,” I said. She looked up at me. “Thank you.”

She leaned over and squeezed my shoulder, then busied herself again, piling leftovers onto a plate. “What will you do now?” she asked lightly.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m leaning toward staying here for a while.”

“And you’ll finish your book, of course.” I nodded, though part of me didn’t want to. I had started it with Ada. And finishing it would be closing that chapter of my life even more. “I’ll pass it on to Paul when you do.” Paul Stein was Daddy’s editor friend who sent her books early.

“You will?”

“Of course.” She looked surprised by my question. “If he doesn’t want it—and I think he will—I’m sure he’ll have recommendations of who else we can take it to.”

“We?”

Her mouth twitched up into its first real smile since the phone had rung in the brownstone. “I’ll even waive the customary percentage that literary agents get. Though you can afford it now.”

A sound escaped my throat, and it took me a moment to realize it was a laugh. “Oh, Mama.”

But the corners of her mouth turned down again. “I should have stood up to your father earlier. It shouldn’t have taken Ada dying for you to be able to live the life you wanted.”

I wondered if there had been any way to get here without Ada dying. After all, it had taken Ada’s fiancé dying for her parents to agree to let her stay single and go to nursing school. Perhaps my father had been bluffing all along. But with the clarity of time, I now recognized the remorse on his face when I told him it was his fault Ada had died alone.

I thought back to how angry I had been when they made me go home. And at my father at the train station.

That was gone now, replaced with an aching exhaustion. I just didn’t have it in me to be angry anymore, even at Daddy. He was a product of his time. And not everyone could be like Ada and reject the norms that they were raised in. Not everyone wanted to. I saw that now.

I also saw my mother more clearly. She had surprised me in Avalon with her admission that she read because cooking was boring, not because her life was. Maybe she really was just a terrible cook. Which would mean I came by my lack of culinary skills quite honestly. A giggle rose up in my throat at that disloyal thought, but I swallowed it down.

Instead I wrapped my arms around her and hugged her. “Sometimes things work out how they’re meant to,” I said. “Ada understood that.”