Page 78 of This Is How It Started
“It was my good oven mitt.” Mom holds up a charred silicon potholder. “I left it too close to the flame.”
“At least it wasn’t the carrots,” Adam says.
Hannah takes charge, moving pans around in the oven, pulling out the dishes that are ready, and transferring them to the serving platters my mother has laid out on the counter. It at once feels familiar and foreign. It’s our first big holiday without Josh. Without Stephen. And I miss Dad so much it makes my heart fold in half.
Hannah, who is about as good a cook as my mother but organized as hell, gets everything on the table while Mom hustles around the kitchen like a chicken with her head cut off. We sit down, open our Haggadahs, and start the seder.
“What makes this night different from all other nights?”
Mom, Hannah and Adam take turns answering the four questions. We sing a couple of songs in bad Hebrew and call it. We’ve managed to conduct the entire seder in less than fifteen minutes, which is a record breaker even for the Golds.
Adam is eyeing the goblet we’ve filled for Elijah, the prophet who is supposed to show up to herald in the dawn of the messiah.
“Don’t you dare,” my mother says.
“Why? It’ll just go to waste. Elijah’s not coming. He’s got a previous engagement.”
Hannah grabs another bottle of wine off the counter, opens it, and fills Adam’s glass.
Adam was right, the food is delicious. I go in for seconds of the brisket and add a heaping spoonful of mashed potatoes to my plate.
“How’s Brooke?” my mother asks, her voice filled with fake genuineness. I know full well her seemingly innocuous question is a prelude to a rant about the kurveh.
“I don’t know. I hardly see her,” I lie, hoping to cut my mother off at the pass.
But Shana Gold is undeterred. I can see it in the gleam of her eyes. Where’s Elijah when you need him?
“How can you hardly see her when you live under her roof?”
“She works a lot.” More than anyone I know, even Hannah and Stephen.
My mother snorts. “She could sell that house and live the rest of her days on a sunny beach in Acapulco.”
“Except she wants to save the house for us and future Golds,” I blurt vindictively, even though I’ve said the same thing to Brooke multiple times. And now, because I’ve gone this far, I figure there’s no reason to hold back. “She has to Vrbo the cottage and the pool house just to support the damned place. In June, we’re renting out the entire property for a wedding.” I can’t tell if I’m being mean or honest.
Three pairs of eyes stare at me in shock. Well, make it two pairs. Hannah doesn’t appear surprised in the least, which surprises me. The townhouse gets so quiet that all I hear is the hum of the kitchen fan.
Adam breaks the stunned silence with, “Who’s getting married?”
“Does Brooke even have the right kind of insurance for that?” Hannah is in lawyer mode now. “One slip and fall and she could lose the house.”
I make a mental note to ask Brooke about this because Hannah raises a good point. But my sister doesn’t stop there and continues to pepper me with questions.
Do the neighbors know?
Have we checked city zoning codes?
Are we setting up an LLC?
Throughout the entire conversation, my mother is conspicuously quiet. I can’t tell if she’s upset by the news that I’m working with Brooke to turn her and my father’s marital home into the Disneyland Resort or is simply reorganizing for a counterattack. She’s stealthy that way, the original B-2 Spirit.
“Mom?” I look at her, really look.
“What do you want me to say? We all do what we have to do. Do you think it was easy to bring that house back from the dead with three small children at my knee and a husband who was never home? Do you think we had the kind of money back then to own a place like that? Of course not. We had to scrimp and save just to keep the lights on. For days at a time, we ate nothing but meatloaf and lentils and rice just so we could afford to redo the plumbing and replace the old knob-and-tube wiring. No one knows better than I do that the house is a money pit.”
Either her strategy here is to out-martyr Brooke—no contest there, my mom would win hands down—or she’s tacitly agreeing not to turn this into a federal case. Whatever it is, I’ll take it. I don’t have the energy to pretend that Brooke is the enemy. I’m not saying I’ve forgiven her. What she and my father did was wrong. Atrocious. They were no better than Stephen, skulking around behind Hannah’s back. But there has to be a statute of limitations on resentment. Mine has slowly begun to ebb away, and I’m trying hard not to feel guilty about that.
Adam, who is not as stupid as he looks, feels my pain. I can tell by the way he’s reading the room, flicking his gaze from Mom to me, waiting for it, Shana Gold’s ambush. She usually goes straight for the heart.
