“Whatever we want. We’ll be bohemians. Live on a beach somewhere. Drink out of coconuts to survive.”
“The world doesn’t actually work like that.”
“What if I work for a year and save up as much as I can, and then we leave?”
A year. A year in that house. I couldn’t do it. Now that I had been free, I couldn’t go back into a cage and sing and pretend I was happy.
He took my hand. “Then actually marry me. It won’t be like your parents. I’ll support you while you write. There are ways to not have kids—we won’t until you want to—if you ever want to. And if I can’t make enough money doing photography, well, I’ll do whatever I need to.”
I looked at him curiously. “Do you actually want to marry me?”
His eyes widened. “I don’t know the right answer here.”
“The truth is the right answer.”
He took a moment before he responded. “The truth is, you’re not like anyone I’ve ever known. I’m alive when I’m with you. And I want to be with you—in whatever way you’ll have me. If that involves rings and a ketubah, yes. If it’s coconuts and sleeping in a shack on the beach, that’s great too. But I’m just trying to find a solution that helps you right now.”
It was the right answer.
“Let me talk to my father,” I said, aware that my heart was racing. “And we’ll save all that as a very last resort.”
“Okay,” Dan said. “But the offer stands.”
We spent much of the next day working out what I was going to say, flip-flopping between the idea of a letter, a telegram, and a phone call. Dan even role-played my father. But when he thundered that I was to come back that instant, I knew it had to be a letter. I was a writer, after all, and a phone call would likely end in a screaming match. I drafted it, then showed it to Dan, Ada, and Lillian, all of whom agreed it was the best I was likely to be able to do. I outlined my desire to write and my plan to enroll in writing classes, and implied that I was seeing someone Jewish and appropriate down here.
“He can’t refuse that,” Dan said.
Lillian agreed, but Ada looked less certain. “Add that my eyesight is failing,” Ada said.
I looked at her in confusion. Her eyes were sharper than mine.
“Tell him you read to me and are helping me run the business. Tell him I’ll rewrite my will if you stay.”
I felt a chill, as if the temperature of my blood had dropped suddenly. It was the first time Ada had hinted at death being a real possibility for her.
“Ada—”
“Don’t ‘Ada’ me. I’m not going anywhere. But we need to throw everything we’ve got at this and see what sticks.”
I revised the letter.
It wouldn’t go out until Monday’s post, but Dan and I dropped it in the mailbox near the center of town on Sunday before he left.
“Call me when you hear,” he said and kissed my forehead. “And I meant what I said. I’ll do whatever you need.”
“Least romantic proposal ever.”
He pulled me back by the shoulders. “Marilyn Kleinman,” he said. “The day you let me know you would be open to accepting that, believe me, I’ll make the show you want of it. Until then, this will have to do.” And he pulled me in to him, kissing me deeply until the world spun.
“Where did a rabbi’s son learn to kiss like that?”
“Do you really want to know the answer to that question?”
“No,” I laughed. “But do it again.”
He obliged. And for a moment, I believed that the letter would do its job and things could continue exactly as they were.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I jumped when the phone rang on Monday afternoon. Ada pursed her lips in annoyance. “You can’t expect to hear from your father before Wednesday, you goose,” she said.
I knew she was right, but I was too on edge to be much good to anyone. I tried to focus on the final scrapbook, but there were huge time jumps. Either Ada had years where she didn’t take many pictures—which did make sense, once she was older and alone in Philadelphia—or I was just too scatterbrained to put the pieces together.
When I finally gave up in annoyance, I sat at my typewriter, but the words weren’t flowing. Instead, I picked up my stack of pages, realizing it had grown far thicker in the last couple weeks, and sat downstairs with them and a pencil, hunting for typos and plot holes.
That provided the distraction I needed, and I quickly found myself immersed in the story I had told. It was closer to finished than I realized, but I didn’t quite know how it ended. My idea of a happy ending wasn’t the same as most people’s after all. And I still wasn’t sure if the aunt character lived or dramatically died at the end. It would propel the story along if she died, but it felt like too much of a jinx for my own irascible aunt.
No, she would live. There wasn’t a way to write a happy ending if she didn’t.
“What’s got you so wrapped up?” Ada asked, coming to sit opposite me.
“Debating whether to kill your character off or not,” I said tartly.
Ada shrugged good-naturedly. “You wouldn’t be the first to try.”
I wouldn’t steal her backstory, but she had proven to be a much juicier character than any I could have created. “Who was your second great love?” I asked.
“Pardon me?”
“You told me you’d been in love twice. I know about John—who was the second?”
She shook her head. “No. That one belongs to me.” She stood to leave. “And you won’t find it in those boxes of photographs either.”
I spent the next half hour debating ways to kill her character out of spite. I wouldn’t do it, but there were days when it would be satisfying.
Wednesday came and went.
“It’s a good sign,” Lillian said, patting my hand affectionately. “Truly. It means he’s writing a reply. If he were angry, you’d get a phone call or a telegram.”
Ada said nothing.
Thursday morning, the two of them were in the living room with clients as I applied rubber cement to the back of photographs and then stuck them in the scrapbook. I would be done soon. I had reached the pictures from my mother’s trip by Tuesday. Now I was firmly in my own lifetime, and the last box of pictures was nearing the end.
I hummed along to a song on the radio, turned down low so as not to disturb Ada and Lillian at work, and had just turned to a fresh page when a pounding sound startled me. I poked my head out of my bedroom, listening. Ada would be mad if it was Frannie.
But it was the front door. Heart in my throat, I ran down the stairs, skidding to a stop and narrowly avoiding crashing into Frannie, who was in the process of opening the door.
I righted myself and looked up into the angry face of my father, my mother standing pale behind him.
“Pack your bags,” he said, eyebrows drawn together. “We’re leaving today.”
“Hello to you too, Daddy,” I said drily.
Then Sally ran up and bit his pant leg, tearing at it angrily and growling as my stoic father tried to get away from the tiny little monster.