“In fact, though, in Judaism, it’s sinful to eulogize the dead with attributes they didn’t possess. It’s considered mocking them. I’m Jewish, so I’m really not allowed to bullshit about her unless I want to be infested with locusts or become a pillar of salt or whatever. So here’s the no-BS truth. Ruth was old, and weird, and sometimes super-cranky, and not a lot of people in the neighborhood understood her. Honestly, not a lot of people close to her did, either. I sometimes didn’t, for sure. She had a way of knocking people off balance, and if you didn’t fall down like most other people, if you rode the wave and kept standing, you were in forever. If you didn’t fit in anywhere else, it’s almost like she had a you-shaped hole just waiting.
“She was a lot of things to a lot of people who meant more to her than I did. Before I met her, she was a rebellious daughter and a brave friend. If Ruth’s life were a book, I only read the last chapter, except it was upside down and in Esperanto. And she seemed like she was losing it, sometimes. Last year she came over to my house at, like, eight A.M., knocked on my door, and told me, “I’m going to talk to the president.” It was her way of trying to tell me that everything would be okay, and I shouldn’t worry. She was handling it. But to just tell me that, plainly, like everybody else was telling kids—that everything would be okay—felt like the lie to her. And if she had chosen you as a person in her life, she knew you’d see through it too.
“That was another one of the amazing things about Ruth: She never underestimated anybody around her, even when it would be so easy to. And when you’re as smart as she was, that’s a really incredible, rare way to be.
“It’s a little devastating to think about this now—devastating is a melodramatic word, I know; I tried a bunch of other ones: sad, depressing, disconcerting, but none of them felt as right—because I wrote off so much of what she said when she was still here without really listening to her, when the whole time she was really telling me everything. She just refused to do it in the typical way. She knew, or at least hoped, everybody she knew was better than that. And we were. But some of us probably didn’t know it until now. This isn’t fair of me, but I’m mad at her. She was supposed to sit in the waiting room and feel bad for herself and let the rest of us have a proper goodbye. But just because she knew she was about to get called into her appointment, she wasn’t about to waste the years she had left. If she didn’t, nobody should. And yet, here we are. Right? Using our valuable time just to sit in the waiting room and complain about how bored we are.
“This is the part that she would hate, and I know she’d hate it because during our first-ever conversation, she told me that she didn’t want to be thought of as some wise old person, only still alive to teach us all valuable lessons. But maybe the most valuable thing Ruth taught me is the importance of trying to understand people who are different from you, even though it’s so much harder than writing them off, because it might make you admit something to yourself that’s painful. Sometimes you won’t be able to understand, and that’s okay. It’s the trying, and realizing the importance of trying, that makes a person really special.”
I finish reading, my paper blowing a little in the wind at its well-worn crease. To my surprise, almost everybody is in tears, including some of Ruth’s family that I’ve never met and Dawn. Even Avery looks a little tearful.
I flinch when I see my dad in the very last row, sitting straight up like he knows he’s in trouble and doesn’t want to make it worse. As I climb down from the podium, it’s over. Everyone disperses. I stay to help fold and stack the chairs.
Dad jumps in front of me as I carry some chairs to a van, saying, “Scarlett, I know you’re furious with me, and I completely understand why.”
I say nothing.
“I was just . . . I was a different person. I was really unhappy. So was your mother. And it just happened. I swear I tried to take those lines out, but the editors insisted I leave them in, keep everything as pure and raw as the original manuscript was at the time.”
Puuuuuuke.
“I really . . . I’m so sorry, sweetheart. Please, you need to forgive me. I’m devastated.”
There are a lot of things I could say to him. Like: Yeah, you were devastated when you got a book deal. You were devastated when it got optioned by a major movie studio. And you were really devastated in that online magazine profile that included glossy photos of your apartment and your new wife and daughter, in which I was not mentioned once. But if I’ve learned anything this week, it’s that life is short.
“You’re not a good writer,” I say and then walk away.
In the car on the ride home, I feel like a raw nerve. Once the floodgate opens, it turns out it’s hard to shut it off. It’s begun to rain. Dawn keeps looking at me nervously, like she has for the last few days, checking to see that I haven’t disappeared or died or something.
“I really hope this doesn’t ruin your relationship with your dad,” she says tentatively.
“Wha—give me six months and maybe a frontal lobotomy, then tell me that.”
She nods. We drive in silence, and I flip the radio on. “Fire and Rain,” James Taylor, in case I wasn’t already in the mood to weep.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“I asked Dad once, but it occurred to me that I never asked you. . . . Why did you marry him?”